Among the important wartime activities of the Forest Service has been 

 the stepped-up cutting of national forest timber to meet greatly accelerated 

 demands. Special authority was obtained to reduce the time required by 

 law for advertising sales and to sell without competitive bids where this 

 promoted the war effort. By opening up new stands and utilizing tree 

 species ordinarily considered unmerchantable, the increased cut was ob- 

 tained without violating sustained-yield principles, or jeopardizing the wel- 

 fare of the communities dependent upon the national forests. An impor- 

 tant new source of timber was the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, from 

 which over 38 million board feet of high-grade airplane spruce was obtained 

 in addition to about 46 million board feet of lower-grade spruce and 

 hemlock. 



A Timber Production War Project was created by the War Production 

 Board and directed by the Forest Service. Efforts were concentrated on 

 maintaining and expanding the production of lumber, pulpwood, and naval 

 stores, chemical wood, and other wood products — all critical war materials — 

 especially through small operators east of the Plains region. 



The war created tremendous new needs for wood products. In meeting 

 these needs the Forest Products Laboratory has taken a leading part. It 

 helped to solve problems of packaging, loading, and shipping all sorts of 

 fighting weapons to the battle fronts, and gave training courses for members 

 of the armed services and representatives of war industries in packaging, 

 container construction, repair and maintenance of wood aircraft, and other 

 subjects. The Laboratory devised important new materials, such as "com- 

 preg," formed by the compression and impregnation of wood with phenolic 

 resins, which has strength properties comparable to steel and is used in air- 

 craft production. It also adapted old materials to new uses, such as the 

 manufacture of alcohol from wood waste, now being undertaken on a com- 

 mercial scale. 



To the Forest Service fell the job of undertaking the production of 

 natural rubber from domestic sources. Guayule, a plant native to northern 

 Mexico and Texas, was selected as the most promising source. Some 30,000 

 acres were planted to this shrub and harvesting and extraction of rubber 

 from these plantations began in the winter of 1944. The Agricultural 

 Research Administration cooperated on research phases of the project. 



Other wartime services of the Forest Service have included extensive 

 surveys, in cooperation with other agencies, of the supply, requirements, 

 stocks, and cost of wood products, and production capacities of wood-using 

 industries. The Service, at the request of war agencies and foreign govern- 

 ments, sent missions to study wartime timber requirements of Great Britain 

 and the forest resources and wood-industries' possibilities of Chile. Mis- 

 sions also went to Costa Rica to study the availability of balsa wood needed 

 for airplane construction and other wood problems, to Ecuador to find 

 wood suitable for shipbuilding, and to Colombia and other South Ameri- 

 can countries to survey the possibilities of obtaining cinchona, the source 

 of quinine. 



The Forest Service Engineering Division helped the armed services in pre- 

 paring topographic maps, doing map-compilation work, and preparing 

 aeronautical approach charts. It also assisted our fighting forces in devel- 

 oping special equipment — such as a small tractor trailbuilder transportable 

 by airplane and a special tractor for travel over snow — which has materially 

 aided our military operations. 



U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 



32 



