And Then There Were None

The nation's druggists, grocers, confectioners and tobacconists had turned amiable liars. There was hardly a U.S. store anywhere last week without the sign: NO CIGARETS. Yet under the counters, at least part of the time, the cigarets were there, saved for the old customers.

A New York Daily News reporter, assigned to investigate the famine, wrote: "The shortage will grow progressively worse until October 1947, when there won't be any [cigarets] at all." This was not mere cheerful exaggeration, for the U.S. was rapidly depleting its stocks of cured tobacco.

Yet, aside from the shortage itself, the overwhelming fact of the famine was that no one could explain it. Of all the Congressional investigators, retailers and wholesalers, the men who know tobacco best, no one came up with a sensible answer.

Partly, of course, the civilian shortage was caused by the Army & Navy. They had ordered 83 billion cigarets for 1944. This left 250 billion for the nation's 50-odd million civilian cigaret-smokers--an average of 14 a day. The average for the Army's eight million smokers was 23 a day, or eight packs a week. But a steady stream of news stories bore out the fact that soldiers at the front were getting nowhere near as many as that. The question arose: were there huge unused Army & Navy stocks stored away in seaboard warehouses?

But even if true, this was little consolation for civilians. They wanted soldiers to have all the cigarets they needed. The merest shred of comfort came from S. Clay Williams, board chairman of potent R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. To a Senate investigating committee, he confessed that even he had to walk more than a mile for a Camel.

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