p2 Together they produced two-thirds of all Allied military equipment used in World War II. That included 86,000 tanks, 2.5 million trucks and a half million jeeps, 286,000 warplanes, 8,800 naval vessels, 5,600 merchant ships, 434 million tons of steel, 2.6 million machine guns, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition p2 Knudsen left GM in 1940 to spearhead America’s rearmament, first as director of the Office of Production Management and then to accept a lieutenant general’s commission (the first and only civilian in American history to receive this honor) as head of industrial production for the U.S. Army. p2 American workers in war-related industries in 1942–43 died or were injured in numbers twenty times greater than the American servicemen killed or wounded during those same years. At General Motors alone 189 senior executives died on the job during the war, trying to ensure final American victory. p6 Nye’s proposed solution was nationalizing the armaments industry. That didn’t happen, but companies like DuPont got the message. The Wilmington, Delaware, firm had supplied America’s armed forces with gunpowder since the American Revolution. Now it slashed its munitions-making division to less than 2 percent of operations.7 Other companies drew the same lesson: Supplying America with arms was business you did not want.* p7 From the fourth-biggest military force in the world in 1918, the United States Army shrank to number eighteen, just ahead of tiny Holland. p7 When Roosevelt learned in October 1938 that Neville Chamberlain had handed over a large chunk of Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich, he sent a congratulatory telegram: “Good man.” p8 Patton had 325 tanks—at a time when the Germans had more than 2,000—but no reliable nuts and bolts to hold them together. Patton asked the quartermaster for the necessary nuts and bolts; they never reached him. In desperation he ordered them at his own expense from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. p9 After Poland fell, Roosevelt dared to appoint a War Resources Board of industrial leaders to consider what might be needed if America did have to prepare for a modern war. The board sat for six weeks before public outrage forced him to disband it. p10 Within hours he sent an urgent message to Congress, asking that the $24 million appropriation for the Army be expanded to $700 million. He said, “This nation should plan at this time a program that will provide us with 50,000 military and naval planes…. I should like to see this nation geared up to the ability to turn out at least 50,000 planes a year.” p11 What kind of planes do you want? they asked. Morgenthau could not tell them. They wanted to know exactly how many were needed and when the delivery date would be. Again the Treasury secretary drew a blank. The executives went home, more confused than ever.

Note:Help the customer define the solution

p13 When Roosevelt announced his plans for 50,000 planes a year, Hitler branded the number a fantasy. He scoffed, “What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records, and Hollywood?”27 He was about to find out. p21 Knudsen realized that the key to mass production was not uniformity or even speed. It was creating a continuous linear sequence that allowed every part to be fitted where and when it was needed, while keeping costs down by growing the volume instead of skimping on materials. Knudsen had found the key to the economy of scale underlying all industrial manufacturing. “In other words,” as Knudsen liked to explain it, “the less complex parts were, the easier they were to make; the easier to make, the less the cost; the less the cost, the greater the demand.” It was a guaranteed formula for success and profit. p22 Albert Kahn, a poor immigrant like himself with a positive genius for industrial architecture. Kahn had revealed that gift in 1907 in his factory building for Packard—the nation’s first modern factory with great cathedral-like windows that flooded the shop floors with sunlight—and then with Ford’s Highland Park plant. p31 “Speed produces nothing in manufacturing,” Knudsen liked to say—which was one reason he eschewed the complicated time-and-motion studies of production gurus like William Taylor. “Accuracy is the only straight line to great production.”52 Knudsen was moving automobile production out of the workshop mentality and into modern manufacturing. p33 The experts call it “flexible mass production”: a manufacturing process that allows for constant modification and change. This was the second revolution William Knudsen introduced to the auto industry, after the continuous assembly line he developed at Ford. Flexible mass production was embodied in the idea of the annual model. Billy Durant’s consumer-driven car culture was about to become reality.55 p35 Sloan was blunt about why. “We want to make you dissatisfied with your current car,” he told Chevy customers, “so you will buy a new one.” But there was a more profound truth underlying flexible mass production. Companies could now change how a product was made—or even introduce a new product—in rapid response to either changing market demands or to new technology, without breaking a single stride. This was true whether they were making cars or radios—or later, tanks, planes, and radar sets. p36 Centralization equals regimentation. Decentralization equals free enterprise. By 1937 the Sloan-Knudsen formula had