How Goes the Battle?

In North Africa, the U.S. advance was stalled for lack of air superiority. From the Solomons came little news of fighting. Sole bright spot on the fighting front was Buna, which finally fell into U.S. hands. But from one battlefront--on which all others ultimately depend--the nation received dramatic news of great successes.

Out last week was the seventh of Franklin Roosevelt's quarterly reports on Lend-Lease. The others had been inconclusive, sometimes disappointing. Now at last came one in which Americans could take real pride. Better than any purple language, its simple facts told the story of how American industry and the American worker had triumphed in the battle of production.

> By year's end the U.S. will have more than 1,000,000 well-equipped men in expeditionary forces all over the world. (In 1940 Army maneuvers, soldiers used iron pipes for guns, planks across wagon axles for artillery, trucks for tanks; in 1941 they were still short of anti-aircraft guns and field artillery.)

> While equipping these men and the Army on its own shores, the U.S. has sent stout help to the British in Egypt (more than 1,000 planes, "many hundreds" of tanks, 20,000 trucks). It has increased Lend-Lease assistance to all allies to the rate of $10,000,000,000 a year. With Great Britain, it has shipped to Russia this year, over the northern route alone, more than 3,000 planes, 4,000 tanks, 30,000 trucks--though not all arrived.*

> In the last six months, U.S. production has passed Great Britain and Russia and is increasing its lead. (WPBoss Donald Nelson added that U.S. production now exceeds all the Axis nations combined.)

Flow & Future. Conferring at the White House, Franklin Roosevelt and Lend-Lease Administrator Edward R. Stettinius were mightily pleased. The flow of arms had only begun: their next report would be better than this one, and the one after that even better.

In Chicago, Chrysler Corp. was completing an airplane motor factory bigger than even famed Willow Run. (see p. 92). Three coastlines were now a-clatter with shipyards. (Henry J. Kaiser, who had never built a ship until 20 months ago, now has built 320.) And from Michigan, center of U.S. mass production, came another significant announcement: the Detroit area, which produced only $36 million worth of materiel before Pearl Harbor, had produced $1,100 million since.

Detroit had licked its bogeys: of unemployment during conversion, of possible failure at a new job, of possible paralysis when gasoline rationing began. A year ago the auto industry had 500,000 workers, only a fraction of them at war work. Now it has 660,000, with 95% of them at war jobs. The industry produces 60-70% more than it ever did in peacetime--and the peak is still six months away.

Michigan newspapers spoke glowingly, yet without exaggeration, of the "Miracle of Michigan." And up & down the land, the same miracle occurred. The National Association of Manufacturers reported that U.S. war production had quadrupled since Pearl Harbor, was still expanding toward new records for 1943.

Production would not win the war automatically, without fighting or bloodshed. But it meant that the steel sinews of war were America's to use.

* One grievous black mark on the year's record: Lend-Lease shipments to China, "limited by a transportation bottleneck that was made still tighter when the Japanese took Burma." Promised Franklin Roosevelt: "We shall find ways to send more."

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