Great piece with a very high signal / noise ratio.
Also very very glad Knudsen gets his dues. I would put him right up there as one of the most impactful US immigrants in history, at least as it relates to progress and industry.
I think the near monopoly US industry had on mass manufacturing before WW2 is worth calling out. Ford and GM (with Knudsen a key player) were the absolute titans of industry from the mid 1910s through the start of the war.
Could the US have ramped aircraft production (and engine assembly) as quickly if not for the knowledge, process (like transfer machines as mentioned) and talent spillovers from the auto industry?
Neither Japan or Germany had anywhere close to the volume of auto production prior to WW2 either.
Yes! And a big part of it was the redundancy and diversity that were generated by the decentralized nature of the industrial system of the USA's Old Republic's political-economic-scientific organizational paradigm. Variegated industries, from automobiles to chemicals to consumer goods and lots of others, had grown out sophisticated manufacturing capabilities that could be directed towards aircraft production. This was huge when companies like Ford and General Motors transitioned from cars to plane components and planes.
Also, the the Old Republic was able to draw from a wide, deep, and vibrant pool of trades skills, engineering talent, and scientific talent, characterized by a stunning amount heterogeneity among the individuals in these areas of endeavor and even each areas sub area. The decentralized information ecosystem and the culture of individual enterprise grew a workforce with highly variegated backgrounds, know hows, ways of approaching problems, and even, in some cases to some extent, varying fundamental understandings of their underlying fields. This heterogeneity was key to handling the complex tech challenges of designing and scaling up aircraft production.
Tsung, yep, Knudsen’s contributions are often underappreciated, yet his impact on U.S. industry and progress is monumental.
The dominance of Ford and GM, with Knudsen's expertise, laid the groundwork for the rapid ramp-up in aircraft production during WW2. The knowledge and talent spillovers were truly unmatched, giving the U.S. a significant edge.
I find that neither Japan nor Germany had the same level of auto production, which likely affected their wartime manufacturing capabilities. Great points!
This article is quite interesting and mostly (but not entirely) correct so far as I can tell, it is regrettable that it is so coy about sources in many cases. Many important assertions are entirely unsourced while for others the citations will be to cryptic for most readers.
One important cryptic source is, more fully, _Buying Aircraft: Matériel Procurement for the Army Air Forces_ by I. B. Holley (1964). As it is one of the U.S. Army's outstanding "Green Book" series of World War II histories it is not only still in print but available online in PDF at https://history.army.mil/html/books/011/11-2/CMH_Pub_11-2.pdf .
Much more difficult to find, unfortunately, is _Problems of Accelerating Aircraft Production During World War II_ by Tom Lilley, et al.
Great article full of interesting information. My parents worked at the Goodyear aviation plant in Akron during WWII. Also, there are a few Lustron homes in my wife’s small Ohio hometown. Thanks for rekindling these memories!
Great research and a reminder what American unity and determination once was. I can't help but think while reading this just how much long-term damage the Lend-Lease Program did, still is...The FDR Administration was so infested with Soviet appendages (Venona files confirm) that at points during WWII more military hardware was going to Russia than all US/Allied operations in both the Atlantic and Pacific combined (See Diana West "American Betrayal"). No doubt help beating the Nazis was good, but the same tanks/trunks/monitions that the Soviets did so with from the East they also used to build/close the Iron Curtain. Thank you nonetheless.
Fdr wanted to win the war, so he helped the Soviet Union, undoubtedly saving the lives of many US solders. You don’t need a crackpot conspiracy story to explain it.
The Nazi war machine was broken on the Eastern front. With the help of Western materiel. DDay would have been a failure if this would not have been the case.
Interesting range of opinions and perspectives about a challenging time in our national history. Being able to say these things openly and freely is a fragile “right” not available in all governmental and societal systems across the world.
Given the extant extreme division of the opposing tribes today I can’t even imagine what after action reports on the current events in America will look like if MAGA wins the 2024 presidential election, or if there will be any after action reports.
