Oil Shortage (?) Over

The filling-station curfew (TIME, Sept. 22, et ante), which had annoyed the Eastern Seaboard and aroused more shouts of outrage than anything Harold Ickes had done since the last time, was called off last week.

Mr. Ickes announced that the British, doing better in the Battle of the Atlantic, would soon (by next month) return 40 of the 80 tankers they had got from the U.S. This addition to the U.S. tanker fleet, plus the savings effected by the curfew and a 10% cut in deliveries to dealers, said Mr. Ickes, ended the threat of oil shortage for the Eastern Seaboard.

To connoisseurs of Ickes-hating, the announcement was a particularly choice tidbit, iridescent with proof that the oil shortage had existed only in Mr. Ickes' mind. Ickes' assistants philosophically reminded themselves of what they had said all along: that if they succeeded in averting a shortage, they would forever be damned because no shortage arrived.

Would there really have been a shortage? There was no way of telling for sure. But the U.S. may still find out. If the Battle of the Atlantic again reaches last spring's fury, Britain will get the tankers back and the Eastern Seaboard will again get Mr. Ickes.

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