Mobilizing a Nation
By Williamson Murray
Proceedings, August 2005
On the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September 1939, the United States was still in the throes of the Great Depression. Its military institutions hardly reflected those of a great power. Its army rested somewhere between those of Bolivia and Thailand in terms of its size. Its army and naval air forces were just beginning to acquire modern aircraft. And its Navy, undoubtedly the best prepared of the services, could at best maintain a defensive posture to defend the Western Hemisphere from external maritime threats. Only its separation by two great oceans from the conflicts boiling over in Asia and Europe allowed the United States its arrogant sense of being removed from world affairs. The geographic removal from the world's trouble spots also allowed substantial numbers of American politicians, and the electorate that supported them, to believe that the United States could remain safe and secure. As late as July 1941, when Nazi panzer divisions had already captured Smolensk two-thirds of the way to Moscow and with Japan threatening war in the Pacific, the Congress of the United States renewed the draft, which had only begun the previous year, by a single vote.
Six years later the representatives of the Empire of Japan signed the instruments of surrender on the decks of the great battleship Missouri (BB-63)—their country a defeated and broken nation. The third of the Axis powers that had embarked on war with such arrogance and assurance in the late 1930s was now surrendering to the Allied nations. The Italians had collapsed in summer 1943, while the Germans had fought through to May 1945, leaving their country a broken and wrecked hulk of what Adolf Hitler promised was going to be the Thousand Year Reich. In spring 1945 American soldiers had derisively scratched Hitler's by then preposterous claim on the broken masonry of Germany's smashed cities that no one would be able to recognize the Reich after the Nazis had finished with it.
The Missouri was only the foremost representative of the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet—or Third Fleet, depending on who was commanding it—which by itself (not including the other major fleet units of the United States that were deployed around the globe) was larger than the combined strength of all the rest of the navies in the world. Overhead, as the Japanese signed the surrender without visible emotion, a great fleet of B-29s and carrier aircraft flew to underscore that the United States ruled not only the world's oceans, but its airspaces as well. By spring of 1945 the United States Army counted over seven million soldiers in its ranks, while it had trained and equipped eighty-nine combat divisions, all of which, save one, would see combat in either Europe or the Pacific. By that time the minuscule U.S. Marine Corps of 1939 had grown to over six divisions, supported by its own air units and the massive amphibious forces of the United States Navy.
The armed forces set up programs literally overnight that trained young Americans from all walks of life to do whatever needed doing. In the spring of 1942 at NAS North Island, California, these sailors were learning to be aviation machinists mates.
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Over the course of those six years since the outbreak of the war, the United States had mobilized its economy and manpower to an extraordinary extent. It created the world's largest navy and the world's largest air forces. It built up a massive logistic infrastructure to project its military power across two of the world's greatest oceans. It fought a two-ocean, two-front war and won. Almost single-handedly its military power had defeated the Japanese. It helped to win the battle of the Atlantic. It waged the great daylight strategic bombing campaign against the Luftwaffe and by so doing had won complete air superiority in the skies over Europe by May 1944. The defeat of German air power represented the triumph of the American mass production of weapons systems. In 1944 the production of four-engine bombers reached the astounding total of nearly 1,500 bombers per month. As one British commentator noted, American industry was turning out bombers "like cans of beans."
But the military side represented only half of the equation. U.S. industrial and agricultural production played a major role in supporting its allies. The creation of Lend Lease in 1941 allowed the United States to supply immense quantities of military supplies and foodstuffs to Britain and the Soviet Union. The supplies of foodstuffs most probably kept portions of the Soviet population from starvation. Machine tools from the United States had helped to keep the war industries of Britain and the Soviet Union humming. Lend Lease supplied 2,000 locomotives and 11,000 railroad cars to the Soviets. American industry supplied 450,000 trucks that provided the logistical support for the great Soviet offensives that broke the Wehrmacht's back on the Eastern Front in 1943, 1944, and 1945. America's great shipyards turned out merchant shipping in unheard of quantities. While German submarines sank 733 American merchantmen, U.S. shipbuilding yards produced 5,800 vessels, most of them tankers and large cargo carriers. It accomplished this total by literally mass producing ships. Between 1942 and 1944 U.S. shipyards reduced the time required to produce a Liberty Ship from 105 to 56 days.
These accomplishments are by themselves impressive, but at the same time that it was the "Arsenal of Democracy," the United States was putting together the military organizations that contributed so mightily to Allied victory in the war. Here the U.S. military confronted its greatest difficulty. In the 1980s the eminent Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld, wrote a well-received book, Fighting Power , that compared how the U.S. Army and the German Army went about the business of selecting officers to lead troops in combat. Van Creveld's portrait of the American methods and the results could not have been more uncomplimentary to the U.S. Army—especially what he regarded as the overemphasis on staffs and logistics in the American system.
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