saved GM. In three years it would have to save the world. p49 Then and later, Kaiser never could understand businessmen who shunned dealing with the government. He quickly discovered that government contracts were often also the longest running. p53 Although ninety-six men would die in accidents and cave-ins, the thousands who worked on the dam were grateful for a job at a competitive wage when tens of thousands of others were on relief. p54 Ickes wanted every federal safety regulation to be rigorously enforced; Kaiser patiently showed him that doing so would mean the dam would never be finished on time, let alone on budget. p54 Kaiser struck back—not by confronting Ickes directly but by having a pamphlet with color illustrations drawn up, called “So Hoover Was Built,” celebrating the heroic achievements of the Six Companies and its engineers and employees, which Kaiser intended to mail en masse to congressmen and members of the media. p56 Garfield suggested setting aside part of the employees’ paychecks to provide health insurance in case of injury or illness, which would also extend to their families. Kaiser enthusiastically agreed, and the result was the creation of the Kaiser Health Plan—the biggest and most successful private health insurance plan ever established by a private business, which is still up and running today. p62 But the Futurama was unique. It was the brainchild of Norman Bel Geddes, America’s foremost industrial architect and a former Broadway set designer. He had come up with the idea after working with J. Walter Thompson on an ad campaign featuring a futuristic city built around the automobile. p68 Pratt had done his level best to give advice on how to coordinate industry with military needs for war materiel. His reward was being vilified in the left-wing press as a corporate shill, while New Dealers attacked the entire WRB as a haven of fascistic “Wall Streeters and economic royalists.” Interior Secretary Harold Ickes denounced the idea of giving business a major role in organizing for war, calling it an affront to democracy itself. p71 Despite a decade of depression and high unemployment, the U.S. economy was still the most productive in the world. Its steel mills had produced an impressive 28 million long tons of steel—although that was less than half of what it produced in 1929. Nonetheless, America still produced more steel, aluminum, oil, and cars than all the world’s great powers put together—almost three million cars in 1939 alone. p71 Likewise a year’s production of aluminum, the primary material for making modern warplanes, would have to rise to a minimum of 750 million pounds. The industry’s twin giants, Alcoa and Reynolds, were making less than a quarter of that amount. p72 America’s merchant shipbuilding industry on both coasts was producing four ships a month, when it would need to launch hundreds. p73 In private, Harry Hopkins was even more apocalyptic. “Democracy must wage total war against totalitarian war,” he wrote in a secret memo for the president. “It must exceed the Nazi in fury, ruthlessness, and efficiency.” p74 Abroad, his agents bribed South American officials to keep certain strategic materials such as tungsten out of German hands. p79 He couldn’t get a straight answer because they were waiting for him to tell them what the American economy could produce, and how much. If the country was going to make itself seriously ready for war, neither the politicians nor the generals nor the admirals were willing to take the lead. American business and industry would have to figure it out on their own. p86 British and French military planners all assumed American-made planes and other equipment could help to close the gap with the Germans. In 1938 alone, their orders would total some $350 million—with $84 million in aircraft engines.2 It was five times what the Army Air Corps was ordering. p87 Meanwhile, French and British purchasing agents were ordering machine tools for their own factories, some $100 million worth, while another $138 million was spent providing machine tools for American factories to fill their orders. It was equal to the entire machine tool output of the country the previous year. p88 The evacuation of Dunkirk marked the next turning point in America’s call to arms—the very week Knudsen arrived in Washington. The British army had left all its tanks, trucks, and field artillery pieces on the beach. Even rifles and machine guns were in desperately short supply. With a German invasion looming, Churchill confessed to one intimate that there might be fewer than seventeen tanks left in the entire British Isles. p92 Knudsen also insisted that a “letter of intent,” meaning an official War or Navy Department letter stating the government’s intention to do business with a particular firm before a formal contract was drawn up and signed, should be enough to get a company advance funds from their bank—and to protect the company’s out-of-pocket expenses in case the contract never went through. It was a practice he borrowed from the British, and critics would hound him for it, decrying the fact that he had abandoned the costly, time-consuming process of competitive bidding. But Knudsen sensed that the time for slow, deliberate action was over. The government had to be willing to work with those companies willing to work with it. p94 For all of 1941, one-third of all warplanes produced in the United States—and one-half of all tanks—would be slated