Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SEATTLE – Having traveled slowly and deviously all the way from San Francisco to Seattle, I am now ready to file my report on the pulse of the Upper Pacific Coast. (Good old southern California will have to come later and in a separate category, as usual).
From what I hear in letters, the rest of the country seems to think people on the Coast are in a dither over the war. But to me the Coast does not seem in a dither.
The small towns have not changed in appearance from peacetime. I haven’t seen any service stars in windows yet. People on the streets act as they always used to. Occasionally in restaurants you see fat-stomached, middle-aged men in major’s uniforms! – obviously not regular Army – which is one thing you didn’t see before the war.
Hotels all have blackout instruction cards in every room. But many hotels have made no arrangements for permanent blackout. Room and meal prices have gone up in some places, but not all. In most cities I’m paying the same price for the same room as in 1936.
Newspapers have instituted daily columns covering their war factories and shipyards. War news takes up most of the space. Police reporters and leg-men say it is almost impossible to get an ordinarily good story in the paper any more.
Despite denials, it is true that many people have left the Coast. I suppose there’s no way of knowing how many. The only ones I personally know of are retired people who had been living in hotels and who have now gone back to their Midwest homes for the duration.
Regular dwellers aren’t scared
But the regular dwellers aren’t scared. I don’t believe people on the Coast are half as excited about themselves as their friends and relatives in the East are about them.
War is talked at parties and wherever two people get together, of course, but the man with a zeal in his eyes is a rare one. War fever is not at the 1918 pitch. In spite of the drubbing the Japs have been giving us, I believe most people still look on them with contempt, instead of burning with the hatred we had for Germany the last time.
And in spite of the impossible having happened at Pearl Harbor, I believe 95 per cent of the people on the Coast feel there is little likelihood of the Japs bombing the coastal cities – except maybe a few isolated suicide and token raids later in the war.
True, they are in earnest about their civil defense, but there isn’t the old spark that drives you when you know – as the British knew – that the raiders are coming tonight and every night and you’re gonna die if you don’t watch out.
Life, even on the “front line” here, has been disarranged very little by the war so far. There is plenty to eat, wear, drink and buy. I know an awful lot of people on the Coast, but I don’t know of a soul who is yet pinched in any way.
If the public has begun laying up its autos, it isn’t noticeable yet. Traffic in the big war-production centers is becoming a ghastly problem. It is like going through a major battle to get to work and back home again.
Traffic bottleneck is grave
Seattle’s transportation bottleneck is grave. Workers by the thousand have signed petitions calling on the city to do something about it – widen streets and augment bus and ferry services. One shipyard worker’s petition says it takes two hours to get from the yard downtown, and that 1500 men are late for work every day.
There are many boom towns. There is lots of money. They say in Seattle that probably never in history have so many bosses been told to go to hell. If a fellow doesn’t like his job, he just quits and goes to the shipyards.
In Seattle people are offering a $10 reward for vacant houses or apartments, and in the third-string hotels workmen are sleeping in the halls.
On the whole, I would say the Coast is far from all-out in its war effort. And I don’t mean any criticism by that. A country can’t get all-out until a war has been going on for a long time. England wasn’t all-out even after a year and a half of war.
A country isn’t all-out until everybody in it is being denied something, and is contributing something extra. Today the bulk of the population of the West Coast – including me – is living just about as it always did. “All-out” will undeniably come, but it hasn’t come yet.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – Joe called up to say goodbye and thanks for past patronage because he is going out of business at the end of the week. He said the gasoline and oil business just about paid his rent and the help, while the tires and accessories gave him his living.
Now, already, some of the people are laying up their cars or using them so sparingly that they consume hardly any fuel and oil; so he has laid off the boys and is winding things up, anticipating that by next fall, at the latest, many another like him will chuck it.
Anyway, Joe’s simple but deadly estimate of his situation shows him that starting right now, or even two weeks ago, with no tires to sell he is through.
Joe is no head to fret about big economic consequences. He isn’t multiplying himself by some score-by-innings statistic representing all the other guys named Joe who run gas and service stations throughout the country and the drivers who deliver the fuel in the big trucks and the office help ‘way back yonder in the system by which fuel, oil, tires and all take shape from raw materials and travel to the service stations.
It is merely that he is just Joe
It makes no never-mind to him that the advertising agencies which handled the copy for his goods are laying off help and that in the newspaper shops, with the decline of such linage and revenue, there will be corresponding declines in the mechanical and advertising and editorial staffs.
It isn’t that he is selfish or intentionally indifferent. It is merely that he is just Joe, an individual, who always has assumed that these big, formless, soulless powers of commerce and industry were as reliable as the solar system. He doesn’t know that his last name is legion. In fact, it isn’t. It is gross. Joe Gross, age 40, married, with two kids, a little home and a mortgage.
