From: Everette (194cbteng@bellsouth.net)
Date: Fri Jan 13 2006 - 04:37:43 PST
January 13 1942
On this day: President Franklin D. Roosevelt establishes the U.S. War
Production Board, with business executive Donald M. Nelson as its chairman.
This was not the first time Roosevelt called on Nelson. In 1940, the
president asked Nelson, then executive vice president of Sears, Roebuck and
Co., to head up the National Defense Advisory Commission. As Roosevelt
established agency after agency to coordinate the transition of industry
from peacetime to wartime production, Nelson skipped among jobs, becoming
director of purchases for the Office of Production Management and, in August
1941, director of the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board. The War
Production Board, created to establish order out of the chaos of meeting
extraordinary wartime demands and needs, replaced the Supply Priorities and
Allocations Board.
As chairman, Nelson oversaw the largest war production in history, often
clashing with civilian factories over the most efficient means of converting
to wartime use and butting heads with the armed forces over priorities.
Despite early success, Nelson made a major judgement error in June 1944, on
the eve of the Normandy invasion, when he allowed certain plants that had
reached the end of their government/military production contracts to
reconvert to civilian use. The military knew the war was far from over and
feared a sudden shortage of vital supplies. A political battle ensued, and
Nelson was eased out of his office and reassigned by the president to be his
personal representative to Chiang Kai-shek in China.
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