PRIORITIES: Purp and the Alphabet

Almost every U.S. manufacturer even remotely concerned with war production is this week cudgeling his brains to button up his material needs into one quarterly package: WPB's statistical white hope, "Purp" (the Production Requirements Plan; TIME, April 20).

WPB still does not know what has become of the scarce materials on which it has issued priorities. If & when it gets all the priority records set up the Purp way (whereby material uses for the past quarter and needs for the coming one appear on one huge form), it will at long last begin to know the answer to that one. How much more it will have advanced towards rationalizing the use of rationed materials still depends on the Army & Navy, and on how tough WPB is ready to be.

Last week there were two strong indications that neither of these central problems had yet been solved: 1) Don Nelson was reported to have asked the President to choose between him and the armed forces as the final authority over raw materials flow; 2) WPB pushed two new high-preference ratings (AAA and AA-1) into the bottlenecked top of its priorities alphabet. Including AA-2, there are now three emergency-preference categories ahead of the highest priority rating, A1a.