Production Tripped Up

The whole pellmell, damn-the-expense, U.S. war-production program collided in a hundred places at once this week with the steel shortage. The crash could be heard from Berlin to Tokyo. For the U.S., it was news calculated to humiliate the world's most production-proud nation more than a military defeat.

>> For lack of steel the Maritime Commission canceled its biggest single contract for 200 sorely needed Liberty ships. So doing, it junked $10,000,000 worth of preliminary work on the $65,000,000 assembly-line shipyard being built by Andrew Jackson Higgins in New Orleans.

>> For lack of steel the famed Chrysler tank arsenal in Detroit may grind to a stop within a few weeks. Elsewhere in the Detroit area the Chevrolet gear and axle plant, the Fisher Body plant No. 1 are already shut down.

>> For lack of steel Henry Kaiser's Oregon shipyard produced five fewer merchant ships last month than its full capacity. Within the last fortnight, Todd Shipyards had steel snatched away from it for some other purpose allegedly more necessary than building ships.

>> For lack of steel many Lend-Lease allotments were cut 50% last week.

In Washington, officials admitted that many war plants now under construction will not turn a wheel for months after they are completed, at best will run well below capacity. Some will stand idle for the duration. Donald Nelson said frankly that there are not enough raw materials to keep all the plants already built running full tilt, let alone all the new ones. In fact, Robert Nathan, chief of Nelson's Planning Board, believes that some of the half-finished structures should be torn down to recover the materials that were put in them, put them to use in more urgent war needs.

How is it possible? The U.S. has close to 50% of all the world's steel capacity, enough at full blast to roll out 90,000,000 ingot tons this year. How could this fail to be enough? There are all kinds of reasons--all of them shocking or tragic or both, none of them conclusive.

Most shocking fact of all is that, despite the crying need, the steel industry will operate some 5,000,000 tons below its full capacity this year (TIME, June 22).

Second most shocking fact is that WPB has little idea what has become of a very large part of the 85,000,000 tons of steel for which priorities have been issued in the past year (TIME, June 22, July 6). Not until the Production Requirements Plan (better known as "Purp") was ordered into operation July 1 did the Government even begin to have any way of keeping track of where steel was going.

The result was the final absurdity of confusion: nobody in Washington could tabulate sense-making essential needs for even 85,000,000 ingot tons, but still practically no essential needs were being wholly filled. Sample confusion:

>> War Manpower Commission statisticians think 200,000 tons a month could be saved on ridiculously lavish steel used for barracks, warehouses, etc.

>> Too much steel is still going into warships for 1946.

>> 27,000,000 tons of steel are now under allocation for "indirect military use"--a term no one can define except to say that the Army & Navy have some use in mind for it.

>> Lend-Lease demands, operated by Harry Hopkins directly from me White House, have been huge and variable. When Churchill was last in the U.S., the President alloted him additional steel, and WPB was slow in being advised.

>>War-production planners and the Army went hog-wild on new construction both before and after Pearl Harbor: this year's building program amounts to over $14,000,000,000 and 11,000,000 tons of steel (half of it for Army camps and bases); it is eating up 12% of the U.S.'s steel-plate capacity, 36% of its structural steel shapes. But while almost every other kind of productive capacity in the U.S. was ballooning, steel capacity was increased a bare 10%.

In brief, the Government's munitions-plant expansion program had been too successful. Not knowing exactly what would be needed, it tried to make lavish provisions for everything. Instead, it got the inevitable mess.

-- Only previous draft of null was in World War I, only other major foreign war in U.S. history.

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