The country was anything but ready for a major conflict in 1941. Due to the Great Depression and a national unwillingness to get involved in conflict overseas, the United States had been unprepared.
But with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into the war, just like today, the nation had to come to grips with its unreadiness.
The country’s industrial sector was still reeling from the Depression, and owners weren’t thrilled about the thought of investing in defense production. “Many American producers of primary materials were reluctant to expand facilities, and many manufacturers reluctantly converted assembly lines from peacetime goods to vitally needed armaments,” according to historian Barton J. Bernstein.
To break through that reluctance, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued sweeping war powers.
He now requisitioned supplies and property and forced entire industries to produce wartime products.
Instead of producing products for civilians, the nation’s factories became powerhouses pumping out planes, tanks, military vehicles, weapons, ships and other defense-related products.
U.S. manufacturing output grew by 300 percent during the war, and despite wartime scarcity, consumer spending increased, too, thanks to higher employment and wages.
“Powerful enemies must be out-fought and out-produced,” President Roosevelt told Congress and his countrymen less than a month after Pearl Harbor.
“It is not enough to turn out just a few more planes, a few more tanks, a few more guns, a few more ships than can be turned out by our enemies,” he said. “We must out-produce them overwhelmingly, so that there can be no question of our ability to provide a crushing superiority of equipment in any theatre of the world war.”
Two years earlier, America’s military preparedness was not that of a nation expecting to go to war.
In 1939, the United States Army ranked thirty-ninth in the world, possessing a cavalry force of fifty thousand and using horses to pull the artillery.
Many Americans — still trying to recover from the decade-long ordeal of the Great Depression — were reluctant to participate in the conflict that was spreading throughout Europe and Asia.
President Roosevelt did what he could to coax a reluctant nation to focus its economic might on military preparedness. If the American military wasn’t yet equal to the Germans or the Japanese, American workers could build ships and planes faster than the enemy could sink them or shoot them down.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the president set staggering goals for the nation’s factories: 60,000 aircraft in 1942 and 125,000 in 1943; 120,000 tanks in the same time period and 55,000 antiaircraft guns.
In an attempt to coordinate government war agencies Roosevelt created the War Production Board in 1942 and later in 1943 the Office of War Mobilization. To raise money for defense, the government relied on a number of techniques — calling on the American people to ration certain commodities, generating more tax revenue by lowering the personal exemption and selling government war bonds to individuals and financial institutions. All of these methods served to provide the government with revenue and at the same time keep inflation under control.
War production profoundly changed American industry. Companies already engaged in defense work expanded. Others, like the automobile industry, were transformed completely. In 1941, more than three million cars were manufactured in the United States. Only 139 more were made during the entire war. Instead, Chrysler made fuselages. General Motors made airplane engines, guns, trucks and tanks. Packard made Rolls-Royce engines for the British air force.
And at its vast Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the Ford Motor Company performed something like a miracle 24-hours a day. The average Ford car had some 15,000 parts. The B-24 Liberator long-range bomber had 1,550,000. One came off the line every 63 minutes.
America launched more vessels in 1941 than Japan did in the entire war. Shipyards turned out tonnage so fast that by the autumn of 1943 all Allied shipping sunk since 1939 had been replaced. In 1944 alone, the United States built more planes than the Japanese did from 1939 to 1945. By the end of the war, more than half of all industrial production in the world would take place in the United States.
Wartime production boomed as citizens flocked to meet the demand for labor.
While 16 million men and women marched to war, 24 million more moved in search of defense jobs, often for more pay than they previously had ever earned. Eight million women stepped into the work force and ethnic groups such as African Americans and Latinos found job opportunities as never before.
“Most of the people who got out of high school if they were female and didn’t go to the war, they went to Mobile,” said Emma Belle Petcher, who moved to the city from the tiny town of Millry, Alabama. “That was the place to go and get a job. And there were all kinds of jobs.”
World War II utterly transformed Mobile and its economy. Local shipyards won contracts to build Liberty ships and destroyers in 1940, and by the time America entered the war in late 1941, Mobile was already booming. The Alcoa plant processed millions of pounds of aluminum used to build many of the 304,000 airplanes America produced during the war; the Waterman Steamship Company boasted one of the nation’s largest merchant fleets, and Mobile became one of the busiest shipping and shipbuilding ports in the nation. In 1940, Gulf Shipbuilding had had 240 employees; by 1943, it had 11,600. Alabama Dry Dock went from 1,000 workers to almost 30,000.
Like the shipyards in Mobile and plane-repair facilities near Sacramento, factories in Waterbury, Connecticut were transformed to keep up with the war. The Mattatuck Manufacturing Company switched from making upholstery nails to cartridge clips for the Springfield rifle, and soon was turning out three million clips a week. The American Brass Company made more than two billion pounds of brass rods, sheets and tubes during the war. The Chase Brass and Copper Company made more than 50 million cartridge cases and mortar shells, more than a billion small caliber bullets and, eventually, components used in the atomic bomb.
Scovill Manufacturing produced so many different military items, the Waterbury Republican reported, that “there wasn’t an American or British fighting man … who wasn’t dependent on [the company] for some part of the food, clothing, shelter and equipment that sustained [him] through the … struggle.”
Many factories ran around the clock. “It was seven days a week,” said Clyde Odom of Mobile. “And during the war when it was so strong, it was twelve-hour days five days a week, ten hours on Saturday, eight hours on Sunday.