to be sent to Great Britain. p95 Nelson was a little shocked at the Army’s intransigence regarding uniform buttons. It told him that it had to have horn or ivory for its uniform buttons, as in the First World War. Nelson pointed out an American company called Rochester Button was ready to make thousands of perfectly fine celluloid buttons, and that horn and ivory had to be imported from South America or Czechoslovakia—the latter now under Nazi rule. Horn or ivory, the Army said, and for the time being that was where things stuck. p101 But the old man was adamant. He was still in the throes of isolationist sentiment and strongly believed that the war in Europe was none of America’s business—and that any money used to prop up a tottering British Empire was money wasted. p105 The difference was that whereas the English Merlin was still made by hand, with workmen still shaping every part to fit each particular motor, Packard’s mass-production approach allowed relatively unskilled labor to do the same job three times faster. Indeed, one-third of Packard’s new employees were women who had never set foot on a factory floor. p109 Describing those early days at NDAC later, he talked about being barraged by would-be defense contractors whose attitude was, “I’ve never done it before but I can do it again.” p111 The auto industry was the country’s biggest single employer, with one out of every twenty Americans employed directly or indirectly by its 850 companies.14 It had the biggest pool of mechanical and engineering talent—engineers who knew how to make rapid modifications in production and design, including machine tools. It was also an industry of associations, with closely knit ties binding its members together, p112 Here was a network that could mobilize talent, information, and resources from iron and steel to plate glass, copper, lead, leather, and motor oil, for the defense effort. p112 Knudsen also sensed that the auto industry was poised to be a model for the future of the American economy. Everywhere Knudsen looked, he saw an American industrial base woefully unprepared for the scale of demands that would be placed on it. He stunned one audience of politicians and businessmen at the Carleton Hotel by stating that the war effort was going to require a complete retooling of nearly every American factory over the next eighteen months.

Note:Parallel to data/AI decisions?

p115 By D-day almost one out of every five Michigan residents was involved in war work, and 70 percent of that work was confined to the four counties around metro Detroit, the heart of the auto industry.

Note:1 in 5 is almost low, really

p118 Out of nearly $100 billion worth of defense contracts, 70 percent went to America’s one hundred largest corporations, from Knudsen’s own General Motors, to Dow, DuPont, and General Electric. p120 Yet neither then nor later did Roosevelt ever sign on to the idea of taking full charge of the economy in order to prepare for war—or appointing an all-powerful “war production czar.” Perhaps he also instinctively grasped that the war mobilization effort was too big a task for one plan or person—that, in Eliot Janeway’s phrase, “a victory small enough to be organized is too small to be decisive.” p126 No one wanted Britain to starve—but no one dared to suggest loaning Britain the money it needed. They had tried that in the First World War, and it had been a disaster. Something more systematic was needed, something that would allow American factories to fill British orders without the British paying dollars for it. And so the idea of Lend-Lease was born. p126 Starting in December, the federal government would place all orders for munitions made in the United States. If the Army and Navy needed them, the United States would keep them. If Washington decided that the defense of the country was better served lending them to Great Britain, then “we could either lease or sell the materials, subject to mortgage, to the people on the other side,” as Roosevelt explained in a press conference on the seventeenth. Roosevelt compared the transaction to lending a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire. It’s still our hose, he explained. We are just letting the one who needs it most use it first. p129 Knudsen must have smiled. The phrase “arsenal of democracy” was his.55 It was already happening. Some 50,000 planes, 130,000 engines, 380 Navy ships, 9,200 tanks, and 17,000 heavy guns, plus rifles, helmets, and clothing for an army of 1.4 million men, were being made or under contract to be made. Plant facilities to arm another 2 million, and get a two-ocean navy of 800 ships out to sea, were on their way, as well. p132 All the same, an operation of this size required an experienced superintendent. It was a typical early morning Kaiser phone call that got Edwin W. Hannay, a famed West Coast shipyard manager and troubleshooter for several shipmakers during the First World War, out of bed and out of retirement. Henry’s son Edgar was on the line. “Can you come back to work for us?” he asked. Hannay agreed and made some calls of his own. He pulled together sixteen friends and former colleagues, who then brought in their friends. In no time a skeleton force was ready to get to work.6 This was fleshed out with the men who had worked with Kaiser before on every project from Boulder Dam and Grand Coulee to the Oakland–San Francisco Bridge, and who were used to doing the impossible for the boss.

