Category: War

We can just put up a bunch of numbers, but I don’t think that gives a full appreciation of scale. So first let’s hit some specific examples.

The B-24

This is a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. It was a mainstay bomber for the American bomber force during WW2. We produced and flew more B-24s than we did B-17s.

This is Willow Run. It was a B-24 plant built by Ford to mass produce the bomber. It ran its line 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and produced a complete B-24 every 63 minutes on average. At peak, it produced 100 bombers in just two days.

This plant produced less than half of the total B-24s we built during the war.

That is just one plant, producing one type of aircraft. We had literally thousands of plants like this, producing everything from tanks to field dressings.

The Liberty Ships

This is a Liberty Ship. It was a 14,000 ton cargo ship used for carrying essential war materials from the US to our allies and troops during WW2.

Let’s see how they come to be.

Pretty plain

Getting some shape and decking

Looking more like a ship…

Wait – where did you all come from?

America had 18 dry docks building Liberty Ships during WW2. Whereas typically riveted ships of the day took months to build, the Liberty Ships went from nothing to ready to launch in an average of 42 days in those dry docks. They were welded instead of riveted, and only built for a 5-year life span.

Forty-two days doesn’t seem very fast? Well I did say that was an average. The first Liberty ship took 230 days to complete. The fastest built ship took less than five days. That is a 14,000 ton ship from laying the keel to launch in less than five days.

We built 2,710 of these ships during the war.

The Garand

This is the M1 Garand. It was the primary standard issue battle rifle for the US military during WW2. The US Military was the only military to enter the war with a semi-automatic rifle as its primary battle rifle. During the war they were produced in two armories: Springfield Armory, Springfield Massachusetts and Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven Connecticut.

(EDIT: Since this keeps coming up in the comments, Yes the Garand was eventually built by other armories and companies, but not until after the end of WW2.)

These gentlemen are just two of the hundreds to thousands working to produce those fine rifles. At peak production, the Springfield Armory produced 122,001 rifles in a single month (January 1944). I’ll save you the math: that ends up being 164 rifles per hour for the month of January.

We went on to produce more than 4 million M1 Garand rifles during the war, accounting for about half the battle rifles the US produced for the war. Yes, I said that was HALF.

(We made another million and a half Garands after the end of the war.)

The Steel Pot

Here we have the M-1 helmet, or Steel Pot. As the name implies, it was a steel helmet for our soldiers and marines to wear. Can’t go to war without a helmet…

But wait, it wasn’t just the soldiers and marines wearing these guys. Our sailors had them, civil defense folks had them, anyone remotely close to being in a position of having anything to do with fighting got one.

Eventually, we made 22 million of them by 1945.

The Sherman

Here we have the M4 Sherman Tank. This was a medium tank, and the primary tank of the US Army during the war. It has received a lot of criticism both then and now as being too light for the competition, having an undersized gun and the liability of a gas burning (instead of diesel) engine. For all that, it was still a very successful tank. One of its best features… it lent itself to mass production.

Above is the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant. This plant was built by Chrysler for the US Army and was the country’s first government-owned, contractor-operated tank plant. Shown in the picture is the assembly of the M4A4 Sherman tanks.

This 113-acre plant built Lee, Sherman and Pershing tanks during the war and was only one of nine plants that built the Sherman. Between the nine plants, 49,234 Sherman tanks were built during the war, accounting for about half of the tanks the US produced during the war. Yeah, half again.

The Flat Tops

While we were building Liberty Ships as if we were breeding rabbits, we had to also build some fighting ships. To this end we built a whole bunch of shipyards.

Here we have a portion of the Boston Naval Yard in 1943. In the large slipway on the left you can see a monster of a ship. That would be the USS Iowa, a big-ass Battleship. We built eight battleships during WW2, and repaired several more that got a rough start at Pearl Harbor. But what I want to point out is the long flat guy in the center top. That is the USS Bunker Hill, an Essex Class Aircraft Carrier.

The Essex Class Carriers were a mainstay of the American Carrier Fleet. They were the Navy’s new wonder weapons, and the Navy could not possibly have enough of them. The Essex could carry 90–100 aircraft, had a crew of about 2600 and could take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.

The Navy built 24 of these babies during WW2.

Here is the Bunker Hill right after being launched on December 7th 1942, exactly one year after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It joined the fleet as one new carrier out of the 141 Aircraft Carriers we would build during the war. No, that number is not a typo. The United States built and launched 141 Aircraft Carriers of all classes during the war. To protect them we built 498 escort ships (Corvettes and Frigates)

(Above: Buckley Class Destroyer Escort, 148 built)

As well as 349 destroyers

(Above: Fletcher Class Destroyer, 175 Built).

