How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years

For more than a decade, we had very little defense work and certainly no awareness that we would one day be the world’s largest private producer of military “hardware”. This unexpected distinction was achieved during the second period — the years just before and during World War II. In this period we produced an incredible $12 billion of military g

By the war’s end, the United States had produced 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, and 41 billion rounds of small ammunition. The war against Hitler may have been a European fight, but it was very much made in the U.S.A. The more U.S. factories made, the more fine-grained their standardization became.

As a result, Ford Motor Company emerged from World War II to peacetime manufacture of automobiles with five great advantages over its competitors: First, as we have seen, it had its own source of raw materials. Second, it had the world’s greatest, most complete industrial manufacturing plant—the biggest machine shop on earth. Third, the Rouge plant

As wars go, the Second World War was the big one—a giant, planetwide entropic pulse that converted whole cities to rubble and some fifty-five million living humans into corpses. No war has ever killed more or even come close. From Dresden, Warsaw, Manila, Tokyo, and Hiroshima, that’s what the war looked like: a vortex of carnage. Yet, ironically, p

Very large demands were made on General Motors during the next six years, and the corporation, I think I can say, like most of American industry, responded with distinction. When World War II began, General Motors rapidly converted itself from the nation’s largest manufacturer of automobiles to the nation’s largest producer of war materials. And wh