Things Get Real
Truth be known, the war was over the moment the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor. It just took another four years or so to work out the details. Grit and valor rightfully captured the headlines, but it was American production that really drove the train.
In 1941, the U.S. auto industry produced more than 3 million civilian cars. For the rest of the war, we only built 139. Every single bit of that production went to war materiel. The world had never seen production on that scale, and it never will again.
The U.S. Navy entered the war with seven fleet carriers and one escort carrier. By the end of 1942, the Japanese had sunk four of them.
By D-Day, we severely curtailed the production of capital ships. The writing was on the wall that we would win the war. While we began WWII with eight aircraft carriers, we ended the conflict with 111. At the height of production, we were churning out 65,000 M1 carbines per day.
Such breathtaking production made a great many people filthy rich. Both Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler kept pictures of each other in their personal offices. Before the war was done, we had produced enough ammunition to shoot every human being on the planet 40 times.
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