Chrysler Engineers Redesign Faulty Army Tank Blueprints in WWII

At peak velocity in 1944, America produced fifty merchant ships a day, 9,000 tons of steel an hour, and a warplane every five minutes. That is roughly a 100x scale up during the war. That's what this country is capable of.

There's an unsung hero of the story: machine tools. Machine tools are "the machines that make machines" - the machines that sit in factories. Unlike tanks and airplanes which are made by famous companies like GM, machine tools in 1940 were made by ~200 tiny firms you've never heard of. But you can't scale factories without them.

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America had a few premier shipyards, but their capacity was consumed by battleships and carriers. To fight a war across two oceans we needed thousands of new cargo and troop ships - and no spare shipyards to build them.

Because Knudsen had run production at GM, he understood that machine tools would become the bottleneck to everything if not solved first. So early in the war effort, before Pearl Harbor, he was getting machine tool manufacturers to scale up. By 1941 Cincinnati Milling was producing a new machine tool every 17 minutes, 24/7. Tooling scaled first so everything else could.

A key turning point was that we got our car companies, which were world class at the time, to start making parts for airplanes.

Scaling industrial production during WWII is rightly remembered as America at its best. Millions of engineers and workers, scattered across thousands of factories, worked hard and creatively to solve whatever bottlenecks came up. The government helped finance the effort but did not centrally plan it. Just Knudsen in his little plane, flying around the country and loosely coordinating efforts.

And it worked. America produced two-thirds of ALL Allied military equipment in WWII: 86,000 tanks, 2.5 million trucks, half a million jeeps, 286,000 warplanes, 8,800 naval vessels, 5,600 merchant ships, 434 million tons of steel, 2.6 million machine guns, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition.

Today we regard American supremacy in aerospace as a given, but in 1940, the US aviation industry was far behind the British, French, German and Japanese. It was the the war that "resurrected America's aviation industry from the dead".

To build those transport ships, we built massive new shipyards on empty land. These shipyards were built by a colorful America Industrialist named Henry Kaiser. Most of Kaiser's shipyard workers had mostly never seen a shipyard or built a ship: they were orchestra leaders, nightclub owners, and cabinetmakers. 70% were women - like in the famous "Rosie the Riveter" poster.

Despite being run by people with no experience, Kaiser's shipyards were incredibly productive. And they got relentlessly better. The first Liberty ship took 253 days. A year later it took 4 days. They measured everything and treated build-time like a startup's KPI. They got a 98% cycle-time reduction in 18 months.

Convincing car makers to make airplane parts was not easy. Henry Ford refused to build airplane engines for Britain. But eventually we did it: Buick and Chevrolet built Pratt & Whitney B-24 engines, Packard took the Merlin engine, and GM's Eastern Aircraft built entire Navy fighters.