Word: opm
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Lieut. General William S. Knudsen is a happy man again. The Danish immigrant who rose to be production boss of General Motors but who, as half-boss of the ill-fated OPM, seemed to be a square head in a round hole, is working hard at a job he likes. He knows that what he does is worth while and is appreciated...
...question had never yet come to a clean decision. In the old, bobbling, bungling days of NDAC, OPM and SPAB, the Army, holding tightly and jealously to its power to sign war contracts, set the pattern of U.S. production by mere force of letting the contracts as the Army saw fit. The defense agencies played around with raw materials, plant conversion and subcontracting-all unsuccessfully. Manufacturers got used to thinking of the Army as the source of orders, of OPM as a source of questionnaires...
...snarled results were as much Army's fault as OPM's. Old-fashioned military purchasing methods were geared to buy a few tin hats from a few munitions makers, not to build a total-war arsenal from a whole economy converted to war. And both OPM and Army were under a great handicap: nobody knew how many weapons the U.S. would need or where it would get the raw materials to build them, or even what wars the U.S. was going to fight-if any. The U.S. had no war management, either military or civilian...
...year and a half ago OPM desperately called in all U.S. firms who might be able to manufacture jewels, urged them to have a try at it. For the Nazis had overrun Holland and France, bottled up Switzerland -the countries whence the U.S. formerly imported nearly all its synthetic jewels (as many as 100,000,000 a year). Only one company, Union Carbide & Carbon, volunteered to make synthetics. It alone produced the great volumes of hydrogen and oxygen which are essential in making them...
Independent engineers agreed that Douglas Dam was needed; so did President Roosevelt, Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, everybody on SPAB. OPM's Bill Batt called the one-man fight against Douglas Dam an "irreparable blow to the national defense program"; McKel- lar's constituents bombarded him with angry letters. Finally he had to give...