All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [145]
From the outset, and aided by the fact that some big industrial commitments had already been made, America’s economic mobilisation awed visitors from poorer and less ambitious societies. Even intelligent and informed British people failed to recognise the almost limitless scale of the nation’s resources: ‘The Army … are aiming at a vast programme,’ British Air Marshal John Slessor wrote to the Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal from Washington back in April 1941, assessing the build-up of the US armed forces, ‘their present target being two million men, and they are now considering another 2 million on top of that. Who they are going to fight with an army of this size or how they are going to transport it overseas I do not know and very much doubt whether they would have aimed at anything like this if they had a really thorough joint strategic examination of their defence commitments and requirements.’
Such scepticism was dramatically confounded between 1942 and 1945. ‘After Pearl Harbor,’ Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan, British chief planner for D-Day, said of the Americans, ‘they decided to make the biggest and best war ever seen.’ The secretary of the American Asiatic Association wrote to a friend in the State Department, ‘It will be a long, hard war, but after it is over Uncle Sam will do the talking in the world.’ The federal budget soared from $9 billion in 1939 to $100 billion in 1945, and in the same period America’s GNP grew from $91 to $166 billion. The index of industrial production rose 96 per cent, and seventeen million new jobs were created. Some 6.5 million additional women entered the US labour force between 1942 and 1945, and their wages grew by over 50 per cent; sales of women’s clothing doubled. The imperatives of America’s vast industrial mobilisation favoured tycoons and conglomerates, which flourished mightily. Anti-trust legislation was thrust aside by the pressures of war demand: America’s hundred largest companies, which in 1941 were responsible for 30 per cent of national manufacturing output, generated 70 per cent by 1943. The administration overcame its scruples about monopolists who could deliver tanks, planes, ships.
Everything grew in scale to match the largest war in history: in 1939 America had only 4,900 supermarkets, but by 1944 there were 16,000. Between December 1941 and the end of 1944, the average American’s liquid personal assets almost doubled. With luxuries scarce, consumers were desperate to find goods on which to spend their rising earnings: ‘People are crazy with money,’ said a Philadelphia jeweller. ‘They don’t care what they buy. They purchase things just for the fun of spending.’ By 1944, while British domestic production of consumer goods had fallen by 45 per cent from its pre-war levels, that of the United States had risen by 15 per cent. Many regions experienced severe housing shortages and rents soared, as millions of people sought temporary accommodation to fit their wartime job relocations. ‘The Good War myth,’ wrote Arthur Schlesinger, who then worked for the Office of War Information,
envisages a blissful time of national unity in support of noble objectives. Most Americans indeed accepted the necessity of the war, but that hardly meant the suppression of baser motives. In Washington we saw the seamy side of the Good War. We saw greedy business executives opposing conversion to defense production, then joining the government to maneuver for post-war advantage … We were informed that one in eight business establishments was in violation of the price ceilings. We saw what a little-known senator from Missouri [Harry Truman] called ‘rapacity, greed, fraud and negligence’ … The war called for equality of sacrifice.