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

Arthur Herman

Random House

2012

413 pages

ISBN 978-1-4000-6964-4

Allied victory in the Second World War owed as much to America’s productive muscle as it did to the fighting skills of its soldiers and sailors. Arthur Herman, a visiting scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, attributes America’s astonishing feats of war production to the underlying know-how and drive of American businessmen. The heroes of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II are industrial titans such as William Knudsen, an automobile production genius, and Henry Kaiser, who built countless Liberty cargo ships quickly and cheaply in simple yards on both coasts. The villains of the book are communist union bosses, who caused needless delays by striking, and incomprehending New Dealers in the Roosevelt Administration, who were convinced that big business was fleecing the taxpaying public.

The achievement of American business was undeniable. The productive surge was underway even before Pearl Harbor, spurred on by Britain’s dire situation, and this head start helped to speed America’s military response after it officially entered the war. America produced more airplanes than Germany and Japan combined. It equipped the air forces of its allies with thousands of warplanes and their armies with thousands of tanks.

The key was the allowance for the profit motive. In order for business to function effectively, it had to be operating of its own accord, and not commanded. Typically, war contractors received their costs back for making an item, along with a small profit. The entire system of war production organized itself. There was no way that a government agency, no matter how large, could have understood, let alone arranged, the vast web of assemblers and suppliers who built America’s war machines, such as the awesomely complex B-29. The industrial renaissance engendered by the war laid the foundation for the generation of prosperity that followed.

Marc G. De Santis