100 Days

(See Cover)

After the scars of World War I had been harrowed from the battlefields of Europe, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg paid his respects to U. S. industry's part in Germany's defeat: "Her brilliant, if pitiless, war industry had entered the service of patriotism and had not failed it." Of the War Industries Board which put U. S. industry to work, the old warrior gravely observed: "They understood war."

On May 28, 1940 Franklin Roosevelt, in effect, revived the War Industries Board under a new name: The National Defense Advisory Commission. The President desperately needed production to bolster his country's ailing defenses. To be his Production Chief he chose the nation's No. 1 production man: bulky, blue-eyed, hard-headed William S. Knudsen, General Motors' president, who has turned out more automobiles a year than anyone in the world.

Whether Defense Commissioner Knudsen understood war or not, he understood a big job. And it was a colossal job he had on his hands. The tools and skills of the "brilliant, if pitiless," U. S. war industry had all but disappeared. The War Department had an M-Day plan (which the Nazis had borrowed) for mobilizing industry, but M-Day had not arrived--the U. S. was arming for defense, not war. So Bill Knudsen and his six fellow commissioners had to build a strange, specialized plane-ship-&-munitions economy inside and alongside a vast bread-&-butter economy, which had to go on working. The President had given the Commission no legal power to do anything. All they could do was advise, suggest, request--no more. They did not even have a boss. Franklin Roosevelt kept that post for himself.

As the Nazi war machine ground through the Lowlands, wheeled on France and broke it, stood poised, with engines purring, at the English Channel, the nervous U. S. public wanted to know what the Defense Commission was up to. Where were the results? There were none to exhibit. Motormaker Knudsen was tooling up industry to produce the armed forces' materiel, giving orders to the best, quickest, cheapest manufacturers, easing industry on to a war footing. Meantime Congress, the President, the Army & Navy kept expanding their objectives. Not until late July did the U. S. defense program jell into: 1) a two-ocean Navy, 2) equipment (tanks, guns, artillery, ammunition, etc.) for a 2,000,000-man Army, 3) a 35,000-plane air force. At last Bill Knudsen knew what he had to shoot for.

Last week the Commission was 120 days old. Twenty of those days had been spent in organizing itself. In the 100 days since, it had delivered no important materiel. But out of the $10,529,000,000 which Congress had authorized it to spend, it had cleared $7,660,282,000 worth of contracts for war goods. Of these contracts, only $80,000,000 worth still remained to be awarded last week by the Army & Navy. The orders: Aircraft. With a weather eye on the way Air Marshal Goring's Luftwaffe was tearing up tactics books in Europe, Bill Knudsen tackled aircraft (the "one big bottleneck") first. The President had cried for 50,000 planes. That was an impossible figure. Knudsen set his sights for a target of 35,000--25,000 for the Army, 10,000 for the Navy. By last week he had ordered 10,096 planes (fighters, bombers, trainers, observation, transport), had mailed letters of intention (go ahead, contract coming) for 15,276 others costing $827,310,456.

The Commission thinks the industry can turn out 1,000 fighting planes a month by next January, 3,000 monthly by April 1942. But the industry also has Britain's orders to think about. Fortnight ago Defense Commissioner Knudsen prophesied that the U. S. would have built 33,000 aircraft by April 1942 (July 1942 is deadline for the defense air program). But no one actually knows how many planes the U. S. can make in that time.

Guns. Almost any big U. S. machine shop can turn out shells. The changeover is quick and simple. But guns are tougher. It takes a year just to make the tools for some big ones, another 15-18 months to get finished guns. In World War I the U. S. didn't send enough field pieces to France to put in its eye. In its present program it will be lucky if it turns them out in quantity before the spring of 1942.

Mindful of this inherent slowness. Bill Knudsen has placed every gun contract his program calls for but one. The cost (with ammunition): $995,836,660. More depressing is the machine-gun outlook. Colt, the only U. S. builder, is working almost full time for the British. Three General Motors plants are tooling up to plug the gap, but quantity production of machine guns is a year to 14 months away. The Army is now getting 2,000 Garand semi-automatic rifles a week, confidently expects 5,000 weekly by Jan. 1, 1941, but at that rate it would require four years to turn out a million rifles.

