Keep From All Thoughtful Men
Page 14
Nelson finally met with Army representatives on 29 March. During the meeting Clay and Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson agreed that the 1942 and 1943 requirements were not feasible and that they needed to declare a moratorium on new construction until their staffs had carefully screened all requirements. Nelson had hoped that this recognition would lead the Army to reduce its production requirements in order to help in achieving the president’s “must” items. He was discouraged, therefore, to find that the Army (the Navy did not send a representative to the meeting), despite agreeing that it could not attain its production goals, was not willing to reduce its supply program, taking the position that “its requirements were set to conform with the size of the President’s end-product program, and that they could not be altered until the President initiated downward revision of his own goals.”18 So, rather than Nelson convincing the Army to reduce its goals, Patterson convinced Nelson that any reduction in the final product totals must start with a modification of the president’s “must” program.
Accordingly, Stacy May drafted another letter for Nelson that went to the president on 30 March 1942. The letter reminded the president that in December 1941 he had been informed that the country could produce $40 billion in munitions in 1942 and another $60 billion in 1943. It went on to state that the Army, the Navy, and the Maritime Commission had already formulated programs far in excess of these numbers. Since the War Department was claiming it could not reduce its objectives without sacrificing vital equipment, the letter offered the president two options. He could either order that his “must” items be adhered to and the sacrifice of other items deemed vital by the military, or he could authorize the armed services to revise all objectives to within the bounds of feasibility, including those objectives directed by himself.19
Unfortunately, Nelson changed May’s letter to read, “As you realize, I do not feel qualified to pass on the relative urgency of weapons desired by the Army. However, I have examined the production possibilities and must report that, in my judgment, it will not be possible to provide all of the items set forth in your list of objectives, and at the same time produce everything else now called for under the programs of the Army, the Navy, the Maritime Commission, and Defense Aid.”20
While this letter served to announce the production predicament to the president, it did not ask for a decision. Given Roosevelt’s predilection to ignoring issues—on the assumption that underlings would resolve most problems before he was forced to come down on one side or another—this letter allowed the president to postpone a decision. This standard Roosevelt management procedure often had an unfortunate consequence. Many issues that could have been resolved early with a word from Roosevelt festered until they had bloomed into a crisis where both sides were so locked in their positions that compromise was impossible. The feasibility of the Victory Program was such an issue.
Moreover, Nelson’s new letter used as its starting point a letter Marshall had earlier sent to the president requesting that he allow the Army to substitute halftracks and self-propelled artillery for the “must” number of tanks. The president agreed to this request, but this did not amount to any actual reduction of total objectives—merely a reshuffling of them. Even taken together, Marshall’s and Nelson’s letters somehow failed to alert the president that a crisis was brewing requiring immediate and decisive action. Rather, from the president’s perspective it appeared as if things were rolling along in a satisfactory fashion except for some tweaking that was needed on the margins. One reason for the president’s failure to grasp the dimensions of the growing problems is that Nelson forwarded another note to the president on 1 April that the Planning Committee appears to have been unaware of. In this letter, Nelson asked Roosevelt to make some modifications to the production program, but then stated, “The proposed modification does not represent a decrease in production . . . it would meet all requests on hand and now foreseen for tanks and, at the same time, would provide the equipment for a balanced military force.”21
Despite his apparently ambivalent position on feasibility, Nelson did follow up with Roosevelt in conversation, informing the president of the importance of reducing the total program for 1942 to approximately $40 billion. Roosevelt firmly refused to consider a reduction of his “must” objectives, but accepted that the services needed to reduce their objectives. Roosevelt merely gave his verbal approval to Nelson for a reduction in the Army’s supply goals, however, and did not undertake to inform the services that the president expected them to make cuts (nor did Nelson ask him to do so). Given the contempt that Somervell and even Marshall were beginning to hold for Nelson, his ability to influence them was minimal. Without a direct order from Roosevelt, Nelson did not have the authority to force on the military any decision that they opposed.
