PRODUCTION: Hard Questions Answered

Charles Erwin Wilson is a soft-faced, hardheaded engineer and production man who became acting president of General Motors after William S. Knudsen joined the National Defense Advisory Commission. Last week Mr. Wilson made a speech to fellow alumni of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Like him, most of his hearers had jobs in industry; like him, they were deep in defense production. What they heard boiled down to one question—can the U. S. do its defense job on time?—and two answers:

>”. . . Unless . . . engineers, technicians highly skilled mechanics and managers work more than 40 hours a week, the program will never be completed on time. . . . The job . . . cannot be accomplished by arguments about who won’t do the work and how much he won’t do.”

>If people are willing to pay more taxes, do more work, buy fewer nonessential goods, “then we probably can get the job done without sowing the seeds of future depression. . . . The defense program . . . can be successfully completed only by improving efficiency . . . and by sacrifice.”

Last week the Roosevelt Administration took up Mr. Wilson’s gun-or-butter theme. Fragile, 73-year-old Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson announced that non-military airplanes hereafter will be classed as butter. With chilly disapproval, he quoted a report that booming, under-equipped U. S. airlines hoped by mid-1942 to double the 322 passenger planes now in service. Secretary Stimson told the airlines and their manufacturers to forget that program, count themselves lucky if they can continue their rate of replacement. Said Henry Stimson: “Which is more vital to the nation right now—increased military and naval strength in the air or increased business for the commercial airlines?”

Singled out for denunciation was big Douglas Aircraft Co. in California: Charge that Douglas fell 60 days behind schedule on the first of 186 dive-bombers, in the same 60 days turned out 24 commercial airliners. Manufacturer Donald Douglas roared an angry denial that he had put commercial business ahead of production for the U. S. and Great Britain. He also pointed out that all the airline business in prospect was small potatoes compared to the 23,000 military planes on U. S. order, the 14,000 on British order for delivery by 1942.

President Roosevelt had the power (by Act of Congress) to enforce Henry Stimson’s dictum. Last week the President put on his velvet gloves, said he did not expect to have to use the power. This week the airline operators fell into line, agreed to turn over to the military services all the recently delivered engines that they could spare, further promised to relinquish $7,500,000 worth of equipment on order for 1941.