X-Day is Coming

• Share

Had the nation finally reached its wartime production peak? By last week, not yet a fortnight after Dday, there were significant and contradictory changes already appearing in many & many a war plant of the nation. The U.S. was still spewing out a rising total of munitions every day. But like the first ripples of a change in the tide, the U.S. last week could see a ripple of cutbacks flowing across the country.

¶ In Baton Rouge, La. a $25,000,000 alumina plant began to close down.

¶ In Kearny, N.J. the Federal Shipbuilding yards laid off 800 workers, planned to lay off another 700. These were Federal's first layoffs since Pearl Harbor.

¶ In Washington the Navy let word leak out that it had reduced all of its fighter-plane production, even that of Long Island's famed Grumman Aircraft (Hellcats and Wildcats). Before long the Navy, pleased at the low losses in small landing craft on the French beachhead, expects to cut back this program, which has had a longtime No. 1 priority.

Casualties. The shocks were small and dispersed, like news of casualties, which hits individual U.S. homes but does not move the nation. But at some point the cumulative effect of the plant shutdowns would show. In Philadelphia the Defense Plant Corp. had spent a reported $16,000,000 to build an up-to-the-minute plant for Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Co., to turn out an order for some 800 stainless-steel Army & Navy cargo planes. With only four planes built, the Services cancelled their contracts for all but 25. WPB talked of new make-work contracts for Budd, the WPB solution to the Brewster shutdown (TIME, June 12). As Budd began to lay off 2,000 workers, contracts were in the offing to convert the plane plants to shell making. But mass production is five months away.

There were other telltales. For one: manufacturing employment has steadily declined since last November. By last month the U.S. had 1,000,000 fewer workers than it had six months earlier. For another: Donald Nelson said that it is finally time for U.S. industry to take the first steps toward manufacture of peacetime goods.

Was WPB pulling off all the wraps to let industry reconvert to peace? Far from it. Sternly Nelson warned that war production still came first, that "the next three months will in some ways be the most critical we have yet faced."

Three More Months. Barring unexpected catastrophes of battle, the war peak will be reached in three more months, stay on a plateau for a little while, then start downward. Some war items may even be stepped up (e.g., tank production, only a trickle for months, was ordered into high gear last week when beachhead tank losses in France were bigger than anticipated; in addition, Rear Admiral Emory S. Land announced that merchantship production would soon be stepped up). But a scheduled cut in overall war production is at last in view. Then the U.S. will be smack up against many of the manifold problems of reconversion, must face up to the task of supplying jobs to those laid off by the cutbacks and shutdowns.