Abstract
In December 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt had pledged that the US would be the ‘great arsenal of democracy’. The American contribution to the Allied victory is often, indeed, seen in terms of the production of armaments. The US produced 86,000 tanks, over 300,000 aircraft and 6,755 naval vessels; comparative figures for the whole of the Axis were 55,500, 157,000 and 1,400. To achieve this productivity required the mobilisation of resources, and labour. Roosevelt created a large number of government agencies to manage this, among them the War Labor Board and the Office of War Mobilization. However, these were not always coordinated, and while there were statutory controls of prices and wages, there was never a full national service plan, conscription of labour or nationalised production. Instead, the government and its agencies worked through the business corporations, many of whose leading figures were employed in the new agencies. The spectacular feats of production were therefore carried out largely by private industry: the Kaiser shipyards building Liberty merchant ships or Ford’s Willow Run plant building bombers.