Gloomy Talk

Black-browed, snow-haired John Carlton Ward Jr., president of Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp., is not normally a Gloomy Gus. Generally he is too busy making good his promise to build huge wood-veneer bomber-crew trainers--"the biggest damn airplanes out of wood that anyone ever thought of" (TIME, June 1, 1942). But last week, in his official capacity as president of the East Coast Aircraft War Production Council, 50-year-old Carl Ward caught the headlines with some very Gloomy-Gus talk. Said he:

> When war broke out, aircraft manufacturing was a "sick industry"; when war ends it may well become very sick again: normal peacetime operations would almost certainly provide less than 10% of today's volume and might well amount to less than $1 billion a year (v. $30 billions scheduled for 1944).

> Up to and including the present war, the U.S. has invariably had "a complete record of military unpreparedness"; this time, as always in the past, the U.S. had been saved only by "a series of unanticipated events"; the only way to avoid World War III is for the U.S. to begin to prepare for it now.

Carl Ward gloomed on: he had no confidence that anything short of "acts or directives of Congress" would assure the U.S. aircraft industry of enough peacetime business to keep it inventing, perfecting and producing enough planes to insure the U.S. against the outbreak of World War III.

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