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During World War II, there were tons of issues with the healthiness of recruits. Sadly, this was because of all the malnutrition of children (and adults) that o
by Bucephalus355 8y ago
During World War II, there were tons of issues with the healthiness of recruits. Sadly, this was because of all the malnutrition of children (and adults) that occurred during The Depression.
This did not really effect the war effort during WWII. Fascinatingly, the US never really fully mobilized for WWII, and could have easily fielded an output 2-3x higher than it did. One of the more famous pieces of data is a survey at the end of the war that asked “did you feel you had to make significant sacrifices in your life or living style during the war”. 7 out of 10 said no.
Also, the US has always ramped up INCREDIBLY quickly during war. It’s a testament to the latent, incredible power of democracies. For example, it was just 6 months between Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway, where 4 Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and hundreds of planes / pilots destroyed.
- neffy 8y agoTo be completely fair about this, the US was ramping up a long time before Pearl Harbour. (This is part of the extended discussion around the attack itself, and whether it should have been anticipated.) British rearming began in 1936, the US was certainly planning in the late 30´s, actual spending began in 1939, and ramped up quickly after that during 1940. In war, as in many other things, if you want to ride the wave, you have to be ready long before you see it coming.
- travmatt 8y agoRoosevelt definitely saw the war coming and prepared for it. He was hampered by the strong isolationist feelings at the time but he never gave in to them, and was careful never to run too far ahead of public opinion.
- ethbro 8y agoThe Washington Naval Treaty [1] was also in effect until 1937, limiting new naval construction. I think the original point is valid, subject to the vagaries of international agreements at the time. The production dates and rate of the Essex class [2] were simply ridiculous... (said as someone whose grandfather worked at Newport News during the war) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex-class_aircraft_carrier#Ships_in_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex-class_aircraft_carrier#S...
- hungerstrike 8y agoI read that we stopped supplying steel to Japan which caused them to attack us.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoCaused? No. It was one of the reasons they chose to do so, but that's not the same thing. And why did we stop selling them steel? Because we didn't approve of them invading China and massacring people.
- hungerstrike 8y agoSo if I slap you in the face and you punch me...my slap didn’t cause it? K. In wartime, when your neutral, you’re supposed to supply all sides or nobody. Who made US protector of the world? Meanwhile George Bushes grand daddy was funding the Nazis with his bank.
- d0ugie 8y agoYou mean in retrospect? Or was that the prevailing opinion of citizens at the time that had anything to do with trade or total war?
- Andre_Wanglin 8y agoRoosevelt saw the war coming because he wanted it to come and engineered a way for the US to be attacked (the US way of war has alway been to provoke and goad the other side into firing first [or outright faking such a provocation] then feigning moral outrage) and overcome these (sensible) sentiments. The "isolationist" strain of US diplomacy was part of its founding ethos and WW2 was responsible for obliterating it from the American identity. Was this really a good thing?
- philwelch 8y agoYou’re right, we should have just let Germany, Japan, and maybe Stalinist Russia split up the rest of the world between themselves. That definitely would have worked out fine and they never would have bothered us. Hitler’s not so bad once you get to know him...
- maoistinquisitr 8y agoWell look how communism in Asia played out over the ensuing 40 years. Would it have been such a horrible idea to let Japanese boys die fighting off communists? And why are 50+K American lives still at stake (and billions of dollars in defense spending) policing the region? We should have worked with the Japanese and had them mostly run the place. > Hitler’s not so bad once you get to know him Agreed.
- philwelch 8y agoI feel compelled to point out that I was being sarcastic about Hitler.
- Andre_Wanglin 8y agoWould there have been a "Holocaust" without the war? What would the fate of the interned Japanese in the US have been should the mainland have come under massive bombardment and firebombing that left the populace barely able to eat?
- 8y ago
- Retric 8y agoNot just ramping up, but we also had fairly direct involvement. 'Lend-Lease' occurred before Pearl Harbor providing large amounts of military and non military aid and had a significant impact.
