Report on Metals

In the history of World War II, July 1942 will be marked as a tragic month: U.S. war production tsars ran out of raw materials just when they had finally begun to answer the two-year-old question of what raw-material needs really were. Up to July there were shortages all over the place, but they were mostly regarded as individual bottlenecks, to be broken by separate emergency means. By July--the first month when almost all U.S. war industry was forced to submit quarterly estimates of all requirements--the individual bottlenecks had merged into a choking squeeze around the neck of the whole U.S. war effort, from aircraft to merchant ships, guns and tanks.

How constricting that squeeze now is became clearer last week:

Aluminum capacity--the first fully recognized bottleneck of all--has been more than tripled since 1940, yet WPB's Requirements Committee could not find enough aluminum tubing to fill more than two-thirds of the demand for strictly war needs in the third quarter of this year. They also had to say no to one-quarter of the requests for extruded shapes (though supply and demand are almost together on sheets and forgings). But, by 1943, things should really look better, since the U.S. and Canada are scheduled to produce almost 50% more aluminum than this year's high level.

Copper, zinc and nickel are cruelly short, with about one-fifth of the U.S.'s essential third-quarter needs going begging. On zinc, in fact, WPB still has no adequate estimate of what over-all requirements really are. And despite Canada's overwhelming share (80-85%) of world nickel production, war industry is gobbling it up so fast that would-be users are being shifted to other metals.

Steel is almost as bad as copper and zinc. When WPB made its allocations for the third quarter of this year, it was able to meet only 85% of the demand for plates and less than that for shapes and rails. More than 50% of the U.S.'s gargantuan steel output is now going into direct military uses. Just over 25% is going into Lend-Lease shipments and new plant construction. The rest is being chewed up by repairs and maintenance, plus essential civilian consumption.

That means that if the U.S.'s 90,000,000 tons of steel capacity is ever to be enough. it will not be due in any important measure to further cuts in purely civilian consumption. Moreover, if WPB really jams through its 9,710,000-ton steel expansion, things will get worse before they get better, since it will take up to 4,000,000 tons of steel now to get 9,710,000 tons a year later.

Tungsten to mix with steel is also so critically short that some of the U.S.'s precious air space on trips back from China is being devoted to shipping in a few more tons.

Some metal supplies are in good shape--at least so far as essential needs are concerned. Lead and antimony, on WPB's requirements list, both show a slight excess of supply. Though manganese is now taking some of the load off nickel, the supply situation looks good enough-so that imports have recently been curtailed, at least temporarily. Chromium is one metal about which U.S. stockpilers were so forehanded that--combined with new domestic production (see below)--all appears to be well.

But unhappily, both in tonnage and use, these metals, though strategic, are all pipsqueaks compared to the basic scarce ones --steel and copper and zinc. There are still many doubters who swear that the "scarcity" of base metals is an illusion caused by wasteful use and chaotic allocation methods (TIME, Aug. 3). But so long as the U.S. war machine must have more of them than WPB can find, it cannot run at capacity.

*Including expectations of 20 times normal production from low-grade domestic ores.

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