Destructive Creation. Mark R. Wilson
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on its established GOCO plant operators. For smokeless powder production, the Army’s Ordnance Department relied almost entirely on eleven GOCO plants, managed by Du Pont and Hercules Powder. In TNT production, the GOCO plants were managed by the big explosives producers—Du Pont, Hercules, Atlas Powder and Trojan Powder—which were now joined by a few other big industrial corporations: Monsanto, American Cyanamid, and U.S. Rubber.88
Even the revolutionary new explosive materials used in atomic weapons were produced with GOCO arrangements similar to those already used in many sectors of the war economy. In late 1942, when the Manhattan District of the Army Corps of Engineers faced the problem of how to manage the giant new facilities that it would need to generate atomic bomb fuel, it decided to use experienced GOCO plant operators. One of these was Du Pont, which agreed in November 1942 to take the lead on a plutonium plant—an immense, $330 million complex built in Hanford, Washington. (Under the terms of the deal, Du Pont would be reimbursed for costs, without any additional fees or profits.)89 Two more giant atomic fuel production facilities, which would make enriched uranium using different processes, were located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. One uranium plant, designated K-25, would be run by Union Carbide, the big chemical company that was already the lead contractor on the essential alcohol-to-butadiene portion of the synthetic rubber program. The other, known as the Y-12 plant, was run by Tennessee Eastman, a division of Eastman Kodak, the well-known manufacturer of photographic film. Tennessee Eastman was considered a good candidate for the job because it had recently started work as the operator of a high-explosives GOCO plant in Tennessee.90
In the aircraft industry, of all the new projects that took off after Pearl Harbor, the most important was the effort to make the new B-29 bomber. This was the plane that the AAF would use in 1945 to drop the highexplosive bombs and firebombs (and, finally, two nuclear devices) that would destroy large portions of many Japanese cities. By war’s end, the B-29 program turned out about 3,900 planes at a cost about $3 billion—about 50 percent more than the cost of the whole atomic weapons program. Actually, the Army’s Air Corps had ordered 250 of Boeing’s planned superbombers back in 1941. Wright Aeronautical had been engaged to supply its massive R-3350 “Cyclone” engines, which it planned to make in a new $70 million GOCO plant in New Jersey. After Pearl Harbor, however, the AAF worked with Boeing to create a much larger B-29 program. Boeing itself would build many of the planes, at DPC plants in Wichita and in Renton, Washington. But the War Department also paid for a big new $50 million GOCO plant, outside Atlanta, to be operated by Bell Aircraft, a smaller company based in upstate New York. Later, the Martin-managed GOCO bomber plant in Omaha joined the B-29 program, by switching over from B-25 production.91 The expansion of the B-29 program in early 1942 also created the very biggest of all the new factories built during World War II. This was a $175 million, Chrysler-Dodge-operated plant in Chicago, which manufactured the Wright-designed Cyclone engines. Paid for by the DPC, the Dodge-Chicago plant included 3.5 million square feet of factory space in the main assembly building alone, which stood beside the world’s biggest parking lot, serving the plant’s 30,000 employees.92
The last piece of the puzzle for the aircraft program, which worried mobilization officials all the way through the last months of the war, was to create an adequate supply of aviation gasoline. A standard four-engine bomber like the B-24 could use over three hundred gallons of 100-octane gasoline for each hour it flew; the big B-29s might use as much as ten thousand gallons on one long mission. So by early 1945, when AAF commanders started to use dozens of these planes at a time in raids over Japan, a single operation might require over a million gallons of 100-octane.93
In the high-octane gasoline program, Washington paid for some GOCO plants but also relied heavily on the expertise and investments of the forprofit oil companies. Like their counterparts in the steel industry, the oil companies anticipated that they would be able to find uses for new plant after the war, so they decided to take advantage of the favorable tax amortization rules. Financing new private plant projects was easier for oil companies than for many other firms because they continued to enjoy plenty of civilian business after Pearl Harbor, in addition to their war orders. Even in 1944, when their participation in the war economy peaked, the oil companies—including Standard–New Jersey, Shell Oil, Texas Company, Cities Service, Sun Oil, and others—sent only about a third of their output to the military. And their military sales came mostly from plants they built and owned, or “scrambled” facilities in which public-owned equipment and private plant sat side by side. From 1942 to 1944, as the United States added about 350,000 gallons a day to its 100-octane production capacity, about a hundred new plants were built, at a cost of nearly $800 million.94 Only about a third of the funding came from the government (see Table 1).
The big oil companies’ leading role in the growing aviation gasoline program, together with Washington’s reliance on the GOCO model, made it easy for critics of the industrial mobilization to describe it as dominated by big business. The critics cited statistics such as those provided by an OPM study of mid-1941 that found that just fifty-six companies held threequarters of the aggregate dollar value of prime war contracts.95 Armed with such data, congressional champions of small business, including Senator Harry S. Truman (D-MO), cried foul. So, too, did many other populists and progressives, from farmers in the heartland to leftist journalists in New York. In June 1942, after a torrent of complaints, Congress created the Smaller War Plants Corporation, intended to help distribute war orders to deserving smaller enterprises. After a year of work, this body would complain to Congress that no matter how much it tried, it was never able to do enough to break through the military–big business alliance that was preventing full participation by small business.96
Much of this criticism was misleading. Part of it should be attributed to sour grapes: some members of Congress, as well as officials at the state and local levels, were frustrated by their inability to influence the distribution of contracts and new plant sites.97 States and localities, along with their representatives in Congress, worked hard in 1940–41 to attract war plants and jobs. Many states set up their first formal Washington lobbying offices at this time, in an effort to attract more plants and contracts.98 In Washington, mobilization officials contended with constant entreaties from politicians such as Congressman Karl Stefan of Nebraska, who reported in November 1941 that he was badgering OPM and the Navy and War Departments “almost daily” to ask for more war plants in his state.99
Stefan, Truman, and many of their peers remained dissatisfied and critical of the distribution of war work because their own influence was limited. The location of new plants was influenced less by the pull of congressmen and governors than by the calculations of military and civilian officials in the executive branch. Those officials often did favor the South and West because they endorsed a policy of decentralization, for strategic as well as political reasons.100 However, even this spreading of the work failed to placate many congressmen because, in most cases, it was the military and its contractors who selected sites, using calculations of available transport, power, water, and local labor supply. Internal Navy correspondence from early 1941 shows that the Navy believed that it, and not Congress or even civilian mobilization officials, controlled the choice of plant sites. Under these conditions, even the most powerful congressmen might be stymied. This was true of Senator Walter F. George (D-GA), who fought in late 1940 to have one of the big new GOCO ammunition plants located in Georgia. When Remington (the prospective operator) said it preferred Denver and the Army’s Ordnance Department agreed, Senator George was denied.101
Leaving aside the question of the location of new plant sites, critics of the distribution of war work decried the evident concentration of orders in the hands of big business. But this problem was also exaggerated. For one thing, the prime contracting numbers obscured the participation of smaller firms via subcontracting. As one Harvard Business School professor observed at the time, it was “politic to champion publicly the cause of small business,” but, in fact, the widespread use of subcontracting meant that smaller enterprises were heavily involved in the defense program, from the beginning. To be sure, some subcontracts—such as those for aluminum, steel plate, or large bomber subassemblies—went to other big businesses. But the leading prime contractors also needed millions of dollars’ worth of smaller items,