Thursday, 14 February 2019

dependable trucks and the army began planning the mechanization of its logistics train. One early student in the new (1924) Army Industrial College was Major Dwight D. Eisenhower (1933). As the Europeans sped down the road to war, Americans argued about preparedness for war (Charles A. Lindbergh and the America First Committee opposed the administration) and hindered efforts to build up the army and aid the western democracies. Some industries, notably automobiles, were very resistant to calls to convert their production lines to war production, and most did so only after the Pearl Harbor attack. Henry Ford continued his resistance, but Edsel took Ford Motor Company to war at Willow Run among other places. We learned from the failures of the Great War and did not create a supreme economic war council as our Allies did, but we did organize the effort using civilian administrative agencies run by a combination of federal bureaucrats (economists) and corporate executives and managers. The army and navy were not part of these agencies. Their overlapping and conflicting jurisdictional claims produced in-fighting and gridlock that was adjudicated by FDR himself, effectively providing him with overall control of the economic effort. Combining business, labor, and government managers without military officers meant only FDR could impose direction upon the military’s procurement efforts and the direction of economic activity. Following the 1940 National Emergency, we began enlarging the armed forces and producing new weapons, vehicles, aircraft, and vessels. The dictators, lulled by low depression era figures were amazed by how fast we expanded production and the volume of production – quite probably they did not really believe their informants. As examples, during the course of the war, the US produced over 11million rifles, two and half million military trucks, 141 aircraft carriers, and 35,000 heavy bombers (four engine) and 34 million tons of merchant shipping, to name just a few categories. By 1945 half of global war production was in the United States. Measuring this output, and the inputs necessary, were possible because we began collecting aggregate national economic data in calendar year 1929, just in time to measure the impacts of the Great Depression. The same

- 32:08 Volume 32 Number 08

Published by WW II History Round Table Written by Drs. Chris Simer and Connie Harris www.mn-ww2roundtable.org

# Welcome to the February session of the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War II History Round Table. Tonight’s speaker is

Welcome to the February session of the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War II History Round Table. Tonight’s speaker is to the February session of the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War II History Round Table. Tonight’s speaker is Jim Lacey, defense analyst and author of The Washington War and Keep From All Thoughtful Men, who will discuss the struggles between the advisors of President Franklin Roosevelt and the efforts to pay for the cost of War. Economists and operations research specialists do not normally make the history books and do not lead grand fleets but they help to provide the wherewithal of those grand fleets and armies. In World War II, the economists, military logisticians, and corporate managers serving in government worked, often with labor leaders, to achieve surprising feats of prepared- ness, production, and delivery of the tools of war. Our enemies woefully underestimated our abilities as economists, as well as the producers of weapons (toothpaste yes, guns no), just as they did our will to fight. Deriding America as a “mongrel nation” divided by Jim Crow lynchings and religious and ethnic bigotry, the dictators (Stalin as much as Mussolini, Hitler, or Tojo) were quite surprised at the degree to which Americans came together across the color line (and segregated units) to design, produce, deliver, and effectively use armies, air forces, and navies. The Great Depression spawned President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which did not cure the economy but did begin building the navy of 1942. After all, reasoned the anti- militarists, ships take time and money to build, then you break them up and build them again, another make-work project of the Civil (later Public) Works Administration. In 1934, Congress authorized (in the Trammel-Vinson Act) expansion of the navy to treaty-authorized levels. While the army was badly funded, it was able to experiment with tanks and mechanized forces and later received funding for aircraft design and for some production. Learning from the failures of mobilization and logistics in the American Expeditionary Force, the army especially began planning for the next deploy- ment overseas. The 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy’s agonizing passage over the “Lincoln Highway” from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco highlighted the need for