IT'S LATER THAN WE THINK
It's Later Than We Think THE WAR is far from won. Every trained observer knows that, barring a miracle or an unexpected collapse within Germany, many months of bloody fighting lie ahead. And yet,...
...On Dec...
...Stalin endorsed him...
...Stalin walked out on it...
...that their allotments to dependents likewise stopped as they left the hospital, and that they were forced to shift for themselves until a rating was actually made...
...Browder panned Badoglio...
...Warren H. Atherton, national commander of the American Legion, struck a timely note last week when he accused "the nation, Congress, and administrative officials" of forgetting that while they were busy thinking and talking about what they were going to do for the wounded men of the World War, "men were being wounded and provision had not yet been made for adequate service to them...
...We have energetically reversed the fighting position," and "Despite fierce resistance, we have detached ourselves from the enemy," and the like, all were expressed earlier and better by, our researches disclose, Mark Twain...
...Thanks to American labor and industry, certain war goods have piled up faster than the Army can use them...
...that their Army or Navy pay stopped with discharge...
...These tentative estimates can only suggest the enormity of the problem we face in the months and years which lie just ahead...
...Browder cheered the Davies film...
...Maybe Browder is against the prophet system, but doesn't spell it carefully enough...
...Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, suggested the scope of cutbacks in the immediate future when he wrote Donald M. Nelson, chairman of the War Production Board, that the indications are that "operations [in the basic steel industry] in the early months of next year will fall from five to 10 per cent below the capacity levels of this year...
...Louis Post-Dispatch) The Nazis' far-fetched phrases for describing defeats as if they were victories are not, now that we come to think of it, original...
...Thus far, the cutbacks TfJjfe been relatively small in scope, affecting only a infinitesimal fraction of one per cent of our war workers, and those, of course, can still be quickly absorbed in other war industries...
...Promises On Paper ANOTHER problem which requires prompt and decisive action involves returning members of the armed services...
...He wrote: "Thrusting my nose firmly between his teeth, I threw him heavily to the ground on top of me...
...A Washington dispatch to the New York Times quoted government officials as estimating that cutbacks may reach a total of $8,000,000,000 in 1944, affecting as many as 1,000,000 workers...
...Trouble On The Party Line (From the Worldover Press) Earl Browder seems to agree with Stalin after every move, and disagree just before...
...Calling for an end of "national neglect," Atherton cited a Legion survey of 1,535 battle-casualty cases which showed that many of the injured soldiers had to subsist on charity or on their own resources from four to seven months after their release from hospitals...
...Mark Twain Said It Better (From the St...
...While some members of Congress and many laymen regard the problem as one which can be safely ignored for the present, the simple fact is that even before we have got knee-deep in this war, 700,000 servicemen have already been released and are returning to civilian life...
...Here again it is clear that while we still have a long war to fight, we are being confronted even now with problems usually associated with demobilization...
...And yet, despite the grim prospect of a prolonged struggle, it is later in the war than we think—later in the sense that the peacetime problems of readjustment are taking more threatening shape and showing us how woefully unprepared we are to cope with them...
...1 of this year, 70,000 such cases of World War II veterans, wounded or disabled during service, were already pending in the files of the Veterans Administration...
...Although Congress has refused to have much of anything to do with planning, having killed the National Resources Planning Board and frightened other agencies into dropping the word "planning" out of other titles, it is only by fearless, intelligent ^?iftning for the gradual conversion of our vast production machine that we can hope to head off some of the more painful repercussions of "production cutbacks...
...Tanks, ammunition, and small arms pre glutting the depots...
...These cases showed," he pointed out, "that the average time spent by veterans waiting for compensation was almost four months...
...Watch those words, "production cutback," from now on...
...They mean that a company producing for the war effort has been ordered to stop or reduce the production of war equipment because our supply of the specified materials is greater than our and our Allies' needs...
...As they enjoy a well needed holiday recess, members of Congress might ponder the fact that it is much later than they think—that the price of further delay and temporizing could easily be a violent crackup in the American economy and what we are pleased to call the American way of life...
...The news from McKeesport, Penna., where workers at the National Tube Company, a subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation, went out on strike against a "production cutback" is a striking indication of what we mean...
...They are finding, these honorably discharged soldiers and sailors, that their government's promises about caring for returning servicemen are still largely on paper...
...Browder warned against appeasers, and Czarist aristocrats threw a banquet for Soviet officials...
...But the cutbacks are bound to increase greatly in magnitude as the months go by, and the reaction of workers to demotions, pay reductions, layoffs, and outright dismissals is certain to be emphatic, if not violent, when they realize that their government and their employers have done little or nothing to plan for the change from a war to a peace economy...
...Congress and the Administration cannot safely postpone much longer a head-on grappling with these basic problems...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 52
