CIAO DATE: 05/02

Mobilizing U.S. Industry in World War II: Myth and Reality

Alan L. Gropman

Institute for National Strategic Studies
National Defense University

August 1996

Introduction

At a dinner during the Teheran Conference in December 1943, Joseph Stalin praised United States manufacturing:

I want to tell you from the Russian point of view, what the President and the United States have done to win the war. The most important things in this war are machines. The United States has proven that it can turn out from 8,000 to 10,000 airplanes per month. Russia can only turn out, at most. 3,000 airplanes a month . . . . The United States, therefore, is a country of machines. Without the use of those machines, through Lend-Lease, we would lose this war. ¹

It was more than airplanes, of course. The Soviets received, in addition to thousands of tanks and airplanes, hundreds of thousands of trucks from the United States, which vastly enhanced the mobility of the Soviet ground forces. The United States also supplied Stalin's factories wilh millions of tons of raw materials and thousands of machine tools to assist the Soviet Union in manufacturing trucks and all the other implements of modem war including tanks. ²

World War II was won in largest part because of superior allied armaments production. ³ The United States greatly outproduced all its "allies and "all its enemies and, at its output peak in late 1943 and early 1944, was manufacturing munitions almost equal to the combined total of both its friends mid adversaries. The prodigious arms manufacturing capability of the United States is well known by even casual readers of World War II history, if its decisiveness is not as well understood. But myths provoked by sentimentality regarding United States munitions production have evolved in the half century since the war ended, and these have become a barrier to comprehending the lessons of that era.

When viewed in isolation the output is indeed impressive. United States Gross National Product grew by 52 percent between 1939 and 1944 (much more in unadjusted dollars), munitions production skyrocketed from virtually nothing in 1939 to unprecedented levels, industrial output tripled, and even consumer spending increased (unique among all combatants). But United States industrial production was neither a "miracle" nor was its output comparatively prodigious given the American advantages of abundant raw materials, superb transportation and technological infrastructure, a large and skilled labor force, and, most importantly, two large ocean barriers to bar bombing of its industries. ⁴ Germany, once it abandoned its Blitzkrieg strategy, increased its productivity more than the United States, Britain, mad the Soviet Union, and despite German attacks on Britain and the Soviet Union, these states performed outstandingly too. ⁵

This is not to say that United States logistics grand strategy ⁶ was not ultimately effective. The United States and its allies were, of course, victorious, and we lost far fewer lives than any of our adversaries and fewer than our main allies. Stalin was correct when he hailed American production. But the halo that has surrounded the era needs to be examined because there were enormous governmental, supervisory, labor-management relations, ⁷ and domestic politicai frictions that hampered the effort — and there is no reason to think that these problems would not handicap future mobilization efforts. With enormous threats looming in the mid 1930s and increasing as Europe exploded into war at the end of the decade, the United States was in no way unified in its perception of the hazards, nor was there any unity in government or business about what to do about it. ⁸ In the end, America and its allies were triumphant, and logistics played the decisive role, but the mobilization could have been more efficient and America could have produced more munitions more quickly and perhaps have ended the war sooner. A nostalgic look at United States industrial mobilization during World War II will not make future mobilizations of any size more effective.

Certainly none of the major World War II adversaries was less prepared for war in 1939 than the United States. There were fewer than 200,000 men in the Army, only 125,200 in the Navy, and fewer than 20,000 in the Marine Corps. Those troops on maneuvers in 1939 and 1940 used broomsticks to simulate rifles and trucks to represent tanks. ⁹ Despite war orders from Britain and France in 1939 and 1940 and Lend-Lease shipments to Britain, the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere after Lend-Lease took effect in March 1941, there were still five million Americans unemployed at the end of the year. ¹⁰ Hitler's Germany had long since absorbed its unemployment by building arms and German infrastructure. In the United States, great progress had been made by the time production peaked in late 1943, compared with the situation in 1941, but output could have been even higher. The fact that it took from August 1939, when the first federal agency designed to analyze mobilization options — the War Resources Board — was inaugurated, to May 1943, when the final supervisory agency was put in place &#!51; the Office of War Mobilization — should be instructive. Because it had been less than effective in World War I, industrial mobilization was studied throughout the interwar period — a fact that should be sobering. Certainly the interwar planners hoped to improve on the World War I experience with industrial mobilization and they believed because of their efforts the next round would be more efficiently and effectively executed. They were wrong.

