CRIME: War Tools

One morning last week Shipping Clerk Karl Wehn of Greenfield Tap & Die Corp. opened the company shipping room in downtown Manhattan and found that someone had been there before him. A three-foot hole gaped through a brick wall into an adjoining building. Empty were shelves and storage bins. Missing were valuable, high-speed drills and carbon-steel drills used in machine tools for airplane-engine and munitions manufacture—drills, that had been packed in cloth and straw and wrapped in brown paper, ready for shipment.

Because police and FBI agents kept mum, nobody could say how many such robberies had taken place, whether they were the result of common criminal greed or systematic sabotage. But newsmen learned of two in Chicago, one in Cleveland, six in New York City. The monetary loss in these thefts was about $75,000 but the loss of badly needed tools was more important. In Washington, Advisory Defense Commissioner William Knudsen refused to worry: “I don’t imagine you could steal enough to get us in any trouble, and, anyhow, we could make some more.” But the new form of crime was a sign of the times.