American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  A thousand miles to the east the Japanese land advance had come to a halt at Guadalcanal, an island at the southeastern end of the Solomons. Now the Americans turned to counterattack. The Navy surprised the lightly defended island with an amphibious landing early in August, only to be surprised in turn by a Japanese night attack that devastated the blundering American support fleet in one of the most mortifying defeats the American Navy had ever suffered. For a time virtually cut off from base, the Marines on Guadalcanal captured an almost completed airfield— promptly renamed Henderson Field—and held off fierce Japanese counterattacks. On the seas around Guadalcanal, violent naval and air battles erupted as both sides sought to control access to the island. For the Marines Guadalcanal became a “green hell,” a hot and stinking island full of thorn-studded vines, mosquitoes, malaria, dysentery, “loathsome crawling things,” and rain and humidity that turned food and supplies into mold and rot. But in this hell Americans proved that on the ground as well as on the sea and in the air, they could fight on equal terms and win against a brave and tenacious foe.

  The second of these decisive battles, Midway, was a reverse replay of Pearl Harbor. The American carriers absent from Pearl Harbor that day now had their chance to redress the naval balance in the Pacific; the Japanese now had their chance to smash the flattops that had eluded them. If the Americans wanted revenge, so did the Japanese, and for a very special reason. In mid-April, American bombers had suddenly appeared out of nowhere over Tokyo. These were Colonel James Doolittle’s army bombers that almost unbelievably had been flown off the carrier Hornet by B-25 pilots who had never even practiced this feat. The bombing had little physical but an enormous psychological effect on the Japanese, and especially on the high command, which now resolved on a hazardous sea attack on Midway thousands of miles to the east, an attack that would both avenge this insult and thwart a repeat performance.

  Midway also reversed Pearl Harbor in giving the Americans the advantage of surprise and luck. As Tokyo’s plans developed and a great force of carriers and battleships sortied east toward Midway late in May, cryptologists and radio traffic analysts in naval intelligence had tracked enemy plans and movements. Feinting to the north in a failed effort to draw away Admiral Chester Nimitz’s fleet units, Admiral Yamamoto’s main force of carriers headed straight east. The Americans were ready for them. Wave after wave of torpedo planes and high-flying bombers descended on the attacking warships, only to be devastated by skilled Japanese gunners and Zero pilots. One torpedo squadron lost ten of its fourteen planes and another was totally destroyed—without either squadron scoring a hit. Then American dive bombers arrived by a stroke of luck just as the flight decks of Yamamoto’s carriers were cluttered with planes preparing for the next attack. In a few minutes three Japanese carriers were infernos of fire and explosions. Dive bombers sank a fourth carrier later in the day. The Yorktown was set afire in a counterstroke and was finished off the next day by a Japanese submarine. Yamamoto ordered a retirement. The Japanese had now lost the initiative in the mid-Pacific.

  The third turn-of-the-tide battle was already on the planning tables. While war during spring 1942 raged in the Pacific, Washington and London had continued to struggle over their “Hitler first” strategy—when and where to strike in Europe. As Allied fortunes of war sank around the world, with Japanese victories in the Pacific, Red Army reverses on the long Russian front, the capture of Tobruk in Libya by German general Erwin Rommel, and staggering shipping losses in the Atlantic, Roosevelt felt the pressure of public opinion for more aggressive prosecution of the war, but centered in the Pacific, which was already serving as the biggest suction pump of all. Setbacks along the immense Japanese periphery from the Aleutians to Burma drew men and munitions to the Pacific theater. With no front opened in Europe to match those in the Pacific, Roosevelt and his chiefs of staff sought desperately to bring their power to bear across the Atlantic.