Interesting article. My dad was a B17 crew member. He learned to fly in Hobbs New Mexico. Those were socialist times with kids from the depression. No one would be egotistical enough to ever call themselves a pilot or ace. The pilots/ crew were told that the plane cost $25,000 a copy and to take good care of it. Everybody did everything on the planes. Fly, navigate , drop bombs, handle a machine gun, take before and after pictures. To my dad flying was boring and the navigating and picture taking was interesting. The machine gunning was a strange experience because at times he could almost see the blue eyes and blond hair of the German fighter pilots approaching. It was a war of attrition. As the war went on he saw fewer fighters. The Germans were simply running out of everything. Fewer friends were getting shot down. In the end, when he was dying in his late 60s, he reminisced that he always knew that he did his greatest work in his early 20s. I think few would argue.
In World War I, the US undertook a massive shipbuilding effort, but the war ended before the big shipyards had ramped up production. I think they turned the shipyard into Philadelphia's airport.
When FDR challenged the carmakers to raise production to 50,000 planes a year, the carmakers scoffed. For them, mass production meant at least 150,000 a year.
That 50,000 planes a year didn't come out of thin air. I read an article on Jean Monnet, who was later involved in setting up the European Common Market, in which he was part of the Victory Group, a task force set to estimate overall demand for materiel for the war effort. FDR was given the estimate on a slip of paper shortly before Pearl Harbor. (Fortune 08/1944).
The labor situation was so bad that they actually closed the bordellos and hired the prostitutes to make planes. They also hired Blacks which led to a series of race riots. We tend to think of race riots as about disgruntled Blacks, but traditionally they were about disgruntled Whites.
Thank you for a fantastic account of how the "arsenal of democracy" actually functioned.
A couple of notes:
1) The amount of spending on aircraft during WW2 - even adjusted for present day dollars - is probably not a lot more than what is being spent for aircraft by the US military today...only with far fewer planes produced. No doubt the "cost plus" aspect is a factor.
2) The ecosystem of car manufacturers, appliance manufacturers, etc that were able to reorient, expand and/or adjust to war production simply does not exist today. The mechanical, electrical, materials and other forms of engineering and vocational skills are correspondingly absent. How many decades would be required to bring these back?
maybe I have read a different article, but in this one both of your implicit questions seem to have quite detailed answers.
1) economies of scale. build a lot of planes. have a "well oiled machinery" that can handle changes well, and it will produce high-quality and relatively cheap things. note that the whole thing was kickstarted by the government building the factories and then contracting the operations. (and note, I'm not saying that the current military-industrial-congress complex is oh so great.)
2) GM, Ford, Tesla, etc still exists today, and the whole production was broken down into steps that could be done by unskilled labor.
You clearly missed the part where refrigerator makers and what not were making airplanes or at least airplane parts.
Clearly you are also unaware of just how many more companies existed just making cars in that era; there is no question whatsoever that American manufacturing capacity in WW2 was far, far greater than exists today.
The issue is thus not the government funding or the existence of a few, sad relics of a once mighty manufacturing ecosystem.
If the US wants to it can build the factories and manufacture things, and scale up too. The current obstacles are well documented on this blog. (Permitting takes up most of the time, and due to super low volume everything is ridiculously labor-intensive, and so on.)
Yes, the drop compared to the peakpeak is big, but especially compared to pre-WWII it's especially not. (Because more people worked in manufacturing in 2019 than in 1942, if I'm reading that graph right.)
I worked in aerospace for many years. Few people understand it's complexity. You did a great job revealing the detail required to manufacture. One of the first things you learn is how the blueprints work. A mundane but critical technology for scale and efficiency of manufacturing. A 92 year old friend's father worked for Knudsen. Her father ultimately became chairman of GM. Her stories about the GMs shift for WWII are fascinating.
Most of the Soviet facilities were also designed by Albert Kahn prior to the great purges of 1938, enabling military output far above the size of the economy and manufacturing sector.
