Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

Arthur Herman

Language: English

Pages: 432

ISBN: 0812982045

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SELECTED BY THE ECONOMIST AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Remarkable as it may seem today, there once was a time when the president of the United States could pick up the phone and ask the president of General Motors to resign his position and take the reins of a great national enterprise. And the CEO would oblige, no questions asked, because it was his patriotic duty.
 
In Freedom’s Forge, bestselling author Arthur Herman takes us back to that time, revealing how two extraordinary American businessmen—automobile magnate William Knudsen and shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser—helped corral, cajole, and inspire business leaders across the country to mobilize the “arsenal of democracy” that propelled the Allies to victory in World War II.
 
“Knudsen? I want to see you in Washington. I want you to work on some production matters.” With those words, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted “Big Bill” Knudsen, a Danish immigrant who had risen through the ranks of the auto industry to become president of General Motors, to drop his plans for market domination and join the U.S. Army. Commissioned a lieutenant general, Knudsen assembled a crack team of industrial innovators, persuading them one by one to leave their lucrative private sector positions and join him in Washington, D.C. Dubbed the “dollar-a-year men,” these dedicated patriots quickly took charge of America’s moribund war production effort.
 
Henry J. Kaiser was a maverick California industrialist famed for his innovative business techniques and his can-do management style. He, too, joined the cause. His Liberty ships became World War II icons—and the Kaiser name became so admired that FDR briefly considered making him his vice president in 1944. Together, Knudsen and Kaiser created a wartime production behemoth. Drafting top talent from companies like Chrysler, Republic Steel, Boeing, Lockheed, GE, and Frigidaire, they turned auto plants into aircraft factories and civilian assembly lines into fountains of munitions, giving Americans fighting in Europe and Asia the tools they needed to defeat the Axis. In four short years they transformed America’s army from a hollow shell into a truly global force, laying the foundations for a new industrial America—and for the country’s rise as an economic as well as military superpower.
 
Featuring behind-the-scenes portraits of FDR, George Marshall, Henry Stimson, Harry Hopkins, Jimmy Doolittle, and Curtis LeMay, as well as scores of largely forgotten heroes and heroines of the wartime industrial effort, Freedom’s Forge is the American story writ large. It vividly re-creates American industry’s finest hour, when the nation’s business elites put aside their pursuit of profits and set about saving the world.

Praise for Freedom’s Forge
 
“A rambunctious book that is itself alive with the animal spirits of the marketplace.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“A rarely told industrial saga, rich with particulars of the growing pains and eventual triumphs of American industry . . . Arthur Herman has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history’s memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Magnificent . . . It’s not often that a historian comes up with a fresh approach to an absolutely critical element of the Allied victory in World War II, but Pulitzer finalist Herman . . . has done just that.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Hardcover edition.

Best Little Stories from World War II: More than 100 True Stories

The End: Hamburg 1943

Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World

Kill Rommel!: Operation Flipper 1941 (Raid, Volume 43)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Washington.† Yet they would gain the biggest foothold in the American workplace during the war. At first companies and male workers had their doubts about hiring women, especially for industrial jobs. They had no understanding of machinery, went the argument. They’d be exhausted by any heavy duties, and they’d be a distraction to men on the job. Besides, no factories had women’s washrooms.48 Almost from the start, however, employers began to reverse their thinking. As early as the spring of

meeting at the White House and presented FDR with a glass-encased model of the new aircraft carrier. Deeply pleased, Roosevelt agreed to have Eleanor christen the very first baby flattop.15 On April 5 the First Lady smashed a bottle of champagne across the bow of the USS Alazon Bay. Henry Kaiser’s first aircraft carrier, with its characteristic flat bow and stern, slid into the Columbia River. Microphones carried Mrs. Roosevelt’s remarks to the assembled throng. “The president is greatly

his partners had already submitted their bids. When his son Edgar and thirty-year-old Clay Bedford had finished supervising the work at Bonneville in the spring of 1937, they would be ready to move on to Grand Coulee, which would become the biggest concrete structure in the world. The building of Boulder Dam had changed Kaiser’s company, and changed Kaiser. He had honed his management team to a level of perfection unknown anywhere else in the industry. The sense that they could do anything

have seen the future.” And for tens of millions of them and their children, it was the future—not just in 1960 but for decades after. It was an American future. It was not as perfect as the one socialists and other utopians were promising, with an end to every human problem from hunger to housing—and not as regimented or disciplined as Fascists and Communists prescribed. There was no room here for the Aryan Superman or the New Soviet Man. It was simply better than they had now; a future built to

into his brain, it was never going away until it was done.35 For two months nothing happened. Then came the meeting just before Christmas with Mead and Doolittle, and Sorensen felt vindicated. He arrived for the tour of Consolidated feeling something close to triumph. Before it was over, he was almost in despair. Certainly the B-24 was a hard plane to fall in love with. Hap Arnold had asked Reuben Fleet and his chief designer, Isaac “Mac” Laddon, back in January 1939 to give him a plane that

Download sample

Download

About admin