The 1942 Scrap DrivePearl Harbor had been bombed and the country was officially at war. The problem was we didn’t have the metal to win. Nebraskans responded, and in so doing, jump-started the war effort that led to victory. Story by James J. Kimble |
 |
 |
MAYOR WILLIAM S. REILEY had probably never met Henry Doorly. But on Nov. 4, 1942, Reiley might have had some choice words for the prominent Nebraskan from Omaha.
On that morning, the mayor and four fellow citizens from Red Oak, Iowa, found themselves sweeping the public streets of Atlantic, a rival town one county over. The Atlantic News-Telegraph chronicled the embarrassing scene in mirthful tones. The newspaper’s photograph – with the Red Oak contingent posing soberly, brooms in hand – then went national, as featured in the War Production Board’s weekly publication, the Scrapper.
Reiley’s awkward moment in the national spotlight was one unlikely result of an unusual idea that had emerged three months earlier, just across the Missouri River to the west. Beginning in the creative mind of Doorly, publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, the idea caught fire for three summer weeks across Nebraska, then traveled to Washington, D.C. There, Doorly’s idea inflamed a meeting of publishers from around the country. The publishers, in turn, spread the burning idea to their home states.
By November, Mayor Reiley and his friends had become the unfortunate losers of a county versus county wager, one small part of a country-wide competition conjured up by the World-Herald, the Roosevelt administration and patriotic citizens across the vast World War II home front. This remarkable competition swept the nation into a war frenzy, making the “Nebraska Plan” the latest buzzword in the war-time press and Doorly a most unlikely savior of the war effort.
Nebraska made vital contributions to the Allied victory in World War II. Andrew Jackson Higgins, born in Columbus and a graduate of Creighton Prep, pioneered the Eureka boat design so vital to the D-Day invasion. The Hastings Ammunition Depot produced almost 40 percent of the munitions used by the Navy during the war. And Colonel Paul Tibbets – pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that would drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima – picked out his craft while it was still on the assembly line in Bellevue.
Yet none of these contributions would have been feasible without Doorly and his vital idea. Higgins’ boats, the ammunition from Hastings and Tibbets’ plane were all dependent on the nation’s ability to process, with great speed, the metal-based machinery of war. Only six months after Pearl Harbor, steel factories across the country were slowing production; some even halted altogether. The assembly lines that were producing the tanks, planes, ships and ammunition the nation needed so desperately were in critical danger. The war effort itself, in fact, was in peril.
And of all the patriotic citizens of the United States, Henry Doorly (naturalized immigrant, one-time railroad laborer and publisher of the biggest newspaper in Nebraska) would be the one to solve the impasse.
Following his most unusual idea, citizens of the Cornhusker State soon found themselves at the epicenter of one of the most important initiatives on the World War II home front.
War Machine Stands Still
It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who set the stage for Doorly’s so-called Nebraska Plan. Just weeks after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt used his 1942 State of the Union address to challenge the nation and its industry to begin assembling literally thousands and thousands of planes, tanks, ships and the other munitions that would be needed to defeat the Axis.
Given that the country’s economy was still recovering from the Depression, Roosevelt’s goals remain just as remarkable and ambitious today as they were back then.
Unfortunately, Roosevelt was initially unaware that his ambitious goals would soon run up against a glaring logistical problem. The steel industry, which would be charged with producing most of the president’s munitions, had little or no scrap metal for an ambitious armaments program.
The need was critical because approximately 50 percent of every product in the American system of steel production derived from scrap material. Ironically, one reason that American scrap supplies were so low was that, for years, the country had exported its unneeded scrap metal to Japan. That scrap did, of course, return to the United States . . . in the form of planes and bombs in the attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
The government gradually became aware of the lack of scrap metal and its potentially disastrous effects on the country’s ability to wage war. The War Production Board tried to publicize the importance of turning in scrap metal at the local level. After all, both city dwellers and rural civilians often had ready access to scrap that they were either not using or that they could sacrifice to the war. Unfortunately, thousands of homefront scrap boards soon found that just telling the public that scrap was important was not good enough.
By the spring of 1942, steel production was nearing a standstill. The Roosevelt administration realized that its lackluster scrap efforts might soon result in the deaths of ill-equipped American soldiers. Although officials did their best to remain confident publicly, many in the administration began to feel that the country was staring defeat in the face.