How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years

Work was more finely divided into individual subassemblies to allow increased subcontracting and to have many different people working on portions of the aircraft simultaneously. Manufacturers adopted new, improved high-accuracy machine tools that could automate work and be operated by unskilled labor.

Over the course of the war the U.S. produced around 5,600 cargo ships, 80,000 landing craft, 2.4 million trucks, 2.6 million machine guns, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition.

Production system winds down

As late as 1941, the U.K. was building more planes per year than the U.S. But by 1942, the U.S. was building roughly as many aircraft as Germany, Japan, the U.K. and Italy combined. And by 1944, U.S. aircraft production was so voluminous that the Army and Navy were having trouble dealing with them all. Not wanting to shu

As a measure of the industrial might of the United States in 1944 and 1945, the subsequent whirl of destruction told a better story than a thousand pages of statistics. If a plane needed minor repairs, it was pulled off the flight line and junked, and a shiny new replacement unit flew in to take its place. Hundreds of airplanes were flown into rem

Many of these factories were designed by Albert Kahn, the famous industrial architect responsible for the design of Ford’s enormous Rouge Facility. Over the course of the war Kahn’s firm designed nearly 100 million square feet of factory space. Kahn favored large, single-story factory buildings with wide bays to maximize the flow of material throug

To accommodate inexperienced female factory workers, a variety of changes were implemented. Processes were broken down into simple steps that unskilled workers could do. Part tolerances were relaxed where possible. Tasks were rearranged to be less physically taxing, and aids like trunnion jigs, which parts could be mounted to and freely rotated, we