Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  For all these reasons American rearmament was slow to materialise before 1942. Roosevelt was able to win additional budget funds for the navy only on the grounds that the navy was a genuine instrument of defence rather than offence. The tiny American military aircraft industry was stimulated from 1939 onwards by the demand for aviation equipment from Britain and France. Only in 1941, with a third Presidential election successfully behind him, did Roosevelt feel confident enough of popular support to begin to rearm more earnestly. On 9 July 1941 he asked the army and navy to draw up a comprehensive plan of all the resources they would need to defeat America’s potential enemies. The programme became known informally as the ‘Victory Programme’. The results were presented to the President in September, but a final estimate could not be prepared until British and Soviet requests for military aid were drawn up and approved. As a result a final programme for war production was barely ready before the United States found themselves at war with Japan and Germany in December. Until a clear general picture of the scale of America’s planned rearmament was available, the President could do little more than authorise temporary and uncoordinated contracts, many of them to feed the needs of the other warring states for whom he had promised in December 1940 to make the United States the ‘arsenal of democracy’. In the whole of 1941 military expenditure was just 4 per cent of the amount America spent between 1941 and 1945.31

  When war broke out the United States had still a predominantly civilian economy, with a small apparatus of state, low taxes, and a military establishment that had only reached the foothills of re-equipment. America faced states which had been arming heavily for eight or nine years and now had more than half their national product devoted to the waging of war. American leaders were conscious of how much there was to catch up. The giant plans approved by Roosevelt and Congress in the first weeks of war did not just result from America’s great wealth of resources, but reflected a genuine fear of military inferiority. In four years these plans turned America from military weakling to military super-power. American industry provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war: 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks, 2 million army trucks. In four years American industrial production, already the world’s largest, doubled in size. The output of the machine tools to make weapons trebled in three years. The balance between the United States and her enemies changed almost overnight. Where every other major state took four or five years to develop a sizeable military economy, it took America a year. In 1942, long before her enemies had believed it possible, America already outproduced the Axis states together, 47,000 aircraft to 27,000, 24,000 tanks to 11,000, six times as many heavy guns.32 In the naval war the figures were more remarkable still: 8,800 naval vessels and 87,000 landing craft in four years. For every one major naval vessel constructed in Japanese shipyards, America produced sixteen.33

  Production on this scale made Allied victory a possibility, though it did not make victory in any sense automatic. For all the obvious advantages of resources and remoteness from the field of battle, the arming of America on this scale and with such speed could not be taken for granted. In the first weeks of war the administration struggled to produce a coherent picture of where and when military goods could be supplied. On 5 January 1942 the automobile industrialist, William Knudsen, appointed by Roosevelt to run the pre-war rearmament agency, the Office of Production Management, resorted to the extreme of calling together a room full of businessmen where he read out a long list of military products and simply asked for volunteers to produce them.34 For all its curious informality this was an approach more calculated to work with an industrial community that disliked taking orders and thrived on technical challenges. The urgency of mobilisation left the government with little choice but to rely on the initiative and technical flair of American business. The strengths of the American industrial tradition – the widespread experience with mass-production, the great depth of technical and organisational skill, the willingness to ‘think big’, the ethos of hustling competition – were just the characteristics needed to transform American production in a hurry.

  Even before the outbreak of war Roosevelt had begun to mend the bridges between his Democrat administration and the largely Republican business elite. The liberal, pro-labour stance of Roosevelt’s government was played down. He needed the political cooperation of business, for he knew that he could not just impose a state-run war economy. When war broke out he sought their support by building a structure for wartime planning and supervision largely run by business recruits. This made practical sense. Corporate bosses had as much, if not more, experience of the kind of planning and coordination needed in a wartime economy than did government officials, whose only real experience was the ill-starred New Deal. They preferred a strategy where business was given a good deal of responsibility to get on with the job. The new agencies – the War Production Board under the Sears-Roebuck director, Donald Nelson, the Controlled Materials plan, the Manpower Commission – dealt only with those issues that the marketplace could imperfectly direct in wartime.35

  There was a scramble of volunteers for war contracts, in which the largest corporations were in a strong position, not least because co-opted directors sat side by side with the officials placing the orders. By the time the first rush was over four-fifths of all war orders had been given to the country’s hundred largest businesses. American industrial plants eclipsed in size even the gigantic factories of the Urals. Some of them were so large that they were able to undertake war tasks on a scale no other economy could match. The General Motors Corporation alone supplied one-tenth of all American war production, and hired three-quarters of a million new workers during the war to produce it.36 The great scale of American pre-war output, made possible by the size and wealth of its domestic market, allowed the widespread use of the most modern techniques of mass-production. Though there existed some scepticism in military circles about the feasibility of manufacturing technically complex weapons with the methods used for Cadillacs, even the largest equipment, heavy-bombers and shipping, ultimately proved amenable. No story better exhibits that ‘genius for mass-production’ summoned up by Roosevelt than the story of the Liberty Ship.