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.?
Russia won World War II on the back of its enormous industrial output.
Not until the Normandy invasion, after Germany's defeat, was the U.S.’s enormous industrial output finally unleashed.
As usual, it was unleashed on French civilians, killing 100,000 of them prior to our brave boys storming ashore.
As a footnote, the US actually invaded France and brought with it specially issued dollars to replace the franc, and hundreds of staff to govern French provinces. Happily, de Gaulle thwarted them, but he was unable to save the 100,000 people we blew to pieces.
Is it any wonder we support the Gaza genocide?
As a general rule, we have always been the bad guys.
Terrible take. The USSR’s industry depended on large amounts of raw materials and food from the US, not to mention trucks, locomotives, and ~10% of their weapons. The western Allies accounted for half of all German aircraft losses, maybe 1/3 or personnel losses, most of the navy, and disrupted their industry. Maybe the Russians forget that other countries were fighting Japan the whole time as well, and defeating Italy in the Mediterranean, but we haven’t.
The Normandy invasion was not “after Germany’s defeat.” Maybe you can read histories now and decide their defeat was inevitable, but it wasn’t, and the USSR begged and screamed for a second front at the time.
“As usual” - it was mostly unleashed on the Germans. I’m not sure if you’re imagining the Red Army carefully preserving the civilians where German troops were fortified, avoiding civilian casualties, but that’s not how the war worked. Massive artillery and air bombardments led to victory, while omitting them invited defeat. The French mostly seemed happy enough to be out from German occupation. Bringing hundreds of staff to govern French provinces? Whoa there, it seems like you’re accusing the US of … administration? Leaving aside the collaboration of the Vichy government, which might suggest that the French were not all to be trusted, the wartime franc currency was not terribly reliable, and of course was controlled by Germany.
Godfree is impervious to reality; it takes you far longer to source arguments than for him to make shit up. Not worth it, good sir, just don’t feed the troll.
Nonsense. The only means of getting supplies to Russia was via the convoy system from the US east coast via the UK. So many of these ships were sunk that for a time they were almost suspended altogether. The amount of supplies getting to Russia was a small fraction of what the Russians made for themselves.
As for "other countries were fighting Japan the whole time as well" - more rubbish. Japan only entered the war in 1941. The war in Europe began in 1939, and in China in 1937.
Do some homework, instead of knee-jerk hollow patriotism
It's weird to use the phrase "the bad guys" here - that makes it sounds like the opponents must have been "the good guys". Did the Germans kill more or less than 100,000 French civilians?
In the context of a Uighur classmate of mine having fallen off the face of the earth, I had an exchange with him that boiled down to “nothing is happening in Xinjiang and your classmate is fine, and if something is happening it’s not the Party’s intention, and if it is then the fucking backwards, benighted Uighurs deserved it.”
I seriously question your knowledge of World War II. This is just ideology trying to rewrite history.
Just the statement that US industrial output was not unleashed until after the Normandy invasion is flabbergasting. The amount of material and logistics to mount such an invasion was enormous. The Normandy invasion and the supporting logistical infrastructure that stretched across North America and the Atlantic could only have been undertaken after the greatest ramp up of industrial production that the world had ever seen.
While I doubt very much that Tоварищ Roberts' fact-distortion field is subject to any penetration however small, others may wish to read _How the War Was Won_ by Prof. Phillips P. O'Brien (2019).
Civilian casualties have unfortunately always been part of war, it's just the way it is, especially when the enemy embeds itselfs within population centers and uses them as shields. Somewhere along the way, after Vietnam maybe, the thinking was we could be strategic, even surgical, to avoid impacting civilians but it often just prolongs the inevitable.
>Ford was the only non-aircraft manufacturer that delivered fully assembled aircraft in any appreciable quantity, building roughly 6,800 aircraft during the war.
