Teamwork in Washington: Conversion to War

VOLUME 169

NUMBER 4

APRIL, 1942

BY WAYNE COY

WE NOW have a better working government than France or England had at the start of the war; it is better than we ever had in the last war,’a friend of mine recently said. ‘In fact, if it continues as it is, it will probably be the best government that ever lost a war.'

While it suffers somewhat from epigrammatic oversimplification, this statement does put dramatically the present state of our government. A great deal has been done to improve the working of government, but more improvement is essential to victory.

There was, after all, much to be done. For after more than a century of asking government to be deliberative and cautious and painstaking — to be everything but speedy — we have suddenly required government to meet the quick-changing demands of modern warfare.

The tremendous change involved in our present attitude can be seen by comparing attitudes of the most recent past. It was less than a year and a half ago that the Congress, with considerable public enthusiasm, enacted the Walter-Logan Administrative Procedure Bill. This bill, which would now be law but for a Presidential veto, was intended to make most government agencies act in the manner of courts. The high purpose was creditable enough, but today the idea seems frighteningly grotesque as we see instance after instance where a few hours’ delay can affect the lives of many of our men. For under the procedure of courts, our judges are still engaged with matters arising in the war effort of 1917.

Exceptions from the provisions of the Walter-Logan Bill were, to be sure, made for the War and Navy Departments. But that only underscores the unpreparedness of our attitude toward government. We are now in total war. Our factories, power plants, trains, and workers are intimately involved in the struggle, and time-consuming procedures in the government departments concerned with those matters can be as great an interference to winning the war as similar procedures would be in the armed services. That is the dominant fact about government today. Just as the conduct of every private citizen has its bearing on the war effort, so do the methods of the Food and Drug Administration, the Bituminous Coal Division, or the Post Office Department. Equipping government for war involves more than proper action from the War and Navy Departments; it involves action suited to wartime from every government agency and every government employee.

Copyright 1942, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

In gauging the progress that has been made, it is therefore necessary to remember that we began with a government almost as ill-adapted to modern warfare as our civilian plants were illadapted to making tanks and guns and planes. We needed, and we still need, what has been termed the ‘conversion of government.’ Already peacetime procedures have been overhauled, greater authority has been delegated to subordinates, organizations have been rearranged and streamlined, a better sense of urgency has developed. But much remains to be accomplished if government is to achieve victory. That is what my epigrammatic friend had in mind. And, in all fairness, I think his pronouncement is not true of government alone. He could have added that overall improvement is needed or we shall have the most energetic industry, the most cooperative trade unions, the most alert press, the best bankers and lawyers and doctors and public generally that ever lost a war.

The ‘conversion of government ‘ which we have already achieved has in great measure involved the conversion of formal organization. Agencies have been created and abolished and reorganized.

Authorities have been spelled out and delegated and redelegated. Organization charts have been drafted, redrafted, and redrafted again. The ‘machinery’ of government has been intensively refurbished for war.

But, like all other machinery, it cannot work satisfactorily without men, without the minds of men. The final, successful conversion of government depends upon the conversion of men’s minds. The matter is so well put by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that no one will mind quotation of words he wrote in these pages two months ago: —

Here was another of the war’s absurdities. Nothing worked properly. Our world was made up of gearwheels that refused to mesh. And where the gearwheels refused to mesh, there was obviously no watchmaker.

After nine months of war we had still not succeeded in persuading the industries concerned that aerial cannon and controls ought to be manufactured with regard to the climate of the upper altitudes in which they were employed. What we were up against was not the irresponsible attitude of the manufacturers. Men are for the most part decent and conscientious. I am sure that almost always their lack of initiative is a result and not a cause of their ineffectualness. . . .

If a bomb had reduced the Air Ministry to ashes, a corporal — any corporal at all —• would have been summoned, and the government would have said to him: ‘You are ordered to see that the controls are thawed out. You have full authority. It’s up to you. But if they are still freezing up two weeks from now you go to prison.’

II

By now we are all familiar with the kind of events that de Saint-Exupéry recounts. To the failure to manufacture controls that did not freeze, all of us could add stories of the propellers which were stored in French warehouses instead of being sent to the airfields, of the bridges which were not blown up at invasion time, of the tanks which were made without guns, and so on. To persons with less insight than de SaintExupéry these have been put down as proof that France was riddled with treason.

Treason there probably was in France. But also there were the months of ‘phoney war’ which lulled the minds of Frenchmen into believing that ordinary habits were adequate for winning the war. Surely that lack of imagination, that clinging to outmoded routines, must have been responsible for much of what now passes as treachery.

