It is universally recognized that the Allied victory over Japan and Germany in World War II could not have happened without America’s becoming, in Franklin Roosevelt’s words, “the arsenal of democracy.” The basic figures of American war production are simply gargantuan. The United States manufactured almost two-thirds of all Allied military equipment used in the war: a total of 86,000 tanks, 2 million trucks, and 297,000 planes. And that doesn’t include the atomic bomb or the huge B-29 bombers that carried it to Japan.
The figures are impressive enough in their totality. What is not so obvious is how a nation with a military that ranked 17th in size in the world (behind Romania) when the war broke out in Europe in 1939, and a people and political class who wanted to be as far away from Europe’s messes as possible, transformed their industrial base so totally that even Stalin was impressed. He raised a glass at the Tehran Conference in 1943 with the toast, “To American production, without which this war would have been lost.”
The unstated assumption among many Americans who have thought about the matter is that the government somehow took over industry, or at least jawboned it into compliance before issuing instructions for the numbers of tanks and bombers it needed. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Arthur Herman’s well-researched and engrossing account, the top corporate officers and engineers of major corporations did exceptionally well in wartime what they would have done in civilian industry in peacetime: They mobilized engineers, designers, and factory managers into an intricately linked network of manufacturing processes in which corporate officers could excel in their particular skills.
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