Joe isn’t soldier stuff at the present stage of the war, at his age and with his dependents, so he is going to take one of those Government courses and become a mechanic because the country around him is crowded with plants in which they are beginning to make war things. They are enlarging the vacuum cleaner factory down the line, but not to increase their vacuum cleaner capacity. Old, cold stacks which didn’t give a cigarette’s worth of smoke for years and years are hot around the clock and at night the interiors are bright and men are working at machines.
Joe is no part of a machinist, for all his years around a service station, but he knows the anatomy of the ordinary auto engine and is handy enough with a wrench, so he figures he can learn to be a machinist. Anyway, that is the obvious thing to try and he might be pretty good at that. What else could he do? Become a headwaiter at the Waldorf, with his how’s-tricks personality and those rough and grease-stained hands, or study for the opera with that newsboy voice?
The gas company may try to find an optimist to take over the Spot and struggle along, but it is a game that no man can win. Joe has it figured out right. No tires, no margin to live on and the longer no tires the fewer the cars in action and the smaller the volume of sales of fuel and oil. Even the parking lot goes. Who is going to park what on no tires?
We all saw him and we laughed
So probably the gas company will uproot the pumps and the owner of the real estate will have his place back on his hands when the lease expires and not even good for a vegetable patch with all that gravel and the oil saturation.
But the taxes will grind on just the same and when they have ground just so long, the owner will give it back to the Indians, and Joe will be working at a lathe in some brass plant turning out thousands of some little things for a rifle, gun or shell and probably earning nearly as much in pay out of taxes via the war-order sub-contractor as he margined for himself on the tires. He probably will lend some of it back to the Government for bonds because he is patriotic and wants to do his bit to make the world safe for his children.
The men who push the big tank trucks and the overland boxcars heavy with freight which rumble past Joe’s place on the post road are in a fix, too, for the tankers must vanish when Joe quits business and the freighters, after all, roll on rubber, too. And them with families and some of them with mortgages, too.
Only a few years ago over in Munich a shrieking, shrewish nut im a greasy raincoat, with an insane glare and a Chaplin mustache, was first beginning to squawk that he would rule the world or bring it down in runs about him and Joe and all of us saw him in the movies and laughed and laughed.
Clapper: The bottleneck
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – Nobody ever will be able to add up the terrible cost that is resulting, not from bad decisions, but from just plain red tape, delay in paper work, lost messages and orders, and other causes growing out of sloppy administration.
These are the needless defeats we are suffering.
For instance, the War Department decides it must have a special munitions plant. It selects a location in Ohio and goes to the White House for approval. But at the White House the Army is tipped off that one of the Kentucky Senators is after that plant and the matter must be looked into. Six months later the Army gets the plant in Kentucky. By that time it needs two plants, so it gets the Ohio plant as well. But six months’ time has been lost.
Haggling begins in Washington
A copper company is asked to expand its output. The haggling begins in Washington. But the company is impressed with the need of speed and starts work, although the deal is not closed until three months later. Five months of haggling and time-killing before the aluminum expansion program is begun – and now we are paying for it. Every bit of aluminum has just been reserved for war use, and even so it may be that airplane production will be delayed by shortage of sheets.
The Truman report gives some appalling instances of such delays on the desks in Washington. Clerks around here could tell many stories about important papers being lost, about whole desks full of mislaid priority orders. Some of the lend-lease routines took six weeks and involved passing papers through more than 20 desks. The simple matter of distributing copies and obtaining the necessary initialing has in one branch of lend-lease come almost to the point of breakdown.
No one can know the full damage that such sloppy office work is causing. But even from the outside, enough can be observed to make your hair curl. We wouldn’t dare reveal the full story of the delays and run-arounds in connection with getting material out to the Southwest Pacific, the stories of empty ships waiting for planes that are available but held up because the right official can’t be found to sign the releases.
So it was a relief to get out of Washington the other day and spend a few hours around one of the largest airplane-engine plants in the world – Pratt & Whitney. There you see airplane engines being assembled, wrapped, and packed into boxes. It is something to see those boxes being rolled to the loading dock, for then you know that the war production program is not all talk about what we are going to do some day.
Big edge over Axis output seen
As of several months ago and it is permissible to use such figures because they go back to last October – this one plant was producing as many airplane engines as all of England. Under this one roof were being produced last fall half as many engines as Germany was turning out. Remember also that there is the Wright plant, too, producing about the same amount as Pratt & Whitney. Also there is Allison, with perhaps half as much as either of these plants, and coming up now is the big Ford engine plant, and to follow that toward the end of the year the Buick and Chevrolet plants. So if last fall Pratt & Whitney and Wright were producing double England’s engine output and the approximate equal of Germany’s, it is clear that by the end of this year in plane engines we shall have an enormous edge over Axis output.
Coming out in quantity now on the assembly line is a new airplane engine – unmatched in power anywhere else in the world. This is not a blueprint. I saw literally scores of these big engines in the final assembly and in the crating lines. Many of these engines will go into a new plane which, if it is as advanced as the engine that will power it, should live up to the high expectations heard everywhere.
