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