Word: knudsens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Work Done seemed to add up to mighty small potatoes. Of $5,400,000,000 which Congress had voted for Defense since May, a piddling fraction had actually been spent. An enormous job of planning had to be done first. In charge of the planning were Industrialists William S. Knudsen, Edward Stettinius Jr., some 200 high-powered colleagues on the President's National Defense Advisory Commission. Getting these talented bigwigs down to coordinated work was in itself a big, time-taking job. Up to last fortnight, most commission spark plugs always had time for an easy hour...
...commission announced that Mr. Knudsen had painstakingly passed on $1,000,000,000 of equipment contracts. Aircraft Coordinator George Jackson Mead placed $100,000,000 of plane orders, got tape-wound Army & Navy bureaus to simplify their contradictory, wasteful systems of testing and buying planes and engines. Commissioner Stettinius cheerily reviewed his studies of raw materials which the U. S. would need and might not have in wartime, said: "The situation . . . is more hopeful than we anticipated six weeks ago. . . ." For an example of heartening speed, he told of hearing about a stock of tungsten and antimony "near Indo-China...
...stockmarket, which after a brief spurt in June had marked time. Last week manufacturers began slowing down to the stockmarket's pace. They realized that the expected U. S. boom is still on the drawing boards. Mass production of arms cannot start until Defense Advisory Commissioner William S. Knudsen guides the program out of its present engineering phase, through the plant and equipment building phases, to the assembly lines-all of which may take from six months to three years...
While contradictory rumors still rumbled about the misunderstanding which occurred when Henry Ford turned down a contract to build 9,000 Rolls-Royce airplane engines, the Defense Advisory Commission's William S. Knudsen last week faced about and offered the contract to Packard Motor...
...waited. To them was handed a curt announcement: the Rolls-Royce project had been discussed, but "many matters require further study." Max Gilman apologized for a statement which "you [reporters] will probably think is a dud." It was by no means certain that the contract would be signed. Bill Knudsen's effort to get 9,000 Rolls-Royces seemed to carry a jinx...