Note:Skills base

p138 In February, Winston Churchill had made the stirring statement “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” But which tools? Thus far it had been pretty much ad hoc guesswork. Knudsen’s people had to get ahead of the problem by figuring out what Britain needed and when, and what America could be expected to produce and when—all without derailing America’s own effort to arm itself. p138 The result was the Big Book, a massive compilation of production figures and forecasts for everything from tanks and gas masks to brass for artillery shells and cotton for uniforms. Knudsen and the others had for the first time a comprehensive picture of what America needed to fight a modern war, what it would take to make it, and how much it would cost—roughly $50 billion. p139 As for Congress, its defense authorization for 1942 was stuck at $10.5 billion. That was barely 1 percent of what might be needed. p139 The fiercest obstacle the war-production effort faced, however, wasn’t Washington or the military or even the Axis. It was the labor unions. p140 By March 1941, at a time when airplane production was at a vital premium, there were no fewer than fifteen strikes at aircraft or aircraft-related companies.31 p146 That was the magic number: eighteen months. That’s how long Knudsen estimated it would take for American business and industry to make the arsenal of democracy a reality. One year to build new plants and retool the old ones, six months for conversion. p146 Why so long to get started? Because American assembly lines could not get moving until they had the machine tools for the job. p147 This means some machine tools are not much bigger than a bread box; others are the size of a house. In 1940 eighty-seven were necessary to make the average propeller shaft, from lathes to cut the shaft metal to machines to bore it and grinders to finish the job. p147 In 1940 almost every machine tool in America came from two hundred firms. Most had barely one hundred employees; some, fewer than fifty. p148 K. T. Keller came to Kahn on a Wednesday looking to build Chrysler a new machine shop five hundred feet wide and two-thirds of a mile long. Kahn had the plans ready by Friday morning, and ninety days later the building was going up. p149 One of the biggest and most important was a giant machine for boring giant naval guns. Geier had seen one in action in Germany in the thirties, and secretly bought one in defiance of Nazi export rules. He managed to smuggle it out of the Third Reich, piece by piece, through Switzerland and Italy and then reassembled it in Cincinnati. It was this mammoth machine, the pride of Geier’s factories, that would bore the great sixteen-inch guns for battleships like the Iowa, New Jersey, and Missouri. p151 Big Labor came up with another issue to fight about, unionization of all defense contractors. It found a firm new ally in the National Defense Mediation Board, whose members consistently backed every effort to enforce unionization, including walkouts by labor. Overall, 1941 was a near-record year of strikes and disputes, with more than 3,500 of them, costing 23 million man-days of labor—enough p153 the same time, the first round of curtailment of civilian production had begun. First came the auto industry, with a drastic cut by more than half. Then in October nonessential construction was ordered halted, to divert materials to defense plant construction. On October 21 manufacturers had to stop using copper in almost all civilian products, followed by sharp cuts in refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, metal office furniture, and similar durable goods. p162 Henderson ordered the complete cessation of new car and truck manufacturing as of January 15. The 450,000 civilian vehicles now in the carmakers’ inventory and the other quarter million still on the assembly line were not to be sold through dealers, Henderson decreed. Instead, they would be rationed out to high-priority users like doctors, hospitals, fire and police departments, and the like. p166 So with Jones pushing and the War Department pulling, Knudsen got his appointment—the only civilian in history to be made a three-star general. p167 Germany was