For in this country almost anyone familiar with our defense and war efforts can give examples of incidents almost as foolishly wrong as the things that were done in France. These incidents did not occur because of anyone’s lack of loyalty. They occurred, and more like them are occurring, because the remoteness of the battle fronts permits men to forget for the moment the size of our danger. Let us look at actual cases which would not have been permitted to take place by men aware that they are dealing with life and death.

Last summer we were shipping steel under Lend-Lease to the British Isles and some of it was reshipped from there to the arsenals of South Africa, India, Malaya, and other parts of the British Empire. American and British officials in London quickly urged by cable that this policy of running steel twice through Hitler’s U-boats be stopped, and that direct shipments be made from the United States. In Washington a staff member of the agency concerned proposed an answer which would have rejected the suggestion. He contended that there would be too great difficulties in ‘paper work’ involved if requests of different parts of the Empire were handled separately. He had got so buried in the form sheets he worked with all day that they appeared to him more formidable than Nazi submarines.

In midsummer we had only one factory producing an essential part of a defensive weapon which was vitally needed on merchant ships. Other sources of production were in the offing, but existing weapons were precious. It developed that this factory had somehow badly underestimated its costs and that it would lack money to keep up production unless the contract was altered. Men wrere dying on unprotected ships. Clearly the weapons were badly enough needed to warrant any cost. But the officials of the agency which was buying them delayed matters for a week while they suggested that the factory be put in bankruptcy. Such a proceeding would certainly have interrupted production and even might have stopped it altogether. It was as though the officials were bargaining for soap in peacetime, in a buyer’s market.

Attacks on our tankers in the Atlantic were menacing the fuel supplies needed by arsenals here and in Britain. Yet none of our tankers were being fully used. A treaty of 1931 with some thirty nations (including Germany, Italy, and Japan) had set ‘load lines’ short of full capacity, beyond which tankers were not to be loaded. The load lines had been established as a safety measure and also to limit competition at a time when wre seemed to have too many tankers. By 1941 it was clear that nothing was as unsafe as being without fuel and that we were not in danger from excess competition. It was equally clear that the Axis nations were not abiding by the treaty and that we were entitled to declare the treaty suspended. Secretary of State Hull had already declared to the Congress that the only international law in an Axis-threatened world was the law of self-defense, and Mr. Jackson, while he was Attorney General, had joined in those sentiments in an address at Havana. But for weeks no action was taken while various officials argued about the legal form in which the suspension of the treaty should be phrased. This delay had the same effect as if eight of our tankers had been put out of action by submarines during this period.

It was essential to conserve our supply of a product which, because of military requirements, will be critically scarce during the war. The person charged with obtaining maximum production of the product called together representatives of five or six agencies concerned with its military use, its export to friendly nations, its importation from available foreign sources, and other aspects of the problem. Several days were consumed in estimating the supplies which would be available and the essential civilian and military demands. Recommendations of several steps to eliminate nonessential uses were then prepared for presentation to the officials who could order the necessary action. Unfortunately, the person who had started the matter had forgotten to inform officials of another branch in his department who also had an interest in the matter. The mistake was not unnatural. There are often several branches concerned with a single problem and it is easy to overlook one of them. One would have expected the officials who had been overlooked to examine the recommendations on which much time had been spent, to add any additional thoughts of their own, and then to cooperate in the common effort of having proper action taken. Instead they complained that their jurisdiction had been meanly and unpardonably invaded; they set about preparing their own recommendations, which of necessity were in large measure repetitious of what had been done; they managed to create an obstruction for several days and to bring to despair the other persons involved.

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, when our soldiers and our Allies’ soldiers were critically in need of arms, conferences were taking place about stopping the production of automobiles. Eventually it was decided that thirty or forty days should be devoted to making 200,000 new cars before the factories were prepared for war work. During the conferences one official protested against any further production of automobiles and was told that otherwise more than $100,000,000 in inventories would not be used. ‘Hell,’ he replied, ‘we ought to give up ten times that much if it will save the lives of any of our soldiers.’ The other officials told him he was hysterical and went back to making nice computations about how the inventories could be most efficiently used, how the new cars could best be spread around, and so forth.

Now it is by no means clear that the decision on automobile production was not the correct one. It may well be that the quickest way of getting the factories ready for war work was to clear out their inventories by making new cars. The decision was finally approved by officials who are most alert to our pressing needs. But it is frightening that so soon after Pearl Harbor several officials thought a person ‘ hysterical’ who was only reckoning with reality, who was merely discussing a life and death situation in the language of life and death.