Notwithstanding this, the Planning Committee believed the president was now in their camp. During its meeting on 6 April Nathan told the committee that Nelson had received the president’s approval to reduce the munitions program by $5 billion in 1942. Furthermore, Nathan informed the group that Nelson had instructed them to meet with representatives to be designated by the War and Navy departments for this purpose. Nathan emphasized to the committee that they were not to determine specific individual cuts, but were simply to bring considerations of production feasibility to bear on the thinking of the Army and Navy representatives responsible for the revision of the program.22
There was now a fundamental weakness in the WPB position, and Searls saw it immediately. Although Nathan claimed that the president’s approval of a reduction would be a sufficient wedge to get the services to move immediately, Searls foresaw a prolonged period of negotiations during which things would significantly worsen.23 In the event, Searls was right, but he lost the immediate debate and the committee opted to pursue negotiations in good faith. In the upcoming weeks, the Army did reduce its supply program by about $4.5 billion, but the facilities and construction program, instead of being frozen as Under Secretary of War Patterson had agreed in late March, actually rose by $1.6 billion during April. As Nathan pointed out at a WPB meeting late in April, this meant that the total of munitions and construction objectives for 1942 was still, in his opinion, about $15 billion above the highest attainable level.24
By this time the idea of feasibility was meeting resistance from a growing number of agency heads and senior WPB members, who asserted, “the strategists decide what their requirements are, and our job is to get industry to fill those requirements.”25 Moreover, the bulk of the establishment still did not trust Kuznets’, May’s, and Nathan’s opinions. The three men were most often viewed as a coterie of academic “long-hairs” with no hands-on experience in production, strategy, or war. Men who grew up watching production increase as greater amounts of capital (human, financial, and material) were added to the process did not easily accept theoretical studies such as “National Product in Wartime” as true caps to production possibilities. They plainly could not understand how the high goals established by the president could actually work to lower overall achievement.26
Somervell had not been lying idle during this period of negotiations. He was a big believer in establishing outsized goals as a way to motivate industry to aim high and achieve great things. He was supported in this by the president, who had seized on the outsized goals of the current Victory Program to spur America to action and clearly demonstrate to all the enormity of the effort that victory would require. Somervell did not view the present situation as a matter of feasibility. Rather, he thought increasing production shortfalls reflected a combination of WPB coddling of the civilian sector, poor administrative procedures by the WPB when it came to scheduling and setting priorities, and Nelson’s basic unfitness for the task. Using his connections with Harry Hopkins, he convinced the president to go with his personal inclinations and to send a letter written by Somervell’s staff to Nelson. The letter, dated 1 May 1942 and signed by the president, reaffirmed the War Munitions Program of 1942
and even increased some of the “must” items.27 Moreover, the letter stated that the president’s goals included all complementary weapons and other supplies required and insisted on an expedited expansion of the necessary construction and facilities. He followed up on this letter with one on 4 May asking Nelson to report to the president what was being done to speed up lagging production.28
Stymied in his attempt to bring runaway production objectives to heel, in early April Nathan convinced Nelson to establish a feasibility board. This board met several times, and on 21 April sent a report, signed by Kuznets, to Nathan, urging that a full-scale feasibility analysis be undertaken. Nelson approved, and from early May through July Kuznets and a small staff worked unceasingly on a comprehensive study of the feasibility of the entire Victory Program. While they conducted this study, the rest of the Planning Committee focused on short-term problems capable of rapid adjustment and repair. Nathan himself, however, spent his time educating the rest of the senior members of the WPB and any other government officials who would listen on the concept of feasibility. In much the same way that Monnet had tirelessly worked every available venue to advocate the establishment of super-sized production goals, Nathan now worked the WPB circuit and beyond it to explain why it was important to rein in those runaway goals. Overall, though, it appeared to the services and other government agencies that the WPB and the Planning Committee in particular had abandoned the feasibility question, when they were actually only waiting on the final Kuznets study before declaring bureaucratic war. Throughout this period production objectives continued to rise, while actual achievements fell farther behind.
On 12 August Kuznets delivered his feasibility report to the Planning Committee. It represented an extensive analysis, covering more than 140 pages, divided into four lengthy studies.29 Since 1942 was more than half over, the study concentrated on the 1943 production program. The results of 1942 had to be accounted for, however, since the uncompleted portion would be carried into 1943, enlarging that part of the program even more.
