Word: wpb
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...Production Board, product of half a dozen earlier crises, went through another upheaval last week. Its Boss Donald Nelson, torn between his natural urge to compromise and his belated resolution to "get tough," had reorganized WPB again-and left it teetering on a higher precipice than ever before. No plain citizen could hope now to follow the tortured quarreling inside WPB; even Elder Statesman Bernard M. Baruch, out of his experience as World War I's one-man production board, could only shake his old grey head and gloom: "Tinkering, tinkering, always tinkering. Patching. They have no overall plan...
After last summer's wasting days of turmoil, Franklin Roosevelt had stepped in with some spectacular reorganizations-appointment of Byrnes and Jeffers, of McNutt and Wickard, a shakeup of WPB. Now, even inside the Administration, observers agreed that this, too, had been a stopgap. The sound effects had been terrific, the visual impression of Olympian lightnings spectacular-but nothing had really been changed. The era of good cheer had run its course; some nasty trouble brewed. The only consolation for plain citizens was that, despite the procrastination and the palace revolutions, the Army somehow grew and the munitions somehow...
...protagonist in Washington's latest fracas is tough, shrewd Ferdinand Eberstadt, artillery captain in World War I, outstanding independent investment banker of the '305, and currently charged with WPB's vital materials division. The other is Charles E. Wilson, whom Donald Nelson brought to Washington to take charge of WPB's production division...
...first time, the War Production Board conceded last week that all was not well with Henry Ford's famed Willow Run bomber plant. The 975-acre plant was scheduled to start rolling out bombers last summer, was popularly supposed to produce a bomber an hour eventually. But WPB now admitted: "There have been many disappointments in connection with the Willow Run operation, and the plant, even now, is far from peak production...
...Europe's wine supply, left the import divisions of most U.S. distillers with a crack sales and distributing setup but nothing to do. So the distillers began switching to domestic wines, bought wineries outright because it was far cheaper than starting from scratch. Then last August WPB stopped all whiskey production, ordered the distillers to convert to war alcohol (TIME, Sept. 14). The distillers looked over their whiskey stocks, discovered they had 480,000,000 bbl., enough to last only two years unless the U.S. stops drinking so fast and hoarding so much. If the war lasts that long...