"Critical Situation"

In the grey-paneled calm of the office of the U. S. Army's Chief of Staff, the confusion of war, the hurly-burly of U. S. rearmament seemed far away. Beyond the Venetian blinds the rain fell, streaking the stuccoed walls of the War Department's shoddy Munitions Building, glazing the black asphalt of Washington's Constitution Avenue. Seated before old Phil Sheridan's ornately carved desk, spare, grey General George Catlett Marshall, in summer mufti, talked to 25 newsmen at his weekly press conference.

Across Sheridan's desk last week had flowed plenty of evidence of the slowness of U. S. rearmament--Congressional delay on the conscription bill, inadequate voluntary recruiting rate, the molasses flow of turning peacetime industrial production into production for war. George Marshall, fluent, unhurried, talked frankly.

That day London's outskirts had been savagely bombed and more big raids were to come. For this and other reasons, said George Marshall, the situation facing the U. S. is "critical." How critical? "I apply the term," replied the Army's No. 1 soldier, while pencils flew across copy paper, "to the possibilities of the next month in the Western Hemisphere." What about delay in conscription? "No one can say with certainty, the way things are going abroad, that we won't need the additional man power without delay. Time is the dominant factor, and time is fleeting."

However Congress might dawdle, General Marshall last week could find many an evidence that at last the U. S. was waking up.

> The aircraft contract log jam broken, the War Department signed $32,687,966 in contracts for 1,250 planes, all but 56 of them trainers which the Army & Navy must have before they can school pilots for combat planes. Ready soon will be contracts for the rest of the first emergency appropriation of $400,000,000 for 4,000 ships.

> Signed by Hercules Powder Co. was a $25,000,000 contract for a new powder mill, the second of thirty-three prospective plants.

> To Chrysler Corp. went a $54,500,000 contract to build medium-sized tanks, of which the U. S. now has none.

> Announced by Ford Motor Co. (which refused to build Rolls-Royce aircraft engines if the British were to get any) was an agreement with United Aircraft Corp. to build 4,000 Pratt & Whitney air-cooled engines.

> From the National Defense Advisory Commission came a summary of contracts already approved from the $6,422,103,534 defense bill already passed by Congress. Its total: more than 1,400 orders ($1,961,741,122) for items ranging from barracks bags to submarines.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.