WAR PRODUCTION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25241, 2 June 1943, Page 3

WAR PRODUCTION

AMERICA'S GREAT EFFORT 100,000 AIRCRAFT COMPLETED (Rec. 7 p.m.) NEW YORK, May 81.' The one hundred thousandth aeroplane manufactured since the United States began war production came off the assembly lines to-day. This was one of the many impressive facts of United States production revealed when Judge Byrnes, the Director of the Office of War Mobilisation, made his first bi-oadcast since the creation of the office last Friday. “In the first months of this year.” Judge Byrnes said, “we completed 100 •fighting ships, and during this year we will double the size of the fleet. That accomplishment is without, parallel in history. These are fighting snips-V battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers escort ships, and submarines. They do not include several" thousand landing craft completed in the past five months. This year’s warship construction will be marked by two special achievements—carriers to give air coverage to our convoys and to omr attacks, and escort vessels to destroy enemy submarines. “ The submarine,” he said, “ is still a deadly menace, but our attack against the submarine is even more deadly. Recently one of our convoys was set upon by a pack of Nazi submarines. They got one of our merchantmen, but we got four of their submarines.” Referring to merchant shipbuilding, Judge .Byrnes said the United States was building merchant ships four times as fast as they were being sunk. Equally striking were the army figures. “In the world war,” he said, “we produced one piece of artillery for each 45 soldiers. We made 100,000 pieces of anfi-aircraft cannon. In May of this year we produced three times as many pieces of artillery for ground troops as we did in all the 19 months of the last war. The production of high-explosive powder has been six times greater than during the last war. In the year ended June 1, 1941, our ordnance plants turned out 25,000 machine-guns and submachine-guns. The year following we turned out 750,000. In the past year we turned out 1,500,000, bringing our total -to 2,225,000 since America began to rearm. In the three-year period we have manufactured 44,830,000 bombs.” Judge Byrnes added a warning that the hardest fighting had yet to come. “In fact,” he said, “we are just entering the critical period of the war.”