Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

I read and reviewed the 'advance copy' some months ago. The book is for Amazon readers interested in the creation of the modern America, WW2 history, the wedding of capitalism & politics with the economy, and the micro/macro-economic outcomes of personality and possibility.'Freedom's Forge' is the story of an uncompromised time of cooperation between the public and private sectors but it wasn't easy. Herman delivers a timely and extraordinary encapsulation of this other time in America. The topic was an easy sell to me. The subject matter has long been a personal interest. There is so little being published on the topic that one's pursuit of the curiosity is rather like the blind man defining an elephant.For this reader "Freedom's Forge" is closely associated with my early career experience. The time is a mystery from the only recent past and the curiosity to keep my eyes open for hints. Long ago, my old grizzled techno-industrialist boss cut his eyeteeth in WW2 industry and summed it up for me. I was just a kid-scientist working my first job out of grad school. I had constructed my first technical project plan for his review ... "How long?" he yelled. "My God, son, WW2 was only a 44 month program!". I was stunned and smitten with curiosity from then till now. The more I look, the more I see that confirms that something thoroughly amazing occurred in those 44 months.US factories yielded superior products in total and in volumes that boggle the imagination even in an iPad, smartphone modern world (though they aren't made in the USA). The feat was an ostensibly unrivaled milestone in organized human civilization. There is simply no macro/micro-econometric precedent like this 44 months. That's the phenomena Herman explores. Surely the war was motivation but ... the Japanese and Germans were motivated too. More than motivation ... the American response was a concert of genius, individual trust and a national trust that is unfortunately difficult to grasp in its 70 year distance. In only 40 months, the US accomplished the feat at every level to enable the modern super power ... it was an hellacious cat-drive ... civilians of independent minds, inter-racial, uni-sex and all re-tooled to the cadence of the steadily increasing casualties from the front.In modern context, consider that The F-35 has been a 132 month program and remains incomplete. The next US aircraft carrier will have been a 72 month program if it is commissioned as planned and with only minor naval architectural changes from its predecessors. Between 1942 and war's end, 5, 6 and 7 or more generationally significant leaps in designs of all types were manufactured and rolled out. These modern things aren't 'bad' but there was once another way that worked far more efficiently and quickly.Having visited and worked in some of these old WW2 engineering and production sites all over the US, Britain and Australia one can still find the strange quirks. One Australian armored vehicle final assembly plant (still in operation) was `cut & pasted' with the precise architectural plans of its US counterpart. There was just no time to re-engineer the construction plans... strangely in retrospect, no one had time to notice that the sky lights should face in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere. Larry Bell of WW2 Martin aircraft fame and the Bell Helicopter founder bricked narrow the hangar doors and installed structural columns in his helicopter plants to insure no one at Bell ever tried to imagine a fixed wing aircraft. I've visited Stalin's `east of the Urals' sites where US made machinery and designs of this era are very much in evidence. The vital machine tools that were the critical enabler to build the T-32's & T-34's in such volume were shipped to Stalin through Murmansk & Arkhangelsk ... the old Bridgeport's and Cincinnati's are still turning ... billets of steel are not easily transformed into tanks. The UK was jokingly imagined to capsize with the weight of the American materials staged for D-Day. These are my quirky examples and not from `Freedom's Forge'.Comprehending the reality of the cumulative effort, the tens of thousands of businesses that suddenly made the parts that contributed to the entire process in its time and place is beyond one's grasp if you are at all familiar with modern industry. Herman's narrative fills in some of the home front mega-story away from the front lines, the battles and the generals that are far better known.How could so much be accomplished in the US and nearly alone? `Freedom's Forge' carries the reader through the behaviors of the public and private leadership, their subordinates and the system they built with willing civilians and rancorous, seething bureaucrats. A labor strike at a critical juncture in the US support of the UK cost 14 ship builds that the enemy capitalized with torpedo casualities. Rarely can one find such disparate proportionality over cents/hr. The resolution of ideas, technology and processes extended from the iron mines of MN to the thousands of forges and intricate part factories and to assembly lines that rolled product onto the revolutionary new Liberty ships (the Merchant Marine took the highest casualties of any service just moving stuff)... and it was accomplished with all manner of previously inexperienced civilians.Until Herman's 'Freedom's Forge', the story has been hazy and piecemeal. The whole history is far from complete. Herman provides the accounts of well-known Henry Kaiser and the less known William Knudsen among so many lost names that conjured a new nation out the economic collapse of the Depression. It is a genuine untold story. There are other materials to consider but I've found no narrative that ranges as wide and deep as 'Freedom's Forge' to attribute so many fascinating characters and stories to such a phenomenal human endeavor.5-stars and an important book! This is the first 'advanced copy' that I have purchased after publication. I loved it!p.s. I'm curious about other reviewer's observation regarding the author's `balance issues'. The organized labor strikes are a matter of historical record. The poor safety conditions and casualty records among workers is documented in every industry. The loss of output directly assignable to the strikes is quantified historically. The extraordinary rise of US wages is documented.That the New Dealers and FDR had to call on the military to break coal mining strikes that affected steel output, and then quell other strikes is a matter of historical record. If the author had failed to include the union conflicts, he would have demonstrated another kind of `lack of balance'. The author, for instance, does not mention the Philadelphia transit union strike over union seniority and pennies/hr that shut down the huge Philadelphia based defense industry for a month. The big labor/New Dealer situation had deteriorated into union-interest against the national issue of winning the war with the fewest casualties. Organized labor is seen to pick and choose the choke points to best strike `Freedoms's Forge' for whatever purpose, now long forgotten and rarely recalled.Ickes & Truman are historically documented to use the bureaucracy to perecute the `$1 a year men' in non-value adding assaults. The whole story, good and bad, and for the readers worldview are well covered in this book to consider.

