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other work at hand for the men. What's worse in wartime, even if you're thinking of it only from the army point of view, as a war problem, you scatter and disperse his workers. You can't get them back. They go find themselves a job somewhere. You want them to make some kind of small wiring that is essential to a gun firing apparatus. You don't want those workers dispersed. They're hard to get back. So that really “business as usual” pays from the point of view of production of munitions while your own specifications, orders and assignments of production are catching up. You shouldn't put these factories that you've located that can do these things out of business while they're waiting for the order.
Now, it was frequently rumored that the dollar a year men from big concerns who were working for the WPB were looking out for the interest of their concerns. Some irate person would come and tell you that. Some devoted civil servant who didn't have anything to look out for, except the government of the United States, would come to you in horror and say, “Mr. X sat in that committee meeting and said, ‘What's the Oswego Packing Company going to get out of this order?’” The civil servant would be horrified.
I remember saying to some one like that, “Now, look, do you have any evidence that this man is dishonest, any evidence that he's trying to juggle an order to himself? Businessmen talk that way to each other. It's one of their little jokes.
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