Destructive Creation. Mark R. Wilson
In 1942, the new GOCO plants coming on line would make the United States into the world’s greatest producer of munitions. Most elements for a massive military-industrial mobilization were already in place, even before Japanese planes closed in on their targets in Hawaii.
Phase 3: All-Out Industrial Mobilization
Despite the considerable work that had been done over the previous months, military-industrial planners—like all Americans—were stunned by the Pearl Harbor attacks. Before 7 December 1941, the United States had acted as a giant supplier of munitions to the Allies. Now it became an allout participant, which needed enough military-industrial capacity to fight a two-theater war. The War and Navy Departments immediately called on many existing war plants to add night shifts, so that they could operate round the clock.79 Beyond this, clearly, new plants would be needed. But how large was the production gap, and how would the United States manage to close it?
How big a difference did Pearl Harbor make to the trajectory of American military-industrial mobilization? Across the war economy as a whole, the continuities with what had already been done in 1938–41 seem at least as important as any innovations. On 6 January 1942, President Roosevelt used an address to Congress to announce bold new targets: 60,000 planes and 45,000 tanks produced in 1942, and another 125,000 planes in 1943. Roosevelt’s new targets demanded about $50 billion in war spending for 1942, roughly double the amount planned before Pearl Harbor. This was an aggregate figure but still described the experiences of many industries and firms. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the bomber program was doubled. At the Sperry Gyroscope Company, the nation’s premier designer of complex targeting equipment, executives started 1942 with the task of doubling its production of sights for the .50-caliber machine guns that would be installed in the bombers. Sperry’s output of automatic pilots would need to be tripled. Similar expansions were contemplated by executives in dozens of companies across the country and by the military officers responsible for acquiring the goods.80
The task of doubling aggregate munitions output was formidable, but much of it was handled by the same kinds of government-business interactions that had been used to expand the arsenal over the previous months. Procurement officials continued to rely heavily on GOCO arrangements; private investment in new war plant became even less important. Three of the most remarkable post–Pearl Harbor military-industrial efforts—the synthetic rubber program, the B-29 bomber program, and the atomic bomb project—were managed almost entirely with the GOCO method, using experienced military contractors and big industrial firms. Thanks to all the newly authorized GOCO plants, in addition to the ones that had broken ground late in 1941, the months immediately after Pearl Harbor marked the peak of wartime building. Of all war spending in 1942, about a third went to construction. Three-fourths of this plant building and tooling was paid for by government agencies.81
Despite these continuities, the third phase of arsenal building did bring some changes in the shape of the military economy. One was more genuine conversion of manufacturing, from civilian to military production. Conversion had been much less common during the months before Pearl Harbor, when the civilian economy had been humming. In 1941, the auto industry had sold 4.6 million passenger cars, nearly as many as it had managed back in the banner year of 1929. Now, in early 1942, automakers and other companies were forced to stop much of their production for civilian markets. Managing conversion in 1942 was one of the essential tasks of the War Production Board (WPB), created on 16 January to succeed OPM. In its very first meeting, the WPB agreed that the automobile industry would need to cease its production of civilian passenger vehicles by mid-February. By April, the WPB had issued several orders that prohibited or drastically limited the manufacture of many civilian consumer durables, such as furniture and refrigerators.82 Companies formerly producing these goods would now be expected to make goods for the military; indeed, many of them would need to do so, if they wanted to stay in business. So one of the biggest changes in the shape of the war economy in 1942 was the way in which it broadened, to encompass hundreds of firms and plants that had stayed out of the first two phases of industrial mobilization.
As the nation transitioned into an all-out mobilization, hundreds of smaller firms became involved in the war economy, along with the biggest industrial corporations. Major prime contractors, such as Boeing and Chrysler, actually sent about half of their contract dollars to their subcontractors, which provided hundreds of small parts and larger components. Meanwhile, the War and Navy Departments, encouraged by the White House, Congress, and the WPB, used their large, decentralized procurement bureaus to push war orders even wider. By the middle of the war, most American manufacturers had some direct experience with military subcontracting, if not prime contracts. Even the producers of smaller components might become major prime contractors, because the War and Navy Departments provided the assemblers of large weapons systems with a great deal of “government-furnished equipment” (GFE). Ranging from entire aircraft engines to small components such as valves, the GFE often amounted to a quarter or more of the total value of finished weapons, such as aircraft. Indeed, the ubiquity of GFE in the U.S. war economy suggests how heavily it was coordinated by military officers, and not just by civilian officials and prime contractors.
Table 4. From Peacetime to Wartime Production: Expansion Orders of Magnitude, by Industry, 1939–45
Sources: WPB Minutes, 39; “Administration of Cost-Plus-a-Fixed Fee Contracts, for the Operation of Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated Ammunition Plants” (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Ordnance, Mar. 1945), copy in folder General Files–General Correspondence (1 of 3), box 4, DPED; Patterson, Arming the Nation for War, 173; Gilbert, “Expansion of Shipbuilding,” 158; Turrell, Rubber Policies, 23; Lane, Ships for Victory, 398; Holley, Buying Aircraft, 548; Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, 136–49.
One of the biggest mobilization projects of 1942–43 was the creation of a huge new GOCO synthetic rubber industry. After Japan moved quickly after Pearl Harbor to dominate Southeast Asia, it controlled about 95 percent of the world’s natural rubber supply. Suddenly, the Allies faced the real prospect of running out of rubber.83 This was an ugly problem that exposed some corporations’ early unwillingness to relinquish patent rights, as well as poor decisions in 1940–41 by Jesse Jones and President Roosevelt.84 Of all major American war industries (outside the atomic bomb project), rubber was the one that required the most extreme expansion of prewar capacities. By war’s end, the United States was making nearly three hundred times as much synthetic rubber as it had done in 1940 (see Table 4).
The big synthetic rubber expansion of 1942–43 was handled almost entirely by the GOCO method. In the opening weeks of 1942, the DPC financed the construction of eleven Buna-S synthetic rubber plants, each at least three times bigger than the four 10,000-ton plants that Jones and Roosevelt had authorized in 1941. The DPC would end up spending $700 million on the synthetic rubber program, which included three dozen facilities. The plants, many of which were located in Texas and Louisiana, were operated by big rubber, oil, and chemical companies, including Goodyear, B. F. Goodrich, Union Carbide, and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. (The DPC leased the plants for $1 a year to operators that received management fees that ran from about $6 to $15 a ton, depending on the volume of output.)85 While the plants were under construction in 1942–43, anxieties about rubber supply remained high. But once they began to produce, tensions eased. Between June and December 1943, synthetic rubber output nearly quadrupled, to a rate of 36,000 long tons a month. By the winter of 1943–44, the synthetic rubber program was over the hump. Although rising military demand continued to absorb available supply through 1945, Allied military campaigns would not be crippled by a lack of rubber, after all.86
In most other major war industries, munitions output was already high in 1942, thanks in large part to the big public investments in GOCO plant before Pearl Harbor. In merchant shipbuilding, Admirals Land and Vickery at the USMC were called on to roughly double their production targets. They paid for a few new shipyards, but most of their orders were met by GOCO facilities and contractors they had helped put into business in 1941, including Henry Kaiser.87