This isn't true. That table is from an Army source, and while they call out Navy aircraft, they only do so for companies that delivered meaningful numbers of planes to the Army. Companies that didn't are Grumman and Vought (which made or at least designed the majority of planes on the decks of TF 38/58 at the end of the war) and General Motors, which a quick Google shows delivered twice as many planes as Ford, and which dominated the escort carriers. Goodyear also delivered 4,000 FGs (their version of the F4U), but again didn't do much for the Army. There might be other Navy contractors I'm not thinking of offhand, too.
It's also worth pointing out that the best-performing airplane in Exhibit 10 is an error. The SBD was essentially an evolved variant of the Northrop BT (long story on how that happened) and the basis of the design dates back to about 1935. It's definitely a generation earlier than, say, the SB2C, which is credited with a 1938 start.
Great write up, thank you! Engineering efforts were indeed impressive. Question - how was it paid for? Both workers and materials had to be directed to construct and run these factories. Did British beggar their empire to pay for this or was it mostly bonds that the US gradually paid off?
To help pay for the war, the government increased corporate and personal income taxes. The federal income tax entered the lives of many Americans. In 1939 fewer than 8 million people filed individual income tax returns. In 1945 nearly 50 million filed. The withholding system of payroll deductions was another wartime development. The government also borrowed money by selling "war bonds" to the public. With consumer goods in short supply, Americans put much of their money into bonds and savings accounts.
Great piece with a very high signal / noise ratio.
Also very very glad Knudsen gets his dues. I would put him right up there as one of the most impactful US immigrants in history, at least as it relates to progress and industry.
I think the near monopoly US industry had on mass manufacturing before WW2 is worth calling out. Ford and GM (with Knudsen a key player) were the absolute titans of industry from the mid 1910s through the start of the war.
Could the US have ramped aircraft production (and engine assembly) as quickly if not for the knowledge, process (like transfer machines as mentioned) and talent spillovers from the auto industry?
Neither Japan or Germany had anywhere close to the volume of auto production prior to WW2 either.
Great points!
Yes! And a big part of it was the redundancy and diversity that were generated by the decentralized nature of the industrial system of the USA's Old Republic's political-economic-scientific organizational paradigm. Variegated industries, from automobiles to chemicals to consumer goods and lots of others, had grown out sophisticated manufacturing capabilities that could be directed towards aircraft production. This was huge when companies like Ford and General Motors transitioned from cars to plane components and planes.
Also, the the Old Republic was able to draw from a wide, deep, and vibrant pool of trades skills, engineering talent, and scientific talent, characterized by a stunning amount heterogeneity among the individuals in these areas of endeavor and even each areas sub area. The decentralized information ecosystem and the culture of individual enterprise grew a workforce with highly variegated backgrounds, know hows, ways of approaching problems, and even, in some cases to some extent, varying fundamental understandings of their underlying fields. This heterogeneity was key to handling the complex tech challenges of designing and scaling up aircraft production.
Tsung, yep, Knudsen’s contributions are often underappreciated, yet his impact on U.S. industry and progress is monumental.
The dominance of Ford and GM, with Knudsen's expertise, laid the groundwork for the rapid ramp-up in aircraft production during WW2. The knowledge and talent spillovers were truly unmatched, giving the U.S. a significant edge.
I find that neither Japan nor Germany had the same level of auto production, which likely affected their wartime manufacturing capabilities. Great points!
This article is quite interesting and mostly (but not entirely) correct so far as I can tell, it is regrettable that it is so coy about sources in many cases. Many important assertions are entirely unsourced while for others the citations will be to cryptic for most readers.
One important cryptic source is, more fully, _Buying Aircraft: Matériel Procurement for the Army Air Forces_ by I. B. Holley (1964). As it is one of the U.S. Army's outstanding "Green Book" series of World War II histories it is not only still in print but available online in PDF at https://history.army.mil/html/books/011/11-2/CMH_Pub_11-2.pdf .
Much more difficult to find, unfortunately, is _Problems of Accelerating Aircraft Production During World War II_ by Tom Lilley, et al.
