Week 14

In 1942, the United States embarked on a mobilization of human, physical, and financial resources without precedent in history. All the inhibitions, frustrations, and restraints of the Depression years vanished virtually overnight. Within a single year, the number of tanks built in America had been raised to over 24,000 and planes to over 48,000. By the end of America’s first year in the war, it had raised its arms production to the total of all three enemy powers put together, and by 1944 had doubled it again, while at the same time creating an army which passed the 7 million mark in 1943.149 During the conflict, the United States in total enrolled 11,260,000 soldiers, 4,183,466 sailors, 669,100 marines and 241,093 coastguards. Despite this vast diversion of manpower to the forces, US factories built 296,000 planes and 102,000 tanks, and US shipyards turned out 88,000 ships and landing-craft.150 The astonishing acceleration in the American productive effort was made possible by the essential dynamism and flexibility of the American enterprise system, wedded to a national purpose which served the same galvanizing role as the optimism of the Twenties. The war acted as an immense bull market, encouraging American entrepreneurial skills to fling the country’s seemingly inexhaustible resources of materials and manpower into a bottomless pool of consumption. Extraordinary exercises in speed took place. One reason the Americans won the Battle of Midway was by reducing what had been regarded as a three-month repair job on the carrier Yorktown to forty-eight hours, using 1,200 technicians working round the clock.151 The construction program for the new defense coordinating center, the Pentagon, with its 16 miles of corridors and 600,000 square feet of office space, was cut from seven years to fourteen months. (Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People (p. 781). HarperCollins)

 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING

David M. Kennedy,

Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States),

Oxford University Press,

ISBN 978-0195144031

RECOMMENDED READING

H. W. Brands,

Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

Vintage,

ISBN 978-0307277947

RECOMMENDED READING

Anthony Beevor,

The Second World War,

Little, Brown and Company,

ISBN 978-0316023740

(Recommended to get used hardcover for better font and illustrations for this very big book)

RECOMMENDED READING

Lynne Olson,

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour,

Random House Trade Paperbacks,

ISBN 978-0812979350

The acclaimed author of Troublesome Young Men reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain, told from the perspective of three key American players in London: Edward R. Murrow, the handsome, chain-smoking head of CBS News in Europe; Averell Harriman, the hard-driving millionaire who ran FDR’s Lend-Lease program in London; and John Gilbert Winant, the shy, idealistic U.S. ambassador to Britain. Each man formed close ties with Winston Churchill—so much so that all became romantically involved with members of the prime minister’s family. Drawing from a variety of primary sources, Lynne Olson skillfully depicts the dramatic personal journeys of these men who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and reluctant American public to back the British at a critical time. Deeply human, brilliantly researched, and beautifully written, Citizens of London is a new triumph from an author swiftly becoming one of the finest in her field.