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 LETTER FROM COMMISSIONER OF PUBLIC ROADS

Administrator, Federal Works Agency.


 * This report presents the essential requirements and priorities of operations, necessary to provide roads and streets reasonably adequate for the national defense. Two general construction programs are necessary, the providing of access roads, and the development of the strategic network to eliminate known weak and inadequate sections. There is no padding of the needs with theoretical conceptions or community desires masquerading behind defense requirements. Our highways and streets are inadequate for the national defense in definite particulars. These deficiencies can be remedied promptly and progressively in the order of their defense importance only if adequate programs including the necessary funds are provided, to be carried on through the established State and Federal highway organizations.

France built the Maginot line of defense fortifications, a conception based upon tradition and the historical pattern of previous wars with Germany. Holland relied upon her neutrality and perhaps her below-sea-level possibilities of flooding the land. These and other similar considerations may have influenced the planning of the German military machine. The relatively small number of motor vehicles and production capacity in the countries of Europe, so totally unlike the conditions in the United States, provided a rare opportunity to the German General Staff. At the very moment England was imposing limitations upon the motortruck, Germany was subsidizing its use and, as a major national policy, engaging on a magnificent scale in the construction of a national system of super highways. The mileage actually completed before Germany’s war machine went into action could not have had more than a limited utility, but the whole scheme was symbolic of Germany’s conception of the new technique of warfare based upon fast and coordinated movement of mechanized power units over the land, upon the sea, and in the air.

In each of these fields of operation the defense program of the United States is generating large amounts and varieties of highway traffic which demand new roads and new bridges. Indicative of the universal service of highway transport, many of the most pressing new highways or bridges are to serve essential requirements of the shore establishments of the Navy. 5