Posted on 11/12/2019 5:47:32 PM PST 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.
The Left hates President Trump.
President Trump says, “Make America Great Again”
The Left scoffs: “America was never great!”
I think the Left should read this article. We were beyond Great. And we’re getting back to it too.
“I thought the government did all that.”
That’s actually covered in the first part of the book. FDR wanted the government to build its own factories to build munitions and armaments. He was prevailed upon to have US industry do it. Thank God he did otherwise we probably would not have won the war.
The government paid private industry, of course.
The great death toll was much the fault of Stalin. Giving American humanitarian aid was right, but they never should have been given so much help that they became am advancing force that entered Berlin first. Short term gain, long term loss.
When Germany fell, the US was producing 10,000 fighters + bombers PER MONTH!
My mom was a 22 year old working in the Navy Delt in NYC. Her office’s responsibility was seeing that ships constructed at Brooklyn Navy Yard and NY Shipbuilding, Camden NJ were fully outfitted before engaging in shakedown cruises. She discovered sometime in 43 that she would see the sinkings and damage reports and find ships that according to the Dept of Navy records their had not yet been outfitted.
The Germans’ various rifle factories were producing Mauser 98s at the planned rate of 10,000 per month. At its peak, Springfield Armory alone (which had been tooled up more like a modern auto plant than a rifle factory) was cranking out about 4,000 M1 Garands a day.
We produced so much ammunition that .45ACP from WW2 was still in stock into the 80s (albeit repackaged in the 1960s), and .50 BMG ammo from the 1940s turned up in inventory as late as the Gulf War. Fortunately, there were a few troops that still knew how to work with corrosive primers....
As a young lad myself and other kids would stand on 35th Street across from the AOSmith plant building watching the
red hot bomb casings come out of the ovens and presses that formed them, 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
That plant produced pipe for oil/gas pipelines before and after the War.
P4L
That Battalion was lead by COl John “Axe Handle” Pierce.
A legend in his own time.
In terms of reliability, ease of manufacture, maintenance, and availability for combat duty, US armored vehicles were far better than most German types.
If the most technologically sophisticated can’t get to the fight because it is constantly deadlined, what good is it?
Look at GM production alone during the war:
https://www.usautoindustryworldwartwo.com/generalmotors.htm
We couldn’t do anything close now.
“Quantity has a quality all its own.”
Uncle Joe
True. Because the boots are made with the heels and soles in one piece and attached to the boot as such. Check out the shoes you wear and try to find a “shoe repair shop” that can repair them. (Clue: The goode olde shoe repair shop no longer exists!)
Very impressive. Thanks for posting.
A huge reason for that is that sometime around the 1970's-1980's manufacturing around the world figured out that if you build something to be replaced rather than be repaired, you can build it faster and cheaper. It's a different way of handling manufacturing and logistics entirely. I'm not sure if it's truly better or worse, but is why there aren't any TV repair shops any more.
Now it takes nine years to build one, we have only one shipyard that can do it (if China will sell us the steel).
My Dad spent a lot of time studying and then working at the Naval Hospital at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and there was a steel mill put up nearby to make the steel for, among other things, the USS Missouri.
Just imagine trying to get approval to build a steel mill in Brooklyn today!
Here's what's missing:
"to bring the conflict to a successful termination, all the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States." (US Declaration of War December 8, 1941.
This is why you don’t outsource your production.
“Quantity has a Quality All Its Own."
This required an effort that, in recent decades or years, would absolutely not be possible... The men and women who struggled their way through the recession understood, and made, the sacrifices (both on the war front and the home front) necessary for the final victory...
The sacrifices were so great that it is not even a remote possibility that enough of today's weak and pampered Americans would be willing to perform so heroically... The heroes we can rely on are already serving in harms way to protect America...
From personal experience, I know what it was like to live with one or the other sets of grandparents during WWII... Dad, a Marine, was in the Pacific from 1942 till the war's end and all he had to show for it was three purple hearts ... Our mother worked (eventually as a welder) minimum 12-hour days 6 or 7 days a week in a defense plant... We must have actually seen her 3-dozen times throughout the whole war... She paid the ultimate price by dying at age 54 from the results of the often necessarily unhealthy work environments...
Finally, in addition to not having a large enough American citizenry who would remotely consider these necessary sacrifices, the U.S. has frittered away most of the fantastic manufacturing base it had for a century and government policies have pretty much eliminated our access to much of the natural resources that would be needed in another global war...
If all those numbers don’t blow one’s mind, now think of all the infrastructure and logistics that was necessary to SUPPLY all that manufacturing!!!!
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