It was 9 a.m. on Aug. 16, 1945. In the Philadelphia plant of the Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Co., greying, husky Eugene Beuttel and his partner, Samuel Daniels, worked at a long assembly line. On it, fins for 500-lb. bombs moved slowly along. As they moved, Beuttel and Daniels welded the fins, in an electric blue blaze of light. Suddenly the line stopped moving. A foreman's voice shouted an order.
Obediently, Beuttel and Daniels picked up their welding torches. With the rest of the bomb makers they reported to the company's employment office and were assigned to another assembly line. In a matter of minutes they were at work again—welding automobile bodies. Twenty-four hours later, Budd's first auto body in four years moved off the line.
In small, this was the story of business in 1945. Not all reconversion could proceed so swiftly or dramatically. In some plants it was the work of weeks, in others the work of months. For all business that had to convert, it was a period of upheaval, like the period of conversion to war. But there was a difference.
The U.S. economy had spent three years converting to war. It has had only months, as yet, to reconvert to peace. How long it would be until peacetime production reached its full stride no man knew. Miracles of peacetime production to match the miracles of war production had still to be achieved. But the first crisis of converting to peace had been overcome more swiftly than the first crisis of converting to war.
As the year ended, the U.S. was again in the midst of a major economic adjustment, of a new stage of industrial evolution proceeding so swiftly that it might better be called revolution. The nation was baffled and dismayed by battles at the economic barricades, by sniping from the housetops. No one could accurately foretell how or when the economic upheaval would end. But already a new set of economic forces, the demands of peace, were giving the economy a new shape. It would not be the shape which the nation and its businessmen had known.
In Time of War. The shaping lay in the mechanics' hands of the men who had shaped the wartime economy. They had shaped it to turn out 297,000 combat planes, 86,000 tanks, 41,000,000,000 rounds of ammunition. They had also translated a theory of abstract physics into a practical weapon so efficient that it outmoded all other tools of war: the atom bomb. They had also planned for peace.
Businessmen had pored over blueprints of new plant layouts; they had moved toy men and machines in toy plants; they had tailor-made new models of autos and washing machines in secret rooms, hidden from the prying eyes of competitors. In Washington, the planning had been an off-again-on-again affair. It was off after the Battle of the Bulge, on at the Battle of Germany. Hastily, WPBoss Julius A. Krug had unwrapped the Government's overall plan. In its broad outlines, it was a plan to reconvert cautiously, to pluck the web of controls from industry a strand at a time, allocate materials, fix production quotas for the period between VE and V-J days. What businessmen said about this privately was often unprintable. They did not want to be led from war to peace; they wanted to pick up the ball and run.