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.
. . .which pointed out that upon the Fall of France in May, 1940, FDR’s mind was focused on what the US would be faced with if Britain sued for peace. Especially since the USSR was allied wtih Germany until Hitler attacked Stalin in June, 1941, that was an unappetizing prospect indeed.Thus FDR was desperate to keep Britain’s war effort afloat, and although he was, via Bill Knudsen and also others, ramping up US production of war materiel, he wasn’t keeping that materiel in the US. He was shipping it to Britain. Thus, when Pearl Harbor was attacked and the US entered the war, the US had minimal military inventory. And yet Pearl Harbor was almost exactly 18 months after Knudsen had told FDR in May 1940 that it would take 18 months to be fully prepared to ramp up war production.
The upshot was that the US could produce 50,000 military planes of all types in 1942 - and more annually, thereafter. The Manhattan Project was already under way, and it cost as much as the B-29 program did, but who at that stage would hang their hat on the fact that it would end the war in 1945?? They weren’t even certain that the Germans wouldn’t get the bomb first.
As to FDR’s switch from “Doctor New Deal” to “Doctor Win-the-War,” that is discussed in the very interesting
- The New Dealers' War:
- FDR and the War Within World War II
by Thomas Fleming