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By Root 1025 0

some big industrial commitments had already been made, America’s economic mobilisation awed visitors from poorer and less ambitious societies who witnessed it. 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 Sir Charles Portal, chief of the Air Staff, from Washington back in April 1941, assessing the buildup of the U.S. 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, the 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 percent, and 17 million new jobs were created. Some 6.5 million additional women entered the U.S. labour force between 1942 and 1945, and their wages grew by over 50 percent; sales of women’s clothing doubled. The imperatives of America’s vast industrial mobilisation favoured tycoons and conglomerates, which flourished mightily. Antitrust legislation was thrust aside by the pressures of war demand: America’s hundred largest companies, which in 1941 were responsible for 30 percent of national manufacturing output, generated 70 percent by 1943. The administration overcame its scruples about monopolists who could deliver tanks, planes, and 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 percent from its prewar levels, that of the United States had risen by 15 percent. 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. But everywhere one looked was the miasma of “chiseling” … The home front was not a pretty sight at a time when young Americans were dying around the world.

Among the worst rackets uncovered was that of a primary war contractor, National Bronze and Aluminum Foundry Company of Cleveland, which knowingly sold scrap metal as parts for fighter engines; four of its executives were jailed. The