- neffy 8y agoVery much so. In Churchill's war diaries there's this great begging letter to Roosevelt early on in the war, which basically says, for God's sake, send rifles now. After Dunkirk, the UK didn't have enough to even arm the men they had in the army, never mind the home guard and reserves. Then there were the shipments to Russia. The Allies could never have won the war without the US's incredible production capacity.
- jcranmer 8y agoIt is good policy for any military to work out plans for various kinds of war. Even during extreme pacifism days in the 1930s, the US had contingency plans for wars with Germany (War Plan Black), Britain (War Plan Red, with different shades of red for different colonies), Japan (War Plan Orange). In WWI, it took about a year for the US army to ramp up involvement in the war effort following its entry. There was thus a recognition by 1939 that the US needed to prepare for war or similarly spend a long time ramping up. In 1940, FDR authorized the draft, and throughout 1940 and 1941, the US strained the definition of neutrality to its breaking point, particularly as cash-and-carry (we'll only sell to people who can pay in gold) gave way to lend-lease (we'll only sell to countries named Great Britain or the Soviet Union, and we offer a 60-year payment plan).
- seem_2211 8y agoIt's pretty interesting actually - I'm reading The Last Lion (a biography of Winston Churchill), and it's amazing how much the British appeased Hitler and neglected to rearm, while the Nazis built out a serious army. But then to imagine the current mood for American intervention in Syria being championed by someone like Donald Rumsfeld and it's perhaps a little easier to understand, with Churchill being blamed for a lot of the loss of life in WW1.
- billfruit 8y agoBut I think US ability to organize and deploy faster is something that has materialized after army reforms around 1900-1905, as I understand from Barbara Tuchman biography of General Stillwell. It appears US had major trouble in managing a speedy mobilization in the Spanish American war, and so it does not alwyas imply that democracies have inherent capability to mobilize troops faster.
- philwelch 8y agoI've found this to be a fascinating breakdown of the US's production capacity advantage in WWII: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm > America, even in the midst of seemingly interminable economic doldrums, still had: * Nearly twice the population of Japan. * Seventeen time's Japan's national income. * Five times more steel production. * Seven times more coal production. * Eighty (80) times the automobile production. > Furthermore, America had some hidden advantages that didn't show up directly in production figures....the per capita productivity of the American worker was the highest in the world. Furthermore, the United States was more than willing to utilize American women in the war effort....The net effect of all these factors meant that even in the depths of the Depression, American war-making potential was still around seven times larger than Japan's, and had the 'slack' been taken out in 1939, it was closer to nine or ten times as great! > ... > By 1944, most of the other powers in the war, though still producing furiously, were beginning to max out their economies (i.e. production was stabilizing or plateauing). This resulted from destruction of industrial bases and constriction of resource pools (in the case of Germany and Japan), or through sheer exhaustion of manpower (in the case of Great Britain and, to an extent, the USSR). By contrast, the United States suffered from none of these difficulties, and as a consequence its economy grew at an annual rate of 15% throughout the war years. As scary as it sounds, by the end of the war, the United States was really just beginning to get 'warmed up.' It is perhaps not surprising that in 1945, the U.S. accounted for over 50% of total global GNP. > ... > But it is no joke to say that we were literally building ships faster than anybody could sink them, and still have enough left over to carry mountains of material to the most God-forsaken, desolate stretches of the Pacific. Those Polynesian cargo cults didn't start for no reason, and it was American merchant vessels in their thousands which delivered the majority of this seemingly divinely profligate largesse to backwaters which had probably never seen so much as a can opener before.
- WalterBright 8y ago> incredible power of democracies I'd say free markets. The US was able to handily fight two wars (against Japan and Germany) as well as massively supplying Britain and the Soviet Union.
- philwelch 8y ago...and simultaneously invent the atom bomb.