You can read Lilley et al. page-by-page here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015023148151&seq=7
Now do ship building…
Fantastic article and it reminds me how woefully unprepared we are if we get into a big China/Russia conflict.
Great article full of interesting information. My parents worked at the Goodyear aviation plant in Akron during WWII. Also, there are a few Lustron homes in my wife’s small Ohio hometown. Thanks for rekindling these memories!
Great research and a reminder what American unity and determination once was. I can't help but think while reading this just how much long-term damage the Lend-Lease Program did, still is...The FDR Administration was so infested with Soviet appendages (Venona files confirm) that at points during WWII more military hardware was going to Russia than all US/Allied operations in both the Atlantic and Pacific combined (See Diana West "American Betrayal"). No doubt help beating the Nazis was good, but the same tanks/trunks/monitions that the Soviets did so with from the East they also used to build/close the Iron Curtain. Thank you nonetheless.
Fdr wanted to win the war, so he helped the Soviet Union, undoubtedly saving the lives of many US solders. You don’t need a crackpot conspiracy story to explain it.
The Nazi war machine was broken on the Eastern front. With the help of Western materiel. DDay would have been a failure if this would not have been the case.
Interesting range of opinions and perspectives about a challenging time in our national history. Being able to say these things openly and freely is a fragile “right” not available in all governmental and societal systems across the world.
Given the extant extreme division of the opposing tribes today I can’t even imagine what after action reports on the current events in America will look like if MAGA wins the 2024 presidential election, or if there will be any after action reports.
Interesting article. My dad was a B17 crew member. He learned to fly in Hobbs New Mexico. Those were socialist times with kids from the depression. No one would be egotistical enough to ever call themselves a pilot or ace. The pilots/ crew were told that the plane cost $25,000 a copy and to take good care of it. Everybody did everything on the planes. Fly, navigate , drop bombs, handle a machine gun, take before and after pictures. To my dad flying was boring and the navigating and picture taking was interesting. The machine gunning was a strange experience because at times he could almost see the blue eyes and blond hair of the German fighter pilots approaching. It was a war of attrition. As the war went on he saw fewer fighters. The Germans were simply running out of everything. Fewer friends were getting shot down. In the end, when he was dying in his late 60s, he reminisced that he always knew that he did his greatest work in his early 20s. I think few would argue.
In World War I, the US undertook a massive shipbuilding effort, but the war ended before the big shipyards had ramped up production. I think they turned the shipyard into Philadelphia's airport.
When FDR challenged the carmakers to raise production to 50,000 planes a year, the carmakers scoffed. For them, mass production meant at least 150,000 a year.
That 50,000 planes a year didn't come out of thin air. I read an article on Jean Monnet, who was later involved in setting up the European Common Market, in which he was part of the Victory Group, a task force set to estimate overall demand for materiel for the war effort. FDR was given the estimate on a slip of paper shortly before Pearl Harbor. (Fortune 08/1944).
The labor situation was so bad that they actually closed the bordellos and hired the prostitutes to make planes. They also hired Blacks which led to a series of race riots. We tend to think of race riots as about disgruntled Blacks, but traditionally they were about disgruntled Whites.
Thank you for a fantastic account of how the "arsenal of democracy" actually functioned.
A couple of notes:
1) The amount of spending on aircraft during WW2 - even adjusted for present day dollars - is probably not a lot more than what is being spent for aircraft by the US military today...only with far fewer planes produced. No doubt the "cost plus" aspect is a factor.
2) The ecosystem of car manufacturers, appliance manufacturers, etc that were able to reorient, expand and/or adjust to war production simply does not exist today. The mechanical, electrical, materials and other forms of engineering and vocational skills are correspondingly absent. How many decades would be required to bring these back?
maybe I have read a different article, but in this one both of your implicit questions seem to have quite detailed answers.
1) economies of scale. build a lot of planes. have a "well oiled machinery" that can handle changes well, and it will produce high-quality and relatively cheap things. note that the whole thing was kickstarted by the government building the factories and then contracting the operations. (and note, I'm not saying that the current military-industrial-congress complex is oh so great.)
