“There was a story about a woman who had been asked to christen a Portland yard ship but arrived too late; it had already been launched. ‘Just keep standing there, ma’am,’ she was told, ‘there’ll be another along in a minute.’” — Arthur Herman, “Freedom’s Forge“

In February 1900, a 20-year-old immigrant from Denmark arrived at New York, destitute of everything except his ambition to build bicycles. At Linz, Austria, that day, the son of Alois and Klara Hitler was 10. He became an aspiring but untalented artist who would find another career.

The immigrant and the Austrian never met, but their lives intersected in a way pertinent to today. American military aid for Ukraine has been inhibited by this: Our nation, which faces global challenges from two near-peer adversaries, has chosen to not have an adequate defense industrial base.

It was similarly unprepared in the late 1930s. Then it chose to be as serious as the darkening world was. In his exhilarating 2012 book, historian Arthur Herman, now at the Hudson Institute, tells how the nation magnificently marshaled its talents for making things, and saved civilization.

By 1937, the Danish immigrant, William Knudsen, had risen from the factory floor to the apex of the automobile industry as General Motors’s president. 

On May 28, 1940, as France was falling, President Franklin Roosevelt called: “I want you to work on some production matters.” That bland job description disguised Knudsen’s task of turning the Army, then barely larger than that of the Netherlands, and the rest of the United States military into an emanation of American industrial might from a small, somnolent, and technologically stagnant force.

When in 1940 FDR vowed production of 50,000 planes a year (the Army Air Corps then had about 1,700, most of them small and old), Hitler scoffed: “What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records, and Hollywood.” “He was,” Mr. Herman writes, “about to find out.”

By 1945, American white-collar business executives and engineers, and properly valorized blue-collar workers, had produced two-thirds of all the Allies’ war matériel: 86,000 tanks, 2.5 million trucks, 286,000 planes, 8,800 naval vessels, 5,600 merchant ships, 434 million tons of steel, 2.6 million machine guns, 41 billion rounds of ammunition, etc. 

Working at frenzied paces, often in hastily improvised workplaces with dangerous equipment and red-hot rivets, Mr. Herman writes, “workers in war-related industries in 1942-43 died or were injured in numbers twenty times greater than the American servicemen killed or wounded during those same years.”

In 1939, the American steel industry had its lowest capacity in 20 years, and the shipbuilding industry was producing four vessels a month. Yet in late 1939, a woman who had lived in Pittsburgh for most of a decade saw smoke billowing from nearby hills. She called the police, who said: “That’s no fire lady. Them’s the mills.” The giant was awakening.

With the indefatigable Knudsen setting the tone and pace, in mere months American industrialists planted shipyards and steel mills on mudflats and empty fields. In four years, the Richmond yard near San Francisco launched 747 prefabricated ships.

Mr. Herman says this was the fruit of “spontaneous order”: “It was the most powerful and flexible system of wartime production ever devised, because in the end no one devised it.” This “industrial exuberance” sprang from the nimble adaptability of America’s market economy.

Today, Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine is rousing European nations from their military slumbers. For example, Germany now has the world’s fourth-biggest defense budget and has loosened debt restraints for defense spending to become kriegstüchtig — war-ready, in the defense minister’s terminology.

The United States is not ready. The Economist reports, “At current rates of procurement it will take seven years to bring America’s ammunition stocks back to where they were before military aid to Ukraine began.” In a Washington think tank’s 2023 war game simulating a conflict with China over Taiwan, the American inventory of long-range missiles was exhausted in three weeks.

The Economist also reports that in 2022, just after Russia attacked Ukraine, Poland ordered “a big batch” of American Abrams tanks from the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Ohio, which since 1942 has been the main United States factory for armored vehicles. 

America no longer makes completely new Abrams tanks. Instead, the JSMC “refurbishes stripped-back hulls and turrets from old models, which are kept in storage in Alabama.” Refitting one tank takes about two years. Poland has yet to receive most of the Abrams tanks it ordered three years ago.

Poland needs tanks. America needs a new Knudsen.

The Washington Post