Time: The Present

WAR & PEACE

Next -week the U.S. will face the third year of world-wide war.

In two years U.S. life and thinking have been changed far more than those who lived through them find it easy to understand. But sometimes some contemporary thing emerges, like a mark left on a building by a flood, to show how much the water level of life has altered. Such a mark is the August issue of FORTUNE, devoted entirely to the U.S. war effort and the effects of that effort on the U.S.

FORTUNE'S appraisal is based on the assumption, unacceptable to isolationists, that the U.S. is already engaged in an inescapable struggle. Herbert Hoover, Alfred Landon, Burton Wheeler, John L. Lewis, Charles Lindbergh and many a lesser citizen in their several ways question or deny that assumption.

But as important as the discussion of what the U.S. should do about the war is the discovery—written bold across the —75 pages of FORTUNE'S facts, figures, charts, graphs, criticisms and proposals—of what the war has done to the U.S. This is not questionable and not deniable. The war has been fought across the economic and social face of the U.S. just as certainly as it has been fought across the geographical face of Europe. Whether or not the U.S. is rightly at war, it has been and still is in the war.

Because the August issue of FORTUNE provides an extraordinary vantage point from which to examine the U.S. in the war, TIME herewith undertakes to review it:

In every period of sweeping change, life outruns its popular interpreters. Happenings come too fast; old familiar actors on the stage of history are whisked away and disappear; newcomers crowd in, get half through their opening lines and vanish with a dull thud and a gurgle.

Two years of war and sweeping change have given the U.S. a new cast of characters, still undefined, appearing on new stages, still barely seen. There are the army officers and admirals whose names are becoming familiar; the army camps and airfields that are still dim and a little disquieting to citizens. In its war issue, FORTUNE appraises the U.S. war effort from the point of view of editors to whom the new scenes are familiar, the new faces long known. And the net of their appraisal is that the U.S. is not succeeding in the task of organizing itself to cope with the world of war. They say that it is not mastering the complexity of its industrial life. The U.S. that emerges has shortages in many things—in raw materials, steel, power, transportation—but they argue that it has its greatest shortage in ideas, ideas of what it can do and how it can win. They assert that it has the men who can put the ideas into effect—but that the men have not been called. So far, in the great fields of its efforts, they find that the U.S. is not winning. It is losing, and it is losing fast.