Criminal Waste

"There is no real shortage of critical metals that can't be remedied . . . merely the most extravagant kind of wastage."

No carping crackpot made this shattering statement last week, but a man who ought to know. It came, in fact, from the head of WPB's Conservation & Substitution Division, mild, white-thatched Harvey A. Anderson. Before he came to Washington he was the ace waste eliminator for American Telephone & Telegraph; now he is a thorn in the side of Army & Navy. Last week, with his big boss Don Nelson engaged in his own grapple with the services over scarce materials, Harvey Anderson was mad enough to blow up.

What makes mild Mr. Anderson maddest is to compare the U.S. use of raw materials with Germany's. The U.S. copper supply this year is ten times what Germany has been winning the war with, he points out; yet the U.S. war plant is now slowing down for "lack" of copper! Germany is using one-quarter as much copper ammunition, though both nations are producing about the same quantity of shells.*

In Germany porcelain tubes replace copper and brass tubing in water, air, fuel and chemical containers; alloy steel supplants copper, bronze and brass in armatures, turbine blades, and food, soap, chemical and synthetic gasoline factories.

Harvey Anderson's charge that bad management is the real cause of the metals crisis was backed up by no less an expert than Mordecai Ezekiel, economic adviser to the Department of Agriculture, now on leave to WPB to study the steel shortage. Behind closed doors Ezekiel told a subcommittee of the House that faulty allocation of steel, rather than any serious general shortage, forced the Government's sensational decision to cancel its order for 200 sorely needed Liberty ships from Higgins Corp. of New Orleans (TIME, July 27).

Waste is the Answer--waste so criminal and so widespread as to give any citizen a temperature. The waste he sees reaches its peak in Army & Navy, but it is pyramided by the sluggish mental attitude of U.S. industry, "too long used to cheap materials and expensive labor, still addicted to the extravagance that made Ford use alloy steel radiator grilles designed to outlast the rest of his V-8 bodies by several lifetimes." Sample horrors en his list:

> Monel-metal urinals (70% nickel, 30% copper), chrome-plated brass towel hangers, aluminum lockers, 13,000 lb. of brass name plates are among the Navy's specifications for a seaworthy cruiser.

> Almost all Army & Navy specifications call for virgin metals, though secondary metal would often do just as well. The Navy still insists upon top-grade primary aluminum for cable cases, fire-control boxes, etc. In copper, there is an actual surplus of secondary metal on the market, while painfully short virgin metal is still insisted upon for belts and insignia, laundry equipment, whistles, zippers, etc.

> The Army has grudgingly made a few changes: it was finally persuaded to use plywood pontoons, for example, after it was clearly demonstrated that they handled as well as aluminum and were much easier to repair.

> The Navy contends that aluminum lockers, stairways, etc. are essential to keep its warships from being "topheavy." No other Navy specifies on that basis.

> Every warning to U.S. industry to save about-to-be-scarce metals "invariably resulted in a rush to grab as much as they could of the scarce metals while the getting was good, thus making the shortage even more critical." Sample: by the time dogfood canners were told they could have no more tin, they were sitting on a huge pile of cans already lithographed, which they asked permission to use up. WPB graciously let them go ahead, though Army rations could have gone into those cans just as well as into the new ones the Army was ordering. Says Anderson, in mild defense of WPB's generosity: "Do you think we could ever get that Army bunch to accept anything that wasn't exactly up to their specifications? Not while the Army still gets A-1-A priorities on tinplated steel for its beer cans."

"Many a mickle makes a muckle" says Harvey Anderson, when he is challenged on his belief that waste like this is the one big reason for the raw-materials crisis. He wants a new, over-all review of all Army & Navy specifications, with particular emphasis upon using more secondary, reprocessed metals. He also believes that castings could replace metal-wasting machining operations in many cases, that silver could bear much more of the load borne by copper, nickel and tin.

But Harvey Anderson knows that no mickles will make any muckle to speak of until the hard core of the U.S.'s war-production crisis is cracked. So long as no overall production tsar exists in fact as well as in name, no overall production orders will even be properly formulated, let alone carried out.

*Even in the last war, Germany used steel for shell cases. World War I historians trying to reconstruct battle scenes could always spot German trenches by rusted cartridges lying around in contrast to the bright brass cartridges along Allied lines. Last week Buick said it had solved the engineering problems of steel casings and is going into large-scale production.

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