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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SELECTED BY THE ECONOMIST AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Remarkable as it may seem today, there once was a time when the president of the United States could pick up the phone and ask the president of General Motors to resign his position and take the reins of a great national enterprise. And the CEO would oblige, no questions asked, because it was his patriotic duty.
In Freedom’s Forge, bestselling author Arthur Herman takes us back to that time, revealing how two extraordinary American businessmen—automobile magnate William Knudsen and shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser—helped corral, cajole, and inspire business leaders across the country to mobilize the “arsenal of democracy” that propelled the Allies to victory in World War II.
“Knudsen? I want to see you in Washington. I want you to work on some production matters.” With those words, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted “Big Bill” Knudsen, a Danish immigrant who had risen through the ranks of the auto industry to become president of General Motors, to drop his plans for market domination and join the U.S. Army. Commissioned a lieutenant general, Knudsen assembled a crack team of industrial innovators, persuading them one by one to leave their lucrative private sector positions and join him in Washington, D.C. Dubbed the “dollar-a-year men,” these dedicated patriots quickly took charge of America’s moribund war production effort.
Henry J. Kaiser was a maverick California industrialist famed for his innovative business techniques and his can-do management style. He, too, joined the cause. His Liberty ships became World War II icons—and the Kaiser name became so admired that FDR briefly considered making him his vice president in 1944. Together, Knudsen and Kaiser created a wartime production behemoth. Drafting top talent from companies like Chrysler, Republic Steel, Boeing, Lockheed, GE, and Frigidaire, they turned auto plants into aircraft factories and civilian assembly lines into fountains of munitions, giving Americans fighting in Europe and Asia the tools they needed to defeat the Axis. In four short years they transformed America’s army from a hollow shell into a truly global force, laying the foundations for a new industrial America—and for the country’s rise as an economic as well as military superpower.
Featuring behind-the-scenes portraits of FDR, George Marshall, Henry Stimson, Harry Hopkins, Jimmy Doolittle, and Curtis LeMay, as well as scores of largely forgotten heroes and heroines of the wartime industrial effort, Freedom’s Forge is the American story writ large. It vividly re-creates American industry’s finest hour, when the nation’s business elites put aside their pursuit of profits and set about saving the world.
Praise for Freedom’s Forge
“A rambunctious book that is itself alive with the animal spirits of the marketplace.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A rarely told industrial saga, rich with particulars of the growing pains and eventual triumphs of American industry . . . Arthur Herman has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history’s memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Magnificent . . . It’s not often that a historian comes up with a fresh approach to an absolutely critical element of the Allied victory in World War II, but Pulitzer finalist Herman . . . has done just that.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #70740 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Random House Trade Paperbacks
- Published on: 2013-07-02
- Released on: 2013-07-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .89" w x 5.19" l, .74 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“A rambunctious book that is itself alive with the animal spirits of the marketplace.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A rarely told industrial saga, rich with particulars of the growing pains and eventual triumphs of American industry . . . Arthur Herman has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history’s memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Magnificent . . . It’s not often that a historian comes up with a fresh approach to an absolutely critical element of the Allied victory in World War II, but Pulitzer finalist Herman . . . has done just that.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A compulsively readable tribute to ‘the miracle of mass production.’ ”—Publishers Weekly
“The production statistics cited by Mr. Herman . . . astound.”—The Economist
“[A] fantastic book.”—Forbes
“Freedom’s Forge is the story of how the ingenuity and energy of the American private sector was turned loose to equip the finest military force on the face of the earth. In an era of gathering threats and shrinking defense budgets, it is a timely lesson told by one of the great historians of our time.”—Donald Rumsfeld
“World War II could not have been won without the vital support and innovation of American industry. Arthur Herman’s engrossing and superbly researched account of how this came about, and the two men primarily responsible for orchestrating it, is one of the last great, untold stories of the war.”—Carlo D’Este, author of Patton: A Genius for War
“It takes a writer of Arthur Herman’s caliber to make a story essentially based on industrial production exciting, but this book is a truly thrilling story of the contribution made by American business to the destruction of Fascism. With America producing two-thirds of the Allies’ weapons in World War II, the contribution of those who played a vital part in winning the war, yet who never once donned a uniform, has been downplayed or ignored for long enough. Here is their story, with new heroes to admire—such as William Knudsen and Henry Kaiser—who personified the can-do spirit of those stirring times.”—Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Arthur Herman, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of How the Scots Invented the Modern World, which has sold more than half a million copies worldwide. His most recent work, Gandhi & Churchill, was the 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
The Gentle Giant
My business is making things.