Just before D-Day in 1944, General George S. Patton made a famous speech (also used in the movie Patton with George C. Scott) to the US 3rd Army in which he said, "We have the best food, the finest equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity those poor sons-of-bitches we are going up against." Source: Patton: A Genius for War  Patton: Genius for War, A .In Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II by Arthur Herman, just published in May 2012, we learn why and how "the finest equipment" in the world was built in massive quantities for the allied cause.At the start of World War II, the USA was a third rate military power. In 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland Hitler's Luftwaffe had a strength of nearly 8,500 fighters and bombers. The US Army air corps had barely 1/5th that number. Patton's Second Armored brigade had only 325 tanks while the Germans had more than 2,000. There were only 334,000 men in the total US armed forces. The US army ranked 18th largest in the world with about 190,000 men just ahead of Holland and behind Hungary and Romania. Time Magazine said "the US Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns." There was no Military Industrial Complex, the USA was not a superpower and about 3/4's of the population supported isolationism and the preservation of peace at all cost.From July 1940 to VJ day in August 1945 the United States produced a staggering $183 billion in arms. America's shipyards launched 141 aircraft carriers, eight battleships, 807 cruisers, destroyers and destroyer escorts, 203 submarines and almost 52 million tons of merchant shipping. US factories turned out 88,410 tanks, 257,000 artillery pieces and 640,000 Jeeps. The United States produced 324,750 aircraft averaging 170 per day since 1942. Nearly 10 million American men and women would serve their country in uniform.The United States, by the end of the war, had the best equipped fighting force on the planet. Moreover, through the lend lease program the United States had supplied many of the arms needs of Britain, the Soviet Union and other allied forces.How did this remarkable transformation take place? FDR was wise enough to recognize that the power of American business, more often than not led by those who opposed him politically, needed to be harnessed in order to win the war. Freedom's Forge shows how FDR reached out to Bill Knudsen, a Danish American and the President of General Motors, to spearhead the wartime production effort. Knudsen served as the head of the Office of Production Management and brought an experienced manufacturers' vision to the problem of producing war material.Herman documents many of the American production achievements that led to victory in World War II. In Freedom's Forge we learn about the unsung and nearly forgotten production heroes such as Bill Knudsen, Henry Kaiser and others that put the USA on a path to a rapid build-up of industrial production.It was the free market that enabled America to gear up for war so effectively. Herman writes, "Production, however, remained an entirely voluntary process. The War Production Board could and did order companies not to produce things: new cars, for instance, and refrigerators and other heavy durable goods, It never told anyone what to make. That was left to the imagination of American business. This was how Bill Knudsen had designed things from the start, and it remained the pivot point of the entire wartime system. Everything made for the war effort was made by those who saw some advantage for themselves in doing so, and therefore they brought all their skills and tools and knowledge to bear on the task--both to help the country and to make some money...Nor was it entirely a coincidence that no other wartime economy depended more on free enterprise incentives than America's, and that none produced more of everything in quality and quantity, both in military and civilian goods."American business showed remarkable flexibility during the war. The famous carmaker Henry Ford, who was an ardent isolationist before Pearl Harbor and despised FDR's New Deal, built the massive Willow Run production facility to crank out B-24 aircraft. Henry Kaiser, who had specialized in road construction projects before the war, became a massive ship and aircraft builder. Kaiser led the "Six Companies" that produced thousands of Liberty Ships that ferried men and equipment to the war zones. Kaiser had one Liberty ship built in an astonishing 4 days, fifteen hours and twenty-six minutes. Winston Churchill declared, "The foundation of all our hopes and schemes was the immense shipbuilding program of the United States."Not all US casualties in World War II served in the military; many were from the world of work and business. Morrison Knudsen (another "Six Companies" member) had employees serving alongside US Marines in the defense of Wake Island in December 1941. A Japanese amphibious force was dispatched to capture the island in late 1941. Many of these MK engineers fought, were killed or wounded, and were captured and spent years in Japanese POW camps. Thousands of civilian merchant mariners aboard Liberty ships lost their lives particularly as a result of Nazi U-boats in the North Atlantic. On December 30th, 1942 Boeing's best civilian test pilot, Eddie Allen, was killed with the rest of his crew while test-flying a B-29 which crashed near Boeing field in Seattle. Boeing later sorted out the issues with the B-29 and the "Superfortress" bomber; these planes ignited Japanese cities with incendiary bombs (developed by Kaiser) and delivered the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Arthur Herman's fine book is not without a few flaws. Herman writes that Hap Arnold "was the only senior military or civilian leader to oppose dropping the atomic bomb." Yet in Eisenhower's own book Mandate for Change, he recalls a Potsdam conference encounter with Henry Stimson, the head of the War Department, where he "voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives." (Source: D.D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 312-13).If you enjoyed Freedom's Forge you will also like America Invades  America Invades: How We've Invaded or been Militarily Involved with almost Every Country on Earth  by Kelly / Laycock and  Italy Invades

