Good Plan, Bad Planning

The Office of War Information last week quietly announced the first U.S. campaign of economic warfare designed to win conquered natives to the United Nations' cause. Over $5,000,000 of civilian goods, said OWI, had been purchased with Lend-Lease funds for shipment to French North Africa. Some 6,000 tons of sugar, kerosene, green tea, matches, newsprint, cheap textiles and clothing, medicines, etc., are already en route, 7,000 tons more are awaiting shipment and "additional civilian supplies of many times that value" are to be purchased soon.

The plan was brilliant: since, as OWI pointed out last week, "the Nazis have stripped North Africa," it can do enormous good to the United Nations to supply newly conquered nations with the civilian necessities they have had to learn to do without under Axis control. Moreover, North Africa has been so gutted that its production is not even self-sufficient, must be raised by U.S. aid before the U.S. can really cash in on its conquest.

Too Many Cooks. Unhappily the execution of the plan up to now has been anything but brilliant. Though a good many people have known of the North African campaign for months, last week none of the overlapping Washington agencies knew how to handle civilian-goods shipments to Morocco, Algeria, etc. There was a four-cornered wrangle between 1) Lend-Lease (which pays for the goods), 2) the Board of Economic Warfare (which distrusts Darlan and all his works), 3) the State Department (which in the main is willing to play along with ex-Vichy officials but is not prepared for the African job), 4) the Army & Navy (the only people on the spot in North Africa). Herbert Lehman's Office of Rehabilitation and Relief, to whom the job logically belongs, was too new to be more than an innocent bystander.

Result of this fracas: although the goods are already under way, no setup exists in North Africa to distribute them at the right prices. The price angle is important because French North Africa is suffering from serious inflation. Thus BEW last week was frantically teaching Army and Navy officers how to run rationing and price control, how to by-pass existing Axis-established laws when distributing U.S. civilian goods in Africa. This itself was a strange commentary on the Army's and the Navy's "Gauleiter" schools at the University of Virginia and Columbia, where the teaching has been directed at post-war occupation problems.

One Cook Too Few. Despite the multifarious agencies fumbling with this crucial matter, one segment of the war administration was not involved in the North African plans--and should have been. That was Joe Weiner's Civilian Supply division in WPB (and the officials concerned with similar problems in Leon Henderson's OPA).

Last week the Lend-Leasers-to-Africa made a big point of the acknowledged fact that the shipments now under way or contemplated are only a drop in the bucket compared to total U.S. supplies. But in Manhattan the retail trade was buzzing with known purchases of 150,000 pairs of $4 & $5 men's and women's shoes and rumored purchases of 3,000,000 yards of rayon. In terms of current and threatened civilian shortages in the U.S., such sudden subtractions from the market are not a drop in the bucket--if for no other reason than that they can once again throw the none-too-good Government estimates of domestic civilian supply galley-west.

If U.S. citizens suddenly find themselves really short of essential goods at the same time that stories crop up of similar goods rotting in depots abroad, there will be hell to pay. The moral was clear: unless someone coordinates North African civilian plans fast, the U.S. is heading for serious trouble both at home and abroad. If that happens, the usual good plan will have been wrecked by the usual bad planning.

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