- _yosefk 8y agoWhat's the difference between France (lost quickly in WWII), Britain (barely evaded invasion), and the US (not invaded, economy grew during the war)? Is it democracy, free markets, or accessibility to German tanks and war planes that is the likely reason for the difference? 8 out of 10 Germans losses were inflicted by the Soviet Army; the USSR didn't rank high on democracy or market freedom but it had no choice but fight Germany, whereas the US could afford to choose the extent of engagement and let the USSR (and Britain) bleed while inflicting losses on Germany. This is not to say that the US policy wasn't sensible for the US, just that WWII is not a clear testament to the latent strengths of democracies and free markets at waging war. And on the point of democracy specifically, in "The Gathering Storm," Churchill nearly pins the breakout of WWII on the inherent difficulty of conducting sensible foreign policy under democracy (both in the case of the badly designed peace treaties at the end of WWI, and in the case of subsequent appeasement of Nazi Germany.) I wouldn't want to live where they don't have democracy or a reasonably free market, but neither is a reliable device to either prevent or win a world war.
- passivepinetree 8y ago> What's the difference between France (lost quickly in WWII), Britain (barely evaded invasion), and the US (not invaded, economy grew during the war)? A lot of it is location, to be honest. Invading the U.S. was nowhere near as easy as invading France, Poland, etc. for Germany (or Japan, for that matter). I think the closest we got to invasion during the war (outside Pearl Harbor) were some isolated submarines off the coast of Oregon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Fort_Stevens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Fort_Stevens
- olegious 8y ago> incredible power of democracies I think it helped that the war wasn't fought on American soil (outside of Pearl Harbor, obviously). This means the homeland, industrial capacity and transport systems weren't disrupted.
- jcranmer 8y agoThe speedy US ramp up in WWII is illusory, because the US essentially entered the war effort in 1940, well before its official entry in 1941. That said, logistics has long been one of the core competencies of the US. As far back as the American Revolution, Henry Knox transported captured cannon at Fort Ticonderoga to Boston--in the middle of winter--and then installed them in a single night on Dorchester Heights, which forced the British evacuation of Boston. The Americans also managed a major supply route to China via an aerial airlift (The Hump), which became the template for supplying Berlin via airlift--something most military planners thought completely impossible until the British and the Americans pulled it off.
- philwelch 8y agoA lot of the US production numbers peak in 1943/1944, though, and even then, only because we thoroughly outgunned the Axis and didn’t actually need to keep producing at that rate. The amount of ramp up that was politically possible in 1940 was nothing close to what the US was capable of.
- megaman22 8y agoMost of German manpower and materiel was bled out on the steppes of Russia - even the greatest threat to the ETO (Battle of the Bulge) was a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, compared to even the shadow of the Wehrmacht that was still fighting in Poland and Hungary at the same time.
- s2g 8y ago> For example, it was just 6 months between Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway, where 4 Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and hundreds of planes / pilots destroyed. Part of that was that Pearl Harbour didn't really accomplish the strategic goals. The US didn't lose nearly enough to cripple them.
- zantana 8y agoI am always surprised that people analogize moonshot as the ultimate national effort opposite WWII. Despite noir movies like Double Indemnity, which don't seem to show any effects at all, reading about it, it always seems that WWII effected practically every part of life down to the steel penny. Whereas despite the "let them eat moonshot" quip from Asimov I haven't heard of great initiatives which didn't take place because of the space race.
- philwelch 8y agoThe Manhattan Project alone is close to the scale of the moonshot, and the US was devoting so many resources to the war that virtually no one even noticed that the Manhattan Project was happening. Not even Vice President Truman knew about it until after FDR’s death.
- 15charlimitdumb 8y agoInteresting note on WW2 expenditures, the B-29 Superfortress actually cost more than the Manhattan project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress "Including design and production, at over $3 billion it was the single most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, exceeding the cost of the Manhattan Project by between $1 and 1.7 billion"
- philwelch 8y agoI'm curious about how that happened, honestly. Was there a "second-system effect" that settled in after the B-17?