Word: knudsen
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...revived the War Industries Board under a new name: The National Defense Advisory Commission. The President desperately needed production to bolster his country's ailing defenses. To be his Production Chief he chose the nation's No. 1 production man: bulky, blue-eyed, hard-headed William S. Knudsen, General Motors' president, who has turned out more automobiles a year than anyone in the world...
Whether Defense Commissioner Knudsen understood war or not, he understood a big job. And it was a colossal job he had on his hands. The tools and skills of the "brilliant, if pitiless," U. S. war industry had all but disappeared. The War Department had an M-Day plan (which the Nazis had borrowed) for mobilizing industry, but M-Day had not arrived-the U. S. was arming for defense, not war. So Bill Knudsen and his six fellow commissioners had to build a strange, specialized plane-ship-&-munitions economy inside and alongside a vast bread-&-butter economy, which...
...Nazi war machine ground through the Lowlands, wheeled on France and broke it, stood poised, with engines purring, at the English Channel, the nervous U. S. public wanted to know what the Defense Commission was up to. Where were the results? There were none to exhibit. Motormaker Knudsen was tooling up industry to produce the armed forces' materiel, giving orders to the best, quickest, cheapest manufacturers, easing industry on to a war footing. Meantime Congress, the President, the Army & Navy kept expanding their objectives. Not until late July did the U. S. defense program jell into...
...specialty producer's unfilled orders continued to pile up. One such was little Crucible Steel. Its canny, portly president, Raoul Desvernine, who in last October's phony boom warned businessmen "not to get ahead of the war," urged President Roosevelt to confer "broader" (crackdown) powers on Commissioners Knudsen and Stettinius...
...Defense Commissioner William S. Knudsen and the Army's Chief of Air Corps Henry H. Arnold, who had plenty to do in Washington, had to go on a pretty tour of western aircraft factories to make it look as though defense was getting ahead...