McNair Paper Number 50, Chapter 1, August 1996

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.(Note 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 with 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 modern war including tanks. (Note 2)

World War II was won in largest part because of superior allied armaments production.(Note 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 and 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. (Note 4) Germany, once it abandoned its Blitzkrieg strategy, increased its productivity more than the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and despite German attacks on Britain and the Soviet Union, these states performed outstandingly too. (Note 5)

This is not to say that United States logistics grand strategy(Note 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, (Note 7) and domestic political 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. (Note 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. (Note 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. (Note 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-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.