1,000,000 Gas Masks

Week after World War II got under way last September the U. S. Army decided to do something about its gas-mask situation. To bolster its own gas-mask assembly plant at Maryland's Edgewood Arsenal it asked U. S. manufacturers to bid on a new assembly plant to turn out masks for Army use. Winners of three contracts were not among the nine U. S. commercial gas-mask makers. They were Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Firestone Tire & Rub ber Co., and Johnson & Johnson, biggest U. S. surgical-dressing maker.

Last week, on a site next to Chicago's Municipal Airport, workmen broke ground for the new Johnson & Johnson assembly plant. Under terms of its Army contract, the company will: 1) equip its factory to turn out 100,000 masks a month (300,000 on a three-shift, 24-hour basis); 2) make 10,000 masks during 1940; 3) at year's end turn over equipment and gas masks to the Army for the sum of $341,714. By Aug. 1 Johnson & Johnson expected the first masks to come rolling off the assembly line.

At Fall River, Mass., the second gas mask maker (Firestone) is also at work under a $328,329 contract virtually identical with Johnson & Johnson's. Furthest advanced of all is the third maker, Good year, expected to swing into production within a week at Akron, Ohio, where it will turn out 5,000 masks.

For the three companies the deal was designed as a labor of love. The contracts will meet expenses, leave no profit. The project is educational, designed to acquaint the manufacturers with war materials production. From their experience the Army expects to get accurate cost and production figures for use when war comes. Incidentally the Army will control three plants which can in six weeks make enough gas masks for the 1,000,000 soldiers that the U. S. mobilization plan expects to put in the field within six months after a declaration of war.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.