McNair Paper Number 50, Chapter 10, Notes, August 1996

1. Wartime Production Achievements and the Reconversion Outlook (Washington, DC: War Production Board, 1945), 1-2. The labor force went up from 54 million to 64 million in the war, but most of the increase here came from the 9 million who were unemployed in 1939. There were about 12 million in the armed services at the manpower peak. Most of the 10 million increase in the labor force went into factories (the volume of manufacturing output tripled), and agriculture. The construction trades lost workers after 1942. The workweek increased from 37.7 hours per week in 1939 to 45.2 hours in 1944, and productivity increased sharply.

2. James L. Abrahamson, The American Home Front (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1983), 139-140. In Britain, real total personal consumption fell at the wartime nadir to 70 percent of the 1938-1939 level, whereas in the United States at the worst, in 1942, it was 5 percent higher than it had been in 1940. Thereafter it went up rapidly. In the United States, personal consumption never fell below 55 percent of a rapidly expanding gross national product, whereas in Britain it never topped 49 percent of a much smaller gross national product [Harold G. Vatter, The United States Economy in World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 20].

3. Herman M. Somers, Presidential Agency: The Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 140-158.

4. Jerome G. Peppers Jr., History of United States Military Logistics 1935-1985 (Huntsville: Logistics Education Foundation Publishing, 1988), 51-52.

5. Peppers, 51-52; Somers, 167-174.

6. Somers, 158-167. Byrnes was the manpower "czar" and on his own, with doubtful legal authorization, declared at the end of 1944 that essential industries make 30 percent of their men eligible for the draft. Many industrialists and their sponsors in the War Production Board and in other agencies complained, but Byrnes succeeded in enforcing his decision.