Behind the Eight Ball

The entire U.S. shipping program was under scrutiny and attack last week.

Back from London, Presidential Adviser Harry Hopkins talked about a "real" shipping pool. He apparently meant a plan to bring all U.S. and British vessels, the ships of all other United Nations too, under one single control, because the so-called Combined Shipping Pool, of which Rear Admiral Emory S. Land is chief, had failed to combine, had failed to coordinate, had failed to move the stuff of war.

Shipping officials, critics said, have used cargo space poorly. Joe Curran, chief of C.I.O.'s maritime union, grumbled that tankers and sailors were being lost carrying oil to the East Coast so that women could drive to bridge parties--hardly a fair criticism with gas rationing going rapidly into effect. Ships still hauled nonessential goods in the Gulf.

In only four of the ten principal shipbuilding yards was the stepped-up production schedule being met. The rate of submarine sinkings, terrible enough in February and March, was worse in April. How much higher was a secret over which shipping officials brooded and cursed. It made little difference to critics that the shipbuilding program was fabulous. The United Nations had to have ships. The U.S. had to provide them--8,000,000 deadweight tons by the end of 1942, 23,000,000 by the end of 1943.

In all Washington's palmiest days of buck-passing, no such buck-passing had been seen as came now: steel was short, labor shirked, management mismanaged, Washington had failed to plan well. But the man on the hottest spot was salty, profane Jerry Land. Editors and officials called for his head. The demand for a more effective manager of the shipbuilding program most frequently mentioned Joe Kennedy, onetime head of the Maritime Commission, also a pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist. His name bobbed up again, from a quarter that surprised nobody, when G.O.P. Chairman Joe Martin, called for "some efficient, capable man of proved experience like . . . Joseph P. Kennedy. . . ."

Hollered Seaman Joe Curran, who naturally had no liking for the idea of tough Joe Kennedy as shipping boss: "If you want to win the war you don't put in a key spot, like shipping, a man who wants to make peace with Hitler." But so far, no one had mentioned anyone else.

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