FDR tried government (Army) building military equipment..
Marshall told him to get the big guys involved or else..
He had enough sense to know that his way was failing..
The first eighteen months of the war the US had crap to fight with..
You are correct, we did have crap to start out, but keep it in context...there was an excellent book that outlined it very well; “Freedom’s Forge”.
It wasn’t Marshall that started our country down the road of engaging our industry for war, it was a guy named Bill Knudsen whose greatest service to this country was convincing Roosevelt that he had to allow US industry to make money, and lots of it in order to engage it fully.
I have stated, I didn’t have much love for Roosevelt, but I give him credit in this, because it required him to go against all his New Deal “principles” (If those heinous ideas can be called that) and also against the wails and screams of his New Deal acolytes.
In the end, he was right to do so, because the power of a capitalist free enterprise engaged the industrial might fully.
It is ironic that his decision to deviate from his socialist principles stands to this day as one of the greatest and most solid examples of the superiority of a capitalist system over a socialist system.
But you ARE correct. We did start out the war with crap for equipment, but...remember, I only said we got the foundation laid and the cogs turning, there is a huge time lag between conception/design and a piece of equipment getting into the hands of the people fighting with it.
Bill Knudsen ended up making a lot of enemies and got canned from his position as the head of war production very early on, and he went on to the Army where he was given a General’s commission, which was nearly unheard of. That he was one of the very, very few (if not the only) civilian to do so says a lot.