—William S. Knudsen, May 28, 1940
On a freezing cold day in early February 1900, the steamer SS Norge pulled into New York Harbor. It was carrying five hundred Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish passengers looking for a new beginning in a new world. One of them stood eagerly on deck. Twenty-year-old Signius Wilhelm Poul Knudsen braced his Scotch-plaid scarf tight against the cold and yanked a gray woolen cap more firmly on his head.
William McKinley was president. Theodore Roosevelt, fresh from his triumph at San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, was governor of New York. The United States had just signed a treaty for building a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific—in Nicaragua.
New York City was about to break ground for a subway system. And six cities—Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis—had agreed to form baseball’s American League.
Young Knudsen’s first sight after passing the Verrazano Narrows was the Statue of Liberty, holding her barely discernible torch high in the fog. Then, as the ship swung past Governors Island, objects loomed out of the icy mist like giants from Norse legend.
They were the office buildings of Lower Manhattan, the first skyscrapers—the nerve centers of America’s mightiest companies. Almost half a century later, Knudsen could recall each one.
There was the twenty-nine-story Park Row Building, topped by twin copper-tipped domes and deemed the tallest building in the world. There was the St. Paul Building, completed in 1898, twenty-six stories, or 312 feet from ground floor to roof. There was the New York World Building with its gleaming golden dome. In a couple of years, they would be joined by the Singer Building, rising forty-seven stories; the Woolworth Building at fifty-seven stories; and then, looming above them all, the Standard Oil Building, its 591-foot tower topped by a flaming torch that could be seen for miles at sea—a torch to match that of Lady Liberty herself.
“When you go to Europe,” Knudsen liked to say, “they show you something that belonged to King Canute. When you go to America they show you something they are going to build.” No king or emperor had built these mighty edifices, the twenty-year-old Danish immigrant told himself. No king or emperor had built this country of America. It was ordinary men like himself, men who worked hard, who built with their minds and hands, and became rich doing it. Signius Wilhelm Poul Knudsen was determined to be one of them.
He was one of ten children, the son of a Copenhagen customs inspector who had made his meager salary stretch by putting his offspring to work. Work for Knudsen had begun at age six, pushing a cart of window glass for a glazier around Copenhagen’s cobblestone streets. In between jobs, he had squeezed in time for school, and then night courses at the Danish Government Technical School. Bill Knudsen was still a teenager when he became a junior clerk in the firm of Christian Achen, which was in the bicycle import business.
Knudsen’s first love was bicycles. With one of Achen’s salesmen, he built the very first tandem bicycle in Denmark. In a country with more bicycles than people, he and his friend became minor celebrities. Soon they were doing stints as professional pacers for long-distance bicycle races across Denmark, Sweden, and northern Germany.
But Knudsen had bigger horizons. He knew America was the place where someone skilled with his hands and with a head for things mechanical could flourish. So he had set off for New York, with his suitcase and thirty dollars stuffed in his pocket. Years later, when newspaper articles described him as arriving as “a penniless immigrant,” he would archly protest. “I wasn’t penniless,” he would proudly say. “I had saved enough to come with thirty dollars.”
The Norge disgorged its passengers at Castle Garden, the southern tip of Manhattan. Before putting his foot on American soil for the first time, he paused for a moment on the gangplank to gawp at the new world around him.
A voice barked out from behind, “Hurry up, you square-headed Swede!”
From that moment, Bill Knudsen used to tell people, he never stopped hurrying. That is, until he became a living legend of the automotive industry—bigger in some ways than Henry Ford.
