FDR - Jean Edward Smith [360]
Results followed almost overnight. The B-24s, equipped with radar, powerful searchlights, machine guns, and depth charges, could stay aloft eighteen hours and, in the words of military historian John Keegan, “were flying death to a U-boat caught on the surface.”8 In the last week of March the Allies sank eight U-boats; in April, thirty-one; in May, forty-three. Faced with the inevitable destruction of his submarine fleet, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz called it quits. On May 24, 1943, he ordered German U-boats out of the North Atlantic. In the next four months, sixty-two convoys comprising 3,546 merchant vessels crossed the Atlantic without the loss of a single ship.9 Churchill gave the good news to the House of Commons on September 21. “This is altogether unprecedented in the whole history of the U-boat struggle, either in this war or in the last.”10
With the sea-lanes to Britain secure, American industrial production tipped the balance in favor of the Allies. Roosevelt’s 1942 production goals appeared puny once the economy converted to war. The figures are staggering. Between 1941 and 1945 the United States produced 300,000 military aircraft. In the peak year of 1944 American factories built 96,318 planes—more than the yearly total of Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union combined. Henry Ford’s enormous Willow Run plant produced a B-24 every sixty-three minutes. By war’s end the United States had manufactured 2.4 million trucks, 635,000 jeeps, 88,400 tanks, 5,800 ships, and 40 billion rounds of ammunition.
Quantity was the all-important goal of the war effort. American industry thrived on high-volume output performed on an assembly-line basis. No other industrialized nation had mastered the art of mass production so efficiently. In a sense the United States made a virtue of necessity. With a workforce composed disproportionately of unskilled labor, assembly-line techniques fit American industry like a glove. And they matched the needs of war perfectly. The Germans and Japanese, by contrast, with their highly trained labor pools (at least in the early stages of the war), chose qualitative superiority over mass production and depended on precision-made, flawlessly performing, high-standard weapons for their margin of victory.11 But as the war dragged on they simply could not produce enough of them. “We never did develop a top tank during the war,” said General Lucius D. Clay. “We did all right because we made so many of them. That offset some of their weaknesses. But we never had a tank that equaled the German tank.”12*
Roosevelt, who had handled the Navy’s contracting responsibilities in World War I, was well served by the procurement team Stimson assembled at the War Department. Undersecretary Robert Patterson, General Brehon Somervell, who commanded the supply services, and Clay presided over the greatest military buildup the world has ever known within a time frame few considered possible. Between Pearl Harbor and VJ Day the armed services let contracts that ultimately exceeded $200 billion ($2 trillion currently) with scarcely a breath of scandal. “We were not against industry making a profit,” said Clay, “but we were damned sure they were not going to make an excess profit.” For the first and only time in American history the military employed a process of mandatory contract renegotiation. Whenever a supplier reaped an excessive profit or the Army no longer needed what it had contracted for, the War Department renegotiated the contract and recaptured the government’s money. “I think it was the greatest job we did during the whole war,” said Clay years later. “You haven’t heard any criticism of excess profits from World War II, and no one else has.”13*
The conflict in North Africa continued longer than Roosevelt anticipated. The Germans and Italians resisted