Tanks. Speed is the keystone of Hitler's Army, and the fastest, toughest fighting machines in it are tanks. Their performance in Poland and Flanders so impressed the U. S. Army's General Staff that they redesigned their medium tanks to give them more armor and weight. Army men are still scratching their heads for an effective defense against them.

For almost 6,000 light (13-ton) and medium (30-ton) tanks, 1,750 scout cars, 350 combat cars, fleets of trucks, Bill Knudsen has doled out $306,411,280 worth of contracts. Chrysler is building a $20,000,000 plant which should be pouring out mediums within a year. American Car & Foundry's pre-defense light-tank assembly line is rolling out five a day, and Baldwin Locomotive is experimenting with some horrendous 50-tonners which some day will come crunching down its assembly line.

Ships. The Navy is on a war footing all the time. That fact has saved Bill Knudsen considerable trouble. But the Navy has taken the lion's share of his appropriation: $4,274,437,356. For that staggering sum taxpayers are to get 200 new warships, a repair ship, other craft. When the last of these ships slide down the ways, four to six years from now, the Navy will be almost 70% larger. Because its ships are not mass-produced the Navy's production problem is to find skilled craftsmen and available shipyards. At present most of the nation's 100-odd private ways are clogged with ships, and the Navy and the Defense Commission are busy reconditioning old shipyards to speed the new fleet.

Construction. New industrial plants take time to build. Whenever possible, Bill Knudsen has used available plants which could be adapted to his new war industry. But there was a limit to that. Now a string of 50 or more Government-owned munition plants have reached the blueprint stage. Some (for smokeless powder, explosives, ammunition loading, etc.) are under construction. New aircraft factories are contemplated and building. For the first of these plants, plus airports, shipbuilding facilities, old plant expansion, Bill Knudsen has allotted $873,272,148. There will be much more.

Industry, still smarting from the taxes it had to pay on useless war plants after World War I, has hesitated to risk money on new plants until it was certain they would not be taxed once the emergency was over. To reassure manufacturers, the Commission recently issued a new contract. By its terms the Government will reimburse the company (within five years) for the cost of its new plant, at emergency's end sell it back to the company for cost minus depreciation or keep the title itself. That, Bill Knudsen thinks, should settle the plant-construction problem.

Odds & Ends. Bill Knudsen's last $383,014,000 has gone into clothing, shoes, tents, food, housing, etc. for the Protective Mobilization Plan Force of 1,200,000 men which the Army is about to train; for outfitting the Navy; for odd bits of miscellaneous equipment that armed forces need. These items have been the personal charge of one of the Defense Commission's ablest workers--robust, twinkly Donald Marr Nelson, executive vice president of Sears, Roebuck. Responsible only to Franklin Roosevelt, he is not a Commissioner. His job is to coordinate billions of dollars worth of defense orders, to apply his vast knowledge of U. S. merchandising to the problem of getting the fairest price, fastest delivery, best quality in everything the Army & Navy buy, from safety pins to 16-inch guns.

Stock Pile. Without raw materials, Bill Knudsen's lengthening production line would be worthless. Feeding it (as well as getting heat, light & power to run it) is the task of tall, handsome Edward R. Stettinius, the white-haired young man who resigned his $100,000-a-year chairmanship of U. S. Steel to take over the Defense Commission's Industrial Materials Department. Ed Stettinius is kept awake nights figuring how to get an adequate supply of the 29 strategic and critical materials which the U. S. has not enough of.

For some $300,000,000 (borrowed from RFC) he has laid in a stock pile of these vital war materials which will carry the Commission over the hump but no farther. Prize necessities of his precious store are manganese (a necessary ingredient of steel), rubber, tin. Although the stock pile (plus what industry has on hand) has almost 1,000,000 tons of manganese, that is scarcely a nine-months supply for U. S. industry. Adequate shipments of rubber have been arranged for, but Japan could cut them off any day by gobbling up the Dutch East Indies, leaving the U. S. with little but its infant synthetic rubber industry to rely on. As for tin, 12,000 tons are in Ed Stettinius' cupboard, 22,000 more on the way--more than one-third of a year's wartime supply.

The Other Five. Aside from Knudsen & Stettinius, other members of the Defense Commission have been dealing in even further futures. Begoggled Sidney Hillman, shrewd president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, has the ticklish job of providing an adequate labor supply and keeping labor happy. His biggest nightmare: finding 270,000 new workers (25% of them skilled) to man aircraft plants for peak production.

