On the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September 1939, the United States was still in the throes of the Great Depression. Its military institutions hardly reflected those of a great power. Its army rested somewhere between those of Bolivia and Thailand in terms of its size. Its army and naval air forces were just beginning to acquire modern aircraft. And its Navy, undoubtedly the best prepared of the services, could at best maintain a defensive posture to defend the Western Hemisphere from external maritime threats. Only its separation by two great oceans from the conflicts boiling over in Asia and Europe allowed the United States its arrogant sense of being removed from world affairs. The geographic removal from the world's trouble spots also allowed substantial numbers of American politicians, and the electorate that supported them, to believe that the United States could remain safe and secure. As late as July 1941, when Nazi panzer divisions had already captured Smolensk two-thirds of the way to Moscow and with Japan threatening war in the Pacific, the Congress of the United States renewed the draft, which had only begun the previous year, by a single vote.
Six years later the representatives of the Empire of Japan signed the instruments of surrender on the decks of the great battleship Missouri (BB-63)—their country a defeated and broken nation. The third of the Axis powers that had embarked on war with such arrogance and assurance in the late 1930s was now surrendering to the Allied nations. The Italians had collapsed in summer 1943, while the Germans had fought through to May 1945, leaving their country a broken and wrecked hulk of what Adolf Hitler promised was going to be the Thousand Year Reich. In spring 1945 American soldiers had derisively scratched Hitler's by then preposterous claim on the broken masonry of Germany's smashed cities that no one would be able to recognize the Reich after the Nazis had finished with it.
The Missouri was only the foremost representative of the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet—or Third Fleet, depending on who was commanding it—which by itself (not including the other major fleet units of the United States that were deployed around the globe) was larger than the combined strength of all the rest of the navies in the world. Overhead, as the Japanese signed the surrender without visible emotion, a great fleet of B-29s and carrier aircraft flew to underscore that the United States ruled not only the world's oceans, but its airspaces as well. By spring of 1945 the United States Army counted over seven million soldiers in its ranks, while it had trained and equipped eighty-nine combat divisions, all of which, save one, would see combat in either Europe or the Pacific. By that time the minuscule U.S. Marine Corps of 1939 had grown to over six divisions, supported by its own air units and the massive amphibious forces of the United States Navy.
Over the course of those six years since the outbreak of the war, the United States had mobilized its economy and manpower to an extraordinary extent. It created the world's largest navy and the world's largest air forces. It built up a massive logistic infrastructure to project its military power across two of the world's greatest oceans. It fought a two-ocean, two-front war and won. Almost single-handedly its military power had defeated the Japanese. It helped to win the battle of the Atlantic. It waged the great daylight strategic bombing campaign against the Luftwaffe and by so doing had won complete air superiority in the skies over Europe by May 1944. The defeat of German air power represented the triumph of the American mass production of weapons systems. In 1944 the production of four-engine bombers reached the astounding total of nearly 1,500 bombers per month. As one British commentator noted, American industry was turning out bombers "like cans of beans."
But the military side represented only half of the equation. U.S. industrial and agricultural production played a major role in supporting its allies. The creation of Lend Lease in 1941 allowed the United States to supply immense quantities of military supplies and foodstuffs to Britain and the Soviet Union. The supplies of foodstuffs most probably kept portions of the Soviet population from starvation. Machine tools from the United States had helped to keep the war industries of Britain and the Soviet Union humming. Lend Lease supplied 2,000 locomotives and 11,000 railroad cars to the Soviets. American industry supplied 450,000 trucks that provided the logistical support for the great Soviet offensives that broke the Wehrmacht's back on the Eastern Front in 1943, 1944, and 1945. America's great shipyards turned out merchant shipping in unheard of quantities. While German submarines sank 733 American merchantmen, U.S. shipbuilding yards produced 5,800 vessels, most of them tankers and large cargo carriers. It accomplished this total by literally mass producing ships. Between 1942 and 1944 U.S. shipyards reduced the time required to produce a Liberty Ship from 105 to 56 days.
These accomplishments are by themselves impressive, but at the same time that it was the "Arsenal of Democracy," the United States was putting together the military organizations that contributed so mightily to Allied victory in the war. Here the U.S. military confronted its greatest difficulty. In the 1980s the eminent Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld, wrote a well-received book, Fighting Power, that compared how the U.S. Army and the German Army went about the business of selecting officers to lead troops in combat. Van Creveld's portrait of the American methods and the results could not have been more uncomplimentary to the U.S. Army—especially what he regarded as the overemphasis on staffs and logistics in the American system.
