American Plane Production

Southland Times, Issue 24353, 6 February 1941, Page 6

American Plane Production

DELIVERIES of American military aeroplanes to Britain are still far below the expectations of a year ago. According to a cable message printed yesterday 308 aeroplanes were exported to Britain and Canada during December. The total sent to Britain, 221, was the second highest since the outbreak of war. The highest figure was reached in August, when the American Government released a number of its own army and naval aircraft to tide Britain over a critical period. The December total compared with 193 in November, 177 in October and 136 in September. These figures represent only a fraction of the deliveries of 500 to 700 planes a month which were predicted at the end of .1939, when it was said that if Britain survived the following year American plane production would give her superiority in the air, quantitative as well as qualitative, by the beginning of 1941. But the important, point is that the rise in American aircraft exports is steady and unbroken, and that every effort is being made in the United States to augment it. President Roosevelt, for instance, has departed completely from his “rule of thumb” policy of dividing production equally between Britain and his own forces. The American magazine Time stated on December 23 that the whole of the production of the Curtiss-Wright P4O fighter, the only pursuit; plane being made in quantity' in the States, had been diverted to Britain. This morning it is reported that Britain received as much as 90 per cent, of the total American production of all types of aircraft in December and January (the actual number of machines delivered in January has not yet been announced). Moreover, it is stated on the authority of “a Government source” that American production may exceed 1000 a month by' March, and that after the passage of the Lease and Lend Bill more service planes will be ferried across the Atlantic. Even if these new predictions are regarded with some scepticism, the outlook in the United States is very much more encouraging than it was six months ago. The collapse of France and the sudden realization of America’s peril, heightened by the signing of the Tri-partite Pact, shook the United States Government and aircraft manufacturers into an activity that they would otherwise have reached only under war conditions. Up till that time American industrialists had been critical of Britain’s efforts to expedite her aeroplane production; but they

found, soon enough, that the difficulties which had restricted the British output had also to be surmounted in the United States. The construction of new factories had to be undertaken, specifications had to be fixed and machine tools prepared (a long and complicated task), and questions of priorities, profits and labour had to be decided. Progress was slow, as it had been in Britain, but one by one these problems have been overcome and American factories are now at last beginning to move towards large-scale production. It will be many months before United States production equals Britain’s or Germany’s, and many months more before it reaches the astronomical figures that have been promised. But America’s industrial power is such that she will ultimately outpace the whole of the rest of the world; and that power has been placed, unmistakably, behind Britain.