Freedom's Forge (24 page)

The president decided it was time to act. On May 27 he declared a state of national emergency, saying that “if we were to yield on this, we would inevitably submit to world domination” by Hitler.
²⁵
American naval forces extended the security zone as far as Iceland and occupied that barren island country. On June 9, Roosevelt ordered federal troops in to end the strike at the North American plant. Many predicted a violent backlash. Instead, when troops arrived, workers unveiled an American flag and marched with them back into the factory.
²⁶

That was the one bright patch on an increasingly dismal labor front. On June 22, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Some hoped this would move the Communist Party firmly into the Allies’ camp, especially the CIO. Instead, Big Labor came up with another issue to fight about, unionization of all defense contractors. It found a firm new ally in the National Defense Mediation Board, whose members consistently backed every effort to enforce unionization, including walkouts by labor. Overall, 1941 was a near-record year of strikes and disputes, with more than 3,500 of them, costing 23 million man-days of labor—enough to build 124
Fletcher
-class destroyers.
²⁷

That second week in August, the strikes came with a dizzying flurry. On August 6, 16,000 CIO shipyard workers walked away from their jobs at Federal Shipbuilding in Kearny, New Jersey. The issue was not pay or conditions, but a contract with the Navy that allowed an open shop. Three tankers, two freighters, six destroyers, and a cruiser sat unfinished and useless as union stewards and management wrangled.

That was Wednesday. On Saturday fifteen hundred workers walked away from the Curtiss-Wright propeller plant in Caldwell, New Jersey, which made propellers for eight types of warplanes. That same day, carpenters struck at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where they had been building a new dry dock. Their demand was for overtime pay on Saturdays.
By the time the strike was settled, almost two weeks of crucial work were gone.
²⁸

Knudsen watched, helpless to stop the crumbling production effort. Roosevelt was sending conflicting signals on the seriousness of the defense effort, while the American people themselves were sharply divided. Gallup polls showed that almost two-thirds of the country opposed getting involved in the war in Europe, but almost the same number expected the country to be at war in the next year. It was not a formula for boosting morale.
New York Times
reporter Frank Kluckhohn toured the American heartland—Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri—and of the hundreds of businessmen and working people he spoke to, only three or four actually supported entering the war. “I would do everything short of going to Leavenworth to sabotage the war if we entered,” one young lawyer declared.
²⁹

A
Time
reporter visited the Army’s new training depots to interview eager young draftees, except that few of them were very eager. At one Mississippi camp, soldiers booed newsreel pictures of President Roosevelt and General Marshall, while excerpts from a speech by isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson drew a loud ovation. Certainly it was hard to expect American business to go full out for the war effort when the country itself was so conflicted.
³⁰

The battle over raw materials bottlenecks brought all the caterwauling in Washington to a fevered pitch. Don Nelson had to report to Knudsen and the rest of OPM that his priorities system for raw materials was breaking down. As many as five thousand factories might have to close because they couldn’t get adequate supplies of aluminum, copper, nickel, alloy steels, zinc, tin, and tungsten. Somewhere between one and two million workers might find themselves out of work.
³¹

Clearly something had to give. What gave was the Knudsen formula for steadily growing military orders on the backs of civilian production, and letting suppliers find new ways to increase production. Instead on August 28 the president announced the creation of yet another new agency, the Supplies, Priorities, and Allocation Board, to split up available supplies of materials between military and civilian needs. “Don’t worry, Bill,” Roosevelt said with his engaging grin, “it’ll make your job easier.”

Knudsen knew better. The New Dealers had won. The membership of the new SPAB told the story. They included Leon Henderson, now head of the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply, who wanted deep cuts in civilian production (it puzzled Knudsen and his stalwarts that the man in charge of protecting civilian consumers from the impact of war preparation was always looking for ways Americans could do with less). Harry Hopkins sat at the table in his capacity as head of the Lend-Lease program. So did Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, the former agriculture secretary and New Deal ideologue who, like Hopkins, saw the defense buildup as a way to deepen and extend the powers of the federal government—in the words of one cynic, “as a version of WPA that Republicans will have to support.”

If Knudsen was the big loser, the winner was Donald Nelson as SPAB’s executive director. The creation of SPAB involved a larger personnel shake-up. Ed Stettinius was appointed to replace Harry Hopkins in running Lend-Lease. Knudsen’s right-hand man, John Biggers, was moved to London to oversee that end of the Lend-Lease knot.
³²
At the same time, the first round of curtailment of civilian production had begun.

First came the auto industry, with a drastic cut by more than half. Then in October nonessential construction was ordered halted, to divert materials to defense plant construction. On October 21 manufacturers had to stop using copper in almost all civilian products, followed by sharp cuts in refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, metal office furniture, and similar durable goods.
³³

Yet in the end, SPAB did no better than its predecessors. The Army and Navy would fight it tooth and nail over what it saw as misplaced priorities in the allocation of materials, as they would its successor agency, the War Production Board. Don Nelson’s efforts to tell them they could not have everything they wanted, exactly when they wanted it, and that a military buildup without a strong civilian sector (one with enough lumber, for example, to build houses for war plant workers or enough heavy equipment to repair roads and bridges) was impossible, would make him the most-hated man on Constitution Avenue.
³⁴
As for SPAB, it became another lump in Washington’s administrative alphabet soup until it was washed away by Pearl Harbor.