already spending one-quarter of its national product on munitions, and two-thirds of all industrial investment, but Hitler sensed they were falling behind in the race to the production finish line. p167 As armaments minister, Speer had the formal power to order which factories would produce what, and to move materials and workers to whatever industry he believed needed them—everything, in fact, that people in Washington wanted for an American production czar. p169 Someone would have to rebuild America’s premier Pacific naval base, and get it ready for war on a scale no one had seen before. It was an ideal job for the Six Companies and Henry Kaiser. p175 With the coming of war, Somervell was now looking at an army that was going to expand from a projected one million in 1942 to seven million by the end of 1943. He also figured that the Army’s supply of tanks, trucks, and planes would rise to 50 percent of its Victory Plan goals by the end of 1942. p177 The first telegram he got back was at 11 P.M. that night, from Steve Bechtel. “We are studying the problem tonight,” it read, “and will give you our sincere best judgment tomorrow.” Steve put his younger brother Kenneth in charge of the task force and gave him twenty-four hours to plan out the yard and find a place to build it. On March 4, Ken showed his brother the results and Steve wired back to Washington. Nine days later the Bechtels had their contract. The place they had found was in Marin County, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, near Sausalito. It was a stretch of deserted land along the shore of Richardson Bay belonging to the Northwest Pacific Railroad. The railroad leased the land to the Bechtels, the Marin County Board agreed to the terms, and on March 28—little more than three weeks after Vickery’s telegram—bulldozers broke ground. p186 Assembly-line production had come to America’s shipyards. By August the prefab yard had 2,500 workers, with 42 women welders and burners—and ships were ready that were 95 percent preassembled.30 The time it took to launch a Liberty ship plummeted, while the man-hours required fell by almost half. The Kaiser yards had already found ways to reduce the time to build a ship from 220 days to 105. Now Clay Bedford was pointing the way to 50 days or less. p187 32 On the twenty-third the Joseph Teal was finished in just ten days. p190 Then, at 3:27 P.M. on November 12, the Robert E. Peary was launched, just four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-six minutes after laying the keel. p193 Unlike his predecessor, he would help them use conversion to a wartime economy as a tool for taking power away from businessmen and “the blind chances of an allegedly free competitive marketplace,” and investing in “purposeful, detailed, and total economic planning by the national government”—even, as one later enthusiast put it, international government. p196 But Nelson in his quiet way persisted, defying newspaper columnists, congressional investigators, outraged labor leaders, Army and Navy brass, and furious businessmen who thought they were being shortchanged or overburdened by Nelson’s system—and sometimes both. p198 Early on, the Truman Committee pushed hard to abolish them, or at least enforce a rule that “no person shall be employed in any position in which he will make decisions directly affecting the affairs of his own company”—which could mean Bill Batt could offer no advice on the manufacturing of vital ball bearings, even though his former company was one of their biggest producers, p200 Before 1942 was out, the United States was producing more war materiel than all three Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—combined. p203 Even more amazing, the coming of war forced an unprecedented cooperation among these aviation competitors. Old rivals shared aerodynamic and engineering data, exchanged information on tooling and equipment, and drew together a $250 million stockpile of parts and materials under the management of the Aircraft War Production Council, to provide emergency help to anyone who needed it. Douglas helped Consolidated build its B-24s at a plant in Tulsa, and helped Boeing build B-17s at its newest Long Beach plant. Lockheed