The World at War (54 page)

DR GALBRAITH

The business community regarded Roosevelt, at minimum, as a major deputy of the devil and Roosevelt was deeply suspicious of the
businessmen, so the people who were associated with mobilising for war were divided. Some of them felt that their main purpose in being in Washington was to put a curb on the Socialist excess of the New Deal. Some of them were uneasy about being there. They had something of the feeling that the people who worked there were playing in an orchestra in a brothel. There was also a great unwillingness to convert from civilian industries. There was a feeling that war production would be a very unprofitable business, would lose markets for automobiles, for tyres, for chemicals and so forth and there was a very great reluctance to take the plunge into the production of war goods.

OLIVER LYTTELTON

It's very easy to win battles with tanks that can't be produced and if you ask the ordinary run of General what he wants, he wants eight inches of front armour, he wants a high-velocity gun, capable of forty-five miles an hour over rough country and absolutely reliable. Such an animal can't be made. In the Air Force they used to introduce modifications – say a new bombsight that weighed twenty-eight pound more than the last one – and this starts altering the whole design and hundreds of modifications have to be put in, the wing, the ribs have to be strengthened and so on. So you want a synthesis between tactical requirements and what is possible from the point of view of production.

ALBERT SPEER

We succeeded quite well with
tank productions, in fact we produced five times more tanks in July 1944 than in February 1942, but one must compare to see the whole picture that the output in 1942 was a very low one, and the output in 1944 was, compared with the production in United States or in Russia, the normal one. I wouldn't say it was a minor one but it was a good output and also if I think of the air attacks, everything was against the highest production in Germany. But we could have done more without the changes Hitler always ordered – but Hitler was representing the Army wishes and a Production Minister has to fulfil what the Army is asking for. Of course we were all sticking together, and we had many talks about it and we tried, almost with intrigues, to attack Hitler's opinion from different sides and were winning other officers who were coming with experience from the fights to tell Hitler. Well, he changed his opinion maybe for a few days, but afterwards he jumped back again, and it was mainly the question that he wanted the heaviest tanks possible, which now were so slow that the tanks of the other side were far superior to them.

DR GALBRAITH

Washington in the 1930s had been a place of great excitement. I was not there much during the 1930s but many young people had come to be part of the Roosevelt revolution, part of the New Deal and then, after Pearl Harbor or even before Pearl Harbor, it became the Mecca for every kind of talent and non-talent. It was the scene, and everybody who was there had an enormous sense of his own importance when we all felt we were carrying the fate of the world on our shoulders and didn't hesitate to proclaim that fact at any given moment. One saw everyone you'd ever heard of in the streets, in the restaurants. It wasn't a place of great gaiety but on the other hand Washington never is. It was a very interesting time, and I think there's a tendency if one is winning, that is common to both Britain and the United States, to behave in a crisis with a certain panache, a certain style and everybody wanted to prove that he can take on very serious tasks of the period without being too gloomy about it.

PROFESSOR BUSH

We started on this side a year and a half before Pearl Harbor and gradually, through Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt himself who saw the picture, we had an organisation here for the development of new weapons by civilians going for eighteen months before we got in. We also had a complete interchange with Britain way back there, the form of organisation was a simple one. The first national office was later made the Office of Scientific Research and Development. The change came when the military machine was joined to it and through that all the work funnelled, it was a single paramilitary organisation getting its money from Congress. On the other hand the British – I never did understand the British organisation and I'm not dead sure they did either. But it was not in paramilitary form, it was in the separate military branches and joined together largely by committee. We had the unitary organisation, which is far better.

DR GALBRAITH

There was a certain enthusiasm in Washington for making people suffer. I think most of us who were associated with it felt a certain amount of suffering on the part of the American business community was good for its soul and I think that was probably disliked. And then, as everywhere else, there was great dislike for disrupting the accepted patterns of life and when you shifted the corporation from producing automobiles to tanks, or when the Ford Motor Company had to become the producer of the B-24 bomber – which it did very inefficiently for a long time – this interrupted comfortable patterns of life, which many people didn't like. Then there were the shortages. Though on the whole the people took the shortages rather well. I think there is the same tendency to accept shortages that existed here in Britain, with one exception: people were very resistant to
gasoline rationing. Clothing shortages, food shortages, coffee, sugar, people would accept – but there was no form of rascality, chicanery, thievery and larceny which people wouldn't engage in to get extra gasoline. That was the one form, that was the kind of rationing which was really terrible to administer in the United States.

DR SAMUELSON

The first problem was that we had a head of stagnation, what we call the Great Depression, and so most of our business community said we couldn't expand our production very much. It was a perfect controlled experiment of modern science – you wouldn't think that was possible in economics but it was: the followers in America of
John Maynard Keynes versus the business community.
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The Keynesians said the American economy had lots of slack, it will get the orders and there will be a secondary multiple in response, there will be a vast expansion in output, and so build big plants. The business community generally said, 'Oh, no, we're practically at capacity now.' Well, Franklin Roosevelt decided in favour of the Keynesians and when he announced fifty thousand planes everybody thought the man had lost his senses. Well, of course, we didn't get fifty thousand aeroplanes in a month, but a couple of years after Pearl Harbor the American economy reached levels just about what had been predicted by John Maynard Keynes himself in visits here and by his followers in this country.

