Word: wpboss
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...less spectacular fashion ammunition plants were shut down all over the nation, at least one of them before a single pound of powder had been made. The cutbacks hit aluminum, magnesium, pocketed the nation here & there with jobless. And they stirred up the fracas of the year between WPBoss Don Nelson and his tough, big-jawed vice chairman, Charlie Wilson...
...False Armistice. The issue was simple: had the time come for the U.S. to begin to reconvert to peace? Eyeing the mammoth stockpiles for war and the progress of the Allied armies across France, WPBoss Nelson thought it had. Charlie Wilson did not think so. Reconversion won. And Charlie Wilson tacitly admitted that perhaps Don Nelson had been right. For he promptly reconverted himself back to General Electric, remarked that G.E.'s reconversion was "one hell...
...stayed at $250,000,000 per day, near the peak. Almost unnoticed, tight-shut ammunition plants were reopened, big new contracts were loaded on businessmen who had once worried about cutbacks. At first the explanation was that new Army & Navy tactics, plus new discoveries, demanded new weapons. But when WPBoss Krug, who walked the tight line between civilian and military demands, slapped a "freeze" on any more civilian production, the explanation of new tactics was not enough...
...Problems. More production meant the building of more plants, although Nelson had said smugly: the war machine is built. In August WPB still thought no new plants would be needed. But from November on as German resistance stiffened into a crashing offensive, the Army hastily reconsidered. WPBoss Krug had dumped on his desk plans to build one billion dollars' worth of new war plants. These would be for high-octane gas (the octane shortage had been "solved" months ago), for tires (the rubber problem had been "solved"), for jet motors and scores of brand-new weapons...
Donald Marr Nelson, U.S. special envoy to China, was back in Washington after a strenuous month's trip around the globe. The ears of the ex-WPBoss still rang with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's encomium: "If it [the Nelson mission] had happened as much as one year ago, I believe the present situation would be far better." To Franklin Roosevelt, Don Nelson brought a heartening report. With the Generalissimo's full cooperation, the Nelson mission had launched at Chungking a Chinese...