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Notes

Note 1. Stephen Donadio, Joan Smith, Susan Mesner, Rebecca Davison, eds., The New York Public Library Book of Twentieth-Century Quotations (New York: Warner Books, 1992) 184. The Lend-Lease Act, a controversial law, authorized the president to send munitions or other supplies to any country that he deemed "vital to the defense of the United States." The law at once gave essential munitions and supplies (and raw materials) to our future allies to fight and also deprived the United States armed forces of needed material. Lend-Lease was a major part of United States grand strategy. The bill was passed by the Senate on 9 March 1941 and signed on 11 March by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Jerome Peppers argues that the "survived of many of the Allied nations is a direct result of [Lend-Lease] support." In operation 9 months before the United States entered the war, it "permitted the early war to be carried on in great proportion by the Allies since the United States was, by law, unable (unwilling?) to participate then." Well before the law was passed, the British (and French until their surrender) prodigiously purchased munitions. Until Lend-Lease was passed, however, the president could not send the British, by then almost flat broke, munitions without payment. Lend-Lease, Peppers asserts, often permitted the allies to do more them their share of thecombat. It also created a high degree of allied munitions standardization, simplifying logistics and slimulated United States industrial production. Finally, it enhanced United States leverage over allied strategy and policy. Jerome G. Peppers Jr., History of United States Military Logistics 1935-1985 (Huntsville: Logistics Education Foundation Publishing, 1988), 24-25. See also David C. Rutenberg and Jane S. Allen, eds., The Logistics of Waging War: American Logistics 1774-1985 Emphasizing the Development of Airpower (GunterAir Force Station: Air Force Logistics Management Center, 1986), 81-82. More than $48 billion worth of supplies were furnished, and aircraft and parts amounted to more than 16 percent of that total. About two-thirds of the total went to the British Empire, and most of that went to the United Kingdom. Back

Note 2. Aircraft were probably the most valuable item in the Lend-Lease catalog. More them 15 percent of the aircraft in 1943 and more them 16 percent in 1944 (a year in which more them 96,000 aircraft were produced) were sent to allies. Over the war, 34,500 airplanes went overseas to the allies. But there is more to the story. During World War II, the United Kingdom produced about one-third the number of airplanes produced in the United States (about I00,000 airplanes), and most of the raw materials to build thai number and much of the petroleum to fuel them came from the United States. See Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace ,and Co., 1946), 237. Back

Note 3. Alum Milward writes, "The war was decided by the weight f armaments production" [War. Economy and Society: 1939-1945 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 75]. World War II was extraordinarily different from World War I, given that only 20 years separated them. A typical U.S. Army division in WW II required the support of 400,000 mechanical horsepower to keep it moving, versus 3,500 for one of General John J. Pershing's divisions, and a WW II division was less them half the size of a WW I similar unit. Considering the relative sizes, a WW II unit required 228 times the mechanical horsepower of the one 20 years earlier, thus the demand on industry in World War II was truly striking. See James L. Abrahamson, The American Home Front (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press. 1983), 132.Back

Note 4. Milward, 73-74. The United States "had advantages in terms of size of labour force and raw material supply that were shared only by the Soviet Union, or would have been had not so much of Russia been in German hands. Nor was there imy active interference by the Axis powers in the workings of the United States economy apart fromsinking its ships and killing its citizens, whereas a considerable amount of industrial plants in the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom were reduced to rubble by the German armed forces." Back