  But where? The British still resisted an early cross-Channel attack. The Russians still pressed for an assault in force. Roosevelt still sought major action somewhere. Stimson and Marshall still fought “dispersion.” General Dwight Eisenhower, who was assuming an ever larger role as a war planner, spoke his superiors’ views as well when he noted that a cross-Channel attack would be “one hell of a job” but was better than “sitting on our fannies giving out stuff in driblets all over the world.” Back and forth swayed the battle over strategy between American and British planners; some joked that it was the biggest fight going. But soon it was summer of 1942, too late to take advantage of good invasion weather in the Channel. The major assault on the Continent was put off to 1943, as much by delay and default as by decision, in favor of an attack in North Africa for the fall of 1942.

  However modest the North African plan appeared compared to a massive continental assault, it was bizarre and daring enough in itself. The United States’ attack would be launched initially not against its mortal enemy, Germany, but against its oldest ally, France—albeit a France run by Nazi hirelings in Vichy. Its success might turn more on political than on military factors. It was long opposed by the very generals and admirals who would have to carry it out. And no wonder—the plan called for moving tens of thousands of troops across thousands of miles of Atlantic waters infested by U-boats, landing them on difficult North African beaches, deploying them to cope with French forces under Vichy command, to link up with British and other Allied troops pushing west and catch Rommel’s forces in a vise, and to do all this with untried sailors and soldiers. There was always the fear too that Hitler’s friend Franco might close the Straits of Gibraltar and thus cut the invasion lifeline or even allow the Führer to thrust his own divisions through Spain and into Africa.

  Mirabile dictu, the military plan worked. In the early hours of November 8, 1942, troops scrambled ashore at a dozen target points along the shoulder of northwestern Africa from south of Casablanca to east of Algiers. Luck was with them: the Atlantic surf was unusually calm; the U-boats had been successfully feinted off; French troops put up only scattered resistance. There lay ahead a long struggle, during which American troops were bloodied, before Allied forces could corner the Germans in Tunisia. But the unseasoned American soldiers and sailors in North Africa, as in the Pacific, showed that they could meet the enemy, take their losses, persist, and ultimately win through.

  Oddly, Roosevelt’s luck rose with the military landings, which had to be somewhat improvised, and fell with the political operation, on which he and Churchill had lavished much effort and thought. The initial attack appeared to outrage alike the Vichy French, the non-Vichy French, and the anti-Vichy French. When an “arrangement” was finally struck with the local Vichyites then in apparent command, Roosevelt was roundly berated for the sordid deal with the French admiral Jean Darlan. But the President said he would “walk with the Devil” until he had crossed the bridge. And he could proclaim high ideals. Disembarking troops were issued a letter from their Commander-in-Chief: “Upon the outcome depends the freedom of your lives: the freedom of the lives of those you love.” BBC London broadcast his words in French to the French: “My friends … I salute again and reiterate my faith in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

  The Production of War

  The war would be won, Churchill had exulted after hearing the news of Pearl Harbor—all the rest would be merely the “proper application of overwhelming force.” He was right. Once the Allies had won the initiative in the desperate battles of 1942, especially at Midway and Stalingrad, they never relinquished it for long, despite many defeats and setbacks. In every major engagement on the western front there was always more, much delayed at times, sometimes inferior in quality, but always more—more men, and from the overflowing war plants more munitions, more supplies, more planes and tanks and landing craft. Although for a time every theater felt starved, the Allies could plan their major attacks months in advance, achieve enormous buildups, and feed in mountains of backup supplies as the troops moved forw
ard.

  The troops themselves were in many ways production workers. Usually they did not advance in splendid array as in a pageant, or fight with bayonets and pistols in Hollywood fashion. Typically soldiers wormed ahead on their bellies as they encountered strong points, manhandled their light weapons into place, poured in fire and explosives, and moved on; or if the enemy defenses held, they called up reinforcements, asked for bigger tools such as tanks, waited, summoned artillery, heavy mortars, planes, unleashed a holocaust of metal and fire, waited.… The press glorified “tough, elite troops” serving as the “cutting edge of war.” More likely at the end of the long supply lines was a thin, almost invisible line of men with grimy hands and hairy faces, in shapeless work clothes, cursing and bitching as they fed the machines of war.