Knudsen landed a job not very far from where he had disembarked, in the Seabury shipyards in the Bronx’s Morris Heights. Ironically perhaps, his first job in America was in the armaments industry. Knudsen found work reaming holes in steel plate for Navy torpedo boats for seventeen and a half cents a day, then graduated to join a gang of Irish riveters as the “bucker-up,” the man who held the chunk of steel behind the hole as the red-hot rivet was hammered into place.
After a long day at the yards, he would go home by a steam-driven train on the Seventh Avenue Elevated to 152nd Street, where he had a shabby room in a boardinghouse run by a Norwegian immigrant named Harry Hansen. There he would wash away the soot and sweat, then head downtown to the beer gardens along the Bowery or to the saloons on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, which was still a village. There a nickel bought him a dinner of roast beef, smoked fish, pickles, bread, and sliced onions.
“If I had to start over again,” he said many years later, “I would start exactly where I started the last time.” But it was sweaty, brutally tough work with brutally tough men. Bill Knudsen was big, almost six foot four. So his landlord was amazed when he came home after his second day in the yards with welts across his face, and an eye that was nearly swollen shut.
“What happened to you?” Hansen wanted to know.
“I got into a fight—with a little fellow,” Knudsen muttered. “If I could have got my hands on him, I would have broken his neck. But I couldn’t. He just danced around and did this—” He waved his arms around like a boxer, and then pointed to his wounds. “And then did this! Where can I learn to do it?”
So Hansen handed him over to a fellow Norwegian named Carlson, who taught boxing at the Manhattan Athletic Club at 125th Street and Eleventh Avenue. There Knudsen strapped on a pair of boxing gloves for the first time. Soon he became so adept at the pugilistic art that he was presiding champ of the shipyards—no small feat—and did amateur bouts at the Manhattan Club and all around New York.
From building ships he graduated to repairing locomotives for the Erie Railroad, and then in 1902 he got the opportunity he had been waiting for. It was a job building bicycles for a firm in Buffalo called Keim Mills. Buffalo was already New York State’s fastest growing industrial town, and John R. Keim was a Buffalo jeweler who had bought himself a bicycle factory. Knowing nothing about bicycles, he left the running of it to his shop superintendent, a Connecticut Yankee named William H. Smith.
Knudsen packed his suitcase and boxing gloves and took the train to Buffalo. If he imagined working in a bicycle plant meant making bicycles, however, he was disappointed. With the new century, the business had fallen on hard times and Keim was turning his machines over to other work. Some of it was for an inventor of a steam-powered horseless carriage called the Foster Wagon. Since Knudsen knew about steam engines, he found himself making engines for Foster.9 In the process, he also learned about machine tools, the machines that made machines, and about toolmaking—and how diagramming out tool-work problems on paper could speed up the manufacturing process.
After his work with machine tools, Knudsen took a course on steelmaking at the Lackawanna Steel Company plant, and later he and Smith developed their own steel alloy. Soon he was supervising the making of brake drums for a Lansing, Michigan–based company called Reo Motor Company, run by Ransom E. Olds. Olds had been making his version of the horseless carriage since 1886, but by 1904 he was finding plenty of competition from an upstart entrepreneur operating out of Detroit named Henry Ford.
Smith and Knudsen learned that Ford, who had been in business barely a year, was looking for someone who could make steel axle housings for his cars. They immediately bought train tickets out to Detroit and met Ford himself at his plant on Piquette Avenue. They spoke amid the placid and rhythmic clop of horses’ hoofs and carriage wheels from the street outside, and came back with an order worth $75,000—the biggest in Keim’s history.
The partnership would grow and prosper at both ends as the infant automobile industry grew. By 1908—the year the first Model T chugged out of the Piquette Avenue factory and entrepreneur Billy Durant founded General Motors—the twenty-nine-year-old Knudsen was general superintendent at Keim and employing fifteen hundred people. Three years later he proudly took a bride, a girl of German descent named Clara Elizabeth Euler. That same year, 1911, Ford was impressed enough with the Keim operation that he bought the whole company outright. Knudsen suggested Ford think about assembling Model T’s right there in the Buffalo plant, as well as in Ford’s brand-new setup in Highland Park off Detroit’s Michigan Avenue.
