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

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.