Long read: Manufacturing and war: Lessons from WW II

It is fashionable these days to say that “we want to go to war”. After all, that’s what real men like Vladimir Putin do. The punchline of this well researched blog by Yogesh Upadhyaya is that “If you go to war without a strong manufacturing base then God help you”. Why? Because in a prolonged war no other country will come to your help when the chips are down and if a country does not have strong manufacturing base, then once the chips are down, they will keep going. Mr Upadhyaya writes:

“‘In a war, you cannot throw Power Points or pdfs at your enemy.’ The commentator Gray Connolly recently said something to this effect. It was in response to blithe comparisons of the size of the Russian economy with the combined Spanish and Portuguese economies. In a war a country’s manufacturing capability matters and much of services revenue may not be directly useful. This was shown recently in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine where Russia has often made more war material than all of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) put together. This lesson should never have been forgotten by Americans. The United States outproduced Germany, Japan and Italy combined by the end of second World War. This, when they had very low capacity to build war related material when the war began. What they did have was a very strong manufacturing base.”

The rest of Mr Upadhyaya’s piece is an extended case study of how America out-manufactured everybody else to win WW2. Mr Upadhyaya’s piece in turn draws upon a book called “Freedom’s Forge” by Arthur Herman.

For those of us who don’t understand how much strain an economy undergoes during a major war, Mr Upadhyaya shares a few factoids: “The phrase ‘war footing’ is sometimes used casually. It shouldn’t be. The numbers out of the US show why. In 1939, the US army had 325 tanks. Over the period of the war, the US produced 86,000! That is more than 250 x. This is war footing. If all the ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers (12,731) were laid from wing tip to wing tip they would cover the distance from Washington DC to New York City! And this was not the only plane built. This is ‘war footing.’

Before the war, aircraft manufacturing companies were producing around 90 planes a month. President Rossevelt announced that the country would produce 50,000 planes a year. Hitler was not impressed. “What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records, and Hollywood?” he asked. By the end of the war, he had his answer.”

Then Mr Upadhyaya helps us understand how a country with a strong manufacturing repurposes its manufacturing base to crush the enemy: “President Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR), constituted a National Defence Advisory Commission. This commission was to advise him on how the US could meet the expected high demand for munitions. One of the key members of this commission was Bill Knudsen. Knudsen was the President at General Motors at the time. He had spent most of his life contributing to the mass manufacturing revolution, first in Ford and then in General Motors. Knudsen recognised that the required numbers could be made mainly by specialised manufacturing companies and not just by munitions companies.

If Ford and General Motors and Chrysler could make cars in large numbers, why couldn’t they make tanks, he asked?…

In 1940, the British approached the United States to make tanks. The British said that they would need a thousand a month. The army officers were stunned because at that time one company — American Car and Foundry — was barely making thirteen a month. This was when the US army itself wanted another 1,000 a month. To get anywhere close to these numbers, not only a new facility, but also a new way of making tanks would be needed. Knudsen approached the automobile industry. Chrysler agreed to build the tanks even though the Chief Engineer for Chrysler had never seen one in action.

The Chrysler management decided to rely on the army blueprints for making the M3. However, they soon realised that this was not necessarily a good strategy. The army’s design had not taken the progress made by the automobile industry into account. For example, the army design used springs that had been abandoned by the automotive industry a long time ago. Another example was that the tanks were supposed to use air cooled engines which did not work well in hot weather. One of the biggest problems was the use of rivets. The army wanted steel plates to be joined together by rivets. Riveting many thick plates together raised the cost a lot. But the army thought that the alternative — welding — would not be able to handle the rough handling that a tank endured. Eventually Chrysler was able to convince the army. It turned out that not only was welding cheaper but also it was safer. Dislodged rivets played havoc inside a tank.

Another similar example came from the Great Lakes area of the country. The Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company made small cargo vessels. It was approached to make submarines.”

Behind all of this drama are skilled executives (skilled in running vast factories producing highly engineered products) and skilled workers (skilled in cutting, welding, sealing, assembly, etc): “One thing that kept jumping out while reading Freedom’s Forge is how many capable people staffed the senior levels of American manufacturing. People who had the experience of designing and running many factories and products. Oftentimes these people had begun as workers and understood the manufacturing process deeply.

William Knudsen was an immigrant from Denmark. He had pushed carts as a six year old. He then co-built the first tandem bike in the country. When he migrated to the US, he “…found work reaming holes in steel plates for Navy torpedo boats for seventeen and a half cents a day..”. He was a big part of Ford’s mass manufacturing revolution. He had developed most of Ford’s twenty-eight branch factories. Knudsen ended up being in charge of America’s war manufacturing effort… General Motors (GM) was responsible for 10% of the war production.”

At the end of his piece, Mr Upadhyaya cuts to the chase with a message for the chest thumpers in India: “If your country has such an ecosystem, you can hope to put up a fight. If not, you have to hope that your friends supply you with the required material. What happens if you do not have the capability, and if your friends stop supporting you?”

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