Knudsen spent weeks arranging the tools and machines on the Keim floor in order to put together the Model T components. He taught his mechanics how to assemble the car in separate stages, from bolting together the chassis to trimming the body and varnishing. Then one morning Knudsen was stunned to come in and find all the machines idle.
The Keim workers told him they were on strike. They had decided they didn’t like the piecework rates they were being paid on some of the outside contracts. Knudsen couldn’t believe they were so shortsighted as to break off building the country’s fastest-selling automobile over a minor contract dispute. But the men wouldn’t budge. He decided this was a crisis requiring the advice of the owner himself. At great trouble and expense, Bill Knudsen managed to reach Ford on the primitive telephone in the Keim office.
Ford listened and said, “That suits me. If the men don’t want to work, get some flatcars and move the machinery to Highland Park.”
Three days later it was done. Then Ford ordered Knudsen himself, William H. Smith, and other key Keim managers out to Michigan.
They were now part of the team running the most famous factory in the world.
Nineteen hundred and twelve was a crucial moment in the evolution of Ford’s business. His Model T consisted of nearly four thousand separate parts. Eight years earlier Walter Flanders, a veteran machinist who had dropped out of grade school and gone to work at Singer Sewing Machine, had shown Ford the value of making as many parts as possible interchangeable. These eliminated the need for custom or form fitting, which slowed production to a crawl. Flanders also showed him and his young engineers—Carl Emde, Peter Martin, and another Danish immigrant named Charlie Sorensen—how to arrange their machines in a priority sequence so that tools and parts were easily accessible.
Flanders had just taught them the rudiments of assembly line production. Ford was lucky to have on hand young engineers like Martin and Sorensen, men whose idea of fun was breaking the assembly of a Model T down into eighty-four discrete stages—from forging the crank shaft and drilling out the engine block to stuffing the seat upholstery—then lining them up to form a single process. Highland Park became the first mass-production assembly line in automotive history. When Knudsen arrived, they were making a Model T every hour and a half, at a rate of five hundred a day.
Outsiders treated Highland Park as a manufacturing miracle. People toured the factory and snapped pictures (Ford sensed that inviting visitors, even other automakers, to see his assembly line would only enhance its mystique).14 Others tried to reproduce its elements, without success. But when Bill Knudsen arrived, he found the surroundings looked rather familiar. He realized he and Smith had used the same techniques at Keim for stamping steel parts for fenders and doors and for Ransom Olds’s brake drum assemblies. Instead of being mystified or dazzled by Ford’s accomplishment, Knudsen set about finding ways to make it work at a whole new level.
He had learned other things at Keim, especially from its manager William Smith. He had learned he had a special gift for making something with his hands while visualizing its outcome in his mind—and he learned the value of practical experience. When Knudsen was trying to save enough money to get an engineering degree at Cornell University, Smith had told him, “You’re a better engineer right now than any college graduate I have ever seen,” and he was right.
When Keim was first contracted to assemble Ford cars, Smith had a Model T delivered and then he and Knudsen spent the day taking it apart and putting it back together again. Then Knudsen drove it around the plant floor—it was the first car he had ever driven—and out the door. He took Smith home and then drove to his lodging, where he stayed up half the night studying the transmission and gear system. “By the time I went to bed,” Knudsen later remembered, “I had a good working knowledge of the Model T.”
From Smith he also learned certain economic lessons. Smith made Knudsen think about a factory as something more than a place for making things. A factory is a place for wealth creation, his mentor would tell him, and a place for practicing the dignity of work. There is something sacred about work, about an honest productive effort that earns the wages that are the foundation of home and health, education and security—and the foundation of the America the Danish immigrant had fallen in love with.
Knudsen took to Ford for the same reason. Its owner paid his men a standard five-dollar-a-day wage and looked out for their welfare. But above all, the factory floor at Highland Park offered a fascinating array of problems and challenges, into which he jumped with the same enthusiasm as a conductor with a new orchestra.
