Destructive Creation. Mark R. Wilson

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      Destructive Creation

      AMERICAN BUSINESS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY

       Series editors

      Andrew Wender Cohen, Pamela Walker Laird, Mark H. Rose, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

      Books in the series American Business, Politics, and Society explore the relationships over time between governmental institutions and the creation and performance of markets, firms, and industries large and small. The central theme of this series is that politics, law, and public policy—understood broadly to embrace not only lawmaking but also the structuring presence of governmental institutions—have been fundamental to the evolution of American business from the colonial era to the present. The series aims to explore, in particular, developments that have enduring consequences.

      Destructive Creation

      American Business and the Winning of World War II

      Mark R. Wilson

       PENN

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved.

      Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation,

      none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means

      without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 191041-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America

      on acid-free paper

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

       A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4833-3

      For Christine

      Contents

       Introduction

       Chapter 1. Shadows of the Great War

       Chapter 2. Building the Arsenal

       Chapter 3. War Stories

       Chapter 4. One Tough Customer

       Chapter 5. Of Strikes and Seizures

       Chapter 6. Reconversions

       Conclusion

       List of Abbreviations

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      World War II was won not just by brave soldiers and sailors but also by mountains of matériel. This was true even in times and places where guts were at a premium, as during the Allied invasion of Normandy, in June 1944. On D-Day and in the days that followed, American GIs and their British and Canadian counterparts were sometimes disappointed (and killed) by their own machines, too many of which sank below the waves, missed their targets, or otherwise failed to work as advertised. Even so, the soldiers preparing to land on the Normandy beaches could not help but be overawed—and deafened—by the firepower assembled to support them. In the skies just ahead, they saw hundreds of military aircraft, which, on the morning of 6 June alone, dropped thousands of high-explosive bombs. Behind them in the English Channel floated more than a hundred hulking warships, their big guns close to overheating from their constant shelling of German positions on the shore. Along with the naval vessels, the soldiers could also see a fleet of hundreds of cargo ships and landing craft, stretching to the horizon. These vessels, by the end of the two weeks starting with D-Day, would deliver to the Normandy beaches nearly 94,000 vehicles and over 245,000 tons of equipment and supplies, along with nearly 620,000 men. Here was the beginning of the end for the German armies, which, in the weeks to come, would be overwhelmed by the speed and power of Allied forces.

      D-Day was truly an Allied operation, in which Britain (and Canada) provided much of the equipment and manpower. Yet even in a battle that took place just a hundred miles from England, one of the world’s great industrial nations, it was obvious how much the Allied war effort depended on the economic output of the United States. The skies above Normandy buzzed with the bombers of the Eighth Air Force and Ninth Air Force: B-17 Flying Fortresses, B-24 Liberators, and B-26 Marauders (among other aircraft), made in Seattle, San Diego, and Baltimore. Many of the GIs who struggled ashore at Omaha Beach owed their lives to the sailors manning the five-inch guns of a whole group of the U.S. Navy’s Gleaves-class destroyers, sitting in shallow waters just behind them. Those destroyers had been built during the early months of the war, in places such as Norfolk, Newark, and Seattle. At Omaha Beach and elsewhere, soldiers went ashore in small landing craft, built largely in New Orleans. Once they landed, the Allied armies relied on thousands of Sherman tanks, two-and-a-half-ton trucks, and jeeps, most of which were made in Toledo and Detroit. These tanks and trucks were disgorged by the score at Normandy by a fleet of some 230 tank landing ships (LSTs), the biggest of the Allied landing vessels, most of which were constructed in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and southern Indiana. And most of the fuel for the Army vehicles, along with most of the high-octane gasoline guzzled by Allied aircraft, came from the United States, as did most of the aluminum and steel used to make the planes, ships, tanks, and trucks.1

      Normandy was an exceptional military operation, but its reliance on American-made machines and matériel was part of a broader pattern of Allied war-fighting. During World War II, the United States helped vanquish the Axis powers by converting its enormous economic capacities into military power. By producing nearly two-thirds of all the munitions used by Allied forces—including huge numbers of aircraft, ships, tanks, trucks, rifles, artillery shells, and bombs—American industry became what President Franklin D. Roosevelt once called “the arsenal of democracy,” providing the foundations for a decisive victory.2

      So the U.S. military-industrial mobilization for World War II worked well, or at least well enough. But how exactly did it work? How were all those bombers, ships, and planes produced, in such short order, under the pressures of a war emergency? And how was the mobilization related to broader, longer-run political and economic developments? What lessons should we take from its history? Seven decades after the end of World War II, we still lack good answers to these questions.

      Since the 1940s, most accounts of the U.S. industrial mobilization for World War II have emphasized one of two stories.3 The first is a tale of the patriotic contributions of American business leaders and their companies. This account of the war contains a large element of truth. Private companies—including those led by remarkable wartime entrepreneurs


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