McNair Paper Number 50, Chapter 13, August 1996

No country kept a higher percentage of its labor force in armaments production and out of the fighting services than did the United States. In Germany, 1 in 4.5 men was a fighter, in Japan one in five, in the United Kingdom, one in five, but in the United States, it was one in six. No other country expanded its civilian production as much. In fact, our major allies severely contracted civilian production as did Germany after 1942. In the United States, manufacturing for the Armed Forces accounted for 59 percent of all manufacturing, but in the United Kingdom it was 66 percent. So rich was the United States that it could tolerate labor strikes. There were 3,000 labor strikes in 1942; in 1943, the number of man-days lost to strikes increased three fold. to 13.5 million lost man-days; and in 1944, the number of strikes increased (but fewer workers went out). By mid-August 1945, 9.6 million man-days had been lost in that year, which, had the war gone on, would have been the worst year of the war. Germany and the Soviet Union had no similar problems, although Britain did abide strikes. (Note 1)

Another useful comparison with the mobilization efforts of other belligerents is in the employment of women in industry. Rosie the Riveter is a well known icon in the United States, and many millions of women were indeed employed in the munitions industry. In early 1942, industry employed 19,000,000 American women between the ages of 20 and 60, and by the next year women made up a third of the aircraft production work force-almost a half million women. (Note 2) By July 1944, 36.9 percent of the workers in industries handling prime contracts were women. . (Note 3) One author wrote, the "margin of victory in terms of the nation's labor force proved to be completely feminine." By October 1943 there were 164,700 women at work in the shipyards with comparable figures in other industries. In 1943, at Willow Run, the world's largest aircraft manufacturing factory, 38 percent of the work force were women. (Note 4) These percentages were not extraordinary by comparison to other nations at war, however. In the Soviet Union and Britain only 30 percent of the women aged 14 and over were "at home;" in the United States, it was twice that percentage. (Note 5) In the Soviet Union females accounted for 38 percent of the labor force in 1940, and 53 percent in 1942. In that country, 33 percent of the welders, 33 percent of the lathe operators, 40 percent of the stevedores and 50 percent of the tractor drivers were women. In the United Kingdom, 80 percent of the total increase in the labor force between 1939 and 1943 were women who had not previously been employed outside the home; about 2.5 million women workers came into the United Kingdom labor force during the war. (Note 6) Germany also employed women in industry at a high rate. German women made up 51.1 percent of the civilian labor workforce in 1944. The female German percentage was higher than in the United States throughout the war. But it also began at a much higher level-German women made up 37.4 percent of the civilian labor force before the war. At the peak women in the United States comprised 35.4 percent of the labor force (up from 25.8 percent before the war). (Note 7)

At least three of the belligerents in the war outmobilized the United States. The United States had greater technological capabilities, was more industrialized to begin with, and was not bombed or invaded. But a higher, and in some cases a much greater, percentage of the belligerents' population was either in the armed services or producing munitions. Germany for example had a population of 78 million and during the war years had 17.9 million in their military, of whom 3,250,000 were either killed in action or missing. The United States with a population of 129,200,000 had 16.4 million in its military services, losing 405,000. Germany also had another 2 million civilians killed in the war, not counting those 300,000 murdered by the government. The direction of the grand strategies is apparent in these number. While the German military was about the size of that of the United States, the United States outproduced the Germans in trucks seven to one (2.4 million to 350,000). Germany often lugged its supplies around on horse drawn wagons. The United States, because it fought as much of an air war as an infantry war, outproduced the Germans five to one in bombers, 97,810 to 18,225. Moreover, American bombers had much greater range, much more carrying capacity, and were better armed and better armored. Even in fighter aircraft, the Germans were outproduced two to one, and in transport aircraft almost seven to one. (Note 8) The United States spent six times as much as did the Germans on munitions per man in 1942, 3.5 times in 1943, and 2.5 times in 1944, again reflecting the different grand strategies. (Note 9)

What did the tidal wave of munitions mean in the end? At Leningrad in January 1944, the Soviet Union, which had received thousands of trucks, thousands of tank-killer aircraft, hundreds of thousands of tanks, and millions of tons of essential raw materials from the United States in Lend-Lease aid, outnumbered Germany in tanks and self propelled guns by six to one. In the Crimea in March 1944, the ratio was 12.5 to 1. In April 1945, on the Oder/Neisse line, far from the Soviet logistic base and inside Germany's it was 5.5 to 1. At the time of Operation Overlord, the Western Allies, on their front, outnumbered Germany 8.5 to 1 in aircraft (the United States by itself 4.5 to one), and within days after 6 June 1944 the Allies outnumbered the Germans in tanks 4.5 to 1. In April 1945 the allied superiority in aircraft was greater than 20 to 1. (Note 10) As Clausewitz wrote, superiority in numbers is the first principle of war, and in every dimension that mattered the United States and its allies swamped their enemies logistically. The war production machine had become so powerful that the United States could launch two massive amphibious assaults both involving thousands of ships in June 1944: the assault on Normandy and later in the month the attack on Saipan.