2) GM, Ford, Tesla, etc still exists today, and the whole production was broken down into steps that could be done by unskilled labor.
You clearly missed the part where refrigerator makers and what not were making airplanes or at least airplane parts.
Clearly you are also unaware of just how many more companies existed just making cars in that era; there is no question whatsoever that American manufacturing capacity in WW2 was far, far greater than exists today.
The issue is thus not the government funding or the existence of a few, sad relics of a once mighty manufacturing ecosystem.
US manufacturing jobs are gone, but the output is not.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manufacturing-really-declining
And even that employment graph is not that simple. Roughly 16M people worked in manufacturing in ~1945, and roughly 13M in 2019. (Here's the detailed one https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling-manufacturing-employment.htm )
If the US wants to it can build the factories and manufacture things, and scale up too. The current obstacles are well documented on this blog. (Permitting takes up most of the time, and due to super low volume everything is ridiculously labor-intensive, and so on.)
Yes, the drop compared to the peakpeak is big, but especially compared to pre-WWII it's especially not. (Because more people worked in manufacturing in 2019 than in 1942, if I'm reading that graph right.)
United States were powerhouse with 45% of world industrial production, they could switch easily to war production.
American production was modern and efficient, unlike German who had a mix of modern and traditional production practices.
Modern America with extinct industry is unable to sustain a big war.
“War Factories” is a great docu series about the industry in the Second World War.
I worked in aerospace for many years. Few people understand it's complexity. You did a great job revealing the detail required to manufacture. One of the first things you learn is how the blueprints work. A mundane but critical technology for scale and efficiency of manufacturing. A 92 year old friend's father worked for Knudsen. Her father ultimately became chairman of GM. Her stories about the GMs shift for WWII are fascinating.
It'd be fascinating to compare this to the British industrial scale-up.
Yes - and the Russian one!
Most of the Soviet facilities were also designed by Albert Kahn prior to the great purges of 1938, enabling military output far above the size of the economy and manufacturing sector.
Some of the details are in this book
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/208564/freedoms-forge-by-arthur-herman/
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.?
Russia won World War II on the back of its enormous industrial output.
Not until the Normandy invasion, after Germany's defeat, was the U.S.’s enormous industrial output finally unleashed.
As usual, it was unleashed on French civilians, killing 100,000 of them prior to our brave boys storming ashore.
As a footnote, the US actually invaded France and brought with it specially issued dollars to replace the franc, and hundreds of staff to govern French provinces. Happily, de Gaulle thwarted them, but he was unable to save the 100,000 people we blew to pieces.
Is it any wonder we support the Gaza genocide?
As a general rule, we have always been the bad guys.
Terrible take. The USSR’s industry depended on large amounts of raw materials and food from the US, not to mention trucks, locomotives, and ~10% of their weapons. The western Allies accounted for half of all German aircraft losses, maybe 1/3 or personnel losses, most of the navy, and disrupted their industry. Maybe the Russians forget that other countries were fighting Japan the whole time as well, and defeating Italy in the Mediterranean, but we haven’t.
The Normandy invasion was not “after Germany’s defeat.” Maybe you can read histories now and decide their defeat was inevitable, but it wasn’t, and the USSR begged and screamed for a second front at the time.
“As usual” - it was mostly unleashed on the Germans. I’m not sure if you’re imagining the Red Army carefully preserving the civilians where German troops were fortified, avoiding civilian casualties, but that’s not how the war worked. Massive artillery and air bombardments led to victory, while omitting them invited defeat. The French mostly seemed happy enough to be out from German occupation. Bringing hundreds of staff to govern French provinces? Whoa there, it seems like you’re accusing the US of … administration? Leaving aside the collaboration of the Vichy government, which might suggest that the French were not all to be trusted, the wartime franc currency was not terribly reliable, and of course was controlled by Germany.
