Here Comes The Army

Behind closed doors two Washington giants struggled last week to decide who is to be the real boss of U.S. war production. Theirs was the struggle of two opposing forces, two theories of how to get things done: it was the old, inevitable wartime fight between military and civilian.

On one side was stolid, peaceable WPBoss Donald Marr Nelson, who holds the big civilian job of the war. On the other was slim, stern, impatient Lieut. General Brehon Burke Somervell, who runs the Army's biggest show as Chief of the Services of Supply. They fought without personal rancor but with no holds barred, to determine whether Army or civilians should have last say on U.S. war production.

The question had never yet come to a clean decision. In the old, bobbling, bungling days of NDAC, OPM and SPAB, the Army, holding tightly and jealously to its power to sign war contracts, set the pattern of U.S. production by mere force of letting the contracts as the Army saw fit. The defense agencies played around with raw materials, plant conversion and subcontracting--all unsuccessfully. Manufacturers got used to thinking of the Army as the source of orders, of OPM as a source of questionnaires.

The snarled results were as much Army's fault as OPM's. Old-fashioned military purchasing methods were geared to buy a few tin hats from a few munitions makers, not to build a total-war arsenal from a whole economy converted to war. And both OPM and Army were under a great handicap: nobody knew how many weapons the U.S. would need or where it would get the raw materials to build them, or even what wars the U.S. was going to fight--if any. The U.S. had no war management, either military or civilian.

Solution on Paper. When President Roosevelt made Donald Nelson the nation's production boss last January, he provided a solution--on paper. Donald Nelson had full power to convert U.S. factories to war, build new plants, gather up the nation's raw materials. Most important, he could allocate the materials as he saw fit among Army, Navy, Maritime Commission, Lend-Lease, civilians.

Donald Nelson took the job believing that his grant of power was enough. He set about his job patiently, quietly.

Up from behind him came General Somervell, as efficient an administrator as ever hung his hat in Washington, combining the best military directness with top-notch civilian experience as administrator of New York City's $10,000,000-a-month WPA projects. He was also an ambitious, professional fighting man who was already being mentioned for the next Army Chief of Staff.

When General Somervell became Chief of S.O.S. last March, he revitalized Army procurement methods overnight. Soon he was bumping his head against WPB: he was dependent on WPB's raw materials and the plants it built or converted. Since WPB moved too slowly for Brehon Somervell's speedy taste, he set out to push WPB out of his way.

Solution by Battle. Before Donald Nelson even knew he was in a fight, he had nearly lost it. He sent some of his top men over to the War Department as civilian advisers, to mesh WPB's production program with Army procurement. They did not stay civilians long. Instead of molding Army policy, Nelson's men were molded into well-tailored Army uniforms. General Somervell put the good men to work, boxed off the bad ones. In a matter of weeks, he was head man of production and Nelson had a row of empty desks.

Last month, while Nelson was realigning WPB to handle the new No. 1 problem of materials shortages, Brehon Somervell moved again. He drew up his own plan, making the Army boss of everything, leaving WPB a paper-shuffling agency. At last Donald Nelson realized that he was in a fight. He went to the White House; President Roosevelt vetoed the Somervell plan.

But General Somervell kept boring in. Immediately he suggested one of his own men--able Chairman Ferd Eberstadt of the Army & Navy Munitions Board--for one of the top new WPB jobs. Nelson turned down the suggestion, instead ordered the Munitions Board to move its civilian personnel into WPB quarters. There the fight rested this week.

Authority with Strings. Donald Nelson's grant of power had never been really enough to make him manager of the war effort. He came in after most of the production had been blueprinted, most of the nation's store of raw materials already earmarked for duty. Many of the powers a modern-day Bernard Baruch needs were spread through other agencies--Office of Defense Transportation, War Manpower Commission, Office of Price Administration, Food Control--over which he had no direct control, or even advisory powers. And the Army & Navy, retaining the right to make war contracts, could always veto him in fact if not in theory--and almost always did.

The struggle to take away what power he had caught Nelson at a bad time. WPB's program was sadly out of gear. Some of the nation's bright, shiny, proud new factories would never turn a wheel, for lack of raw materials; some might even have to be torn down for scrap. This was not Nelson's fault: the Army & Navy had contributed to the shortages by prodigal waste in specifications.

But even Nelson's closest friends conceded that he had often been too easygoing, too loth to issue harsh commands when even a second's delay was fatal. The metal that poured into refrigerators and race-track grandstands six months ago, before WPB got around to calling a halt, was now irretrievably gone. And Nelson sat right where the blame, deserved and undeserved, would all fall.

Authority in Deadlock. But no one could say yet who would win the struggle. General Somervell had licked every job he ever tackled; on his record, he was a hard man to stop. But WPB's biggest job now was to allocate raw materials impartially for military and civilian needs. Well might Donald Nelson claim that no Army man should umpire a game that the Army was playing. And allocation of raw materials was a staggeringly difficult task; neither the Army nor anybody else had yet produced a plan better than WPB's.

Army and WPB men looked anxiously toward the White House, whence the final decision must come. But perhaps there would be no decision. The fight had not kept General Somervell from doing miracles in S.O.S. It had put some new muscle on Nelson, made him move more decisively in WPB. Franklin Roosevelt, who well knows that men prove themselves under pressure, has often let Administration rivals knock their heads together until he was sure which was the better man. In this fight, a struggle of methods as well as men, he might never call time.

Payroll

The total number of Government civilian workers reached a new high in May: 2,066,873, a 4.87% increase over April; a 58.2% increase over May 1941. They were paid $336,568,306 in the month, 69.7% more than last year.

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