Still, Knudsen could look down at his own schedule with some satisfaction. Things were on track. The critical period of retooling was almost over. Although the increase in the output of machine tools was not yet visible, by year’s end the value of machine tools put out by the industry would be nearly double that of 1940—just as Fred Geier had promised. Likewise, the nation’s munitions output would double in the second half of 1941.
³⁵

No one who read the newspapers knew it yet, but the tap was about to be turned on. In January 1941 defense spending rose to triple what it had been during the previous six months. By July it quintupled, and December it jumped another
twelvefold
. America, the isolationist nation still at peace, was fast approaching Nazi Germany in its defense output. In 1942 it would roar past it.

Every month of the second half of 1941, $2 billion of munitions were being stamped, milled, riveted, punched, or rolled out. While Walter Lippmann and others bayed about unreadiness and the need to move forward, and while agency heads in Washington were panicking, across the country the war production curve was moving steeply upward. America was poised to produce arms in quantities no one had ever thought possible. The explosive rate of growth Knudsen and his colleagues triggered from mid-1940 to the end of 1941 eased after 1942, although the numbers of planes, ships, tanks, and weapons would continue to explode (see
Appendix A
). As historian Geoffrey Perret later put it, “Without the accomplishment of those eighteen months who can doubt that the war would have lasted substantially longer than it did and taken more lives than it did?”
³⁶

It was all due to Knudsen and his team. They had created, in effect, an almost self-perpetuating mechanism that fed upon its own individual dynamic elements. Theorists of the science of complexity would call it emergence. Economists have another term: “spontaneous order.” It was the most powerful and flexible system of wartime production ever devised, because in the end no one devised it. It grew out of the underlying productivity of the American economy, dampened by a decade of depression but ready to spring to life. Out of what seemed like chaos and disorder to Washington would come an explosion of innovation, adaptation, and creativity—not to mention hard work—across the country.
³⁷

Now it was up to America’s military to get ready to use it—and that moment was coming faster than anyone realized.

On a cold blustery Thursday evening in late 1941, Knudsen attended a dinner in the North Lounge of the Carleton Hotel. Vice President Henry Wallace of SPAB was there. So was SPAB’s executive director, Donald Nelson, Lend-Lease’s Ed Stettinius, and Frank Knox, the secretary of the Navy.

After dinner Knox gave a speech to the assembled distinguished guests.

“I feel I can speak very frankly, within these four walls,” Knox said. “We are very close to war. War may begin in the Pacific at any moment.”

It was true. In June, Roosevelt had imposed an oil embargo on imperial Japan, and in July he had frozen Japan’s assets in America—a virtual
casus belli
if ever there was one for the resource-starved island nation. In October some two thousand Japanese Americans were ordered evacuated from the West Coast. American naval intelligence had discovered that the Japanese were gathering troop transports in their harbors in Indochina—possibly for a strike against British Malaya and Singapore, or the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, or possibly even farther out. On Monday the new Japanese premier, General Hideki Tojo, formally rejected an appeal from Secretary of State Hull for settling America and Japan’s differences amicably.

“But I want you to know,” Knox continued, striking his fist into his palm, “that no matter what happens, the United States Navy is ready! Every man is at his post, every ship is at its station. The Navy is
ready
. Whatever happens, the Navy is not going to be caught napping.”
³⁸

Knudsen’s driver picked him up and took him back to his Rock Creek Park home. It was the evening of Thursday, December 4, 1941.

Three days later, in far-off Hawaii, the roof caved in on Knox’s prediction.

America was about to begin the test of total war.

Photo courtesy of the
Detroit News
Archives

A LITTLE BEFORE
2
P
.
M
. on December 7, 1941, the phone rang in the secretary of war’s house. It was the president, who said excitedly, “Have you heard the news?”

“Well, I have heard the telegrams which have been coming in about the Japanese advances in the Gulf of Siam,” Stimson replied.

“Oh, no, I don’t mean that,” Roosevelt cried. “They have attacked Hawaii. They are now bombing Hawaii.”
¹

The next day, December 8, Adolf Hitler declared war on the United
States. War had come to America without warning, and from both directions.

No one had quite figured out how this was going to work. At the prompting of Undersecretary Robert Patterson, the Army had finally worked out its so-called Victory Plan in September 1941, which for the first time envisaged the United States going full out in a war in the Atlantic and Europe. It still saw Japan as a problem to be put off until at least July 1943.
²

That timetable had suddenly, catastrophically speeded up. Japan’s strike at Pearl Harbor had left eight battleships either sunk or smoldering wrecks, plus two cruisers and four destroyers. On December 10 the first Japanese troops landed on Luzon in the Philippines, after Japanese bombers had flattened the U.S. air force there on the ground. When Knudsen had asked General Marshall back in the summer of 1940 what was the most important thing he needed to get ready for war, he replied without hesitation, “Time.”
³
Time had just run out.

On the Tuesday after Pearl Harbor, a somber Roosevelt summoned Knudsen to the White House. He had already seen Knudsen’s report on production in 1941. The numbers were impressive: 19,290 planes, 50,684 aircraft engines, 97,000 machine guns, 9,924 40mm Bofors antiaircraft guns, 3,964 tanks, and more.
⁴
Now the president said he wanted those numbers accelerated. He needed 30,000 planes in 1942 instead of the 18,000 Knudsen and his team had projected. He wanted 45,000 tanks, and 75,000 in 1943; 20,000 antiaircraft guns; and 8 million tons of merchant shipping instead of the 1.1 million tons produced in 1941.