The exact magnitude by which Allied production exceeded German production is often hard to grasp. Here, I will use two sources linked at the end to explain just how much more the U.S. produced than the Axis. If I come across some sources for the USSR and UK, I’ll be sure to make some follow-up posts about those.
The U.S. alone --with only 40-44% of its GNP being devoted to wartime production – outproduced the entire rest of the world in military materiel during the war years. The U.S. was the only warring country where consumer good production rose during the war years. It produced more tanks in '43 alone than Germany produced in the entire war (29500 tanks being produced by the U.S. in '43 versus 24050 being produced by Germany throughout the war). The total factory floor space of aircraft factories increased from 13 million sqft in the prewar period to over 167 million sqft in '43. Aircraft production rose from ~6000 in '39 to over 96000 in '44. Between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender, the U.S. produced between 270000 and 310000 aircraft. The U.S. was producing about 5 billion dollars worth of munitions monthly at the peak, though this was not the case for the most of the war.
7500 locomotives were produced, as were 806073 2.5 ton trucks and 82000 landing craft.
In terms of Naval production, 211 Submarines, 10 battleships, 27 aircraft carriers, 110 escort carriers, and 907 cruisers, destroyers and escorts were produced through the course of the war.
Over 12.5 million rifles and carbines were produced through the war.
The war also created a construction boom, with several billion dollars being poured into military installations and industrial facilities.
This was not, however, some kind of wartime miracle. Given the massive size of the U.S. industrial base and the relatively high unemployment rate which offered a huge reserve pool of labor which could be tapped, such a large wartime production was to be expected. Nonetheless, it is still pretty amazing how just the U.S. outproduced the Axis by such a wide margin, let alone the industrial powerhouse of the USSR and the pretty industrialized Britain.
Sources:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA316780.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26304207.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A64bbc25bea2b4cd6b47e42b81a2339b8&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1
*Please note that this is not some “America alone won the war” garbage. This is merely a presentation of some cool sources I stumbled across. Many of these produced weapons and munitions were given to the USSR and Britain, without whom the war could not have been won.
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No this was not a miracle but an awful of good planning went into it. They took a lot of really smart people to work planning the factories and systems. It could have gone much worse without good people thinking about this and they started well before the US entered the war.
Also note that despite everything we produced there were still tight supplies. One of the early communiques from Iwo Jima stressed how we needed to maintain war production to succeed.
I found the US produced 193,000 artillery pieces in WW2. I have been unable to find how many shells were produced. I grew up in southern Indiana and often drove past the Charles town ammunition factories which went on for miles. It always looked cool and sad to see it wasting away.
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I did forget to mention that, my bad. Yeah, there were still supply shortages despite this enormous production and there was an immense amount of planning that went into making this work. This should be in the National Defense University source though.
Goes to show how resource-hungry modern war is, and why it shouldn’t happen.
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Another reason was that unlike WW1, Roosevelt did start the built up of the Army much earlier which helped a lot.
Also the USA/Canada could not be bombed so the production flow was greater and the crews could be trained in a safer manner. E.g. the AT-6 Advanced Trainer was bright yellow so it could easily be spotted. Not sure why Germany did not do the same
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I certainly didn’t mean that as a criticism more of a wonder that with all we produced we would still have shortages. We think of the US production but British wartime production was much higher than I would have expected and Russia, with all the aid we sent still produced immense quantities of the basics of war……but they sure used what we sent too.
But more than just stuff, it was the people we could train. We had more than 100 aircraft carriers. The number of pilots that required training just dwarfs the thought of what the axis powers could come up with. It also helped to have gas to train them all.
My point here comes to one scene from Band of Brothers, where seeing German prisoners leading their horse drawn wagons, a soldier yells “you dumb mf’ers! What were you thinking!” Seriously they took on the three biggest industrial powers and also the three most populous countries in a war of attrition….by any reasonable metric, they were insane.
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