The first section of the study emphasized the military production and construction sectors. This was fundamentally an analysis of recent GNP statistics, primarily divided between the military and civilian sectors of the economy. Here, Kuznets again reiterated his conviction that military production objectives were so massive that any attempt to carry them through would result in fewer rather than more finished products.30
Kuznets devoted the remainder of his report of his study to examining the other facets of feasibility. Summarizing these sets of findings, his study noted that for the remainder of 1942 and for 1943 there would be shortages in all important raw material categories that would seriously impede the total output. Moreover, Kuznets believed a substantial labor shortage would reveal itself by the end of 1943 unless strong measures were taken to move workers where they were critically needed. The main problem in his estimations was not a countrywide shortage of labor, but rather the immobility of many potential workers who lived far from the growing war production centers. Finally, Kuznets drew attention to a shortage of machine tools available to equip new and converted factories.31
The key parts of Kuznets’ study, however, were his overall estimates. On the basis of production rates and his calculated estimates of how fast the nation’s GDP could grow, Kuznets found that 1942 munitions output would fall $15 billion short of its goal. In the event, he was off by only $1 billion, since actual output was $45 billion and not the $44 billion he estimated. Similarly, he found that the 1943 goal of $93 billion was at least 30 percent too high, and that the best that one could hope for was $75 billion. This $28 billion shortfall would increase to $33 billion if the 1942 shortfall was rolled over to 1943.32
According to Kuznets, the most important implication of his findings was the crucial requirement of establishing feasible goals since no satisfactory production scheduling procedures could ever be devised as long as overall objectives remained beyond the nation’s capacity. Thus, Kuznets stated that the most pressing need was the development of “well-formulated and properly screened and tested objectives.”33 Going beyond pure economic analysis, he suggested to the committee that it would be impossible to establish such objectives unless the president created an authority “both amply informed and empowered, to set them.”34
Here Kuznets was echoing Nathan’s March proposal for the creation of a super-organization capable of coordinating both strategy and production. Because the military viewed strategy as its singular domain, this suggestion looked much as if the civilian production agencies were encroaching on the military’s area of responsibility. It was a suggestion that uniformed military and General Somervell particularly would bitterly contest. In hindsight it was a remarkable piece of naiveté on Nathan’s, Kuznets’, and May’s part to believe they could carry off this suggestion, particularly because they could refer to their own experience in vehemently opposing military attempts to gain greater control of production controls. The notion that the military would be any less resistant to a power grab in the opposite direction reveals a certain bureaucratic naiveté on the part of Committee members.
But according to Brigante, this is exactly what Kuznets appeared to recommend. Kuznets proposed that a supreme war production council be established in order to represent all the factors that he believed had to be taken into account in a well-formulated production program. According to Kuznets, a segregation of strategic, economic, and political factors was impossible, and no mechanism that called for separate application of them, with continuous shuttling among the agencies supposedly representing each, would really work.35 Kuznets advocated making this new body a permanent institution that would focus on broad questions of production strategy. In his vision, it also would include people responsible for military strategy, for production strategy in its broadest sense, and for social and political strategy. Considering that instituting any such proposal required the support of General Somervell, Kuznets made a major bureaucratic error by failing to include a representative from military procurement in this new oversight body. Finally, Kuznets wanted this body to have full authority over the Army, the Navy, and the Maritime Commission to be able to enforce its decisions on the broad outlines of any future production program. That Kuznets regarded the establishment of this group as crucial in importance was indicated by his closing statement: “Unless such a body is established . . . we are in grave danger of reducing materially the contribution that the productive system of this country can make to the war effort. We shall be threatened by continuous imbalance in output and by failure to obtain . . . the vast flow of munitions which we are capable of producing.”36
Nelson approved Kuznets’ study in late August, and noted that he thought the study was “remarkably well prepared” and a “magnificent analysis of our production program.”37 Nelson only commented on the portion of the report dealing with feasibility analysis, however, and remained silent about whether he concurred with the suggestion to create a “supreme war production council.” Nathan and the rest of the committee interpreted this silence as approval, although the evidence says otherwise. Nelson had already opposed previous attempts to involve the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) and the WPB in strategy and often went out of his way to draw a clear line between board authorities and those of the military. In fact, he was at that time pushing a different proposal, out of another office, to ask the military to establish a “requirements committee” with which the WPB could coordinate information and activities. Moreover, since the Planning Committee’s idea of a “supreme production council” appeared to bypass Somervell entirely in favor of direct access to the Joint Chiefs, it could not fail to garner the chiefs’ intense hostility. Furthermore, this perceived slight made it easy for Somervell to discount the plan to which it was attached—namely, feasibility.
Although Nelson was at best equivocal on the idea of a “supreme production council,” he ordered sixty copies of the study to be produced without modifications.
Of these copies, three went directly to Somervell, Vice Admiral Robinson (head of Navy procurement), and Harry Hopkins. In a break with delivery protocols, Nathan personally delivered the three advance copies and included his own note with each.38
Only Somervell replied to the document, and his response was far from what the planners had hoped. Given that the data were, to his mind, so unreliable and the percentage so inconsequential, Somervell could not support any changes to the current production program. He was also put off by the fact that only a few months before the statisticians had advocated a large increase in production goals, and now that he had complied they were changing their tune and screaming for reductions. Somervell continued his reply with a point-by-point rebuttal of specific elements of Kuznets’ proposal. If he had left it at that, there was a good chance that reasonable men still might have arrived at some compromise in a few weeks since the production system’s failure to attain stated goals was becoming manifest to most observers. Somervell could not resist the urge to twist the knife, though, and ended his letter with a hand-grenade: “To me this is an inchoate mass of words. . . . I am not impressed with either the character or basis of the judgments expressed in the reports and recommend they be carefully hidden from the eyes of thoughtful men.”39