did the same for Boeing at its Vega plant in Burbank. p206 Donald Nelson knew this. He also knew what Knudsen had foreseen: that the key to winning this war of mass production was America’s free enterprise industrial system. That meant keeping the drive for war production as voluntary as possible, so that the right incentives—which included the profit motive—found the right people to do the job. That also meant keeping the civilian economy as strong as possible, something that his critics in the War Department sometimes didn’t seem to understand. p207 When the Army pushed for funding only those synthetic rubber facilities that produced for military use, Nelson had to explain that without tires for autos, buses, and trucks, none of those defense workers would be getting to work. Likewise with gasoline and aluminum and other critical materials: Unless civilian producers, often the smaller businesses, could count on their share, the entire infrastructure on which the military counted for its planes, tanks, and machine guns would slow down and grind to a halt. p207 In 1939 the United States had only one producer making some 327 million pounds a year. p207 By October 1943 the output had reached the point—2.25 billion pounds—that one WPB official was quoted as saying America had aluminum “coming out of our ears.” By then American companies held 42 percent of the world’s aluminum manufacturing capacity. p212 It had three things going for it. The first was it was in the middle of nowhere, where land was cheap and space plentiful: “Think big,” Kaiser liked to tell his men, “don’t allow operations to be cramped.” For a trifling sum, he was able to snap up two thousand acres of hog farms and orange and walnut groves. p212 Third, labor in Fontana was cheap. People were desperate for a better job than picking oranges. p213 The scale of the achievement became clear when weighed against the WPB’s other big steel plant venture, with U.S. Steel, in Geneva, Utah. Its builders had almost a year head start on Kaiser, yet Kaiser finished almost five months ahead of them. Geneva cost the government $220 million. Fontana came in at less than half that. p215 The American auto industry, a business bigger than the economies of every country except Germany, Russia, and Great Britain, was moving to full-time war production. p216 When Saginaw Steering Gear started making the Army’s .50-caliber machine gun, engineer Bud Doerfner saw that the holes bored in the barrel for ventilation were elliptical. He told the Army that if they were round, he could drill three in a single operation instead of one. The Army tested it, and told him to go ahead. Soon Doerfner had a multi-spindle drill cutting ten at a time instead of three. In March 1942, Saginaw Steering Gear delivered 28,728 machine guns instead of the 2,000 they had first promised. p217 In the end, American automakers would produce 50 percent of all aircraft engines, 35 percent of aircraft propellers, 47 percent of all machine guns, 87 percent of all aerial bombs, 80 percent of tanks and tank parts, one-half the diesel engines for ships, submarines, and other naval craft; not to mention 100 percent of U.S. Army trucks, half-tracks, and other vehicles. p217 There were product committees, machine tool committees, labor committees including labor representatives, methods committees whose members met at each other’s plants to see and discuss new ways of saving time and labor.23 There were advisory committees to the Army Ordnance Department, the Army Air Forces, and after 1943 the Armed Service Force. Everywhere there was volunteering of information, sharing of materials, pooling of resources and methods. The voluntarist model was so useful that soon aircraft manufacturers on the West Coast copied it, and then on the East Coast; while the British sent an industry research group to study how it achieved such prodigious results. p219 All in all, the Ford Motor Company would produce more war materiel than the entire economy of Mussolini’s Italy. p225 “I was elated by the certainty that the Germans had neither the facilities nor the conception” to mass-produce planes in this way, Sorensen remembered.43 It would turn the tide of airpower in the future.

