Stirrings in WPB

Donald Nelson's War Production Board lost a good man last week--but thereby gained some new life.

Tall (6 ft. 3), hulking (250 Ib.) Reese Taylor, chief of WPB's Iron & Steel Branch finally got fed up. He had joined WPB late in May with high hopes: though steel allocation was a mess, he figured he could make sense of it, and he thought that his title carried enough authority to make his rulings stick. He went to work ably and thoroughly to find out where steel was going, why there wasn't enough. But forthright Reese Taylor reckoned without WPB's labyrinthine channels of authority. He did not know about the crew of second-rate dollar-a-year men--ex-salesmen and promoters whose chief duty as businessmen had been to act pleasant--which had grown so big that Washington called it WPB's "flimflam layer."

Taylor was used to being his own boss. As a very young boss of California's Consolidated Steel Corp. he took over a company losing $172,000 a year, sparked it to a $570,000 profit before he stepped out. Marked as one of the ablest businessmen on the West Coast, he was given the presidency of Union Oil Co. in order to put new life and efficiency into that big old company--which he promptly did.

The wheels of WPB ground too slowly for impatient Reese Taylor, who thought no time should be lost in winning the war. Even when he got an O.K. from Boss Donald Nelson, his plans sometimes bogged down in the layers of "advisers." When his steel branch was gibbeted in an unauthorized report by a $5,600-a-year WPB hireling, it was about the last straw. Last week, when his new steel quota plan (TIME, Aug. 24) seemed to have been lost in a shuffle of compromise around Donald Nelson, Reese Taylor up and quit.

Taylor's departure left a big unfilled niche in WPB, but it pointed up the problem, made it more imperative than ever for Donald Nelson to act as tough as he was now talking, to get rid of well-intentioned but inadequate subordinates and replace them with tough, efficient men.

At week's end, Donald Nelson called in 100 of his top men, ordered them to stop bickering, to adopt a "hard, realistic" attitude, to forget their concern for the niceties of the civilian economy. Said Donald Nelson: "It just takes too damned long to get things done around here."

The odds were that Nelson now would adopt something approaching Taylor's steel quota plan which would give one single authority power to divide the amount of steel available and give each user a quota for keeps. It was even likely that Nelson would apply similar quota systems to other commodities and toss the report-ridden, unwieldy old Production Requirements Plan ("Purp") out the window. If so, Taylor would have accomplished by quitting what he had not been able to do by working in Washington.

Britain's Precept. A yardstick to show how far WPB and the entire nation must go before they are really all-out in World War II, was provided last week by Donald Nelson's British counterpart, Minister of Production Oliver Lyttelton. Captain Lyttelton made an international broadcast not intended as an invidious comparison but as a reminder that Britain's war effort is one of the United Nations' great assets. He cited two statistics:

> In the first quarter of this year--allowing for the population difference--Britain produced nearly two and one-quarter times as much Army munitions and about twice as many combat aircraft as the U.S.

> In the second quarter, Britain produced one and one-half times as much munitions, about twice as many combat airplanes.

Said Captain Lyttelton: "Out of every 100 occupied men and women in this country about 55 are working for the Government, either in the forces or in the factories, or in other branches of Government service. Almost all the rest are doing work, which even if it serves the civilian population, is necessary to the conduct of the war. . . . To reach our present level, you (in the U.S.) would need to have nearly 40,000,000 people working for the Government.

"You must not forget too that we in Britain have been under constant air attack and that we have had to disperse our industries, to blackout our factories, and to rebuild damage caused by bombs. . . ."

The U.S., as Lyttelton's figures showed, was catching up. But it still had a long; way to go--and many a change would have to come in WPB before the goal was reached.

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