  There was always more, mainly because Americans by 1943 were creating the biggest war-production boom in history. It was slow to take off while the idea of business as usual persisted. Many businessmen, enjoying their best profits since 1929, were slow to convert; many workers were quick to strike; and Washington’s efforts to mobilize and coordinate were often weak and inept. FDR’s much-publicized goals for 1942 of 60,000 planes and 45,000 tanks were not met. For months after Pearl Harbor, the automobile industry continued to produce passenger cars. But the military defeats of early 1942 helped produce a sense of crisis that brought all the producers together in a stupendous united effort. Typewriter factories turned out machine guns, toaster plants made gun mounts, pot and pan makers assembled and loaded flares. In Minnesota a tombstone manufacturer put his grinders to work facing the edges of steel plates for welding.

  Americans were doing what they had always done best—making things—and the results were as astounding as Carnegie’s and Ford’s feats of old. Airplane output jumped from 2,100 in 1939 to 48,000 in 1942 and 96,000 in 1944. From mid-1940 to mid-1945 Americans made more than 100,000 tanks, 370,000 artillery pieces, 87,000 warships, almost 2.5 million trucks, nearly 5 million tons of aircraft bombs, about 44 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition. In 1943 steelworkers produced 12 tons for every American soldier. Production of locomotives quintupled, of aluminum quadrupled, of industrial chemicals tripled. The United States alone furnished in 1944 60 percent of the Allied combat munitions, which helped to guarantee a three-to-one edge in arms over the Axis.

  Once again, as in the days of the Yankee entrepreneurs, technology paced production. America’s production superiority still rested on its unrivaled stock of special-purpose machine tools. The precision of these tools promised that when all the parts were brought together, as in the case of the 2 million parts needed to make one of Ford’s B-24 bombers, they would fit exquisitely. Specific technological advances, such as welding rather than riveting, radically hastened production, especially of ships. A heavy dependence on subcontracting brought a few small firms back into some of the prominence they had enjoyed during America’s industrial growth—along with the multitude of tinkerers they sheltered.

  But enormous production did no good, as shipbuilders kept reminding Americans, unless it got to the fronts. Frightful shipping losses and enormously heightened global demands required a production miracle. Such it appeared to be. Americans produced over 53 million tons of shipping during the war. Improved methods of prefabrication and precision assembly cut the average time for constructing a 10,500-ton Liberty ship from 200 days in 1941 to 40 in 1942.

  At Yard Two, Richmond Shipyards, California, in November 1942, long-necked cranes towered above crews swarming over the shipways, lifting and gently setting down 100-ton prefabricated sections of Hull 440. Work continued through the night. By the end of Day One the hull was shaped, three bulkheads and the entire engine assembly installed, and 18,000 feet of welding complete. On Day Two the rest of the bulkheads, the sheer strakes, fantail, freshwater tanks, and midship deckhouses were in place. The upper deck was finished. On Day Three the six-story “whirly” cranes lifted all of the superstructure—deckhouses, masts, windlass—onto the ship and the big rudder and antiaircraft guns were added. Day Four was devoted to finishing up welding and riveting and electrical wiring. By the end of that day Hull 440 was complete, outfitted with life belts, coat hangers, and signs in the toilets reading “Water Unfit for Drinking.” Then Hull 440, now named Robert E. Peary, its flags flying and coat of gray paint scarcely dry, proudly slid down the ways—and stayed afloat.

  Shipbuilders, like sailors and soldiers, enjoyed telling their own Paul Bunyan stories. One yarn was about the woman who, according to the singer Gracie Fields, was invited to christen a new ship. She was brought to an empty launching way and handed a bottle of champagne.

  “But where is the ship?” the bewildered guest asked.

  “You just start swinging the bottle, lady,” a worker replied. “We’ll have the ship there.”