Note 5. Paul A.C. Koistinen is probably the most assertive ,and cold-eyed revisionist de,fling with U.S. WWII industrial production. Koistinen sees utterly nothing miraculous about American munitions manufacturing. See his "Warfare and Power Relations in America: Mobilizing the World War II Economy," in James Titus, ed., The Home Front and War in the Twentieth Century: The American Experience in Comparative Perspective: Proceedings of the Tenth Air Force Academy Military History Symposium (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1984), 101. For an opposing view, see in the same volume Robert D. Cuff's commentary on Koistinen's essay (Cuff, 112-115). Cuff explicates President Franklin D. Rooseveit's problems and cites the president's "political constraints inside and outside the administration." Given the nature of American business and politics, Roosevelt had little wiggle room in the late 1930s and into the early years of the war. "Private business decision-makers in the United States had already demonstrated unparalleled ability to retain prerogatives notwithstanding economic and wartime crises. And they continued to exact a price for their private performances .... Henry L. Stimson caught the essence of it in the early stages of American war mobilization: 'If you are going to try to go to war or to prepare for war in a capitalist county, you've got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work.'" Back

Note 6. Milward, 40. The U.S. strategy for WW II was openly based on logistics. Roosevelt had no desire to squander lives as they had been wasted in WW I. He expected to win the war "through industrial production. The strategic assumption was that over a long period of time the United Suites must be ultimately victorious if war came to a battle of production." Back

Note 7. Labor was generally discontented during the war, and there were numerous strikes despite no-strike pledges and legislation barring strikes. Wages rose from $.64/hour in 1939 to $.81/hour in 1944 ,and there were gains from overtime work, but taxes and "voluntary" bond allotments drove some of these wage gains down. At the height of the war, however, corporate profits (after taxes and in constant dollars) were up more than 100 percent (vice labor's 21 percent gain). Farmers income went up even more. Business, moreover, benefited from government building of factories and generous tax credits if it invested in plants (Koistinen, 106-109). Alan Milward estimates that industrial profits rose by 350 percent before taxation, ,and 120 percent after taxation while wages rose by only 50 percent before taxation and prices rose by 20 percent (Milward, 63-72). Back

Note 8. Koistinen, 107-108. He argues the United States economic mobilization was fragmented because "public opinion was not only confused and contradictory during the war, but also manifested a callous, selfish and uncaring streak." Mobilization was also seen by Koistinen as inefficient because of Roosevelt's approach to administration and the special interests of the military and industry. "No doubt," he writes, "the vast majority of Americans accepted victory and security as primary goals during the war. But they divided acrimoniously along interest groups and class lines about how those aims could best be achieved" (Koistinen, 92). See also in the same volume John Morton Blum's essay, "United Against: American Culture and Society during World War II," 5-14. "During the war the American people united against those enemies in a measure greater than they united for any other wartime or post war purpose. That unity was never complete. Periodic exhortations to refresh it drew, as one cabinet officer put it, on 'nothing inspirational,' nothing 'Wilsonian'." Rather the American people responded to their visceral hatreds .... In the spring of 1942 surveys indicated that some seventeen million Americans 'in one way or another' opposed the prosecution of the war." After a series of defeats in the Pacific in 1942, "public morale sagged." Blum does assert, however, "American troops... united against their foe with less need for artificial stimulation them was the case with their countrymen at home." Blum is critical of the West Coast Japanese-Americaninternment, because he believes it was racially based, and is even more critical of the antiblack outrages during the war, which cannot be rationalized by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Blum finds racism to be the basis of these abominations: the war did not create "antisemitism, anti- labor attitudes, segregation and hostility to racial minorities," but neither did "it subdue them." In the United States, as elsewhere, "the war at once aroused and revealed the dark, the naked, and shivering nature of man."Back

Note 9. Jerome G. Peppers, Jr., History of United States Military Logistics, 1935-1985, A Brief Review (Huntsville: Logistics Education Foundation Publishing, 1988). 6. Peppers has written ,an orthodox history of World War II industrial mobilization. See also Nelson, 41. In 1940. according to Nelson, who was Chairman of the War Production Board, the Army had on hand 900,000 Springfield rifles from World War I and 1200,000 British Enfields, all obsolete, and only 50,000,000 pounds (not tons) of fresh powder and 48,000,000 pounds left over from WW I. Back

Note 10. Peppers, 19 Back