Essayons! Rationing, the Unthinkable

Continuing a mini-series on lessons from WW2 .... Rationing is a dirty word in a consumocracy like ours. But it’s never been all that far from American practice during emergencies:  In the early 1960s, cities and counties set up review panels (aka God Panels, later slammed as Death Panels in political debates over Obamacare) to decide which patients got access to the very scarce kidney dialysis machines. 

Now CV-19 is at our doorsteps. Just over the horizon is some form of healthcare rationing if people refuse orders to maintain social distancing, thus causing hospitals to be swamped. In our neighborhood, stores began limiting purchases of the Big Four (wipes, alcohol, toilet paper, and paper towels) last week. 
Side note: Even during the biggest wave of panic buying, I noticed that at least two things lingered on the shelves: bags of chickpeas and cans of split pea soup. 

Lesson from the war: The first attempt at gas and tire cutbacks in World War II were voluntary measures like Sunday driving bans. They didn't work. No surprise there.

What did work were wartime coupon books issued by local boards, under simple and clear rules and with help from paid staff that handled the exemption paperwork. For the most part, Americans learned to cope. One reason was a big propaganda campaign, with posters like this (Office of Price Administration):

But it was never perfect! A controversial but amusing wartime article in Colliers described how in 1943, reporter Mike Miller figured out how to drive from Texas to Minnesota without using a single one of his own gas ration coupons. The biggest loophole for "ration chiselers," and exposed by Miller's article, were the unlimited coupons made available to truckers.

When it came to keeping grocers honest about food price controls, the most effective policing was the combination of citizens who recorded infractions, and then relayed their tips to enforcement officers. 

Conserving resources and preventing inflation went far beyond ration books. In the course of enforcing rules from the Office of Price Administration, federal marshals actually handcuffed and carried away the chief executive of Montgomery Ward.  It meant allocating scarce raw materials between companies, stopping the sale of some goods entirely, and forcing companies to redesign stoves and refrigerators in order to save material and labor. 

Outrageous! And successful. 

Essayons! When the Unthinkable turned Thinkable

Commentator P.J. O’Rourke once wrote that giving power and money to government is like handing over a bottle of whiskey and the car keys to a teenager. 

And many Americans have shared O’Rourke’s mistrust. Any discussion on tackling today’s problems is likely fenced in by “unthinkables” -- actions that reasonable people regard as out of bounds for the federal or state governments. If an unthinkable comes up it’s likely to provoke the immediate response, “Don’t go there!” 

Today, in terms of climate change, one political unthinkable has been a carbon tax. In the world of transit, a city ban on all personal cars. In the fight against narcotics trafficking, an unthinkable would be to decriminalize narcotics so as to cut the floor out from under the cartels and narco-states. In the military sphere, a nationwide military draft is unthinkable. In this way of thinking we're hemmed in by the impossible, on all sides.

Actually, no. Here's another lesson from World War II mobilization:  In June 1940 a group of American business and political leaders sat down to put together a list of their own unthinkables. France and Belgium had just fallen to the Germans, so the status quo was beginning to look like a sure road to ruin. They came up with nineteen unthinkable things. Each marked a political line that, so they believed, Americans would never allow its leaders to stick a toenail over, whatever the justification. Here’s a partial list, recorded in a 1943 article in the Harvard Business Review:

• “Conscription for military service must not be used;”
• “Possible shortages of materials must not be discussed;”
• “Foreign service for troops is not permissible;” 
• “Rationing to consumers is unthinkable;”
• “All mandatory curtailment and limitation of industry is unthinkable;” and
• “Close collaboration with a communistic government is unthinkable.”

All these and many more were in place before 1944 ended. 

Though the price was high, no revolution occurred; by mid-1944 a once-fearful citizenry was so certain of victory that it was planning on commuting by helicopter shortly after Tojo gave up. 

“Don’t go there”? Here’s where they went: income tax brackets as high as 88%, the drafting of 16 million men, an historic narrowing of the income gap between rich and poor, price controls, allocation of raw materials, renegotiation of war contracts that proved too profitable, commandeering of ships, censorship of broadcasting and movies, the shutdown of many factories making consumer goods, takeover of poorly run defense industries, 35-mph speed limits, confiscation of spare tires, and gasoline rationing. 

The unthinkables spared no one; when the beloved and iconic company Colt Arms couldn’t make .50-caliber machine guns fast or cheaply enough, the government snatched its contract away and gave it to the Brits. Colt’s refusal to adapt to circumstances helps explain why it was one of the very few old-line defense contractors that managed to lose money during the boom years. 

World War II proved that even the wickedest tangle can be cut down to size. But the solution wounds and kills. It can’t be achieved with “sector neutrality.” During World War II, many small businesses had to close, and that included thousands of gas stations and other small businesses. Some cosmetic makers and horse racing tracks were wiped out. 

The shortage of bearings and alloys at the approach of war shut down my grandfather Dick Chiles’s highway-equipment manufacturing business in Buckner, Missouri. It was a heartbreaking development, since it was his first business success after going broke three times during the Depression. 

