Quora ^ | 2019 | Chris Morehouse
Posted on 11/12/2019, 8:47:32 PM by daniel1212
Chris Morehouse, Aerospace Engineer at U.S. Air Force (2017-present)
We can just put up a bunch of numbers, but I don’t think that gives a full appreciation of scale. So first let’s hit some specific examples.
The B-24
This is Willow Run. It was a B-24 plant built by Ford to mass produce the bomber. It ran its line 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and produced a complete B-24 every 63 minutes on average. At peak, it produced 100 bombers in just two days.
This plant produced less than half of the total B-24s we built during the war.
That is just one plant, producing one type of aircraft. We had literally had thousand of plants like this, producing everything from tanks to field dressings.
The Liberty Ships
This is a Liberty Ship. It was a 14,000 ton cargo ship used for carrying essential war materials from the US to our allies and troops during WW2.
Let’s see how they come to be.
[see images at link )
Wait - where did you all come from?
America had 18 dry docks building Liberty Ships during WW2. Whereas typically riveted ships of the day took months to build, the Liberty Ships went from nothing to ready to launch in an average of 42 days in those dry docks. They were welded instead of riveted, and only built for a 5-year life span.
Forty-two days doesn’t seem very fast? Well I did say that was an average. The first Liberty ship took 230 days to complete. The fastest built ship took less than five days. That is a 14,000 ton ship from laying the keel to launch in less than five days.
We built 2,710 of these ships during the war.
The Sherman
Here we have the M4 Sherman Tank. This was a medium tank, and the primary tank of the US Army during the war. It has received a lot of criticism both then and now as being too light for the competition, having an undersized gun and the liability of a gas burning (instead of diesel) engine. For all that, it was still a very successful tank. One of its best features… it lent itself to mass production.
Above is the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant. This plant was built by Chrysler for the US Army and was the country's first government-owned, contractor-operated tank plant. Shown in the picture is the assembly of the M4A4 Sherman tanks.
This 113-acre plant built Lee, Sherman and Pershing tanks during the war and was only one of nine plants that built the Sherman. Between the nine plants, 49,234 Sherman tanks were built during the war, accounting for about half of the tanks the US produced during the war. Yeah, half again.
The Flat Tops
While we were building Liberty Ships as if we were breeding rabbits, we had to also build some fighting ships. To this end we built a whole bunch of shipyards.
Here we have a portion of the Boston Naval Yard in 1943. In the large slipway on the left you can see a monster of a ship. That would be the USS Iowa, a big-ass Battleship. We built eight battleships during WW2, and repaired several more that got a rough start at Pearl Harbor. But what I want to point out is the long flat guy in the center top. That is the USS Bunker Hill, an Essex Class Aircraft Carrier.
The Essex Class Carriers were a mainstay of the American Carrier Fleet. They were the Navy’s new wonder weapons, and the Navy could not possibly have enough of them. The Essex could carry 90–100 aircraft, had a crew of about 2600 and could take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.
The Navy built 24 of these babies during WW2.
Here is the Bunker Hill right after being launched on December 7th 1942, exactly one year after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It joined the fleet as one new carrier out of the 141 Aircraft Carriers we would build during the war. No, that number is not a typo. The United States built and launched 141 Aircraft Carriers of all classes during the war. To protect them we built 498 escort ships (Corvettes and Frigates)
(Above: Buckley Class Destroyer Escort, 148 built) As well as 349 destroyers (Above: Fletcher Class Destroyer, 175 Built).
We can go on and on, but the fact of the matter is the US was one giant, war-material-producing machine during WW2. We easily out-produced every other participant in the conflict, and at the same time created an entire NEW industry which produced the first nuclear chain reaction, uranium enrichment infrastructure, plutonium production plants and atomic reactors and weapons. We literally invented a new industry while building all this other stuff, creating massive industrial plants for the various type of chemical and physical uranium enrichment processes, as well as testing and production facilities for the weapons themselves.
It is honestly hard to fully grasp the magnitude of the industrial might that was leveraged during the conflict. But hopefully this has given you some appreciation for the monumental effort put forth by American industry and the American people.