“Money seemed to be the least of the concerns,” Ray Leopold of Waterbury said. “The thing was to produce material that will win the war and bring their boys home.”
Following WWII, as the Cold War heated up, President Harry Truman and his advisors saw Korea as a pivotal front. When Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, catching the United States unaware, western powers worried that it was the first foray of a larger communist world takeover and braced for military intervention.
Once again, the United States was unprepared for war. Defense production had dropped off and industries were once again catering to civilian needs. Even the kinds of tools that would be needed to produce more military materials were in short supply, and experts agreed the nation was not ready for another war.
If Communists attempted to fight their western opponents on another front, too, the United States would be unable to respond.
In July 1950, Truman warned Congress that the seemingly inevitable war in Korea would cause supply shortages and inflation at home and asked them—and the nation—to ramp up defense spending at home.
“The things we need to do to build up our military defense will require considerable adjustment in our domestic economy,” he said in an address. “Our job now is to divert to defense purposes more of [our economy’s] tremendous productive capacity–more steel, more aluminum, more of a good many things.”
Truman had been involved in defense production during the previous war, chairing a special committee that exposed abuses and waste in war production. Now, faced with the prospect of a massive, well-organized enemy, he requested the authority to oversee another economic mobilization. In September 1950, Congress passed the Defense Production Act.
“While not as sweeping as the executive powers granted during World War II,” writes historian Paul G. Pierpaoli, “the Defense Production Act was nonetheless an unprecedented foray into government planning and control during a time when no formal war had been declared.”
The law let the president force manufacturers to prioritize defense production, set price ceilings, expand private and public production capacity and more. It has since been reauthorized 53 times.
Over the years, the law’s definition of “national defense” has broadened, and now includes homeland security and infrastructure assistance to foreign nations. Broadly speaking, the law lets the president force industries to make government contracts a priority.
It’s been invoked to do everything from fund biofuel research to prioritize government contracts in the wakes of hurricanes. It’s also been used to increase production of things like batteries for military use and specialized circuits and materials deemed important for national security.
So, as the globe confronts the coronavirus pandemic, one urgent problem is the shortage of key pieces of equipment, including high-quality masks, test kits and—perhaps most important of all—ventilators. It seems hundreds of thousands of lives might be saved, if only manufacturers could quickly ramp up the production of such equipment, perhaps by a factor of 100 or 1,000, within a few weeks.
We know the United States has done something similar, on a nationwide scale, once before—eight decades ago during the emergency of World War II.
Might there be lessons to be learned now, from that history? Here are a few takeaways from our past that we could use today.
1. If the government wants machines fast, it better promise to buy them.
During World War II, manufacturers of key items were guaranteed that national government agencies would purchase all of their output, even if the equipment ultimately wasn’t needed. The lesson for 2020 is that if we want more ventilators as soon as possible, the national government needs to guarantee it will purchase them.
2. Production can be scaled up fast when companies cooperate
During World War II, expert manufacturers shared designs and techniques with other firms, so that key items could be produced on multiple production lines, simultaneously.
This was done on a grand scale in the U.S. aircraft industry. For example, Pratt & Whitney, the top aircraft engine manufacturer, shared drawings and knowledge with Ford Motor Co. and General Motors, the giant automakers, so that they could mass-produce engines.
Similarly, Boeing worked with competitors, including Lockheed and Vega, so the Boeing-designed B-17 bomber could be made at its rivals’ plants in California, as well as in the company’s home facility in Seattle.
Today, public authorities and business leaders might use a similar approach, by arranging to have the best versions of key items like tests, ventilators, medications and vaccines made by multiple companies, using temporary deals that would bypass delays that might come from concerns about proprietary technology and competitive advantage.
3. The government can build and own new factories, and let companies run them
World War II saw the emergency construction of manufacturing plants, the vast majority of which were paid for and owned by U.S. government agencies but operated by companies in the private sector.
Indeed, the main mechanism for the biggest expansions of industrial capacity in World War II was the government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) plant.
The famed Kaiser shipyards, which turned out big merchant vessels in a matter of days, were GOCO facilities, as were most of the big new bomber plants run by the top airframe manufacturers, including Douglas, Martin and North American.
The atomic bomb project, like the conventional explosives program, was based on GOCO plants, run by some of the country’s leading corporate manufacturers, including DuPont and Eastman Kodak.
Today, the GOCO model could be useful in cases where new production lines—for respirators, vaccines or other items we realize are now essential—need to be built fast, without waiting to see whether private capital will fund them.
4. In a pinch, create homegrown alternatives
The record of World War II shows it is possible, if not easy, to produce emergency alternatives closer to home when global supply chains are disrupted.
The U.S. was forced into an all-out emergency scramble to replace imports with new domestic sources, most importantly in the case of rubber. Here American authorities failed to anticipate an enormous problem for the war effort that occurred when Japan’s victories in early 1942 cut off imports of natural rubber from Indonesia.
This threatened to cripple the production of items like military trucks and aircraft, which needed rubber for their tires. However, a massive, rapid effort, using GOCO plants and the expertise of oil, chemical and tire companies, allowed the United States to rapidly build from scratch a big new synthetic rubber industry.
Today, as the disruption of global supply chains is making it harder to procure a variety of key components for the coronavirus fight, it makes sense for policymakers and business leaders to engage in some quick planning and cooperation, to find and finance domestic substitutes.
So there you have it folks. Even though we are dealing with a new enemy, a lot can be learned from those who lived before us about how to survive our current threats.