  In 1940 the British government ordered sixty cargo vessels from American dockyards to make good losses from submarine warfare. Working from the original British designs, American shipbuilders came up with a standard vessel, 420 feet in length, capable of carrying 10,000 tons of cargo at a plodding 10 knots. It was a plain, workmanlike vessel. Roosevelt thought it a ‘dreadful-looking object’; Time magazine christened it the ‘Ugly Duckling’, and the name stuck until the US Maritime Commission, which was in charge of the building programme, insisted that what they were making amounted to nothing less than a Liberty Fleet. When the first ship was launched in September 1941 from the brand-new Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard in Baltimore, the President himself lent dignity to the occasion. It was a gala celebration; the ugly duckling became overnight the Liberty Ship.37

  Over the next three years the initial order for sixty ships swelled into a programme for 2,700. Each new demand placed an ever greater burden on the overstretched shipbuilding industry, short of skilled labour and berths. At first sight the ships did not lend themselves easily to mass-production, but at the west coast shipyards of Henry J. Kaiser the old principles of shipbuilding were overturned in 1942. Kaiser was new to shipwork. He began life running a photographer’s shop in New York, moved into the gravel business, and ended up in California running a multi-million dollar construction company that built the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge. He had a reputation for tackling the impossible. When the shipbuilding programme started his initial involvement was the construction of four of the new yards on the west coast, but he then began to produce the ships as well. At his Permanente Metals Yards No. 1 and No. 2 at Richmond, on the northern edge of San Francisco Bay, the young Kaiser manager, Clay Bedford, set out literally to mass-produce ship
s.

  The secret of the new method was to build much of the ship in large prefabricated sections. Instead of setting down a keel on the slipway, and slowly building the ship from the hull upwards, riveting one piece of steel to the next, the Liberty Ships were built in parts, away from the slipway, and then assembled there by modern welding methods. The shipyards were designed like a long production line, stretching back from the coast. A mile from the shore vast assembly sheds and storehouses were built, where the superstructure of three ships at a time was built up along a moving line. At points along the line, components and sub-assemblies were fed in from the storehouses by conveyors and overhead pulleys. Each job was broken down into a series of simple tasks which could be mastered by even the most briefly trained worker. Outside the sheds, in the open air, were 80-foot conveyors on which the completed superstructure and bulkheads, complete with plumbing and wiring, were moved to the berths, to be lifted by four great cranes on to the welded hull. The whole complex of conveyors, rail lines, cranes, the piles of preassembled, standardised parts, the army of hurriedly-trained workers distributed by time-and-motion experts along the line, the factory banners exhorting workers to build ‘ships for victory’, became an unexpected monument to that American obsession, rationalisation.38 At the start of the programme ships took 1.4 million man-hours and 355 days to build. By 1943 the figure was under 500,000 man-hours and an average of 41 days. At Richmond No. 2 the Liberty Ship Robert E. Peary was launched in just eight days. The methods gradually filtered out to other shipyards. Over the war years productivity in the shipbuilding industry increased by 25 per cent a year. ‘We are more nearly approximating the automobile industry than anything else,’ the head of the Maritime Commission told a Congressional hearing in 1942.39

  To any American audience the motor industry was an obvious benchmark. It had pioneered modern methods of production; its commercial history was one of the distinctive success stories of American enterprise. If the rationalisation of shipbuilding was a surprising bonus, the motor industry, because of its core of mass-production giants – Ford, General Motors, Chrysler – was expected to play a major role in the efficient production of war equipment from the start. American vehicle manufacture grew up in the mid-western states, on the edge of the Great Lakes. Here, in the American equivalent of the Urals-Volga heartland, was concentrated the largest manufacturing complex in the world. In 1941 over three and a half million passenger cars were produced there. During the war production dropped to the extraordinary figure of just 139 cars.40 This decline freed enormous industrial capacity for the war effort. By 1945 the industry supplied one-fifth of all the country’s military equipment, including almost all the vehicles and tanks, one-third of the machine guns and almost two-fifths of aviation supplies. The Ford company alone produced more army equipment during the war than Italy.41

  The conversion of an industry of this size presented all kinds of problems. Until the very eve of war the powerful car-makers resisted efforts to reduce civilian output; 1941 was a record year for the motor industry. When war came they were quite unprepared for the changeover. The last day for civilian output was fixed for 10 February 1942. Small ceremonies were held in the car plants as the last chassis came down the line. Then, under the energetic supervision of a former Ford manager, Ernest Kanzler, the machinery was ripped out and new tools were installed to begin the mass-production of weapons. This was a daunting task. Although the authorities assumed that the car plants could be turned off and on again like a tap, the manufacture of armaments on a large scale was very different from assembling cars. Weapons exhibited a greater degree of complexity and required higher precision; they needed periodic updating and improvement, which made long production runs hard to sustain. That the motor industry did adapt so successfully owed a good deal to the character of the industry. Annual model changes accustomed managers and workers to regular large-scale adjustments on the factory floor; the large companies were used to a wide product range; the workforce was compelled by the nature of the manufacturing process to be flexible and adaptive. Car manufacture was in most cases a job of assembling parts and equipment provided by outside firms, and the practice of employing specialist sub-contractors – General Motors used nineteen thousand of them during the war – was carried over to the production of tanks, aircraft and engines. Once the conversion was completed the industry began to overfulfil its orders. As early as the autumn of 1942 the motor industry could provide enough vehicles, ordnance and equipment to provision America’s new armies throughout 1943, and to do so with weapons of high quality and standard construction.42