Tough, very tough, but there was no choice. As a Detroit News editorial said when switching its stance from isolationism to support for Lend-Lease, “There is no such thing as half a war.” 

So my grandfather (a World War I tank-corps veteran) pestered his relative Harry Truman, then a U.S. Senator, to get him back in the Army; Truman pointed that Dick had lost his hand in a hunting accident and said he could not serve in uniform again. But Truman called back after two weeks with a job lined up: Dick Chiles moved to Washington and began buying up bulldozers to help rebuild the London docks.

Essayons! More lessons from World War II mobilization

Here in Minnesota one of our family's favorite stops is the Corps of Engineers' Marine Museum at Canal Park in Duluth. Here's a picture from the museum grounds of the ship canal and traffic bridge:

A big sign hanging over the museum's entrance hall has this single, odd word:

It's French for "let us try," and it's been the motto of the Corps since the early 1800s. I can't say I agree with everything the Corps has done over the years, but their work under difficult conditions holds some tips for new and difficult days. At its core, the Corps is a wartime organization. 

Over time I've given talks, and posted here, on some lessons from World War II. It's from researching a nonfiction book proposal that, editors assured me later, had no audience: saying, there's no unity today as in the war, and no motivation to do anything but buy stuff and hang out. 

Not that the current pandemic has probably altered that mindset. The crisis will pass, no doubt after many months of casualties and damage to our economy and healthcare system, and we'll eventually adapt. 

But that's a long stretch and in hopes of offering encouragement now with more accounts of how wartime workers dealt with seemingly impossible challenges, I've decided to pull out more of the dozens of lessons I gathered from studying World War II mobilization. I'm not claiming that the nearly unanimous spirit of the American home front can be duplicated. That came out of the fact that a great majority believed they had a personal stake in victory. 

Rather, I'm just saying that some specific lessons from the war years still have relevance. Many techniques developed during the war (such as action learning, collapse rescue, "branches and sequels" military analysis, production expediters, and operational research) are still in active use, although their origins have been forgotten. 

One of those war lessons is the importance of long lead times, rather than assuming we can start producing something from nothing, and in a few months. There are lots of examples, and here's one showing why decisions made well beforePearl Harbor proved crucial to the Allied war effort. 

War orders from the British for cargo ships to break the U-Boat blockade triggered a crash shipbuilding program here in December 1940, followed by a broader effort called Lend Lease that passed three months later. Because the Lend Lease bill made an exception to the Neutrality Act of 1939, the U.S. could begin providing weapons to dozens of allied countries that had exhausted all currency reserves and bankable assets by 1941. Using his fireside radio chats, FDR explained that it was like lending one’s neighbor a garden hose when his house was burning down. 

It was a masterpiece of folksy persuasion, given public resentment stirred up by isolationist, antiwar books like The Case of Sergeant Grishka, Arms and the Man, and The Road to War. The apparent impossibility of European peace had poisoned the politics of foreign aid up until the crucial Lend-Lease vote in Congress. 

In retrospect, Lend Lease’s most important contribution to victory was in getting America’s industrial army underway a full year before Pearl Harbor. As one Navy man said after the war, “Forget the production miracles of 1944. Everything important happened in 1940 and 1941.” The lead time before Pearl Harbor was vital when it came to making goods with unavoidably long lead times. The choke point was most severe with rolled manganese-steel alloy. As an example, 300 new Sherman tanks would not have been available to fight Rommel’s Panzers in North Africa in 1942 had not American steel mills received orders for heavy plate in late 1940.

Mistake-Maker's Club, CV-19 edition

In a 2018 post, "The Lecture I Never Gave," I laid out the concept of the Mistake-Maker's Club. I chose that blog title because, at the time, I thought I wouldn't be giving any more lectures. As it turned out I've given several more disaster-prevention talks since then, with the next keynote talk postponed due to the you-know-what pandemic.

The last couple of weeks have reminded me to remind readers of noting their mistakes right away, so as to avoid repeating them. The kind of mistakes I mean are the ones immediately obvious in retrospect. 

Why the reminder? We're all stressed and for many reasons; yanked this way and that by bad news and changing directives from all directions; worried about friends and family and healthcare workers on the front lines, worried about jobs and savings ... the list goes on. 

Already doctors, PAs, technicians, and nurses in the hard-hit areas are warning that they are working extremely long hours with CV-19 patients, and therefore at risk of infection all the time. We've been reading a lot about the importance of having enough ventilators in ICUs, but less has been said about the need for well rested staff, because their expertise and good judgment is essential in using such machines. Ventilators, as well as other life-sustaining machines like ECMO devices, can cause complications even in ordinary circumstances. 

My point is not to remind you of things to worry about, but just to say that the sleeplessness, fatigue, and daily distractions we're all experiencing make mistakes more likely.  Some mistakes are silly: the other morning I found I had unknowingly added an extra belt on top of the first belt on my pants; twice I missed a routine step in the coffee-making chore and ended up with coffee grounds and hot coffee on the counter.  

Many other mistakes might not be silly, like grabbing the wrong prescription bottle.

So ... check twice before doing something you might regret!