INDUSTRIAL PREPAREDNESS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, Issue LXXII, 23 May 1917, Page 8

INDUSTRIAL PREPAREDNESS.

CONDITIONS IN AMERICA

For some months beforehand American engineers had been quietly preparing for the eventual break with Germany. Though they had but little time to carry into effect their "preparedness" schemes, there is no doubt that the spade-work done in this direction, particularly last year, should facilitate greatly the part played by the United States in the war, for it is America's vast industrial machine that will prove to-be of inestimable service to the Allies. With a view to securing the maximum ■efficiency from this machine, a Committee of Industrial Preparedness was appointed last year by the United States Naval Consulting Board, which secured the co-operation of over 30,000 engineers with the object of making a card-index survey of the whole American engineering industry. Americans have learned from Britain the lesson of not allowing skilled workers to go to the front, only to be brought back later, more or less demoralised, to tasks from which they should never have been taken. In America they have been endeavoring to work on similar lines to those which were responsible for Germany's wonderful organisation, and tb.2y have scheduled the outout of no fewer than 35,000 concerns, with a view to arranging for these to sprfng to arms at a moment's notice. If'there has been time enough to allow this scheme to become really efficient America ought to be able to render to the Allies tremendous service through the medium of her industrial plants, even though not a single American soldier or sailor were to come to grios with the Germans. Besides the production of shells for tlio Allies, in the manufacture of which American firms have already had very considerable experience, there are countless plants which hitherto have not been on war work, and which, could bo pressed into .the service of the Allies —particularly those concerned with the "manufacture of machine tools and motor ploughs. A great stream of the latter from the United States to Britain would help the food position there enormously. Though it is at present assumed that it will be through her factories that America's entry into the war will be ' of the greatest* service to the Allies, it should be pointed out that a scheme of preparedness has been worked out with the object of mobilising the engineer- , ing talent of the country in case of war. The object of this scheme, which became operative on July Ist last, and which involved the formation of an Officers' Corps of Reserve Engineers, and ■also an enli?ted reserve of workmen chilled in the various technical branches of engineering, was to give every engineer or technical specialist an opportunity, when the country needed his services, of doing what he was best fitted to do, and not necessarily to try avA train all up to the same standard of military engineering for service with the troops. It is no doubt due to this scheme that meriea is to-day preparing to send an Army of engineers to France.