Big Store

The world's biggest business stocks ten times as many catalogue items as Sears, Roebuck. It has a larger civilian payroll than General Motors. It runs a bigger teletype system than any U.S. press association. The business is the Air Service Command, the department store, garage, and mail-order house of the Army Air Forces.

Last week the A.S.C. proudly announced its own air freight line. It is, properly, the longest in the world: 14,000 miles from A.S.C. headquarters at Patterson Field (near Dayton, Ohio) to Karachi, India. A big Liberator cargo plane (C-87) made the first round-trip run in twelve days. Outboard, it carried 8,300 lb. of fuel pumps, starters, magnetos and other critical replacements for the China-Burma-India theater. The return load was mainly damaged parts for rush repairs at the 300-odd depots and sub-depots in the U.S.

500,000 Items. More than a million officers and men wear the distinctive insignia of the A.S.C.: a gear wheel surmounted by a propeller, supported by wings. More than 300,000 civilians also labor in the A.S.C., which handles over 500,000 different items, from a jackknife to a B17.

A.S.C. takes every Air Forces plane as it leaves the factory, from then on keeps it in fuel, ammunition and repair. A.S.C. depots make any needed plane modifications which would otherwise slow up a factory production line, fit out every plane for flight or shipment overseas. A.S.C. also acts as an express company for all air freight in the U.S. flown by the Air Transport Command. It even publishes an illustrated catalogue of surplus or obsolete items (TIME, Dec. 13).

Ready Replacements. The vast supply function of the A.S.C. begins in the "accelerated service tests" of the Materiel Command. In these endurance runs of new planes, A.S.C. experts watch for parts which wear quickly, to be ready for replacement demands. By the time a new model (like the B29) is in the field, the parts it will need are ready to hand. In the Attu campaign, parts flown in by the Air Transport Command arrived before the planes for which they were ordered.

Sometimes the most thoughtful planning cannot anticipate every need, or every quirk of war and weather. Then the improvisations of Yankee ingenuity write new legends of the A.S.C. in the field. Empty gasoline tins, hammered flat and cut to size, have made many a patch for bullet and flak holes. Said an A.S.C. general to bug-eyed factory engineers back in the U.S.: "Did you know that you could straighten a prop blade by wedging it in the bumper of a two-and-a-half-ton truck, then backing the truck until the kink was gone. ... It was done and the airplane flew."

Service Heroes. Thousands of miles from warehouses and the parts they needed, the service crews of the A.S.C. have made do with what they had. They have worked without shelter in an Arctic gale, twisting hundreds of little screws to replace a broken wing spar on a B24. When tools were lacking, they made their own.

At Casablanca, several P-39s arrived with a vital fitting broken. Spare fittings, of the same material, were not to be trusted in combat. An A.S.C. officer scrounged some asbestos from the French for a crucible, made an oven from adobe brick, heated it with acetylene torches. With aluminum from salvaged German propellers and a little copper he made new hinges, put the planes into combat in three days. When fabric parts needed repairs, the same officer borrowed the only available sewing machine in town from a French dressmaker. It had no needles. He made some out of bicycle spokes.

In India, a sergeant who had been a Cleveland molder cast a sour look at the local foundry facilities: a fire in a sand pit, with hollows scooped in the ground for molds. There were no furnaces, patterns or flasks. So he made his own. With a furnace of firebrick taken from the town dump, his three enlisted men and several Indians turn out 500 different items from junkyard aluminum and used brass cartridge cases.

Letter from Home. Proud of its great size and fast service, the A.S.C., like so "many big organizations, boasts also of its human touch. Packing parachutes for the whole A.A.F. is one of its most loving cares. Some special customers even get a letter from home immediately after they make an emergency landing: in the jungle kits stitched into the parachutes they find a cozy note from the woman worker who packed the chute.

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