The outbreak of the war made plain the need for expanding the production of a certain product, and officials in Washington began the necessary arrangements. A member of Congress who is generally a most competent person intervened. He had long been opposed to the large producer, for he thought it had a monopoly position harmful to the future of his community. He contended that this concern should be permitted to expand only after the ability of the smaller producers to expand had been exhausted. It was obvious to everyone else that the war cannot be won by using only large producers or only small producers, and that all possible expansion by everyone was required. As a result the officials in charge framed the program to fit the member’s contention in order to avoid the further delay of an open fight. This unnecessary work, however, took up considerable time and the needed production will come weeks later than it should have.

There was nothing willful in the obstruction of the member of Congress — only a failure to realize the extremity of our position. Had he faced the question whether to encourage the expansion of the large producer or surrender to Hitler, he would not have taken his position. Instead he somehow held to the view that there is time to defeat the Axis in the particular manner most palatable to his personal desires, a view which was widely held in lands now overrun.

As this is written, the Dutch East Indies port of Soerabaja is under attack. The arms that are there for resistance were limited by the shipping the Allies had available, so every foot of shipping space should have been carefully conserved. Yet one of the last ships to reach the port was carrying thousands of empty beer bottles. They had been ordered and the permit and shipping arrangements for their export had been made months ago, before war broke out in the Far East. The order and the permit and the shipping arrangements started what de Saint-Exupery calls ‘a machine’ working. Nobody stopped the machine because nobody thought of the Dutch trying to hold back the Japanese with beer bottles. Just as nobody in France had thought of pilots flying over Germany with controls that froze.

III

These stories should not be taken as typical of the work of government, for they are not. They are the trouble spots of government and some of them will always occur in government or in any other institution. Some of them occur because of faulty organization or because of inadequate administrative methods. Those matters are fast being set right in government, but even the most perfectly constructed organizations and procedure cannot eliminate these trouble spots. For organizations and procedures are only what men make of them, and not just the top men at that. The will of the President and men of Cabinet rank cannot alone prevent the recurrence of such instances of mismanagement. In final analysis the ability of our government to meet its present task will depend on the esprit de corps of the operating personnel — from sub-Cabinet members to messenger boys.

This great working force of government must be lifted out of the workaday habits of peacetime bureaucracy. They must find a will for action that is attuned to our awesome needs. That is true of Assistant Secretaries who have spent time manŒuvring for control of new authority. It is true of reception clerks at the War Department who lackadaisically keep men waiting a quarter of an hour for admission badges. It is true of lawyers who delay important matters in order to perfect the drafting of instruments, as though they were writing a will in peacetime. It is true of timid field officers, who let shortsighted superiors in Washington block matters that they know must be speeded.

The main obstacle to the lift in spirit which is needed lies in the intangibility of the government’s affairs. At the end of a day the government official cannot see the lost lines which should have been held, the enemy resistance which should have been overcome, or the damaged batteries which must be reinforced. Soldiers and sailors on the fronts can see these things and adjust their efforts. The men at Pearl Harbor, upon viewing the damage, needed no Roberts report to learn that all was not well with their system of administration. But in Washington, where maladministration can affect the outcome of the war as much as anything soldiers and sailors may do, men can remain unaware of causing disasters. It is difficult to take a bureau chief, or a lawyer, or a stenographer aside and say, ‘Look! A hundred men are wounded because of your delay! A ship has been sunk because of your mismanagement!’

There are doubtless some gains to be had from structural changes in organization. At the same time there could be helpful changes of personnel, for any endeavor as large as our war effort is bound to have a sprinkling of dunderheads and even willful obstructionists. The main evil, however, lies in general inability to grasp the fact that the enemy is upon us though we cannot see his fire. Even if all existing personnel and all lines of authority were frozen for the duration, we could greatly speed victory by constantly keeping sight of the immediacy of our danger and the preciousness of time.

Certainly British officers at Dunkirk did not worry about keeping meticulous records of the supplies they handed out to the withdrawing troops. Local officials in Russia and China and the Dutch East Indies did not await detailed memoranda of instructions before putting into effect the scorched earth policy. The men in Bataan know that a faulty decision made in a few minutes is better than a perfect solution offered days too late.

Men who are aware that life depends on their actions simply cannot continue the interminable conferences, the buckpassing, the jurisdictional disputes, the reliance on peacetime formalities that now are nauseatingly overabundant. Seemingly men can only perceive such obvious things under great pressure. The officers of government must somehow learn that in a very real sense they are standing precariously on the cliffs while the enemy is pouring up the beaches.