What van Creveld left out of his comparison was the context within which American rearmament occurred. While the Germans had six and a half years to get ready for World War II—a war that Hitler had expressly told his generals was coming four days after assuming power in 1933, the earliest move to rearm in the United States came with the naval bills of 1938; not until 1939 did real rearmament in the air begin, while only the shock of the French collapse in spring 1940 awoke the Roosevelt administration to start the Army's buildup. Without the luxury of time—the Navy would be in combat barely three years after its rearmament had begun, and the Army slightly over two-and-a-half years after it began rearming—the U.S. military had to take a number of short cuts the Germans with a lengthy process of rearmament had managed to avoid. Moreover, the United States confronted one enormous disadvantage that the Germans, who were at the center of the war they had started, did not. The United States had to project its military power and supply its allies over oceanic distances, a feat few countries could even attempt. Perhaps at times this did result in an overemphasis on logistics, but considering the catastrophe that the breakdown of German logistics caused during the invasion of the Soviet Union in December 1941, more was definitely better than less.
In effect, the Americans were forced to use the same mass production techniques for turning out its military forces that it used so well with industrial production. Whatever the deficiencies of such an approach, there was no other choice. It was in the categorizing and then training U.S. manpower that the services achieved extraordinary successes. Admittedly, there were weaknesses in the training system. The 90th Infantry Division, which came ashore early in the Normandy invasion, was so incompetent that one of its officers, the future General William Dupuy, described it as the finest machine ever made for killing Americans. But the great majority of Army divisions in the European Theater of Operations, as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel noted in early 1943, proved to be fast learners and eventually highly skilled combat formations. Some were outstanding when they first went into combat, such as the 88th Division in Italy; others had to learn under fire. But there was no other choice given the strategic and operational demands that the war made on the United States.
The story was much the same in the Pacific where the 27th Infantry Division was the exception by virtue of its consistent failures. But for the most part Army, like Marine divisions, proved to be the combat masters of the best the Imperial Japanese Army could throw at them. Historians have quibbled over the decision to stop the Army's build-up at 89 divisions. That decision proved to be a costly one for the troops involved in the war in Europe, particularly in terms of the savage fighting that occurred for two months in Normandy and then for six months on the German frontier. Nevertheless, considering the myriad pressures on the United States, it is hard to see what areas—logistics, production, naval or air power--might have been scaled back to create additional divisions, especially given what was known at the time. War always involves hard choices, and those are precisely what American leaders confronted in 1942.
What was particularly impressive about the American war effort was how the training program married up with the huge increases in weapons production that month by month climbed steadily upwards. In the hard days of 1942 and 1943, when front line bomber and fighter squadrons were suffering heavy losses, the air components of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps chose to pull the surviving pilots, including the aces, back from combat. Those pilots brought their combat-tested talents to the training establishment in the United States, where they were able to impact substantially on the training syllabi and thus the capabilities of those in the training pipeline.
Perhaps the best example of the ability of the U.S. military to turn the raw material drafted out of civilian life into the highly skilled technologists of war was the United States Navy. The Navy confronted a massive number of training challenges, among which were: providing sufficient aircrews for the carrier force and land-based air units; manning the rapidly swelling number of major fleet units, from carriers to battleships to cruisers; manning the amphibious Navy from whose ships the great landings in Europe and the Pacific would be launched; guarding the sea lanes of the American and Caribbean coasts; manning the fleet train to support the great naval operations against the Japanese; providing the trained manpower for the shore establishment on which all of these various efforts rested; training up thousands of specialists in new technologies like radar; and, finally, providing the manpower for the great training establishments that turned young Americans just out of high school into combat-ready sailors.
In the early 1980s, this author became friends wih Wayne Woodrow Hayes, whose coaching days had ended so sadly. We spent a number of hours talking about his career in the Navy—a career in which Coach Hayes joined up as a petty officer in 1941 to coach football at Great Lakes Naval Station. He almost immediately volunteered for OCS, earned a commission, and went off to the Pacific. At the war's end he was the executive officer of a destroyer escort, a ship already assigned the mission of serving as a communications link off the invasion beaches of Kyushu. Shortly after the end of the war he took over command of that DE and brought it and its crew back to the United States. Among the many points Coach Hayes made about the Navy—a service he deeply loved—was that its approach to training had molded his thinking about coaching and played a major role in his success as a coach. Coach Hayes' experiences and his rise through the ranks reflected how the United States was able to put together such enormous and effective military forces in such a short period of time.
Sixty years after the end of the Second World War we might pause to consider the extraordinary accomplishments of that generation. The current position that the United States enjoys today in the world is to a considerable extent the result of its efforts. And the victory of 1945 represented a triumph that reflected the culture and persona of the American people. There was little of art or extraordinary cleverness in it. Victory came as the result of an extraordinarily successful mobilization of the talents and skills of the American people and their ability to draw the full bounty from the factories and fields that were their patrimony. In effect they drowned their opponents with their production, and by so doing they destroyed three of the most monstrous tyrannies in human history. Moreover, the strategic results of that victory laid the basis for America's triumph in the Cold War. In every respect it was an extraordinary record.
Dr. Murray, senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses and professor emeritus of history at the Ohio State University, is the author or co-author of numerous works, including A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2000).
Mobilizing a Nation
By Williamson Murray