06/01/23
6/1/2023This is a season for remembrance.
On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, finally ending World War Two in Europe.
The beginning of the end took place nearly a year earlier, on June 6, 1944, when the Allies debouched their immense D-Day invasion force onto the beaches of Normandy.
And last Monday, May 29, was Memorial Day, when we honor the departed, with special thought and gratitude to those who sacrificed everything on the path to victory. Their gift to America is incalculable.
But how America equipped them for the fight—that’s calculable, and boy, was it astounding. In a few short years the United States mobilized the largest wartime industrial machine in human history.
The late 1930s gave no hint of what was to come for the United States economy. The large majority of Americans strongly opposed getting involved in the massive military conflicts of Europe and Asia. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt foresaw the threats to Western interests in the Far East and the democracies of Europe, but domestic politics prevented more than peripheral assistance in supplies to the Allies and to China.
Their future looked perilous by 1941. Germany, with assistance from Italy and approval from Spain, had overrun almost all of Europe, leaving Great Britain standing alone. The world waited for the Nazis to deliver a knockout blow to the British.
Japan had conquered the agriculturally rich Manchurian portion of northeastern China and controlled large sections of eastern China as well, with designs on Southeast Asia.
In Eastern Europe, Germany broke its two-year-old non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and launched Operation Barbarossa with 3½ million troops, one of the largest military operations in the history of modern warfare. The invaders killed millions of Russian soldiers and civilians, with Soviet Jews especially targeted. The Soviet Union sustained more than three million troop casualties in 1941 alone, with millions more to follow.
The Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—sought quick, early victories, to stay ahead of the huge production capacity of the United States. Germany’s blitzkrieg in the West and Operation Barbarossa in the East, and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, were all designed to force their victims’ early surrender, or at least favorable Axis settlement terms.
They had absolutely the right idea. If America could pivot its economic power to a wartime footing, it would be only a matter of time before the Allies declared victory. The potential was there. Despite the Depression’s toll, America still outstripped the economies of the Axis powers in the late 1930s. In 1938 U.S. national income was nearly double the combined incomes of Germany, Japan, and Italy. The American output of coal and steel doubled that of Germany. America turned out 4.8 million automobiles in 1937, while Germany made 331,000, and Japan just 26,000.
In addition, the United States had plenty of available labor. In 1940 the lingering Depression had thrown nearly nine million workers out of work, and about 50 percent of the nation’s auto plant capacity stood idle. But Pearl Harbor galvanized the American people and their elected representatives, and Roosevelt immediately set about to swing the nation’s production machinery into arsenal mode.
That was especially true for large corporations, like Ford, U.S. Steel, General Electric, DuPont, and similar companies. By the end of 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor, the American government and American big business had forged a powerful wartime alliance, employing a carrot approach when possible, and the stick when necessary.
With millions of American men now under arms, women from across the nation, and destitute heads of families from places like Appalachia and the rural South, descended on wartime production plants in the Midwest and California to “arm the boys.”
That they could contribute so effectively to the war effort was due in large part to the mass production line methods developed earlier by business leaders like Henry Ford. With individual workers doing small repetitive tasks on the line, rather than the skilled assembly of an entire product, production could progress rapidly and with reasonable accuracy.
Take Liberty Ships as an example. Measuring 440 feet in length (considerably longer than a football field), a single Liberty Ship could transport 300 freight cars, 2,840 jeeps, 440 tanks, 230 million rounds of rifle cartridges, or 3.4 million servings of C-rations. Henry Kaiser’s mammoth shipyard at Richmond, California, could make a Liberty Ship from start to finish in 17 days. In the next four years Kaiser’s plants turned out 2,700 Liberty Ships. Other shipyards contributed another 3,000 ships of all kinds.
What Kaiser did for ship production, Henry Ford matched for airplanes in his new plant, Willow Run, southwest of Detroit, which at its peak employed more than 40,000 men and women. Willow Run and other airplane manufacturers turned out 18,000 B-24s, 12,692 B-17s, and 3,763 B-29s. A total of two million workers produced America’s airplane fleet.
Similar eye-popping production took place to meet every need of America’s wartime juggernaut, and for much of Britain’s and the Soviet Union’s as well. U.S. industry, by the end of the war, had made 5,777 merchant ships, 1,556 naval vessels, 634,569 jeeps, 88,410 tanks, 11,000 chain saws, 2,383,311 trucks, 6.5 million rifles, and 40 billion bullets.
In total the United States made 88,410 tanks; Germany made 44,857, and Japan just a handful. U.S. military aircraft totaled 299,293, dwarfing Germany’s 111,767 and Japan’s 69,910.
By the end of 1943 the Americans held a three-to-one munitions advantage over the Axis. That was even more pronounced in the Pacific Theater. In the last 1½ years of the war in the Far East, each American combatant represented four tons of supplies; Japanese fighters, just two pounds.
And then there were Little Boy and Fat Man, the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war in the Far East with Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945. The super-secret Manhattan Project, at a cost of several hundred million dollars, succeeded in harnessing nuclear fission with deadly results. The U.S. effort, ironically enough, was greatly aided by a battery of Jewish nuclear physicists who had fled to the West in the 1930s from Germany and its occupied neighbors.
The Allies could not have won the war without America’s fighting force. Nor could they have succeeded without America’s military production. Both proved essential to the eventual total victory over the Axis.
And never again would the United States come up short of a huge fighting force and an industrial arsenal.*
*For these detailed numbers I’m indebted to Freedom from Fear, Professor David Kennedy’s massive Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the United States from 1929 to 1945. ♦
