McNair Paper Number 50, Chapter 1, Notes, August 1996

1. Stephen Donadio, Joan Smith, Susan Mesner, Rebecca Davison, eds., The New York Public Library Book of Twentieth-Century Quotations (New York: Warner Books, 1992) 184. The Lend-Lease Act, a controversial law, authorized the president to send munitions or other supplies to any country that he deemed "vital to the defense of the United States." The law at once gave essential munitions and supplies (and raw materials) to our future allies to fight and also deprived the United States armed forces of needed materiel. Lend-Lease was a major part of United States grand strategy. The bill was passed by the Senate on 9 March 1941 and signed on 11 March by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Jerome Peppers argues that the "survival of many of the Allied nations is a direct result of [Lend-Lease] support." In operation 9 months before the United States entered the war, it "permitted the early war to be carried on in great proportion by the Allies since the United States was, by law, unable (unwilling?) to participate then." Well before the law was passed, the British (and French until their surrender) prodigiously purchased munitions. Until Lend-Lease was passed, however, the president could not send the British, by then almost flat broke, munitions without payment. Lend-Lease, Peppers asserts, often permitted the allies to do more than their share of the combat. It also created a high degree of allied munitions standardization, simplifying logistics and stimulated United States industrial production. Finally, it enhanced United States leverage over allied strategy and policy. Jerome G. Peppers Jr., History of United States Military Logistics 1935-1985 (Huntsville: Logistics Education Foundation Publishing, 1988), 24-25. See also David C. Rutenberg and Jane S. Allen, eds., The Logistics of Waging War: American Logistics 1774-1985 Emphasizing the Development of Airpower (Gunter Air Force Station: Air Force Logistics Management Center, 1986), 81-82. More than $48 billion worth of supplies were furnished, and aircraft and parts amounted to more than 16 percent of that total. About two-thirds of the total went to the British Empire, and most of that went to the United Kingdom.

2. Aircraft were probably the most valuable item in the Lend-Lease catalog. More than 15 percent of the aircraft in 1943 and more than 16 percent in 1944 (a year in which more than 96,000 aircraft were produced) were sent to allies. Over the war, 34,500 airplanes went overseas to the allies. But there is more to the story. During World War II, the United Kingdom produced about one-third the number of airplanes produced in the United States (about 100,000 airplanes), and most of the raw materials to build that number and much of the petroleum to fuel them came from the United States. See Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1946), 237.

3. Alan Milward writes, "The war was decided by the weight of armaments production" [War, Economy and Society: 1939-1945 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 75]. World War II was extraordinarily different from World War I, given that only 20 years separated them. A typical U.S. Army division in WW II required the support of 400,000 mechanical horsepower to keep it moving, versus 3,500 for one of General John J. Pershing's divisions, and a WW II division was less than half the size of a WW I similar unit. Considering the relative sizes, a WW II unit required 228 times the mechanical horsepower of the one 20 years earlier, thus the demand on industry in World War II was truly striking. See James L. Abrahamson, The American Home Front (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1983), 132.

4. Milward, 73-74. The United States "had advantages in terms of size of labour force and raw material supply that were shared only by the Soviet Union, or would have been had not so much of Russia been in German hands. Nor was there any active interference by the Axis powers in the workings of the United States economy apart from sinking its ships and killing its citizens, whereas a considerable amount of industrial plant in the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom were reduced to rubble by the German armed forces."

5. Paul A.C. Koistinen is probably the most assertive and cold-eyed revisionist dealing with U.S. WWII industrial production. Koistinen sees utterly nothing miraculous about American munitions manufacturing. See his "Warfare and Power Relations in America: Mobilizing the World War II Economy," in James Titus, ed., The Home Front and War in the Twentieth Century: The American Experience in Comparative Perspective: Proceedings of the Tenth Air Force Academy Military History Symposium (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1984), 101. For an opposing view, see in the same volume Robert D. Cuff's commentary on Koistinen's essay (Cuff, 112-115). Cuff explicates President Franklin D. Roosevelt's problems and cites the president's "political constraints inside and outside the administration." Given the nature of American business and politics, Roosevelt had little wiggle room in the late 1930s and into the early years of the war. "Private business decision-makers in the United States had already demonstrated unparalleled ability to retain prerogatives notwithstanding economic and wartime crises. And they continued to exact a price for their private performances. . . . Henry L. Stimson caught the essence of it in the early stages of American war mobilization: 'If you are going to try to go to war or to prepare for war in a capitalist county, you've got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work.'"

6. Milward, 40. The U.S. strategy for WW II was openly based on logistics. Roosevelt had no desire to squander lives as they had been wasted in WW I. He expected to win the war "through industrial production. The strategic assumption was that over a long period of time the United States must be ultimately victorious if war came to a battle of production."

7. Labor was generally discontented during the war, and there were numerous strikes despite no-strike pledges and legislation barring strikes. Wages rose from $.64/hour in 1939 to $.81/hour in 1944 and there were gains from overtime work, but taxes and "voluntary" bond allotments drove some of these wage gains down. At the height of the war, however, corporate profits (after taxes and in constant dollars) were up more than 100 percent (vice labor's 21 percent gain). Farmers income went up even more. Business, moreover, benefited from government building of factories and generous tax credits if it invested in plants (Koistinen, 106-109). Alan Milward estimates that industrial profits rose by 350 percent before taxation, and 120 percent after taxation while wages rose by only 50 percent before taxation and prices rose by 20 percent (Milward, 63-72).

8. Koistinen, 107-108. He argues the United States economic mobilization was fragmented because "public opinion was not only confused and contradictory during the war, but also manifested a callous, selfish and uncaring streak." Mobilization was also seen by Koistinen as inefficient because of Roosevelt's approach to administration and the special interests of the military and industry. "No doubt," he writes, "the vast majority of Americans accepted victory and security as primary goals during the war. But they divided acrimoniously along interest groups and class lines about how those aims could best be achieved" (Koistinen, 92). See also in the same volume John Morton Blum's essay, "United Against: American Culture and Society during World War II," 5-14. "During the war the American people united against those enemies in a measure greater than they united for any other wartime or post war purpose. That unity was never complete. Periodic exhortations to refresh it drew, as one cabinet officer put it, on 'nothing inspirational,' nothing 'Wilsonian'." Rather the American people responded to their visceral hatreds. . . . In the spring of 1942 surveys indicated that some seventeen million Americans 'in one way or another' opposed the prosecution of the war." After a series of defeats in the Pacific in 1942, "public morale sagged." Blum does assert, however, "American troops . . . united against their foe with less need for artificial stimulation than was the case with their countrymen at home." Blum is critical of the West Coast Japanese-American internment, because he believes it was racially based, and is even more critical of the antiblack outrages during the war, which cannot be rationalized by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Blum finds racism to be the basis of these abominations: the war did not create "antisemitism, anti-labor attitudes, segregation and hostility to racial minorities," but neither did "it subdue them." In the United States, as elsewhere, "the war at once aroused and revealed the dark, the naked, and shivering nature of man."

9. Jerome G. Peppers, Jr., History of United States Military Logistics, 1935-1985, A Brief Review (Huntsville: Logistics Education Foundation Publishing, 1988), 6. Peppers has written an orthodox history of World War II industrial mobilization. See also Nelson, 41. In 1940, according to Nelson, who was Chairman of the War Production Board, the Army had on hand 900,000 Springfield rifles from World War I and 1,200,000 British Enfields, all obsolete, and only 50,000,000 pounds (not tons) of fresh powder and 48,000,000 pounds left over from WW I.

10. Peppers, 19