How the United States planned the Defeat of Nazi Germany in World War 2

excerpts from "There's A War to Be Won" by Geoffrey Perret

• In the fall of 1939 the U.S. Army numbered 190,000 men.
• The onset of spring 1940 brought the invasion by German armies of half a dozen countries, every one conquered in just days or weeks. Even now, though, it was hard to convince Congress or the president that a bigger army was needed.
• When France fell a month later, the Army found itself drowning in money. In 1940 Congress showered $9 billion on the Army, more than all the money spent by the War Department since 1920.
• Back in 1924 the War Department had created the Army Industrial College, to which able young officers were sent to study intensively for a year. Important economists and industrialists came to teach them - and to learn. Military men and civilians developed a shared mental universe that centered on the arcane business of Army supply.
• Students and faculty worked from year to year on updating the college's survey of industry. The survey was then fed into an industrial mobilization plan. The outline of the plan ran to a mere twenty pages, but by 1940 the detailed annexes to it were stacked four feet high. The Army had a better idea of who could make what, how well, how quickly and at what price than any other agency of government, school of business or trade association.
• Following the Munich crisis in the fall of 1938 Roosevelt asked Congress for money to build 3,000 planes and expand aircraft production capacity. Most of the planes were destined not for the Air Corps but (he didn't tell Congress this) for Britain and France in the war the president was certain was coming.
• One of the spin-offs of this move was a small increase in money for the Army. The War Department used this windfall as intellectual seed corn. "Educational orders" were placed with 250 plants for items such as pack howitzers, valuable in wartime and hard to make with precision at any time. These orders gave the Army a good snapshot of where production problems were likely to occur. At the same time, hundreds of production engineers got an education in the unusual demands of manufacturing for the military.
• In 1940-41 the updated surveys and the educational orders paid off handsomely. A modern medium tank, for example, was made of 4,500 separate parts. Of these, the prime contractor might produce 1,000 himself. The remaining 3,500 had to come from hundreds of subcontractors. It would have taken the prime contractor years to track down the right subcontractors. The Army knew who they were: They were to be found in that stack of annexes.
• To get the maximum benefit from its hard-won knowledge, the Army had to relinquish its tradition of putting the best possible weapons into the hands of its fighting men. It went against the grain, but in order to arm millions of men quickly it chose as a matter of policy not to aim for superiority in tank versus tank, gun versus gun, grenade versus grenade and so on. There wasn't time for that. Instead it set its sights on adequacy - and crushing, smothering numbers. Weight and quantity of arms were accepted as being decisive over quality, provided the gap in performance wasn't great.
• In July 1941 the president asked for an estimate of "the over-all production requirements required to defeat our potential enemies." The responsibility for providing the answer fell on Major Albert C. Wedemeyer of the General Staff. He had to think out the broad outlines of a strategy to defeat Germany and Italy, calculate what resources would be required and guess how long it would take to fight to victory.
• Army Intelligence estimated that Hitler and his allies might be able to field 400 divisions by the end of 1943. The conventional wisdom said a margin of two to one was needed to assure victory in an offensive. On the face of it, Wedemeyer had to find 800 divisions. Britain and the British Empire could raise roughly 100 divisions. The Russians could raise several hundred, but at the time Wedemeyer made his calculations the Germans were beating the Red Army and heading for Moscow. He couldn't count on the Soviet Union even being in the war in 1943. If it tied itself to the accepted formula, the United States might have to raise 700 divisions.
• Such a figure was simply impossible. In 1941 the U.S. population was roughly 135 million, but in a modern economy only 10 percent of the population could be in the military without wrecking industrial mobilization and thereby jeopardizing the chance of victory. So the armed forces could take only 13.5 million men. After making allowances for the Navy and the Air Corps, Wedemeyer calculated that at its peak the Army might reach 8.8 million men.
• This figure would provide 216 divisions, enough to land a force of 5 million men in Europe. To many people, that wouldn't seem nearly enough, but Wedemeyer believed that if this force possessed overwhelming superiority in air power, fire power and mobility it could shoot its way into the heart of Germany.
• To move 5 million men to Europe and keep them supplied would take a thousand ships averaging 7,000 tons each. To build such a fleet would take two years. And to raise, train and equip such an army would also take two years.
• As the United States drifted toward war in the fall of 1941, Wedemeyer's broad design was tentatively accepted as a key planning document. It offered clarity in the place of confusion, goals instead of hopes. Given the strategy it outlined and the scale of effort it called for, it was at last possible to work out thousands of production targets for everything from bayonets and binoculars to blankets and truck tires.

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