Wallace's Windfall

Vice President Henry A. Wallace's Economic Defense Board completed a sleuthing job last week, came up with a rich haul of loot. In the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad yards in Hoboken, N.J., the board's investigators found the following war supplies, stranded in warehouses and freight cars ever since the consignees had been cut off by Hitler's conquests.

> Marked for shipment to France: 473,510 lb. of aluminum plate and rods; 215,000 lb. of steel.

> For Holland: 2,712,638 lb. of iron & steel; 20 automobiles.

> For Switzerland: 1,491,000 lb. of steel plate; 690,192 lb. of tin plate; 19 automobiles.

> For Italy: 535,515 lb. of steel.

Marveling that nobody had thought to look for these supplies before, EDB took immediate steps to put them to work. One mystery: who had been paying the storage and demurrage charges on them for over a year? Knowing full well that Germany would have been glad to pay to keep the supplies idle, EDB aimed to find the answer in a hurry. It also sent its agents to look for more materials in the freight yards of New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco.

To U.S. businessmen pressed by shortages, EDB's Hoboken windfall had a hopeful note. If a quick survey of one railroad yard could turn up several million pounds of idle materials, the Office of Production Management's still uncompleted overall inventory survey might turn up billions.

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