num_pages: 912
description: Today when the United States has possessed the world's greatest arsenal for more than half a century it is difficult to conceive how stunningly unprepared we were to fight World War II. But in 1939 when Hitler's tanks surged across Europe American war materiel was disastrously scant and most of it obsolete. President Franklin Roosevelt frantically trying to ready the nation for war called for America to build 50000 airplanes a year. Critics said his goal was not just unachievable but preposterous.The critics were wrong. By 1945 American factories had turned out a staggering 325000 aircraft. At the peak of production huge B-24 bombers were rolling off the assembly line at the rate of one an hour. The Axis powers might have fielded better trained soldiers tougher tanks or faster planes but it could not match American productivity. The United States simply buried its enemies with an industrial output such as the world had never seen. The scale of effort was titanic and the result historic. It turned the tide of the war and changed America forever. Small towns in the South and West swelled into cities overnight. Vast numbers of rural workers migrated to urban centers never to return. Women joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers. War mobilization almost doubled the nation's GDP within four years ended the Great Depression and set the United States on the road to the greatest prosperity it had ever known.Until now this crucial dimension of World War II has never been the subject of a comprehensive history. Maury Klein has delivered a brilliantly textured narrative of epic scope full of memorable charactersfrom the canny ever-improvising FDR to the captains of industry who overhauled their businesses on the fly to the real-life Rosie (and Ralph) the Riveters on countless shop floors. A Call to Arms captures when the United States was transformed from a depressed nation shrinking from global challenges to a superpower that bestrode the world.
language: English
title: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II
publisher: Bloomsbury Press