Word: knudsen
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...worth of contracts for war goods. Of these contracts, only $80,000,000 worth still remained to be awarded last week by the Army & Navy. The orders: Aircraft. With a weather eye on the way Air Marshal Goring's Luftwaffe was tearing up tactics books in Europe, Bill Knudsen tackled aircraft (the "one big bottleneck") first. The President had cried for 50,000 planes. That was an impossible figure. Knudsen set his sights for a target of 35,000-25,000 for the Army, 10,000 for the Navy. By last week he had ordered 10,096 planes (fighters...
...Commission thinks the industry can turn out 1,000 fighting planes a month by next January, 3,000 monthly by April 1942. But the industry also has Britain's orders to think about. Fortnight ago Defense Commissioner Knudsen prophesied that the U. S. would have built 33,000 aircraft by April 1942 (July 1942 is deadline for the defense air program). But no one actually knows how many planes the U. S. can make in that time...
Mindful of this inherent slowness. Bill Knudsen has placed every gun contract his program calls for but one. The cost (with ammunition): $995,836,660. More depressing is the machine-gun outlook. Colt, the only U. S. builder, is working almost full time for the British. Three General Motors plants are tooling up to plug the gap, but quantity production of machine guns is a year to 14 months away. The Army is now getting 2,000 Garand semi-automatic rifles a week, confidently expects 5,000 weekly by Jan. 1, 1941, but at that rate it would require four...
...almost 6,000 light (13-ton) and medium (30-ton) tanks, 1,750 scout cars, 350 combat cars, fleets of trucks, Bill Knudsen has doled out $306,411,280 worth of contracts. Chrysler is building a $20,000,000 plant which should be pouring out mediums within a year. American Car & Foundry's pre-defense light-tank assembly line is rolling out five a day, and Baldwin Locomotive is experimenting with some horrendous 50-tonners which some day will come crunching down its assembly line...
...orders, aircraft makers have had no time to experiment with new techniques. Nor could private capital be expected to back so costly an experiment. Reason: nobody knows how long the limitless defense demand for planes may last. But post-war problems do not immediately concern Defense Commissioner William Knudsen. When he came to Washington (an auto man) he counted out Henry Ford's futuristic offer of "1,000 planes a day," quickly allayed planemakers' fears that he might try to move their industry to Detroit. But last week, having watched the industry shoot up to deceptively adult size...