“It takes us too long to make cars,” Ford told him the first day. “We are beginning to get good materials, but we are not moving ahead as fast as we should. . . . That’s what I want you for.” Ford and his engineers had figured how the assembly line worked. Knudsen’s ultimate feat was to figure out why it worked, and how to make it a continuous process.
Most helpful customer reviews
138 of 146 people found the following review helpful.
America- the Arsenal of Democracy
By Wulfstan
Did you ever see those cool WWII newsreel-turned-into-tv-shows, like "Victory at Sea"? One of them is entitled- "America the Arsenal of Democracy" and man, what they showed there- making tanks as fast as the assembly-line could move, warehouse full of bombers as far as the eye could see, and making Liberty ships in under a week. Honestly, it was amazing.
This book takes that idea, and runs with it, concentrating mostly on the story of William Knudsen and Henry Kaiser.
William Knudsen was the head of General Motors, who was drafted by FDR to run the war materiel production efforts for the war. When it turned out Knudsen wasn't getting the cooperation he needed, FDR just made him into a three-star general!
The tale of Henry Kaiser is better known, he brought mass production techniques to shipbuilding. Kaiser decided to use welding instead of riveting and brought in unskilled workers (many of whom were women) to build these "wonder-ships'.
This then, really, is the story of how America won WWII. By the end of WWI, the USA out produced every other nation combined! Just one US company produced more than entire Axis nations.
Now, there is also a political undercurrent behind this amazing story, and that is that it was the practice of free enterprise that was behind these production miracles. Free enterprise is the big hero here.
It's an amazing story and well told (politics aside). However, I think now I want to see that newsreel of "America- the Arsenal of Democracy" again.
98 of 109 people found the following review helpful.
5-Star 'Wow!'
By Robert Johnston
I read and reviewed the 'advance copy' some months ago. The book is for Amazon readers interested in the creation of the modern America, WW2 history, the wedding of capitalism & politics with the economy, and the micro/macro-economic outcomes of personality and possibility.
'Freedom's Forge' is the story of an uncompromised time of cooperation between the public and private sectors but it wasn't easy. Herman delivers a timely and extraordinary encapsulation of this other time in America. The topic was an easy sell to me. The subject matter has long been a personal interest. There is so little being published on the topic that one's pursuit of the curiosity is rather like the blind man defining an elephant.
For this reader "Freedom's Forge" is closely associated with my early career experience. The time is a mystery from the only recent past and the curiosity to keep my eyes open for hints. Long ago, my old grizzled techno-industrialist boss cut his eyeteeth in WW2 industry and summed it up for me. I was just a kid-scientist working my first job out of grad school. I had constructed my first technical project plan for his review ... "How long?" he yelled. "My God, son, WW2 was only a 44 month program!". I was stunned and smitten with curiosity from then till now. The more I look, the more I see that confirms that something thoroughly amazing occurred in those 44 months.
US factories yielded superior products in total and in volumes that boggle the imagination even in an iPad, smartphone modern world (though they aren't made in the USA). The feat was an ostensibly unrivaled milestone in organized human civilization. There is simply no macro/micro-econometric precedent like this 44 months. That's the phenomena Herman explores. Surely the war was motivation but ... the Japanese and Germans were motivated too. More than motivation ... the American response was a concert of genius, individual trust and a national trust that is unfortunately difficult to grasp in its 70 year distance. In only 40 months, the US accomplished the feat at every level to enable the modern super power ... it was an hellacious cat-drive ... civilians of independent minds, inter-racial, uni-sex and all re-tooled to the cadence of the steadily increasing casualties from the front.
In modern context, consider that The F-35 has been a 132 month program and remains incomplete. The next US aircraft carrier will have been a 72 month program if it is commissioned as planned and with only minor naval architectural changes from its predecessors. Between 1942 and war's end, 5, 6 and 7 or more generationally significant leaps in designs of all types were manufactured and rolled out. These modern things aren't 'bad' but there was once another way that worked far more efficiently and quickly.