OLIVER LYTTELTON

Maynard Keynes had an effect in the government circle as he would have in any circle. He had a brilliant brain but he didn't get his way enough. In a curious way this applied more to the Americans than us. People got frightened of this colossal intellect and the Americans were terrified of him. They thought that any minute some unarguable point was going to be raised by him, and US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was frightened of him, he realty was.

GEORGE BALL

Associate General Counsel for the Lend-Lease programme

Lend-Lease was a novel conception and the more immediate problem was to get people to understand what it was. In this, I think Mr Roosevelt's very simple analogy of lending your neighbour a hose when there's a fire was the most persuasive kind of simple illustration so that people could understand it. The biggest problem the programme had, of course, was the allocation of materials. Should we give it to the United States armed forces, or should we send it to the Pacific theatre, or should we turn it over to our European allies or to the Soviet Union after the Soviet Protocol? There was a long period of delay when we simply weren't keeping up deliveries and President Roosevelt got quite exercised about it and really began to put great pressure on the bureaucracy to meet the commitments.

DR GALBRAITH

This was the first war where
radio was important – there was no question that quick access to mass opinion was a matter of great utility. In something like the freezing of rubber-tyre stocks, the announcement of sugar rationing and the announcement of coffee rationing, you could very quickly get the explanation through to the whole population. It was very important in propaganda terms for the keeping up of the war spirit. Roosevelt used it for that purpose and used it with great skill, as did Winston Churchill – Roosevelt I think with less skill than Winston Churchill, but I think he was an apt student. In World War Two, censorship was surprisingly unimportant. We had no powers of censorship in the Office of Price Administration so we had to keep our rationing intentions secret, but we had no protection from leaks and after 1943 we no longer kept our production figures secret. Ships, aircraft and so forth were so large it seemed simpler just to let them be known and we learned after the war that they were on the whole discomfiting to the Germans. Hitler prohibited the citing of American production figures within the German bureaucracy and said they were faked. So the only really important restrictions on the media were the news of impending battles, military actions, the invasion of North Africa and so forth. I think that in retrospect one is surprised how liberal the reporting was. I would say that governments, when they're winning a war, tend to be much more conscious of the importance of the freedom of the press than when, as in the case of Vietnam, they are losing the war.

GEORGE BALL

One of the possible defects of the American system is that the executive branch, the President, does not have control over fiscal policy as in the case of Britain. We have a Budget Message to the US Congress and that's more or less the end of it. It simply makes proposals with regard to taxation, for example, and the Congress wasn't prepared to vote the kind of taxes which the President felt were absolutely necessary. This greatly contributed to the
inflationary forces as we began to gear up for production and we got into some serious problems until that could be brought under control through an enormous bureaucratic operation.

DR SAMUELSON

You might have thought that inflation would have been a major problem because in most countries in most wars it's always been a major problem. But very early when we mobilised we put in rationing and although there was a small amount of grumbling it's amazing how well the rationing system worked, although if the war had lasted another five years I won't answer for the consequences. Probably when you hear the name John Kenneth Galbraith you think of his books
The Affluent Society
and
The New Industrial State.
Well, among connoisseurs like myself it's the book you don't read that's the most intriguing: it's the book he wrote after the war about our wartime-rationing system. He was the Deputy Administrator of our price controls and he called it 'the disequilibrium-equilibrium system' and let me tell you how it worked. It really was a charm, too bad that it had to be in terms of war. You could get as much employment as you wanted and families which had never had any money at all were suddenly having lots of money. Now you'd say that with all this money and limited supplies of civilian goods the balloon would really go up in terms of inflation. But what happened was that all the things that you spend money on and enjoy – automobiles, durable consumer goods – were completely unavailable. There was only one thing available and that was savings, so people put their money in bank deposits, half their money in War Bonds. As a result we not only financed the war without too much disruption of the price levels but also came away with a nice nest egg that prevented the post-war depression which lots of economists – I'm one of them – predicted.

DR GALBRAITH

The cliché has it that Pearl Harbor brought a great change and there was a change, no doubt, but it wasn't dramatic and there was a stepped-up sense of urgency, but some of the same old businessmen were there, some of the public-relations types and what really happened, I suppose, was the organisations got better. But I didn't notice anybody any less interested in making money, anybody more interested in conducting a war in any spirit of business sacrifice. I was in charge of price control and probably I had a somewhat jaundiced view of the whole situation because most of my time was spent by people proclaiming to me how greatly their patriotism would be enhanced and how much more energetic they would be if they could just have a little more money.

DR SAMUELSON

There was a famous wartime picture of Sewell Avery, a great tycoon of the last age who was the head of retailer Montgomery Ward and who had brought it out of the Depression, being carried out of his office by two American soldiers in uniform because he wouldn't comply with the War Labor Board. Well, he learned where sovereignty lay.

DR GALBRAITH

Those years were ones of considerable social progress. The notion of equality of sacrifice – well, it was never realised in fact – but it became in some degree established and so that there was at least a bad conscience after the war about extreme inequality. It certainly committed the United States much more strongly to the idea of
full employment. It was seen that it became a cliché that if you can give a man a job to produce war material, then surely you can give him a job to produce civilian goods, and I suppose the most important single result was that since the war was being conducted by a government very sympathetic to trade unionism, there was a very widespread acceptance of the trade unions among businesses which previously had been very anti-union. If they were going to participate they had to take the unions along with it; this one of the reasons why the businessmen, in the early months of war, dragged their feet.

CHAPTER 22
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