We can go on and on, but the fact of the matter is the US was one giant, war-material-producing machine during WW2. We easily out-produced every other participant in the conflict, and at the same time created an entire NEW industry which produced the first nuclear chain reaction, uranium enrichment infrastructure, plutonium production plants and atomic reactors and weapons. We literally invented a new industry while building all this other stuff, creating massive industrial plants for the various type of chemical and physical uranium enrichment processes, as well as testing and production facilities for the weapons themselves.

EDIT:

Manhattan Project

I get the impression from some of the comments, that it is not fully appreciated what I mean by “we invented an entire new industry.” I am not claiming nuclear science is a purely American invention (though all the major breakthroughs for nuclear weapons occurred in the US, after the US took over as major facilitator of the project) I was speaking solely of the industrialization and application.

We invented a new industry. Not a weapon, or a bomb, or a lab to build a bomb. We built a whole new industrial infrastructure. Going into the details would be an article in an of itself, but allow me to give a couple examples.

Above is the K-25 Facility at Oak Ridge Tennessee. At the time of its completion it was the largest building in the world (at 1.64 million square feet of floor space, and 97.5 million cubic feet of volume) beating out the newly completed Pentagon in Washington DC (also built during the war). Its entire purpose was to leverage the processes of gaseous diffusion to enrich uranium hexafluoride and separate out precious U235 from U238 for the use in nuclear weapons. Construction of the plant began before proper gaseous diffusion barriers were even designed and proven out, because we wanted to go as quickly as possible. At peak it employed 25,000 construction workers (just to build, not operate the plant). The site was chosen in July of 1943. A new bridge had to be constructed to get the massive amounts of building materials to the new site. A dedicated power plant was also built. First steel beams were laid in place in January of 1944, it began operations in February of 1945. Just over a year to build the largest building in the world, with all the vacuum pumps, plumbing and power to put in place a whole new industrial processes never before done anywhere. What is gaseous diffusion you might ask? Well it is a processes were by differences in pressure a porous barrier is used to separate out heavier portions of a gaseous mixture from lighter ones. Using this processes to purify uranium hexafluoride provides a mere fraction of a fraction of a percent concentration per stage. The solution…. was to build literally THOUSANDS of stages of diffusion in this monster of a plant. And that is exactly what we did.

There were a ton of technical and industrial challenges to scaling up this processes, so luckily we were developing 3 separate enrichment processes all at once.

This is a device called an Calutron. It is basically a giant mass spectrometer.

This is the Y-12 “Electromagnetic Isotope Separation Plant”. Construction began on this in February 1943 and it began operating in November of the same year.

These fine woman here are operating the huge number of Calutrons that were built to enrich uranium at the plant.

Here is the “Alpha Race Track” inside Y-12. You can see all the Alpha Calutrons arranged around the race track.

Now the thing about Calutrons is…. they require massive electromagnets to function. Copper was pretty scarce during WW2, so a suitable substitute was needed for the construction of Y-12 and its precious Calutrons. Luckily there was a suitable substitute on hand….. We pulled 14,700 tons of silver from the US Treasury to build these electromagnets. The Treasury made the Manhattan project sign for 395 million troy ounces, because they could not accept tracking the silver by the ton.

This here is S-50, a liquid thermal diffusion plant also constructed for the purpose of Uranium enrichment.

Last example before I go off on too large a tangent, this is Los Alamos. Actually this is just the tech area. It was not just a “Lab” but literally its own town, built for the express purpose of developing and constructing nuclear weapons. It was originally envisioned to be a facility of about 50 scientists and 50 technicians. Construction began in December of 1942. By the end of 1945 8,200 people lived and worked there. You could (and people have) write an entire book on just the monumental effort made in constructing this place, and the diverse and impressive research, engineering, and industrial capabilities that were built there. But just imagine building an entire town, from nothing and in the middle of nowhere, with all the most advanced, state of the art, industrial and technological capabilities of the day.

So when I say we invented an entire new industry on top of everything else. I really mean exactly that. The Manhattan project cost $28 Billion in 2018 dollars, and 90% of that cost was sunk in building industrial capacity. Factories and plants like the ones above, which subsequently employed over 130,000 people. And that was all done ON THE SIDE of building the rifles, tanks, planes, and boots to fight the war.

(END EDIT)

It is honestly hard to fully grasp the magnitude of the industrial might that was leveraged during the conflict. But hopefully this has given you some appreciation for the monumental effort put forth by American industry and the American people.