His own first figure, so the gossip went, had been a nice round 25,000, the very number, curiously enough, which had been hit upon back in 1917 as the number required to “darken the skies” over Germany. But later, so ran the story, the President had tried out his fireside chat on Lord Beaverbrook, the same “Beaver” who, not many weeks earlier, had snorted his scorn at the suggestion that England would ever have to look to America for aircraft production. And the Beaver, so we were told, had advised the President not to be a piker—100,000 airplanes would make better headlines—and the President had compromised on 50,000. In any event, BUAERO and Wright Field had now dubbed the announcement “the numbers racket,” so the fact that a fellow like George Mead, who not only knew the words and music of aviation but could actually sing the song, was now handling the aircraft program seemed to us an incredibly lucky break.
And so it proved, for George got the two services to agree upon the reasonableness of some kind of program that seemed to add up to 50,000 and then passed the job back to them for execution. This put the ball back in play on a field where we knew the score and where the officials knew the rules and the game. It converted the war from a phony to a shooting war, and gave us the signal for take-off.
Now as the new British addition began to take form, we put our War Plans Division to work on a new American addition. This we decided to create in two steps and to finance with funds to be acquired in the market. Designed to utilize the entire capacity of the East Hartford area, the addition would double the total facilities already in hand. Our carefully prepared war plan contemplated farming out more and more of the work to subcontractors and suppliers as rapidly as they could be trained to manufacture to our high standards of precision and workmanship. The original manufacturing concept of Pratt and Whitney, Hamilton-Standard, and Vought had contemplated utilizing the skills and facilities of other competent shops in peacetime and in the interest of economy; now we embarked on our long-contemplated program of expansion of this technique in the interest of accelerated war production.
The capacity of any working area such as East Hartford is definitely limited by physical characteristics, such as transport, electric power, water supply, labor supply, housing, and so on. These limits, as they existed in peacetime, could be expanded to meet wartime needs by close cooperation with the management of the utilities. The War Plans Division, having foreseen the limitations of the several factors, had provided us with the information on which to approach our numerous suppliers of all kinds. Certain of these, like the power companies, whose normal business contemplated a continuous expansion of facilities to meet normal demands, used the information furnished them to arrive at decisions to advance their schedules wherever necessary to meet peak demands. Now “the aircraft,” as we were called in Hartford, moved out of the category of a speculative venture and into the position of the controlling industry of the area. Our whole philosophy of leadership, based as it was on the cooperative process, now paid off, not alone in returns to us but to our neighbors and, in fact, to the whole country.
In this connection, reference can be made to a report on “Industrial Mobilization and Design and Development of Nazi Germany,” issued by the Office of Military Government for Germany under date of October 5, 1945. The report is based on an examination of Albert Speer by several officers of the Intelligence Department, and deals with the part Speer played subsequent to the year 1942 when he was directed to take over the administration of German war production. Speer had realized immediately what great fundamental errors had been committed and how small armament output had remained prior to his taking over. The Reichswehr had dealt with armament problems theoretically and industry generally had had no great inclination to participate in preparatory work. The government organizations had become so large that they had managed only to keep each other busy; they committed what might be called mental incest and paved the way for all the mistakes that had later kept armament production at a surprisingly low level.
Speer had gone on to say that the Germans had been at a great disadvantage because their rearmament had been planned too long on a theoretic basis. A strict system of discipline and orders fully in accord with their authoritarian regime had replaced what this apparatus lacked in knowledge and ability. He had written a memorandum to Hitler on July 20, 1944, in which he stated that Russia and the United States were to be envied because external circumstances had forced them to improvise. The United States had had to raise their armed forces quickly and therefore could not do without the active personalities in industry, politics, and public life. In Germany, on the other hand, those who occupied themselves with war production were professional soldiers, a closed corporation without the benefit of fresh outside minds. For this reason, Speer believed that the extended theoretical preparation of German armaments had been mainly responsible for their low level of production until after 1942 when he had restored the principle of individual initiative by putting war production back into the hands of private industry. Within a year he had completed an organization of completely new leading personalities to restore the autonomy of industry and preserve its unity even in the most trying times.
The virus that infected Germany also attacked us, but our rugged constitution enabled us to throw it off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
For What Is a Man Profited?
The selection of Bill Knudsen to head up the agency charged with coordinating war production was a happy one. Just as George Mead knew his aircraft, so did Bill Knudsen know his production. Furthermore, he knew the men who knew production and he held their confidence and regard. This was important at the moment when business and industry had reason to fear and suspect government; the drift in this country toward the omnipotent state had aroused intense bitterness and might have bogged down the whole program had not Bill Knudsen attracted to his organization other men who held the respect of their fellow manufacturers. These men began immediately on the complex task of unraveling all the mare’s nests that had collected around government procurement.
About the middle of the summer of 1940, Fred Rentschler and I went down to Washington to call on the Grand Old Man and outline to him the key to our whole program. The President’s 50,000-plane program, when superimposed on the already staggering foreign purchases, was clearly beyond the total capacity of the New England area. And if we undertook further expansion in other areas, we would impose further burdens on an already hard-pressed staff. The time had now come to bring in the great automotive industry.