Wings for Imports

Old-line ship operators blinked, reread the report, blinked again: 6% of the dollar volume of U.S. imports last year arrived by air. Another eye opener: during the dreary months when submarines were sinking Allied ships faster than Henry Kaiser and others could build them, shipments in big-bellied Army & Navy air transports were 20 times safer than those on the seas.

The volume was actually less than 21,000 tons by air, and less than 1% of the total imports--25 million tons--by sea. All the air imports could easily have been stowed into two Liberty ships. But the role air freight played in maintaining essential war production could not be thus measured in cold statistics. Last week a young, lean Navy lieutenant, Langdon P. Marvin Jr., chairman of WPB's Interdepartmental Air Cargo Priorities Committee, in a year-end summary of work done, told how air cargoes of vital raw materials arrived only a few hours before the last reserves were scraped from the bottom of U.S. stockpiles. Without planeloads of mica, quartz crystals, tantalate, columbite, industrial diamonds and rare drugs, the production lines of magnetos, electrical apparatus, stainless steel and medicines would have stopped dead.

Things should be calmer in 1944. But Marvin still gets emergency calls--a sugar grower needs a shipment of live frogs from Argentina to eat insects menacing the sugar crop; a silk concern wants a shipment of silkworm eggs from Turkey. He turned down a request to ship perfume essence, worth $1,500 a Ib. But when the U.S. onion crop turned out poorly, 61,600 pounds of onion seeds were flown in from Argentina.

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