Note:Step change

p229 Sorensen was learning this was a more complicated process than even he had imagined. The first thing he needed, he told Consolidated, was the blueprints for the plane. Consolidated had to inform him there weren’t any—certainly not any complete set. Consolidated engineers largely made them up as they went along, modifying here and incorporating new elements and changes there, as field tests and new Army specifications came along. p235 Two years after it had first flown, the B-24’s design was constantly evolving. Changes demanded by Air Force command based on battlefield conditions, or new discoveries by Mac Laddon and his team on how to improve performance, forced modifications in how the plane was made, down to the tiniest subsection. Ford was learning that they barely had time to install their new expensive steel dies before they had to be junked. That meant not only new dies but changing the machine tools to fit them, and often a different jig to handle the altered part. That first year, the Air Force ordered 575 master changes alone—and all the while everyone was wondering where Ford’s B-24s were. p238 “I think we should freeze the designs for a while so we can get some airplanes,” Knudsen said. Trying to stay up to the minute on specifications at the factory end only meant being late on every plane and design. “What I think we should do to keep abreast of things is build the airplanes first and add whatever improvements are necessary at some place especially equipped to do that.”31 Patterson thought about it, and agreed. It marked the start of the Air Force’s field modification program. p246 This time the public reaction was overwhelming. Newspapers across the country denounced the strike as unpatriotic and vile. When Roosevelt threatened to strip the draft deferments from every mine worker, Lewis decided to halt the strike after three days, but the damage to organized labor was done. The Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Labor Disputes Act, ordering a thirty-day notice for all strikes and ending the secret ballot for union membership. On June 25, Roosevelt vetoed it. It took the Senate exactly eleven minutes to override him. p246 As Knudsen had observed, labor trouble, far more than business foot-dragging or profiteering, had been the bane of war production. Work stoppages in 1943 alone cost 13.5 million man-days: almost triple the man-days lost in 1942. On December 27 a threatened railroad strike forced the Army to intervene for real. It seized control and ran the nation’s rail system for more than three weeks before the strike ended. p248 In 1943, American war production was twice that of Germany and Japan combined. p249 It was also General Motors who discovered that eight Liberty ships could carry the same number of two-and-a-half-ton trucks disassembled as one hundred could carry fully assembled. All you needed was a place to do the assembling: A few portable cranes, battery chargers, a couple of portable Quonset huts or even tents, a poured concrete floor, and a tractor and trailer or two worked fine. And with 40,000 employees, GM’s Overseas Operations Division was perfectly poised to deliver and assemble whatever American forces needed, almost on the front line. p250 It was not until June 30, 1943, that the Army finally took over the operation. By then the ultimate capitalist corporation, General Motors had delivered 20,380 trucks to the Red Army. p254 The one thing Knudsen and the Army could not do, of course, was order General Industries or any other company to make the things they needed. The lines of Washington’s control over the economy had been carefully drawn. It intervened to affect the consumption of civilian goods, some of which were rationed, such as meat and gasoline and coffee, and others made according to their place in the system of priorities. It also regulated wages and, to a more limited degree, prices. Production, however, remained an entirely voluntary process. The War Production Board could and did order companies not to produce things: new cars, for instance, and refrigerators and other heavy durable goods. It never told anyone what to make. That was left to the imagination of American business. p258 War production had triggered the greatest mass migration in American history. At least 20 million Americans left their homes to find work in the new and old plants. At the end of the war, 15.3 million of them were living someplace other than where they were the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. p259 If business profits rose during the war, labor’s wages rose much more—an average of 70 percent.33 It was either a very happy or very complacent worker who wouldn’t get himself and his family on the road for wages like that. p263 By July 1944, 36 percent of all workers in prime defense contractors were female. p264 In 1943 an Army newsreel team commanded by Captain Ronald Reagan spotted her and asked her to pose for some pictures. The photos of her in Yank magazine caused such a sensation that the Army used her as a model for several more shoots. After the war Norma Jean took her photos to a modeling agency and moved to Hollywood. There she dyed her hair blond and took a new name: Marilyn Monroe. p265 Katherine Archibald, a liberal sociologist, went to work in the Moore Dry Dock in Oakland hoping to find a nation united in the war effort. Instead she found a boiling cauldron of tensions. Men resented women, whites disdained blacks, old-settler African Americans resented the new “brothers,” and the native Californians hated them all. p268 The battles of Coral Sea and Midway had