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Show "IMPOSSIBLE" DONE 4 AS PLANE OUTPUT HITS MONTHLY HIGH Some not-too-old folks may remember re-member back to shortly after Pearl Harbor when people were saying that President Roosevelt was setting impossible goals for industry by asking for 100,000 planes a year. At the time those experts who had fingers to count on pointed out in horror that this would mean 8,000 planes a month. Now the War Production Board is announcing that aircraft construction con-struction has reached a new high; output last month was 8,362 planes of all types including the largest number of heavy bombers ever produced in a single month. This news isn't nearly so astounding as-tounding as it might be if American Ameri-can industry didn't get into the wartime habit of cracking production produc-tion records as fast as a Fortress can bomb Cologne. A Big Job . . . Newspapermen who were permitted per-mitted into the most guarded precincts pre-cincts of war industries saw that it took more to building a fighting plane than just a contstructor set. Airplane manufacturers had to work with steel, rubber, wood machines, ma-chines, motors, and precision instruments, in-struments, arid have to get .them from other manufacturers who in turn had problems of their own. Automobile men had gone into airplane production too, and were learning a lot in a hurry. And the manpower situation didn't help any, either. The concensus then, with Berlin and Tokyo in agreement, was that it was a nice trick if you could do it, and they didn't think industry could. When the Axis hears about this record it will be in more ways than a newspaper article. |