WAR PRODUCTION: One Salvaged Is One Built

How much further U.S. war production can be cut back depends on how much war materiel now in Europe can be used against Japan. Last week, TIME Editor Joseph Purtell, after a month’s survey of U.S.

Army salvage operations in Europe, reported:

There is no debris of battle in the Ardennes, where hundreds of tanks and trucks were blasted in the Battle of the Bulge.

Beside the smashed dragon’s teeth of the Westwall at Aachen it is hard to find even a rusting fender. In the green fields of Bavaria, where the fighting ended only a few weeks ago, few signs of fighting are left. All of the smashed and pulverized equipment along the long road from Nor mandy to the Elbe is gone. For the reconstruction of war’s broken materiel is already well under way.

Battle Broom. The popular belief that the Army throws away a truck when it gets a flat tire may die hard. But the long convoys of mobile maintenance companies, wich followed the U.S. armies, boast that they tidy up a battlefield in two weeks.

Only in the Battle of the Bulge, where the tanks, halftracks and tank destroyers lay strewn in the woods almost as thick as acorns, did their boast fail. There the job took six weeks.

Standing knee-deep in the winter’s mud, they repaired what could be repaired in a few days. What could not be repaired in 72 hours, they shipped back to great base shops in Belgium and France—the chief of all in Paris. What was smashed completely they cannibalized, stripping it for its spare parts, leaving only piles of twisted junk for salvage as scrap.

French Fed. French automakers, who worked halfheartedly for the Nazis, sometimes spoiling as much material as they used, fed the roving field units with replacement parts. In the hard, fast dash across France, motors were worn to a mass of rattling hardware. Replacements arrived, but too slowly. Then Army Service Forces made a deal that produced replacements in France. Within a month after liberation Gnome & Rhone was rebuilding Continental tank motors; Gen eral Motors France was turning out motors for G.M.’s own famed “Six by Six” truck, the workhorse of the Army. Citroen, which had been given a black eye for collaboration, pitched in. Even Renault, whose Paris plant had several times been solemnly pronounced “destroyed” by bombs, had plenty of plant left for Army work.

The French footed the bill for the most part, through reverse Lend-Lease. But in a France short of everything, the Army had to furnish materials, comb through the Nazi prisoners for skilled workmen, haul coal for the plants from northern France, even supply food.

5,000 a Month. Now there are 17 busy French auto plants, which have al ready rebuilt 54,114 motors, and are turn ing out almost 20,000 motors a month.

Similarly in Belgium, a fast-moving young Lieut. Colonel, Earl H. Zwingle, who was in the millinery business before the war, is now rebuilding trucks, jeeps, motors, etc., in 16 small plants tucked away in Brussels, and in nine other plants spread all over Belgium. Now, Operation Zwingle is turning out 5,000 reconditioned trucks a month, soon will double that. In devastated MÜnchen-Gladbach in Germany, the Army is also rebuilding motors in its “velvet shops” (salvage is velvet).

Western Europe now has a network of “garages,” the like of which the Continent—and probably the U.S. as well—has never seen. Having kept the armies rolling across Germany, they are now putting everything that “rolls, shoots or explodes” in shape for reshipment to the Far East. Many divisions are already rolling out of Germany with equipment in top shape.

Parking Lot. Whatever needs repair is left behind, at great collecting points. In NÜrnberg, as the liberated remnants of the Wehrmacht plod homeward past the great stadium where Hitler ranted, they see it turned into a vast parking lot. where thousands of vehicles, artillery and materiel of all kinds await redeployment.

Two months ago, the Army tentatively hoped to save 70% of its European equipment for use in the Far East. Then, that estimate seemed high. But much materiel proved to be in far better shape than expected because i) once the Rhine was passed, the rate of attrition fell rapidly to zero, 2) repair more than kept pace with losses. General George Patton’s Third Army alone has put back into working order 348,000 pieces of equipment, ranging from rifles.to tanks.

Unexpected Stockpile. Major General Henry B. Sayler, the blue-eyed, square-jawed West Pointer who is top dog for ordnance in the European Theater, now thinks that close to 80% of all equipment on the Continent can be put into fighting trim faster than there are bottoms to take it away.

In the face of this tremendous stockpile of materiel in Europe, present cutbacks in U.S. war production seem conservative. Some 500,000 troops who will be shipped directly from Europe to the

China-Burma-India Theater will be completely outfitted on the Continent, from mess kits to tanks. But this will make only a sizable dent in the enormous store of materiel.