FIVE MILLION DOLLAR SCHOOL

Southland Times, Issue 24769, 13 June 1942, Page 3

FIVE MILLION DOLLAR SCHOOL

AMERICAN PRODUCTION FOR WAR Quoted by Time as America’s No. 1 arms manufacturer and holding 10-12 per cent of all United States arms contracts, General Motors Corporation has now set up a gigantic maintenance school on which it will spend 5,000,000 dollars this year to train men to maintain their huge production in service in the field. On the American production front General Motors has already agreed to produce 40 per cent, of all the aeroplane engines for the army, 25 per cent of the tanks, half of the trucks, a third of the machine-guns and half of the Navy’s Diesel engines, in addition to fulfilling hundreds of other important contracts. This is typical of the substantial effort of American automotive plants which will produce a total of 20 per cent of all America’s war goods. To meet its schedules. General Motors, which averaged a production rate of one billion five hundred million dollars over the past five years, will achieve a rate of three billion seven hundred million dollars this year. But to build a tank is one thing; keeping it going is another. To keep this huge volume of its products—whether machine-guns, tanks or aircraft engines—functioning in the field General Motors is spending its 5,000,000 dollars allocation this year on the intensive training of men for four different types of maintenance service. First are the men who operate equipment in the field; second, field mechanics for light mobile repair units; third, men for mobile heavy repair shops; fourth, base repair depot staff for major rebuilding and overhaul operations. This work is a large scale extension in co-ordinated form of the training programmes already operated by a number of General Motors divisions. The Allison aeroplane engine division has already trained large numbers of aircraft engine mechanics from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and China.