The men running this industry saw no limit to what could be produced, provided – they always said they could get the materials. That is the Government’s job. In the end that will be the bottleneck. Which is what disturbs one in view of the countless little defeats we are suffering daily because of needless delays on the desks in Washington.
Maj. Williams: The new P-47
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
Authoritative figures on the penetration of air bombs show that when a bomb weighing 110 pounds (containing 55 pounds of explosive) strikes solid earth, it will penetrate 13 feet, 9 inches – effecting a destructive area about 22 feet in diameter. A bomb weighing 2200 pounds (containing 1100 pounds of explosive) will penetrate 29 feet, 6 inches and blast out a circle about 40 feet in diameter.
In addition to this specific information, it is worth while noting that a modern bomb contains explosive materials equal to about half the weight of the entire bomb, while the explosive contained in an ordinary shell (gun-fired) is only a small percentage of the total weight of the shell.
Correspondence is an old-fashioned, time-wasting – but most effective – method for carrying on the business of the world, peacetime or wartime. The telephone is far faster, but it lacks a means of actually identifying the speakers and thus is potentially dangerous. Just suppose you, as a business executive, received orders over the telephone to move freight, munitions or materials having to do with the national defense program from someone claiming the status of an officer of the Government. That’s being done and accepted as a mark of the emergency. You don’t know who the fellow is who is giving the orders; you have no way of identifying him. If he is authorized to issue such orders, and if you recognize his voice, the phone facilitates operations. But – and here hangs a story.
A friend of mine had been accepting such orders in his enthusiasm to aid the war program. One order involved the despatching and movement of a great number of railroad cars. Irritation at the tone or manner of the voice issuing the orders, and memory of such an order of a few days previously (which resulted in great confusion and waste of valuable time and materials), prompted him to ask, “Who and what rank are you?” The voice thundered an answer. My friend then became quite patient and tolerantly cautious.
“Yes, that’s okay, but you can’t cash a check at any bank on that sort of an identification, and how the hell do I know that you ain’t some Fifth Communist trying to gum up our railroad system?”
The Thunderer coughed, sputtered, and finally agreed, “Well, I guess you are right. I’ll have to attend to it in some more reliable manner.”
The new P-47 plane
I have a hunch that one of the most highly advertised combat planes, the performance and flight characteristics of which have been challenged most vigorously, will soon be tagged obsolete and manufacture discontinued. The aircraft company which produced this plane will be assigned to the manufacture of a more suitable and thoroughly modern combat plane known as the “P-47.” This new “P-47,” a single-seater fighting plane now in production, is one of the finest of its kind in the world. Its performance at extreme altitudes is reported to be phenomenal, largely by reason of the fact that its engine is supercharged by an exhaust-gas-driven turbo supercharger.
It is a really fast fighter and good for actual fighting at and above 40,000 feet. Its fire power is stupendous, and, as I inspected this “P-47” the other day. I was tremendously impressed with the terrific potentiality for destruction such a weapon can be in the hands of one human. I can’t give you any of the details of this “P-47,” and you’d probably be bored anyway, unless you were thoroughly familiar with aircraft engineering. It’s enough to say that the “P-47” is really tops and no fooling. It is now being built by the Republic Aviation Corporation, Long Island. Republic, as you may or may not know, is the company that took over and reorganized the defunct Seversky outfit.
The designer of the “P-47” is an American citizen of Russian birth. His name is Alexander Kartveli, the chap who designed and laid out all the aircraft built by the Seversky Company. He is a quiet, publicity-shunning aeronautical genius. And freed from all interference and publicity uproar in his present job as Vice President and Chief Engineer of Republic Aviation, Katveli has turned out a masterpiece in the way of a top-notch high-altitude fighter for America.
All-inclusive answers
A short, snappy, and all-inclusive answer occurred to me the other day, which might be of use to any airman when confronted by the old seapower big, floating-fort status queers. You know those fellows have had us on the defensive for many years, and we make mistakes falling for their method of arguing. For instance, the first poser staged by the orthodox Warships-or-Nothing, Inc. outfit is, “Where shall we stop building? Shall it be with the cruiser or the destroyer, since you say the battleship isn’t worth its salt?”
Well, heretofore, we have always fallen for that stuff and tried to supply an answer. I ran across a wise guy posing as a warship advocate the other day, and he asked the same question. I looked at him for a moment, and then an answer flashed in my mind, “How the hell do I know? That’s your job to find out what kind of warships to build in a war where airpower rules the roost. I’m only one of the guys who had something to do with building a weapon (airpower) and developing its tactics, the same weapon that smashed your floating iron forts. We’re getting along all right. You’re a seapower man – you’re in trouble. Build something new that you think can stand up and protect itself against airpower, and we’ll have a go at cracking it wide open. You didn’t build airpower, and we didn’t ask you any questions about how to build it. Seapower is your pet. Let’s see you build something that can keep on floating after our bombers have worked on it.”