Cargo for the U.S.S.R.

Soviet ships had been calling at U.S. ports ever since V-J Day, and nobody but customs officials and longshoremen had paid much attention to them. But last week, when the 10,000-ton Soviet steamship Chukotka tied up at a Jersey City pier and began loading $282,000 worth of industrial machinery (which had been licensed for export by the Department of Commerce), all hell broke loose.

A line of Catholic war veterans appeared at the Chukotka's pier, began picketing her on grounds that her cargo could be used against the U.S. in time of war. Longshoremen decided to join the protest, held a token strike for six hours. Within 24 hours the Chukotka case had made Page One of most newspapers, was being hotly discussed in Congress.

Tractors to Generators. New sensations were touched off immediately. One Clarence Carruthers, president of a New York aeronautical supply firm, told a House subcommittee that "everybody in New York knew there were boxes and bales marked for Russia lying all over the waterfront." He added: "They've brought 60 Soviet flag ships into New York harbor since the first of the year and loaded them with everything from tractors to electric generators."

Then a Texas aircraft supplier named Leroy H. Luckey told of buying usable World War II bomber engines from the War Assets Administration as scrap, and selling 46 of them to a dealer who shipped them to Russia and Poland. With this, the New York Journal-American could hardly contain itself; it reported that "secret agents from the Kremlin were combing WAA depots."

As the uproar increased, the White House made a mollifying gesture. The President issued a long and impressive list of war materiel which would henceforth be exported only with the permission of the State Department. It included aircraft and aircraft parts, all kinds of guns and military vehicles and even steel helmets.

But dozens of Congressmen and Senators continued to cry angrily for a more stringent embargo against Russia; some for a complete halt of all shipments to the U.S.S.R. Thousands of U.S. citizens, who bitterly recalled pre-Pearl Harbor scrap shipments to Japan, agreed wholeheartedly.

Manganese & Chrome. The problem, however, was not quite that simple. Neither was it quite as acute as it might have seemed at first glance. Actually, only five --not 60--Russian ships had sailed from New York since Jan. 1; only 13 had sailed from all U.S. ports. Russia had all but ceased to use her shipping route between Vladivostok and Puget Sound.

There could be no denying that the U.S. was sending war materiel to Russia. Exports to the U.S.S.R. in 1947 had included $3,549,000 worth of petroleum products, $81,110,000 worth of industrial machinery, $16,277,000 worth of machine tools and parts, $1,267,000 worth of automobiles and trucks, $420,000 worth of aircraft parts. But the total of $431,483,000 worth of exports sent all countries behind the iron curtain was only one-tenth of U.S. exports to Western Europe.

Moreover, Russia was shipping the U.S. war materiel too. While all U.S. imports from Eastern Europe totaled only $153 million, they included 25% of the manganese and 29% of the chrome used in the U.S. Russia had also sent platinum, diamonds, iridium, osmium and palladium.

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