Word: wpb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pinch. Thus far, U.S. ground troops in combat have not felt the pinch because of this 25% reduction in the proposed program. But troops in training have, are now at best only 50% equipped. And prospects for improvement are dim under WPB's rules and industry's performance. Battle is eating up ground force weapons and the draft is pouring in millions more men who must be equipped. But production of ground-force weapons rose only 3% in February, 8% in March, and an estimated 5% in April...
Alone of all major Washington problems, civilian supply has had no czar. Since March 1942 the agency charged with civilian supply has been a division in WPB that did not even report to Donald Nelson, but to his vice chairman Charles Edward Wilson (whose job is production of war goods...
Donald Marr Nelson chose a new vice chairman for WPB last week and thereby underlined one of the biggest unsolved war problems now facing the nation. The new WPBureaucrat: short, sharp-eyed Arthur Dare Whiteside, president of credit-raters Dun & Bradstreet. His backbreaking job: to see that U.S. civilians are supplied with enough really essential goods and services so that war production does not suffer...
...problem was: What is bedrock? How deep can the civilian economy be cut without damaging war production? WPB has estimated that some $56 billion of goods and services (almost 50% under last year's consumer goods boom) is the least that the U.S. needs. But no estimate of a bedrock economy (even assuming that it could be accurate in the first place) is static: in a long war, as goods wear out, one year's bedrock can turn into the next year's breakdown, as need for replacements and repairs mounts...
Unfortunately the shame-criers won the fight just when the wolf-criers finally be gan to be right. Most notable example of cutting below bedrock: farm equipment, where a WPB order cutting production to 20% of 1940 coincided with a draft and wage policy that drained workers off the farm and a farm-production policy that called for astronomical quantities of food. This manifest absurdity received only piecemeal attention until the U.S. food situation had assumed near-crisis proportions...