  The ultimate challenge was to produce an aircraft by the same method used to mass-produce a car. The consensus was that it could not be done. This was a technical challenge too great to resist for that apostle of progress, Henry Ford. He was the archetype of the heroic unschooled entrepreneur of American legend, a man whose faith in the possibilities of the machine age was boundless and uncritical. Early in 1941 the Ford company was invited to produce parts for the new B-24 Liberator bomber being built by the Consolidated aircraft plant in San Diego. When Ford’s general manager, Charles Sorensen, visited Consolidated he was appalled at the modesty of their plans and the primitive methods of construction. That evening, 8 January, Sorensen sketched out the plan of a plant to mass-produce bombers. It was the start of one of the most famous projects of the American war effort. The army was lukewarm about the idea when Sorensen and Ford suggested it a few days later, but Ford persisted: he would either produce the whole aircraft in a purpose-built plant, or nothing at all. The army reluctantly concurred and by March 1941 work began on the factory foundations.43

  The site chosen was dictated by the sheer dimensions of the plan and the need to have an adjacent airfield for aircraft testing. In the open country south of Detroit Ford had bought some flat, tree-covered farmland. A small creek meandered across it till it hit the river Huron. It was known as Willow Run. The name was adopted for the project itself. Within months the quiet rural vista was transformed into a sprawling, noisy building site over 900 acres in extent. The centrepiece was the main assembly hall, ‘the most enormous room in the history of man’, a vast L-shaped construction that eventually housed an assembly line 5,450 feet long, and covered an area of 67 acres. Ford’s aim was to break down the construction of the aircraft in such a way that the components could be fed into a continuous moving assembly line. With a car this could be done relatively easily, for it averaged fifteen thousand parts; but the B-24 had thirty thousand different parts, and a total of 1,550,000 parts in all. To mass-produce something so complex was to push mechanised production to its very limits.44

  The project was so difficult that it almost collapsed. Constant delays in the supply of tools and labour, pressure from the army to stick to building the components, the erratic intervention of Ford himself who insisted on re-siting the whole plant when he discovered that the boundary of a Democrat county ran through the complex, all conspired to hold up the promised supply of one bomber an hour. While Ford struggled with Willow Run, the ‘enormous room’ was even eclipsed by a room yet bigger, a vast plant for Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns built by the Chrysler Corporation in Chicago. But Ford’s technical persistence paid off. By 1943 over ten bombers a day were delivered; during 1944 over five thousand were produced, reaching a rate of one bomber every 63 minutes. Willow Run, for all its problems, came to symbolise all the self-confidence and drive of American industry. Looking across the giant assembly hall was like gazing at a scene from Fritz Lang’s futuristic movie, Metropolis. The glare of the machinery and polished aluminium and the clouds of dust made it impossible to see its whole length. At one end four moving lines carried the core of the aircraft; the four merged to two as the aircraft took shape; 1 mile from the start there was just one line of completed bombers, fed out through a cavernous opening on to the airfield beyond. It was, observed the aviation hero, Charles Lindbergh, ‘the Grand Canyon of the mechanised world’.45

&
nbsp; Long before Willow Run redeemed its author’s ambitions the rest of American industry turned to modern methods. Productivity in the aircraft industry doubled between 1941 and 1944. By 1944 each American aircraft worker produced more than twice his German counterpart, four times the output of a Japanese worker. The war revived America’s flagging enterprise culture. After a decade of depression and high unemployment, both business and labour profited from war. The contrast not only with the Soviet Union but with every other warring population was striking. In America there was enough left over from the booming war effort to provide civilians with supplies of consumer goods and food in generous quantities. Rationing was limited and loosely applied, except for petrol. Wages boomed, with an average increase, even allowing for price rises, of 70 per cent across the war years. As the nine million unemployed were absorbed into the workforce, and women – fourteen million in all – took up paid work, family earnings rose even faster. For millions of Americans who had lived on state relief and handouts in the 1930s the wartime economy was a windfall. The lure of high wages drew almost four million workers from the poorer south to the boom cities of the west coast, Michigan and the north-east. That haunting photographic image of the 1930s, the Madonna of the Depression, gave way to the propaganda ideal of war-working womanhood, Rosie the Riveter (though given the changes in work practices Wanda the Welder might have been more appropriate). In reality the high demand for labour and the unwillingness of the government to regiment the workforce led to high labour turnover, and a strike movement that produced almost five thousand strikes in 1944.46 The migration of labour exacerbated racial tension, and strained the housing market. But compared with the hugely deprived Soviet workforce and the bombed and bullied workforces in Germany and Japan, American labour was able to work without danger, well-fed and well-shod. This may have made it harder to exact a higher level of effort or self-sacrifice, but it certainly fostered a productive workforce.