Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

This “campaign oratory” on both sides was based on the general recognition that the overwhelming majority of Americans were determined to stay out of war, but the confusion in the minds of this majority was revealed on numerous occasions, as on October 5, 1940, when a Gallup Poll of public opinion showed that 70 percent of Americans felt it was more important to defeat Hitler than to keep out of war. This poll was close enough to Roosevelt’s own sentiments for him to feel justified in taking any actions which would increase the chances of a Hitler defeat and improve the ability of America to defend itself.

The fall of France raised the problem of American defense in an acute form. The American army and air force were pathetically weak, while the navy was adequate to its tasks only in the Pacific. To remedy these deficiencies it was agreed, in July 1940, to seek an army of 1,400,000 men and an air force of 18,000 planes by April 1942, and a “two-ocean” navy increased by 1,325,000 tons of ships as soon as possible. These objectives could not be achieved, in view of the slowness of American mobilization, both economic and military, and were made even more unattainable by the constant demands of Britain, China, Greece, and others for military equipment as soon as it came off the production line. Two months after these goals had been set, an official memorandum estimated that the United States had no more than 55,000 men in its army and 189 planes in its air force ready for immediate action (September 25, 1940).

As the military forces of the country slowly grew, a series of strategic plans were drawn up to fix the way in which these forces would be used. All these plans decided that Germany was the major danger, with Japan of secondary importance, and, accordingly, that every effort, including actual warfare, should be used to defeat Germany and that, until this goal was achieved, every effort must be made to postpone any showdown of strength with Japan. The priority of a German defeat over a Japanese defeat was so firmly entrenched in American strategic thinking that, as early as November, 1940, it was seriously considered that it might be necessary, if Japan attacked the United States, for the United States to make war on Germany in order to retain this order of priority. As events turned out, Germany’s declaration of war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack saved the United States from the need to attempt something which American public opinion would never have condoned—an attack on Germany after we had been attacked by Japan.

Although $17.7 billion had been appropriated by the American government for rearmaments by October 1940, the actual production of armaments remained insignificant until 1942. There were several reasons for this slow progress. In the first place, the governmental side of the rearmament effort was not centralized because of Roosevelt’s ingrained distaste for all unified, centralized administration. Instead, similar and conflicting powers were scattered about among various administrators or were granted to unwieldy committees made up of conflicting personalities, while the really vital powers of duress over labor, industry, or material priorities were largely nonexistent. In the second place, industry was very reluctant, in view of the recent economic depression with its great volume of unused capital equipment, to build new plant or new equipment for defense manufacture, unless the government gave them such concessions in regard to prices, taxes, or plant depreciation that the new equipment would cost the corporation little or nothing. Even then the more monopolistic corporations (which formed the overwhelming majority of the corporations with defense contracts) were reluctant to expand production facilities, since this would jeopardize price and market relationships in the postwar period.

Accordingly, most industrialists, especially the largest ones, who were in closest contact with the government, rejected the Administration’s plans for defense production as grandiose and impossible. This was most emphatic following Roosevelt’s statement in May 1940 that America’s goal was to produce 50,000 planes a year. Although the industry was almost unanimous in calling this a “fantastic” figure, issued only as a “New Deal propagandist trick,” America’s plane production in the next five years was about six times this figure, and reached 96,000 in 1944. These results were achieved because the government paid for nine-tenths of the new factories and compelled modern mass-production methods to be adopted by what was still, even in 1941, a handicraft industry.

In addition to the reluctance to expand capacity, both industry and labor were reluctant to convert existing equipment from peacetime production to war production at a time when government spending was creating a level of peacetime demand and peacetime profits such as had not been known in many years. Businessmen accepted war contracts but continued to allocate capacity, materials, and labor forces to civilian products because these were more profitable, satisfied old customers who were expected to remain customers in the postwar period, and required no conversion of capacity or disruption of distribution facilities.

This was particularly true of the automobile industry, which refused to convert or even to give up the unnecessary luxury of annual model changeovers until, in January 1942, the government ended pleasure-car manufacture for the duration of the war. But as a result of reluctance to do this earlier, about two years of wartime production by the automobile industry was lost and more pleasure cars were manufactured in 1941 than in almost any year in history. In December 1940, Walter P. Reuther, head of the United Automobile Workers, suggested that the unused capacity of the automobile industry (which he estimated at 50 percent) be used to produce airplanes; this was rejected by both airplane and automobile manufacturers. The latter insisted that only 10 or 15 percent of their machine tools could be used in the manufacture of munitions. After the forced conversion of 1942, 66 percent of these machine tools were used in this way, and the automobile industry eventually built two-thirds of all the combat airplane engines produced in the United States between July 1940 and August 1945.

In most industries the government had little or no authority to compel defense contracts to be carried out before civilian contracts, with the result that the latter were generally given preference until 1942. Even in such a vital product as machine tools, no effective system of compulsory priorities for defense was set up until May 1942. This was so typical of the war mobilization that it can be said with assurance that no real mobilization was established until after June 1942. A year later, by July 1943, there had been an astonishing increase. We produced only 16 light tanks in March 1941, and these were too light for service in Europe; our first medium tank (the General Grant) was finished in April 1941, but thirty months later, late in 1943, we were turning out 3,000 tanks a month. In July 1940, the United States produced 350 combat planes, and in March 1941, could do no better than 506 such planes, but by December 1942, we produced 5,400 planes a month, and in August 1943, reached 7,500. A similar situation existed in shipbuilding. In all of 1939 the United States built only 28 ships totaling 342,000 tons, and in 1940 could raise this to no more than 53 ships of 641,000 tons. In September 1941, when the German U-boats were aiming to sink 700,000 tons a month, the United States completed only 7 ships of 64,450 tons. But among those seven ships of September 1941 was the first “Liberty ship,” a mass-production model largely based on a British design. Two years later, in September 1943, the United States launched 155 ships, aggregating 1,700,000 tons, and was in a position to continue at this rate of five ships a day, or 19 million tons a year, indefinitely.