Thank God for those who served, and for those who enabled such production for the purpose of fighting evil empires. Yet now the Navy knows how to marry men with men, and thinks it is wise to have men and women work (etc.) together on subs, and all overall the military is committed to helping the enemies within, saluting the Leftist politically correct flag.
On her present course of war against God, the day will come when it is said, "How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!" (2 Samuel 1:27)
It’s hard to believe those numbers. That’s back when QA must have been a piece of cake.
The world is now geared for wars that last hours or days, not years.
I read somewhere that we could not actually put a large number of men in uniform quickly today because of...no uniforms, no boots, and no way to manufacture them quickly.
It takes Environmental Health and Safety that many days just to approve one JHA these days ....
Today, the "environmental impact study" alone would take years.
And don't forget the corruption and the kickbacks. Look at projects like Boston's Big Dig.
Where did Billions in Federal money go? Into the pockets of the corrupt.
Thank You for the very interesting article.
And that was just the B24 line, same thing for the B17
My father was rejected as a 4F because of stomach ulcer. He ran a shift of women building bombs and torpedoes at AOSmith in Milwaukee during the war.
He had two young daughters going into the war and three at the end of it.
It has always amazed me how that generation worked so hard and so well.
My Father’s battalion put a bridge across the Rhine while under artillery fire in a day.
They built two mess halls for the Potsdam Conference in two days. That was despite needed materials not arriving and having to scavenge building materials from destroyed buildings.
I have read their history. They performed heroically but mainly they performed brilliantly.
It’s a crying shame, we can barely do or build anything any longer in this nation. Leftists sue to stop any type of productivity or real progress.
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.
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.
P4L
Look at GM production alone during the war:
https://www.usautoindustryworldwartwo.com/generalmotors.htm
We couldn’t do anything close now.
Very impressive. Thanks for posting.
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.
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!!!!
“Everyone knew” that if France and Germany went to war, it would last a long time. When Hitler conquered France in about a month, everyone was shocked. It was at that point that FDR went all unconstitutional (IMHO) and arranged for military mobilization of American industry. And FDR also shipped as much military materiel to Britain as he could scrounge up.
Britain for its part, in addition to its prosecution of the war, shipped a fork truck pallet of top secret military technology to the US. Including the blueprints for the Merlin engine. And microwave radar.
The point is that American production of war materiel gradually ramped up between the Fall of France in May 1940 and Pearl Harbor. The first thing that entailed was building the buildings and making the machine tools required for the military production. The reason the US had a sparse inventory of military materiel was simply that FDR was shipping the stuff over to Britain - and later to the USSR - as fast as it was produced.
Hitler knew that the US was shipping war materiel to Britain, and so did his submariners. So even tho the Tripartite Pact was defensive in nature, and did not obligate him to declare war on the US after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler was motivated to declare war on the US. Not doing so allowed too-easy passage of US aid to Britain and the USSR.