Away With Butter!

The primary military strategy of the U.S. in World War II is to produce enough arms eventually to equip something like 7,500,000 American soldiers, 5,700,000 British, the almost innumerable Russians, 80,000 Dutch and uncountable Chinese.

In Washington the percussion cap of war dynamited the last tag end of the guns-v.-butter argument. In any case, that argument had long since become only a differing about degree. One group had been insisting on all-out expansion; the other group contended that the present plan was big enough--bigger, in fact, than the U.S. could take. This second group had encouraged all-out production, had discouraged all-out planning as "hysterical overexpansion." The second group's bearishness on the potential productiveness of the U.S. was given a final trample at a hurry-up session of SPAB, top defense board. This wasn't even necessary: the take-it-easy members had already hurried to "get right." Now they formally went along with the Victory Program, upping planned defense expenditures from $68,000,000,000 to $150,000,000,000.

The Victory Program itself was at once the greatest mess of wishful thinking and the greatest production dream in U.S. history. It multiplied astronomically impossible figures by five and hoped that each figure would show up as something hard, tangible, useful or deadly: a tank, a gun, a ship, a plane, a truck, a tent, a uniform, a mess kit, a blanket, a parachute, a monkey wrench, a lathe, a screw.

The President gave the Victory Program its marching orders last week. Biggest problem: how to lick the process by which: 1) Congress appropriates billions of dollars; 2) the Army & Navy swish through paper slips of orders; 3) manufacturers hang the orders on a hook, unable to get the plants, tools, materials and manpower to make the stuff. Most immediate, most terrifying bottleneck, bobbing up like a cork released under water: machine tools. This was the bottleneck of 1940 and 1941, was still guaranteed to last through at least three months of 1942.

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