Having visited and worked in some of these old WW2 engineering and production sites all over the US, Britain and Australia one can still find the strange quirks. One Australian armored vehicle final assembly plant (still in operation) was `cut & pasted' with the precise architectural plans of its US counterpart. There was just no time to re-engineer the construction plans... strangely in retrospect, no one had time to notice that the sky lights should face in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere. Larry Bell of WW2 Martin aircraft fame and the Bell Helicopter founder bricked narrow the hangar doors and installed structural columns in his helicopter plants to insure no one at Bell ever tried to imagine a fixed wing aircraft. I've visited Stalin's `east of the Urals' sites where US made machinery and designs of this era are very much in evidence. The vital machine tools that were the critical enabler to build the T-32's & T-34's in such volume were shipped to Stalin through Murmansk & Arkhangelsk ... the old Bridgeport's and Cincinnati's are still turning ... billets of steel are not easily transformed into tanks. The UK was jokingly imagined to capsize with the weight of the American materials staged for D-Day. These are my quirky examples and not from `Freedom's Forge'.
Comprehending the reality of the cumulative effort, the tens of thousands of businesses that suddenly made the parts that contributed to the entire process in its time and place is beyond one's grasp if you are at all familiar with modern industry. Herman's narrative fills in some of the home front mega-story away from the front lines, the battles and the generals that are far better known.
How could so much be accomplished in the US and nearly alone? `Freedom's Forge' carries the reader through the behaviors of the public and private leadership, their subordinates and the system they built with willing civilians and rancorous, seething bureaucrats. A labor strike at a critical juncture in the US support of the UK cost 14 ship builds that the enemy capitalized with torpedo casualities. Rarely can one find such disparate proportionality over cents/hr. The resolution of ideas, technology and processes extended from the iron mines of MN to the thousands of forges and intricate part factories and to assembly lines that rolled product onto the revolutionary new Liberty ships (the Merchant Marine took the highest casualties of any service just moving stuff)... and it was accomplished with all manner of previously inexperienced civilians.
Until Herman's 'Freedom's Forge', the story has been hazy and piecemeal. The whole history is far from complete. Herman provides the accounts of well-known Henry Kaiser and the less known William Knudsen among so many lost names that conjured a new nation out the economic collapse of the Depression. It is a genuine untold story. There are other materials to consider but I've found no narrative that ranges as wide and deep as 'Freedom's Forge' to attribute so many fascinating characters and stories to such a phenomenal human endeavor.
5-stars and an important book! This is the first 'advanced copy' that I have purchased after publication. I loved it!
p.s. I'm curious about other reviewer's observation regarding the author's `balance issues'. The organized labor strikes are a matter of historical record. The poor safety conditions and casualty records among workers is documented in every industry. The loss of output directly assignable to the strikes is quantified historically. The extraordinary rise of US wages is documented.
That the New Dealers and FDR had to call on the military to break coal mining strikes that affected steel output, and then quell other strikes is a matter of historical record. If the author had failed to include the union conflicts, he would have demonstrated another kind of `lack of balance'. The author, for instance, does not mention the Philadelphia transit union strike over union seniority and pennies/hr that shut down the huge Philadelphia based defense industry for a month. The big labor/New Dealer situation had deteriorated into union-interest against the national issue of winning the war with the fewest casualties. Organized labor is seen to pick and choose the choke points to best strike `Freedoms's Forge' for whatever purpose, now long forgotten and rarely recalled.
Ickes & Truman are historically documented to use the bureaucracy to perecute the `$1 a year men' in non-value adding assaults. The whole story, good and bad, and for the readers worldview are well covered in this book to consider.
45 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
America's 40 Month Miracle
By Paul
Arhtur Herman has provided a good history of the contribution of American business to the Allied war effort in World War II.
While this book is primarily about two people, Bill Knudsen and Henry J. Kaiser, it has a large cast of characters, a multitude of corporations (mostly large ones) and an almost endless list of weaponery that spilled out of factories and docks all across the nation.
