Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II
Arthur Herman
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0812982045
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SELECTED BY THE ECONOMIST AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Remarkable as it may seem today, there once was a time when the president of the United States could pick up the phone and ask the president of General Motors to resign his position and take the reins of a great national enterprise. And the CEO would oblige, no questions asked, because it was his patriotic duty.
In Freedom’s Forge, bestselling author Arthur Herman takes us back to that time, revealing how two extraordinary American businessmen—automobile magnate William Knudsen and shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser—helped corral, cajole, and inspire business leaders across the country to mobilize the “arsenal of democracy” that propelled the Allies to victory in World War II.
“Knudsen? I want to see you in Washington. I want you to work on some production matters.” With those words, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted “Big Bill” Knudsen, a Danish immigrant who had risen through the ranks of the auto industry to become president of General Motors, to drop his plans for market domination and join the U.S. Army. Commissioned a lieutenant general, Knudsen assembled a crack team of industrial innovators, persuading them one by one to leave their lucrative private sector positions and join him in Washington, D.C. Dubbed the “dollar-a-year men,” these dedicated patriots quickly took charge of America’s moribund war production effort.
Henry J. Kaiser was a maverick California industrialist famed for his innovative business techniques and his can-do management style. He, too, joined the cause. His Liberty ships became World War II icons—and the Kaiser name became so admired that FDR briefly considered making him his vice president in 1944. Together, Knudsen and Kaiser created a wartime production behemoth. Drafting top talent from companies like Chrysler, Republic Steel, Boeing, Lockheed, GE, and Frigidaire, they turned auto plants into aircraft factories and civilian assembly lines into fountains of munitions, giving Americans fighting in Europe and Asia the tools they needed to defeat the Axis. In four short years they transformed America’s army from a hollow shell into a truly global force, laying the foundations for a new industrial America—and for the country’s rise as an economic as well as military superpower.
Featuring behind-the-scenes portraits of FDR, George Marshall, Henry Stimson, Harry Hopkins, Jimmy Doolittle, and Curtis LeMay, as well as scores of largely forgotten heroes and heroines of the wartime industrial effort, Freedom’s Forge is the American story writ large. It vividly re-creates American industry’s finest hour, when the nation’s business elites put aside their pursuit of profits and set about saving the world.
Praise for Freedom’s Forge
“A rambunctious book that is itself alive with the animal spirits of the marketplace.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A rarely told industrial saga, rich with particulars of the growing pains and eventual triumphs of American industry . . . Arthur Herman has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history’s memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Magnificent . . . It’s not often that a historian comes up with a fresh approach to an absolutely critical element of the Allied victory in World War II, but Pulitzer finalist Herman . . . has done just that.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
From the Hardcover edition.
British Battle Insignia (2): 1939-45 (Men-at-Arms, Volume 187)
Dambusters: The Forging of a Legend: 617 Squadron in World War II
ANZIO: Italy 1944 (Battleground Europe)
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
A Good Place to Hide: How One French Community Saved Thousands of Lives in World War II
Love affair to go with each! The growing legend of Henry Kaiser, however, left less and less space for the rest of the Six Companies. Kaiser had pulled away from his old partners. They hadn’t joined him in his Fontana steel venture, and they played no part in his future plans. When Steve Bechtel wrote a note hoping they could meet and talk “just as we have in the good old days,” Kaiser didn’t answer.19 Kaiser was on his own, and on his way to the top. Franklin Roosevelt even began to wonder.
Million rifles and small arms, and 17,500 tanks.28 Yet that was almost half the number produced in 1943, and deliberately so. The fact was the problem now was not how to speed up or even maintain production, but how to slow it down as the war’s end approached. Back in July 1943, the New Deal critics had finally gotten their wish. A new centralized agency was set up with a single czar to oversee both war production and manpower mobilization. The czar was Roosevelt confidant and Supreme Court.
President by Congress, led by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats—that pumped still more private investment into the reviving economy. Growth came on so fast that it could withstand the renewal of war in Korea in 1950 without missing a beat—and sustain a massive Pentagon budget all through the Cold War. Guns and butter had come to stay. While the new U.S. military establishment built by American industry during the war guarded the free world, the new postwar American economy.
It was a willing workforce, unionized by prior agreement with the Maritime Commission and the AFL, and backed by a production staff who blinked at nothing. All the same, when Admiral Vickery broke the news to Kaiser and his men that they now were expected to hit 105 days for completing a ship (60 on the ways, 45 for outfitting), their minds boggled. Work on Edgar Kaiser’s first ship, Star of Oregon, was begun on May 19, 1941, and delivered on New Year’s Eve: a total of 253 days. How would they.
Under way to build new plants in Oklahoma City and outside Chicago at Orchard Place, to build the two most famous military transports of the war: the C-47 Skytrain and the four-thousand-mile-range C-54 Skymaster, which could carry American soldiers, paratroopers, and supplies from the skies over Normandy to bases on the other side of the Himalayas. Nearby in San Diego, Consolidated Aircraft’s new president was Kaiser’s friend Tom Girdler, who was turning out B-24 bombers and PBY flying boats.