Mobilizing a Nation
 These student naval aviators (top) were photographed with their instructor at NAS Corpus Christi, Texas, in early 1942 getting ready for a cross-country flight. By the fall of 1944, recently designated pilots like Lieutenant (jg) Alex Vraciu (below, signaling six kills) were becoming aces in the far reaches of the Pacific.
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What van Creveld left out of his comparison was the context within which American rearmament occurred. While the Germans had six and a half years to get ready for World War II—a war that Hitler had expressly told his generals was coming four days after assuming power in 1933, the earliest move to rearm in the United States came with the naval bills of 1938; not until 1939 did real rearmament in the air begin, while only the shock of the French collapse in spring 1940 awoke the Roosevelt administration to start the Army's buildup. Without the luxury of time—the Navy would be in combat barely three years after its rearmament had begun, and the Army slightly over two-and-a-half years after it began rearming—the U.S. military had to take a number of short cuts the Germans with a lengthy process of rearmament had managed to avoid. Moreover, the United States confronted one enormous disadvantage that the Germans, who were at the center of the war they had started, did not. The United States had to project its military power and supply its allies over oceanic distances, a feat few countries could even attempt. Perhaps at times this did result in an overemphasis on logistics, but considering the catastrophe that the breakdown of German logistics caused during the invasion of the Soviet Union in December 1941, more was definitely better than less.
IIn effect, the Americans were forced to use the same mass production techniques for turning out its military forces that it used so well with industrial production. Whatever the deficiencies of such an approach, there was no other choice. It was in the categorizing and then training U.S. manpower that the services achieved extraordinary successes. Admittedly, there were weaknesses in the training system. The 90th Infantry Division, which came ashore early in the Normandy invasion, was so incompetent that one of its officers, the future General William Dupuy, described it as the finest machine ever made for killing Americans. But the great majority of Army divisions in the European Theater of Operations, as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel noted in early 1943, proved to be fast learners and eventually highly skilled combat formations. Some were outstanding when they first went into combat, such as the 88th Division in Italy; others had to learn under fire. But there was no other choice given the strategic and operational demands that the war made on the United States.
The story was much the same in the Pacific where the 27th Infantry Division was the exception by virtue of its consistent failures. But for the most part Army, like Marine divisions, proved to be the combat masters of the best the Imperial Japanese Army could throw at them. Historians have quibbled over the decision to stop the Army's build-up at 89 divisions. That decision proved to be a costly one for the troops involved in the war in Europe, particularly in terms of the savage fighting that occurred for two months in Normandy and then for six months on the German frontier. Nevertheless, considering the myriad pressures on the United States, it is hard to see what areas—logistics, production, naval or air power--might have been scaled back to create additional divisions, especially given what was known at the time. War always involves hard choices, and those are precisely what American leaders confronted in 1942.
What was particularly impressive about the American war effort was how the training program married up with the huge increases in weapons production that month by month climbed steadily upwards. In the hard days of 1942 and 1943, when front line bomber and fighter squadrons were suffering heavy losses, the air components of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps chose to pull the surviving pilots, including the aces, back from combat. Those pilots brought their combat-tested talents to the training establishment in the United States, where they were able to impact substantially on the training syllabi and thus the capabilities of those in the training pipeline.
Perhaps the best example of the ability of the U.S. military to turn the raw material drafted out of civilian life into the highly skilled technologists of war was the United States Navy. The Navy confronted a massive number of training challenges, among which were: providing sufficient aircrews for the carrier force and land-based air units; manning the rapidly swelling number of major fleet units, from carriers to battleships to cruisers; manning the amphibious Navy from whose ships the great landings in Europe and the Pacific would be launched; guarding the sea lanes of the American and Caribbean coasts; manning the fleet train to support the great naval operations against the Japanese; providing the trained manpower for the shore establishment on which all of these various efforts rested; training up thousands of specialists in new technologies like radar; and, finally, providing the manpower for the great training establishments that turned young Americans just out of high school into combat-ready sailors.
In the early 1980s, this author became friends wih Wayne Woodrow Hayes, whose coaching days had ended so sadly. We spent a number of hours talking about his career in the Navy—a career in which Coach Hayes joined up as a petty officer in 1941 to coach football at Great Lakes Naval Station. He almost immediately volunteered for OCS, earned a commission, and went off to the Pacific. At the war's end he was the executive officer of a destroyer escort, a ship already assigned the mission of serving as a communications link off the invasion beaches of Kyushu. Shortly after the end of the war he took over command of that DE and brought it and its crew back to the United States. Among the many points Coach Hayes made about the Navy—a service he deeply loved—was that its approach to training had molded his thinking about coaching and played a major role in his success as a coach. Coach Hayes' experiences and his rise through the ranks reflected how the United States was able to put together such enormous and effective military forces in such a short period of time.
Sixty years after the end of the Second World War we might pause to consider the extraordinary accomplishments of that generation. The current position that the United States enjoys today in the world is to a considerable extent the result of its efforts. And the victory of 1945 represented a triumph that reflected the culture and persona of the American people. There was little of art or extraordinary cleverness in it. Victory came as the result of an extraordinarily successful mobilization of the talents and skills of the American people and their ability to draw the full bounty from the factories and fields that were their patrimony. In effect they drowned their opponents with their production, and by so doing they destroyed three of the most monstrous tyrannies in human history. Moreover, the strategic results of that victory laid the basis for America's triumph in the Cold War. In every respect it was an extraordinary record.
Dr. Murray, senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses and professor emeritus of history at the Ohio State University, is the author or co-author of numerous works, including A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2000).
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