AUTOS: Nine Months or Two

Detroit’s automakers last week sat down on one side of a long table in Detroit’s New Center Building. Their faces were grave. On the other side of the table sat some 30 newsmen from New York, Washington, Chicago and Cleveland. They had been invited to Detroit so that they could hear and tell the U.S. the sad story of the automakers. The story: optimistic talk of overnight conversion of the auto industry to car production, come an early V-E day, is stuff & nonsense.

Solemnly, with due regard for the ears of competitors at the same table, the automen sketched in the dark picture. C. E. Wilson, white-thatched General Motors president, estimated that by Jan. 1 G.M. would have only 17% of the machine tools needed to turn out 50% of its prewar car production (the quota tentatively set by WPB). The rest of the tools are not even promised until next June 1. K. T. Keller, the chunky, soft-voiced boss of Chrysler Corp., deftly added some dark shading. “Before Chrysler can build its first car, it must clear 17,000,000 square feet of floor space . . . install 1,000 miles of conveyors, and set up at least 24,000 machine tools.”

Low Gear for Autos. The gloom was slightly relieved by George Christopher, president of Packard. He predicted little reconversion unemployment for Detroit because 1) plants will be busy on Japanese war work, 2) workers will be needed for the reconversion job itself.

Then the automakers said they want:

¶ A new Governmental policy which will give them a free hand in moving U.S.-owned tools and materials from their plants, i.e., let them do it as fast as they moved out their own in converting to war.

¶ Overriding priorities for the auto industry which will permit it, and other industries wholly converted to war, to get machine tools ahead of all other civilian industries. (Two days later WPBoss Krug turned down this suggestion.)

Without these clearances, the bigwigs gloomily predicted that the first cars may not roll out till as late as nine months after V-E day. Added G.M.’s Wilson: Home Front Tsar Jimmy Byrnes must have “misunderstood” the problem when he blithely predicted cars within three months after Germany quits.

High Gear for Ford. Next day the newsmen traveled to Willow Run, sat down with Ford executives for lunch. There they got a shock. Ray Rausch, the plump, candid production boss of the Rouge plant, calmly predicted that the Ford company would turn out its first cars two months after V-E day.

“But,” butted one astounded newsman, “that contradicts all we were told.”

Rausch stuck to his prediction. He knows that the Ford company can do what most others cannot—it can make its own machine tools in the integrated Rouge plant. But he also knew something which had been carefully soft-pedaled before the newsmen. Come V-E day, the hyper-competitive automen will clear their plants of Government-owned equipment and materials in their own way, argue with the Government later on how it should have been done. Thus the two days of foofaraw simply boiled down to the fact that the automen sensibly wanted to scrap now the tangle of red tape which may hold up reconversion. But they have no intention of letting it stand in the way of 1) making jobs; 2) producing cars. As Rausch summed up: “When we start turning out cars the rest of the boys will be right with us, or not far behind. They’ve got to be.”