Coal or Chaos

In Paris, the lights which now blaze so brightly may soon be dimmed. In the huge textile mills of Lyons, the spindles are idle. In Belgium the great steel mills in Liege, Charleroi and La Louviere are shut. In many a European village there is ample food, but no way to get it to the hungry cities.

These were outward signs last week, two months after V-E day, that the econ omy of western Europe was still paralyzed.

Like a watch without a mainspring, it lacked the all-important power needed to start it up again : the power locked up in coal. Until the paralyzing coal shortage is solved, there is little chance that Eu rope's shattered economy can be rebuilt or that any sizable foreign trade with the U.S. can be revived.

As Europe shivered through last winter, so it faced the prospect of freezing in the next. Many a European hopes that the U.S. will ship the coal that Europe needs. Last week, Solid Fuels Boss Harold Ickes dashed this hope. The U.S., said he, will fall short by some 37,000,000 tons of meeting its own needs. Result: coal shipments to Europe, now 500,000 tons a month, will be stopped altogether in September. If Europe is to get coal, it must dig its own.

Cold France. In France, which normally imported two-fifths of its coal, the shortage is Europe's worst. During the occupation, the Nazis kept the French output at a peak of 42,000,000 tons a year by wooing the miners with double food rations. The French Government tried the same stunt but failed to deliver the food. Result: absenteeism in the mines soared to 25%.

Moreover, with consumer goods scarce, there is little incentive to work. The prolonged celebration of V-E day (in some places it lasted a week) cost France 300,000 tons of coal. Now, coal production is Tmly about half what it was in prewar years, far below rock-bottom needs.

Cold Belgium. In Belgium, production has been hamstrung by a series of political strikes (e.g., the miners oppose the return of King Leopold), and is only 65% of normal. Typical result: the Belgian steel industry was so short of coal in March that only one plant operated. Now the mills are turning out only 25,000 tons of steel a month, 12% of prewar production.

The thrifty Dutch have a small coal reserve, piled up by working hard in the mines' in the southern part of their country while the northern part was being liberated. But current production of 240,000 tons a month is still 82% below the prewar output. Italy, which once used to import 1,000,000 tons of coal a month, is now getting only 10% of that. Norway is out of fuel and Sweden, which managed to build up a stockpile of German coal during the war, will soon be scraping bottom.

Help from Germany? Unable to do the job themselves, all these nations are looking to Germany's coal-rich Ruhr to do it for them. (What Russia intends to do with the coal in her part of Germany she has so far kept to herself.) The Ruhr mines were little damaged, but the Allied Coal Headquarters set up to run the mines will have to find manpower (the Nazis employed 160.000 slave workers in the Ruhr) and provide housing and food for the miners, now getting only 1,000 to 2,200 calories a day (requirement for men engaged in heavy labor: 4,000 calories). In addition, the railroads and canals must be rebuilt to haul the coal away.

How Much? Nevertheless, coal is being dug. The Army Service Forces, busily fixing up the railroads and clearing the canals, soon hope to have them in shape. As yet, Ruhr production is small--only 500,000 tons of low quality coal (brown coal or lignite) a month. But the Allies hope to boost this to 3,500,000 tons 'of hard coal and 2,500,000 tons of brown coal by Christmas. While this is far less than Germany's prewar production in the Ruhr (9,000,000 tons of hard coal and 4,000,000 tons of brown coal), the needs of Germany's throttled industry will also be far less. No one can yet estimate how much, if any, coal will be left for export to France, Belgium and Holland.

Said a gloomy official: "One winter without coal you can get away with. But a second you can't. If people don't get coal you can count on chaos or revolution."

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