By 1943, however, Germany was still the most highly mobilized of the powers in terms of its ratio of armed services to total population. However, it had a smaller percentage of its population in industry (Germany, however, did use 7.5 million slave laborers and prisoners of war, but the Soviet Union also employed prisoners-some 4.5 million of them). The Soviet Union was more fully mobilized than the United States or the United Kingdom, with 76 percent of its net national product going to the war. The United States topped out at about 40 percent, but the United States had a vastly greater national product, and it grew by 50 percent during the war, whereas the Soviet Union's gross national product fell to 66 percent of its high in 1940 and never reached its 1940 level by the end of the war. In Germany the gross national product grew by 16 percent between 1939 and 1943, but it had been stagnant in 1940 and grew only 2 percent in 1941 and another 3 percent in 1942. No state on either side pushed a greater percentage of its people into war work or the armed forces than did the Soviet Union. (Note 11) The result of Soviet economic mobilization and Lend-Lease is that the Soviets expended about $60 billion worth of munitions against Germany on the eastern front, whereas Germany expended $50 billion. On the western front, however, the United Kingdom and United States expended $100 billion versus the German and Italian $40 billion. (Note 12)

There should be no doubt, therefore, that United States industrial production in World War II was no miracle. United States production in World War II was about what one should have expected given the size of the prewar technological-industrial base, the population size (three times that of Britain, nearly twice that of Germany, and greater than that of the Soviet Union after Hitler's conquests in 1941). In the face of allied bombing and sea blockade, and with her troops scattered from the north of Norway to the Pyrenees, and from the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean to the Caucasus, Germany increased its productivity by 25 percent between 1943 and 1944-a percentage that exceeded that in the United States. The Soviet Union lost 40 percent of its most productive territory and tens of millions of its people but still produced at a furious pace. Great Britain, while suffering bombing and rocket attacks, produced more tanks, ships (but not submarines), and airplanes than Germany, with about 60 percent of Germany's population. Paul Koistinen argues that when viewed in terms of "prewar potential and when compared with other belligerents, America's World War II munitions production effort was not outstanding." (Note 13)

Koistinen assembles productivity statistics to make his case. The United States, even mired in the depression in the period 1936 to 1938, manufactured almost one-third of the world's products (32.2 percent). The United States outproduced Germany about three times (10.7 percent) and Japan almost ten times (3.5 percent). Taking the United States prewar productivity in terms of production per man-hour as the standard and giving it a value of 100, the following chart indicates the relative productivity ranking of World War II foes.

Pre War War ('35-'38) (1944) All Manufacturing Munitions Country Industries Industries United States 100 100 Canada 71 57 United Kingdom 36 41 Soviet Union 36 39 Germany 41 48 Japan 25 17 One must not forget, however, that the United States was "almost alone in increasing rather than diminishing consumer output during the war."(Note 14) To reiterate the point, all belligerents fiercely produced munitions during the war, not just the United States. America possessed advantages that none of the other warring states had. Its output, while noteworthy, was what a prewar analyst might have expected given the size of the country, its educated population, the status of its technology, the abundance of its raw materials, the quality of its transportation network. In short:, America's munitions production in World War II was no "miracle."

Could the United States have been more productive? Could it have produced more munitions more rapidly at a lower cost? Almost certainly, although it is difficult to determine what difference it might have made by August 1945. Robert Cuff, a generally friendly critic of the U.S. World War II mobilization effort, argues that U.S. Federal Government administrative machinery was not up to the task of managing the economy for war from a central position: "administrative personnel and control coordinating machinery was rudimentary at best." More critically, "A cadre of political appointments loyal to the President is not the same as a higher civil service" and "Wartime Washington was awash with competing centers of administrative decision-making." Where were the weaknesses? "Those with governmental authority did not possess relevant knowledge and control in technical matters, while those with technical knowledge and industrial control did not possess governmental authority." In a war the objective was to "bind them together, not drive them apart" and to create cohesion when the country, before Pearl Harbor was attacked, "divided on the very issue of war itself." The uneasy alliance between business executives and bureaucrats was patched together by Roosevelt and senior government officials (often from the worlds of business or finance) much as Bernard Baruch had pieced together a government/business coalition in World War I. In World War II, as in World War I, the "alliance" was not designed to be permanent, and it did not last beyond the emergency. Given the structure of United States policy, it could not have lasted, and it was never cohesive. (Note 15)

That it worked as well as it did is perhaps the marvel. Paul Koistinen attributes this to the president's "genius for mastering the intricacies of power in American society." He argues further: "Political success depended upon handling an elitist reality within a context of populist ideology." Roosevelt "constantly finessed that blatant contradiction with great skill. His penchant for decisionmaking through conflict and competition stemmed less from an animus toward clear lines of authority and planning, and more from an instinctive and/or calculated tactics of obfusticating the elitist contours of power in America which he both accepted and supported. (Note 16) Certainly, if one blames Roosevelt for the industrial mobilization apparatus failures, one needs to give the president at least some credit for the prodigious (and sufficient) output. Perhaps Koistinen's praise is excessively fulsome, but nobody doubts that Roosevelt was the political master of his era, and the more one studies the subject of industrial mobilization, the more one becomes convinced that domestic politics drove this arena.