Nobody took much notice of the sharp-eyed, unsmiling man, standing in the long queue. Slowly and inconspicuously he moved along with the other 3,500 veterans waiting to buy surplus property at Baltimore's Holabird Signal Corps depot. But the sharp-eyed man was taking plenty of notice of them. Major General Robert McGowan Littlejohn, new War Assets Administrator, was out to get firsthand information on what was wrong with a WAA sale.
By day's end he had found out enough to fill a five-foot bookshelf. There had been a big mistake in the inventory: instead of the advertised $7 million worth of photographic equipment there was only $1.5 million worth. Congestion and bottlenecks were everywhere. Many purchasers went hungry rather than stand for hours in a PX line to buy food. After seven and a half hours of business, only 119 sales had been made, only $27,384.26 worth of merchandise sold.
Regional Directors of WAA all over the country braced themselves for the storm. It came. In a blistering letter General Littlejohn said that mismanaged sales, like the one at Holabird, had better not happen again. Chances are they won't.
In WAA only six weeks (TIME, July 8) 55-year-old General Littlejohn has used his vast energy to clean house. Regulations were often too complex to understand. WAA was months behind in its paper work. Inventories were inaccurate and out-of-date. Littlejohn promptly called in all WAA directors and representatives for a three-day what-is-wrong conference. Result was the tabulation of 120 problems the organization had inherited. The General gave his staff a month to correct them. And property began to move faster.
Littlejohn hopes that WAA's job, now 30% completed, will be over & done with by June 30, 1947. Until it is, he is ready for criticism. Said he: "When there's an error made let's find out why. If the hair shirt belongs on my office, put it on."
In one swoop, War Assets Administration managed to get rid of 20,960 war planes, almost all it had left. WAA accepted bids of $6,582,156 for the lot, which had originally cost $3,900,000,000.
Biggest buyer was a 43-year-old contractor named Martin Wunderlich, of Jefferson City, Mo. In the largest single surplus sale to an individual, he acquired (for $2,780,000) a whole plainful of Flying Fortresses and other big planes (see cut), 5,540 in all. Like the other buyers he must scrap them.
Unlike the other bidders, Wunderlich got a surprise dividend: 2,300,000 gallons of 100-octane aviation gasoline, worth some $700,000. The gasoline, left in plane tanks, had been overlooked by WAA. Despite some WAA grumbling that it wasn't included, Wunderlich said he intended to keep it.