. . .which pointed out that upon the Fall of France in May, 1940, FDR’s mind was focused on what the US would be faced with if Britain sued for peace. Especially since the USSR was allied wtih Germany until Hitler attacked Stalin in June, 1941, that was an unappetizing prospect indeed.Thus FDR was desperate to keep Britain’s war effort afloat, and although he was, via Bill Knudsen and also others, ramping up US production of war materiel, he wasn’t keeping that materiel in the US. He was shipping it to Britain. Thus, when Pearl Harbor was attacked and the US entered the war, the US had minimal military inventory. And yet Pearl Harbor was almost exactly 18 months after Knudsen had told FDR in May 1940 that it would take 18 months to be fully prepared to ramp up war production.
The upshot was that the US could produce 50,000 military planes of all types in 1942 - and more annually, thereafter. The Manhattan Project was already under way, and it cost as much as the B-29 program did, but who at that stage would hang their hat on the fact that it would end the war in 1945?? They weren’t even certain that the Germans wouldn’t get the bomb first.
As to FDR’s switch from “Doctor New Deal” to “Doctor Win-the-War,” that is discussed in the very interesting
- The New Dealers' War:
- FDR and the War Within World War II
by Thomas Fleming
Thanks very much for the recommendation, CIC, I will check it out!
I found “Freedom’s Forge” to be pretty amazing. Before I read it, I had this nebulous notion that industry needed to be kick started at that point, but after reading it, realized the effort to open the path to wartime industry began long before I thought it did.
FDR did indeed perform a juggling game with war material to Britain (and the Soviet Union) while trying not to strip our own military (over the howls of our own military leaders who often thought we were doing just that!)