Washington War

When WPBoss Donald Nelson gets back to his desk, perhaps this week, he faces a tougher fight than his successful bout with pneumonia. While he was abed his balky WPB co-workers had shelved what is probably the most important order Nelson had ever issued: an order that would begin the reconversion of U.S. war plants in an orderly way.

This was a big fight--one of the biggest of all the Washington battles of the war--and one which it was important that U.S. citizens should understand.

Nelson's sidetracked directive would per mit manufacturers to utilize the great masses of surplus aluminum and magnesium. Under restrictions, they could forge experimental models of postwar products. More important, war contractors whose orders are canceled or have been cut back could resume consumption of these metals for a limited output of civilian goods. In effect, the long-delayed Nelson order is a clutch that would allow the industrial gears to change from war to peace production without stopping the whole machine.

But stolid Don Nelson, and bouncy Maury Maverick, chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corp., are in a minority. They argue that idle U.S. machinery and men should be free to use the mountains of surplus aluminum. (Fortnight ago the Aluminum Association stated that curtail ments in aluminum for war materials now exceed the total amount of aluminum used by the country annually before the war.) Last week SWPC estimated that two and a half million tons of steel in odd lots, shapes and sizes could be turned over to small manufacturers who have no war contracts.

What Nelson, Maverick & Co. were striving for was a gradual adjustment from war to peace with a minimum lag in employment for labor, and minimum chaos and financial loss to manufacturers.

Aligned solidly against Messrs. Nelson, Maverick et al. stand the Army & Navy, the able WPB vice chairman, Charles E. Wilson, and a powerful majority group of WPB lieutenants.

Their case is a mixture of morals and materialism. The Army & Navy stand on the unassailable high ground that the U.S. soldier had much better have too much & too soon than too little & too late.

Even now, with materials piled up every where, and only China, which is a logistics problem, not supplied to the point of oversupply, the Services insist on building the piles ever higher. Both Services could probably cut back many production pro grams even farther than they have. But both fear one thing deeply: that man power, seeing the war program ending, will desert in droves to the security of peace production jobs. They well know that after each war-plant cutback the workers prefer and seek peace-plant jobs, so that they will not soon be let out again.

But what the Services are up against here is that realistic American workers, skeptical of the it's-a-long-long-war talk that comes from Washington, are already seeking safer peacetime jobs. Individual Americans, in short, are cannily doing their own reconverting right now.

There are facts on the Services' side. Steel production slumped last week to 94.3% of capacity. Reason: the steel industry needs 50,000 more workers. The worst car shortage in 21 years threatens to cripple the western railroads this summer. The carriers need 90,000 more workers. There are also fairly critical labor shortages on the farm, in canneries and in lumbering.

This is the problem that has split the top policymakers. Last week the deadlock seemed absolute. Aluminum, the key to the problem at the moment, will remain unavailable for civilian goods as long as the Services are convinced that its release will interfere with war production. In effect, the reconversion problem, on whose solution future U.S. prosperity largely hangs, has clashed head on with the lingering problem of war production. This week home front Czar Jimmy Byrnes offered to arbitrate the big dispute. But Donald Nelson still might need all his convalescent strength for the battle ahead.

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