  For some Americans it was the best of times, for some the worst, and for some it was both. On the face of things, never had so many Americans had it so good. At last jobs were abundant; full employment was achieved just a decade after the New Deal got underway. The labor force grew 36 percent during the war years, while the average workweek lengthened from 37.7 hours to 46.6. Wages soared. Average hourly pay in manufacturing rose from 73 cents in 1941to $1.02 in 1945; average weekly wages almost doubled.

  The rising tide of prosperity lifted all income groups, but some rose much more than others. Most notably, the poorer persons did best relatively. From 1941to 1945 family incomes of the lowest fifth grew 68 percent and of the second-lowest fifth 59 percent, while family incomes of the top fifth rose 20 percent. At last Americans were seeing the poorest of their fellow citizens lifted out of the bleakest poverty—a goal sought futilely by progressives, socialists, New Dealers, and some capitalists, a goal rarely achieved by liberal democracies or by self-proclaimed egalitarian revolutionary or totalitarian regimes. But by a bitter irony it was a goal now achieved almost incidentally as part of a very different but transcending goal—winning a war.

  For a time Americans—especially the poor—spent as they had never spent before. Consumer spending as a whole rose from $66 billion in 1939 to $104 billion in 1944. As durable goods like washing machines and refrigerators became more scarce, however, spending shifted from goods that might have provided poor people with an improved quality of life to more transient satisfactions. Racetrack attendance rose by two million a year, while the amount bet skyrocketed. Movie theaters were often open around the clock to accommodate three shifts, and nightclubs boomed. So did jewelry and cosmetics—except those with ingredients that were needed for munitions. To a degree, however, rising incomes lifted all consumer spending, save for scarce or rationed items. Book sales rose 20 percent a year as cheap paperbacks came into their own. Pocket Books, whose sales had been in the hundreds of thousands before the war, sold 40 million copies in 1943. Comic books, catering to servicemen as well as children, became a billion-dollar business. Tourism, however, stagnated because of gasoline rationing, though Miami had some success with its advertisements that weary war workers could “Rest Faster Here.”

  If in a material way some of the poor had never had it so good, more fundamentally they hardly escaped their poverty of health, speech, education, and aspiration, or their vulnerability. Many of them had to move from rural areas in order to find the big-paying jobs. They were part of one of the biggest migrations in American history, as some 15 million of the civilian population left their home counties and poured into Detroit-Willow Run, Mobile County, Los Angeles, San Diego, by the hundreds of thousands. They were the new Okies—Okies with jobs but little else. Schools were sometimes so crowded that countless children did not attend at all. Inadequate child care and lack of extended families among migrants left young children to their own devices while their mothers worked the graveyard shift. A Los Angeles social worker counted forty-five babies locked in cars in a single parking lot near war plants. Housing was so scarce in Bath, Maine, that fifty families stuck out an intensely cold winter in trailers banked
with snow. In Beaumont, Texas, people were nauseated by the stench of an out-of-control garbage dump near the shipyards.

  Whatever their income group, the best-organized did best. From the very start of the defense effort businessmen moved into Washington to run the industrial mobilization agencies. Shortly after Pearl Harbor the President created the War Production Board under Donald Nelson, who would be the “final authority” on production issues. Nelson, formerly chief purchasing agent for Sears, Roebuck, was an unpretentious, agreeable man who preferred persuasion over wielding the big stick but lacked FDR’s sense of timing and relish for control. “On this job … we must have down here men who understand and can deal with industry’s intricate structure and operation,” Nelson said. Naturally such men had to come chiefly from industry itself. Businessmen were moving up in the New Deal Administration, Business Week exulted, “replacing New Dealers as they go.”

  Many executives in government, including three-fourths of those in WPB, were dollar-a-year men who continued to draw their corporate salaries, an arrangement that angered Harry S Truman, chairman of the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate the Defense Program. Unimpressed by Nelson’s contention that dollar-a-year men could not afford to give up their corporation salaries for lower federal pay, Truman wrote: “The committee does not like to have procurement matters entrusted to men who have given such hostages to fortune.” But even Truman conceded that if necessary the executives should be hired. “We want to win the war.”