Master bookkeeper is the role of truculent Commissioner Leon Henderson, who runs a clearing house for defense statistics. He also brandishes the Commission's club over rising prices, had threatened to use it once to keep the wood pulp & paper industry in line, is waving it at present in the faces of the copper, lead and zinc tycoons. Working closely with him is plump, earnest, wry-mouthed Commissioner Harriet Elliott. When defense begins to take a bigger cut of the national income, she will have her hands full pacifying consumers who feel the pinch. She will be, in effect, a safety valve for angry consumer steam.

World War I was a field day for the U. S. wheat farmer. World War II is not, for the export market has shrunk to a memory. That is the personal worry of owl-eyed Chester C. Davis, Defense Commissioner for Agriculture and one of Washington's ablest administrators. Charged with keeping the U. S. agricultural plant up to par while industry arms, he has mapped an M-Day plan for the food-processing and packing industries, persuaded the Commission to put its new plant in areas that have surplus agricultural labor. His work has barely begun.

In six months U. S. railroads and trucks will be groaning under the first big loads of defense materiel, and Burlington President Ralph Budd's Transportation Division will have to keep it moving. Railroads, recalling World War I freight-traffic jams, are preparing to buy many new freight cars to handle the war goods. At present Commissioner Budd is working with Army engineers to bolster 2,000 U. S. highway bridges against the day when tanks will grind over them.

"K." In Bill Knudsen's office in the marble Federal Reserve Building workmen a month ago set up a huge radial airplane engine. The Production Chief wanted to see his problem in terms of real steel and aluminum. Paper work gives him such willies that he has ordered all contracts boiled down to a single typewritten sheet, which he approves with a sprawling blue "K." To relieve him of the strain of theoretical figuring, he brought quiet, resourceful John David Diggers, president of Libby-Owens-Ford (glass), to Washington as his chief executive assistant.

No zealot for causes, Bill Knudsen has made his new job of rearming the U. S. as methodical as a retooling at General Motors. He has had to fudge a bit on his maxim that "an executive is no good if he can't do his job in an ordinary working day at the office." Mr. Knudsen is working overtime. Quiet, genial, soft-voiced, he has the shyness of a very simple man. Although he blushes, bows to ladies from the waist, has called reporters "Sir"' and "Madam," Franklin Roosevelt himself is not more adroit. Hunched over his desk, his big hands ruffling through papers, Knudsen is a disarming picture of relaxation. Army & Navy men know better. Said one bedazzled procurement chief: "He moves so fast sometimes he makes our heads swim. But . . . he has always weighed the essential factors."

Fortnight ago Bill Knudsen offered his own appraisal of the state of U. S. rearmament. "From now on," said he, "it becomes a problem of tools and men." The bulk of his orders were in. Industry was tooling up. In 100 days he had done a bang-up job of getting ready to begin. (Under a dictatorship it would not, of course, have taken him 100 days.) The hard part of his program--production--lay ahead, but production was his dish.

The Defense Commission had got along all right without a chairman in its contract-letting stages. Bill Knudsen had been chairman, in effect. His prestige and talent for running men had got the work done. Moreover, Franklin Roosevelt had kept his own and others' hands off. But the time for a permanent chairman, who would not only have power to enforce priorities and push plant expansion but would have to take the rap for the Commission, was now at hand. That was a job Bill Knudsen did not want. He wanted to do what he was good at: make defense-production lines hum.

Proof that the defense program was nearing its second stage came last week in the President's warning to industry that if it couldn't rearm the country voluntarily he would have to use the power given him by Congress to take over recalcitrant plants, put the production of war goods ahead of consumer goods. Steel, copper and the machine-tool industry had already instituted their own system of priorities. Defense was getting tougher.

Total Defense? To the question "How are we doing?" the answer last week was: about as well as a democracy in peacetime could be expected to do. No one pretended that a peacetime democracy could hope to take on a totalitarian war machine--yet. And the official hope last week was that the U. S. was arming not for war, merely for "defense." The Army's fully equipped and trained field force of 1,200,000 men was two long years away. Not for four to six years would the Navy have its two-ocean fleet. There was a long lag between Franklin Roosevelt's "total defense," on order, and Europe's total war, on hand.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.