proved the value of the aircraft carrier as the fleet’s primary capital ship—even as battle losses shrank that force from six to four. At the same time, both the British and American fleets in the Atlantic saw the value of carriers for convoy protection. From Atlantic to Pacific, the push was on for carriers—not just the 34,800-ton monsters of the Essex class like Yorktown and Intrepid, but smaller carriers that could be built faster to fill the gap.3 The result was the so-called Independence class of less than 15,000 tons, which could carry nine TBM Avenger torpedo planes and twenty-four new Hellcat fighters, compared to the nearly one hundred aircraft on a Yorktown or Bunker Hill. p283 As 1944 began, 70 percent of America’s manufacturing was focused on wartime production. American factories were building a plane every five minutes, and producing 150 tons of steel every minute. Shipyards were launching eight aircraft carriers a month, including Kaiser’s baby flattops, and fifty merchant ships a day. p284 There is in America a spirit that drives people to want to do different; they are just ornery enough that they will not stay where the rule was laid down. In that I believe you will find the greatest hope for America’s future. p286 Knudsen in turn told him his impressions of the captured Japanese planes he had seen when he stopped in Brisbane, including the much-vaunted Japanese Zero. He had been less than impressed. The planes struck him as “standard construction, but generally lighter than ours”—and the products of a Japanese industrial base that was still stuck, like the German’s, in a handcraft tradition. p288 Knudsen learned that was not going to be easy. What amazed him, touring aircraft plants on both coasts and the Midwest, was how confident everyone was that America was going to win, and win without effort. He feared it was beginning to affect production schedules, as both managers and workers were unwilling to work flat-out—in fact, people were feeling more and more free to take time off. The very success he and his colleagues had achieved, of making war production look simple and straightforward, had its downside. p293 And so Wells and his engineers worked at their drafting tables, so intensely that by the time the Army sent out a formal request for a larger four-engined bomber, on January 29, 1940, nearly every feature had been worked out at Boeing a year beforehand, only months after Lindbergh’s secretive monologue in the bleachers at West Point. p298 All in all, the B-29 was turning out to be the most massive project in the history of aeronautics. It was also, in the words of historian Tom Collison, “the most organizational airplane ever built.”34 American business had never before been asked to undertake an industrial project of this size or cost or complexity. Even the Manhattan Project turned out to be cheaper. Boeing and its partners set up a Liaison Committee to supervise the entire effort, which included representatives of the biggest of Boeing’s one hundred major subcontractors: Chrysler, Goodyear, Hudson Motors, McDonnell of St. Louis, and Republic Aviation. Major government agencies agreed to stay away. Production and development of the B-29 was left to American business and the Army. Note | p298 Relevnce to managibg thiss today

p300 The engines alone required over nine hundred separate engineering changes from the time the first prototype rolled out until the first flight. p303 For engineers at Boeing, it meant an agonizing return to the drawing board. For Ed Wells, it meant personal heartbreak—and possibly the end of the line for his magnificent superbomber. More than twenty months after the first plane was ordered and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, Wells still hadn’t come up with a B-29 ready for safe flying. Already the word from Washington was that officials wanted to stop the program before any more money was wasted—and any more lives lost. The Truman Committee decided the B-29’s engines were defective and substandard, and no more money should be spent. The president himself hinted perhaps it was time to pull the plug on the Superfortress. p328 Some 334 B-29s lumbered into the air and made the fifteen-hundred-mile flight to Japan, arriving just after night had settled over an unsuspecting Tokyo. The effect was terrifying. In LeMay’s words, “It was as though Tokyo had dropped through the floor of the world and into the mouth of hell.”27 Two thousand tons of incendiaries rained down on the city from every direction, burning out sixteen square miles of the city and destroying more than a quarter million buildings. Some 83,000 people died in the conflagration that set entire blocks alight and boiled away the water in Tokyo’s canals. p334 When Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill first met at Tehran in 1943, and Stalin raised his glass in a toast “to American production, without which this war would have been lost,” it was a stunning tribute from the leader of world Communism to the forces of American capitalism. p334 And the United States converted the least of all its economic output to the war effort, just over 47 percent in 1944 compared to almost 60 percent for Britain and more for Germany and the Soviet Union, only to outproduce everyone else put together, including Japan. p334 Total economic production in the United States had doubled;* wages rose by 70 percent. American workers were twice as productive as their German counterparts, and four times more productive than the Japanese. Later critics would point out that those numbers were no different before the war than they had been during it.