Forest Harvest Jor New Year Tied to Overseas Combat

By Wilson Compton Secretary-Monager, Nationol Lumber Manufocturers Associotion

Lumber has had two emergency jobs within the global war emergency. The first is all but completed, the second has scarcely begun.

So heavy will be military demands for lumber and other wood products in 1944 that there is no reason to believe that any substantial a d di t i o n a I amounts of forest materials will be routed to domestic civilian uses in the coming year.

The lumber industry, in the last three years, has witron connptoa been dominated by four chref tactors:

1. Even before Pearl Harbor, the producing industry felt the impact of war domination when it was called upon to furnish the principal materials to create the basic United States military training establishment.

2. By the time this establishment was near completion, lumber inventories no longer were important. They virtually ceased to exist, as current production felt the pressure of increasing demand.

3. Even though the military construction program passed its peak, there was no letup. With no time lag for creating new inventories, m,ilitary operations-as contrasted with military training-taxed the industry even more heavily.

4. Through all this period, because so many forest and mill workers had been drawn away by other war industries and by the military forces, adequate lumber production confronted such a manpower problem that, in 1943, with a labor deficiency of nearly 25 per cent production declined in the face of an ascending curve of packaging and other requirements.

The fact that lumber is a versatile material, and can be directed into any one of the hundreds of war uses, caused it, at the start of the emergency, to be drained away from retail outlets faster than almost any other marketable commodity. This meant that retail lumber dealers were among the first community merchants whose activities were seriously curtailed by the war.

But, because of this versatilit5 lumber merchants will be among the first to benefit from renewed domestic demand in the normal civilian market. The product of the green chain and the dry-Krln can roll just as quickly to a building site on Main Street as to a defense production center. The lumber merchant will have a head start, while his neighbor, the automobile dealer, is waiting for his factory to revert from tank or plane production to pleasure cars.

Some men hale believed that when the twin projects of housing troops and housing war workers were substarr tially completed, demands on wood would have passed their peak. It is true that military and war plant construction in 1944 will be only about 3O per cent of such construction in 1942, for most of the barracks and factor'ies are built. That is true, also, of most civilian war housing.

But this conclusion does not take account of the gigantic task of maintaining fighting forces in the field, and this is a task to which we have scarcely put our shoulders. The secretary of war recently pointed out that only about a third of American fighting forces have even started toward the various theaters of action.

As I write, returns for 1943 are not all in. Yet it is apparent that military.boxing, crating, and shipping alone will have used, in this one year, between 12 and,15 billion board feet of lumber. This is between 36 and 45 per cent

(Continued on Page l'i)