Godfree is impervious to reality; it takes you far longer to source arguments than for him to make shit up. Not worth it, good sir, just don’t feed the troll.
Nonsense. The only means of getting supplies to Russia was via the convoy system from the US east coast via the UK. So many of these ships were sunk that for a time they were almost suspended altogether. The amount of supplies getting to Russia was a small fraction of what the Russians made for themselves.
As for "other countries were fighting Japan the whole time as well" - more rubbish. Japan only entered the war in 1941. The war in Europe began in 1939, and in China in 1937.
Do some homework, instead of knee-jerk hollow patriotism
My source is my own investigations in Russia in the early 70s, and Norman Davies' quantitative analysis, Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory.
What are yours?
It's weird to use the phrase "the bad guys" here - that makes it sounds like the opponents must have been "the good guys". Did the Germans kill more or less than 100,000 French civilians?
Kenny, from experience, Godfree is not worth it.
In the context of a Uighur classmate of mine having fallen off the face of the earth, I had an exchange with him that boiled down to “nothing is happening in Xinjiang and your classmate is fine, and if something is happening it’s not the Party’s intention, and if it is then the fucking backwards, benighted Uighurs deserved it.”
interesting paraphrase!
Far less.
I seriously question your knowledge of World War II. This is just ideology trying to rewrite history.
Just the statement that US industrial output was not unleashed until after the Normandy invasion is flabbergasting. The amount of material and logistics to mount such an invasion was enormous. The Normandy invasion and the supporting logistical infrastructure that stretched across North America and the Atlantic could only have been undertaken after the greatest ramp up of industrial production that the world had ever seen.
While I doubt very much that Tоварищ Roberts' fact-distortion field is subject to any penetration however small, others may wish to read _How the War Was Won_ by Prof. Phillips P. O'Brien (2019).
Civilian casualties have unfortunately always been part of war, it's just the way it is, especially when the enemy embeds itselfs within population centers and uses them as shields. Somewhere along the way, after Vietnam maybe, the thinking was we could be strategic, even surgical, to avoid impacting civilians but it often just prolongs the inevitable.
Not in this case. It was pure brutality.
Your story is false
>Ford was the only non-aircraft manufacturer that delivered fully assembled aircraft in any appreciable quantity, building roughly 6,800 aircraft during the war.
This isn't true. That table is from an Army source, and while they call out Navy aircraft, they only do so for companies that delivered meaningful numbers of planes to the Army. Companies that didn't are Grumman and Vought (which made or at least designed the majority of planes on the decks of TF 38/58 at the end of the war) and General Motors, which a quick Google shows delivered twice as many planes as Ford, and which dominated the escort carriers. Goodyear also delivered 4,000 FGs (their version of the F4U), but again didn't do much for the Army. There might be other Navy contractors I'm not thinking of offhand, too.
It's also worth pointing out that the best-performing airplane in Exhibit 10 is an error. The SBD was essentially an evolved variant of the Northrop BT (long story on how that happened) and the basis of the design dates back to about 1935. It's definitely a generation earlier than, say, the SB2C, which is credited with a 1938 start.
Great write up, thank you! Engineering efforts were indeed impressive. Question - how was it paid for? Both workers and materials had to be directed to construct and run these factories. Did British beggar their empire to pay for this or was it mostly bonds that the US gradually paid off?
"
Dollars for Defense
To help pay for the war, the government increased corporate and personal income taxes. The federal income tax entered the lives of many Americans. In 1939 fewer than 8 million people filed individual income tax returns. In 1945 nearly 50 million filed. The withholding system of payroll deductions was another wartime development. The government also borrowed money by selling "war bonds" to the public. With consumer goods in short supply, Americans put much of their money into bonds and savings accounts.
"
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/america-goes-war-take-closer-look
Inflation was around 20% in 1947 (but went down to ~0 in 1949), debt to GDP ratio peaked at 106% in 1946. (But in 10y already 50% of it was gone.)