Streamlined WPB

Don Nelson last week reshaped WPB. NDAC had lasted eleven months, 0PM twelve and one-half, SPAB four and one-half months.

Each defense agency was born out of confusion, and died of strangulation by red tape. Each left unsolved the great root question: Should civilians or the military allocate war-scarce materials? WPB and Donald Nelson insisted that civilians should do the allocating, that the civilian economy must be protected, or the whole war effort would suffer. His reshuffle of WPB last week was a sign that his victory over the services, still struggling for control of materials, was practically complete.

No longer would Nelson have to keep an eye on every tiny administrative detail in order to head off incipient Army & Navy thrusts.

Realignment. Nelson explained that he had realigned WPB, not reorganized it. He is a "kind of umpire," said he, with plenty of authority to decide what supplies go to civilian needs, to Lend-Lease, Army, Navy. To the Army he turned over the remaining production problems, except plant conversion. The Army can decide for itself, said Nelson, how it can best use what it gets.

Unwilling as ever to hurt anybody by firing him, he packed Phil Reed, chief of the bureau of industry branches, off to London, as he had transferred Walter Wheeler, former chief of WPB subcontracting, to the Boston regional office.

> He upped genial, broad-shouldered, tall William Loren Batt, 57, from chairman of the requirements committee to be vice chairman of WPB. chief of staff to determine policies, direct operations. Batt rose from a Wabash farm and an Indiana roundhouse to head the big S.K.F. Industries (ball bearings), went into NDAC in May 1940.

> For another vice chairman and his deputy on the combined production and resources board, Nelson picked slim, ruddy-faced, grey-haired James S. Knowlson, former director of WPB's industry operations, an oldtime friend from Chicago. President of Stewart-Warner Corp., Knowlson became Nelson's deputy director of priorities in September 1941. On his first day he told staff members: "If there's any guy who doesn't think we can deliver this program in 1942, he had better get his time check, turn in his tools and get the hell out of here, quick."

> The job of putting into operation Knowlson's program governing the flow of materials was handed to handsome, athletic, 42-year-old Amory Houghton III, board chairman of Corning Glass Works. Houghton, of the fourth generation of glassmaking Houghtons, joined the firm as a glass blower on his graduation from Harvard in 1921. He rose quickly.

> Nelson left open the fourth big job, that of deputy chairman on program progress who checks on performance to anticipate bottlenecks, detect causes of failure, correct mistakes as they pop up.

Work to be Done. Donald Nelson hoped his realignment would stick. Some problems were left on the stove to simmer. One is a serious transportation jam, but he could do little with it. For Transportation Chief Joe Eastman has no status on WPB, must work round about. Another is Harold Ickes' separate jurisdiction over petroleum. Authority over electric power rests with six different Federal agencies. Plant expansion has to be checked again, lest there be more factories than materials to feed them.

Two days after his realignment, Nelson disclosed the production goals in terms of money: about $45 billion this year, $70 to $75 billion next year. "I do not believe that it can ever rise much above that figure, because I think that that is just about the limit that our economy can stand," he told Detroit automobile executives. "The materials which would be needed to get production substantially higher than that simply are not available." But doing that much, he added, will be splendid, magnificent.

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