On May 30, 1940, Franklin Roosevelt called Bill Knudsen away from leading General Motors to lead the defense effort. FDR had been walking a tight rope for some time in the conflict between American isolationists and the need to equip and modernize a depleted military while Europe was itself suffering under the German army and Imperial Japan's invastion of China and other parts of Asia was in process. He chose Knudsen because of his reputation of being able to bring an efficient operation into play. Knudsen was the man who was critical to the automobile business by advocating and bringing out changes in car models yearly. After working for Henry Ford, he went to GM and put forth the idea that people would want a new model every year and that the industry had to gear itself for this type of business. With it, he propelled the sales for Chevrolet and proved to Henry Ford that people would buy something other than black. Knudsen believed in precise tooling of parts so that product moved smoothly down the production line. He had no regard or time for "craftsman" techniques in manufacture. He wanted parts to be precise and fit together without coaxing by a person with tools.
Henry Kaiser is also prominent in this book and rightly so. He was a man of immense personal charm, and dreamed on a very large scale. He was a giant in building roads and eventually became the master of the liberty ships that were provided by America in such abundance during the war.
There is the expected play of politics throughout the book. FDR appointed Knudsen a three star general, Kaiser secured contracts for vast ventures but not without making enemies as he did so. While he was immensely successful in many areas, he suffered the burden of a lot of bad press when his Liberty ships began to crack apart under stress and extreme cold, but hardly anything could deter him or keep him from pressing forward his next idea, one of which was the small aircraft carrier meant for convoy duty.
That America could pull this off is incredible. When you read of the tons of military equipment that was produced for war it is staggering. When the war started, America had six carriers, later reduced to four after early battles. SeePacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 Yamamoto was correct when he stated that he feared Japan had only awakened a sleeping giant. During the war 141 aircraft carriers were produced, granted many of them of much lesser size for mainly convoy duty, but without question, we outproduced the Axis. I would take some issue with his charge that Speer was labeled as the person that laid Europe in ruins. Speer, in spite of bombings, was able to increase German armament numbers throughout the war, but he had total control, and of course forced or slave labor has no union to represent them. Hitler was the culprit here and Speer one of the few Germans that received prison time. SeeInside the Third Reich.
There is a lot of information regarding labor unions during this time. Unfortunately, their image is not too favorable. It was a time when labor had an ally in the White House, and the AFL and CIO were in a serious competition to sign up members. Inevitably, strikes were called and production was lost. Of all the moves made by the unions, the most disastrous was from the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis who called for a strike in April of 1943 and FDR blew up and order the army to take over the mines. This sent them back to work until June 19, when 60,000 miners struck and created a wrath of public opinion against the union. They were back to work in three days and the end result was Congress passing legislation over the veto to call for a 30 day notice for all strikes and the end of the secret ballot for union membership. In addition, blacks were starting to enter the work force and the labor unions have a poor record of discrimination against them, a far cry from today.
For me, one of the greatest stories are those of the women who poured into factories and shipyards, and for the first time were doing jobs that only men had done previously. Bearing the hardship of the labor, and the hazardous conditions in many plants, women came forward to help save the world and have never looked back. Imagine, the widow of Confederate General James Longstreet driving to work at the age of 80!!! She was one of the many.
The book itself can spark further debate as to what was and what we are now. Obviously, those that favor big government can claim that it was FDR and his administration that provided all of this, while those of the other side can lay claim that it was free enterprise that saved the world. They both have their points, but I suppose it was a combination of the two that swept fascism away. Could we do it again? No chance of something of this scope being done again. With government as big and cumbersome as it is today, and so full of regulation there would be little opportunity to pull something like this off in such a short time, and we have a media much more responsive and critical of anything and everything. I fear that this feat was a one time thing. Keep in mind that all this was done in a little over forty months.
I encourage readers to get a copy. I have revised to three stars. There is a serious flaw in the information provided about the civilian construction workers massacred by the Japanese at Wake Island. The author cites numbers in the twenties while there was actually almost one hundred people bound in barbed wire and machine gunned to death. You just cannot miss something so important and expect good reviews.
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