Great account of the way that industry chiefs were called on to ramp up production of aircraft and ships along with other materiel for the US entry into WW2. This was also met with resistance by the New Dealers and the Labour Unions at the time. Despite of the successes, and this programme laying the ground for the US's postwar industrial might, the private sector men who drove the production, were largely forgotten.A literally riveting read!

This is a story that mainly revolves around two remarkable men, 'Bill' Knudsen and Henry Kaiser, who led the way for US industry to become the maker of the majority of the ships, aircraft, vehicles, tanks and weaponry used by the Allies in World War Two. The scale of their collective achievements is astonishing and, from the author's point of view, it happened despite rather than because of the politicians in Washington. No doubt other historians would take a different viewpoint on that. It is a story of Americans and America but it is not nationalistic or hagiographic, as some US historians tend to write. The scope of the book means that the astonishing achievements of other Allies like the UK and Canada are barely touched upon although Mr Herman does acknowledge that UK orders from US manufacturers before 1942 was crucial as were Britain's innovations, which were shared with the US. I recommend reading also David Edgerton's Britain's War Machine.

Arthur Herman has once again applied his enormous intellect and writing skills to make an important contribution to world history ,recording the vital and successful role that American industry played in the war.I am not sure I would have read the book,had it not been written by Herman.He has that ability to write about quite complex subjects,very important ones at that.His books on Ghandi and Churchill and How the Scots invented the modern world,are good examples of this.Most of all,when I read a Herman book,I always learn so much and know I can trust him to keep to the facts.I recommend this book to anyone who has a thirst for knowledge but does not like to be lectured.

This is a cracking book and once started very hard to put down. Covers a facet of WW2 which most people have little knowledge of. The book covers many different topics and is a fascinating read. Is a great example of what a few key people with real skills and experience can do when they put their heads down and "go for it" Anyone interested in Manufacturing technology, American manufacturing history, how WW2 was won and how the US came out of WW2 with a massive manufacturing machine to rebuild the countries devastated by the war will enjoy this book.

Well written and very informative!