How The Americans Outproduced Everyone Else In WW2 | War Factories | Timeline

hi everybody welcome to this timeline documentary my name is dan snow and here i am in a lancaster bomber cockpit one of the few remaining lancasters from the second world war to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hit it's like netflix for history hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians follow the information below this film or just search online for history hit and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show the untold story of war production all wars are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph over the other side hitler knows he needs industry if he wants to build a war machine this is a war between the factories the real story of how the second world war was fought and won the united states is about to launch the single greatest program of armament production in human history [Music] they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production the secret war of the factories that will decide the fate of the whole world gotta get back to [Music] work detroit it is here in the early 1900s that a small number of young entrepreneurs like henry ford and the dodge brothers begin producing affordable cars in europe they are built by skilled craftsmen for the rich those from detroit are for ordinary people built by a revolutionary technique that will be called mass production [Music] detroit transforms america within decades it will also save the world from tyranny when war came poland collapsed in four weeks hitler had said today germany tomorrow the world and this was tomorrow [Music] nazi germany spends the 1930s manufacturing a vast number of tanks and other weapons but while germany makes tanks america makes cars [Music] americans don't like war and they don't like armies the american armed forces particularly the army and the air force were minutes and he had a political tradition of opposition to the military so you had almost no military infrastructure americans hated being dragged into the first world war so when it is over america disbands most of its armed forces and closes down many of its war factories you could say that the american army was born on the battlefield of 1918 in france but then it goes into hibernation until world war ii soon the tiny u.s army ranks 18th in the world just ahead of holland and what few weapons it has are hopelessly out of date we had makeshift equipment stove pipes for cannon bags of power for bombs our infantry had exactly 488 machine guns we possessed 235 pieces of field artillery 10 light and 18 medium tanks the united states simply does not have the very large scale production companies for things like guns ships tanks and all the rest of it that even the united kingdom has americans do not want war but soon they will have no choice hitler despises everything america stands for and he have no fear of americans nazi germany regards the united states as a weakling it sees it as a country undermined by this kind of decadent corrupt jewish capitalism it has no military capability or stomach for a fight germany has six times as many tanks as the us [Music] five times as many combat planes and thirteen times as many soldiers when belgium surrenders to hitler in 1940 u.s president roosevelt is convinced that sooner or later the fascist powers will turn on america so who is he going to call because he's got no armaments industry at all what he does is he brings in the head of a car company the head of u.s steel and the head of sears roebuck hitler has to be laughing his socks off the head of u.s steel understands raw materials the head of sears understands logistics the guy who knows about production is the head of general motors bill nudsen knudsen is a typical industrial pioneer who works his way up from the shop floor bill knudsen arrived in new york from copenhagen age 20 with 30 dollars in his pocket and a lot of big ambitions what he is as a skilled mechanic and he rises very quickly through the ranks until he lands a job with ford in 1911. ford makes the model t and at that time it's the country's fastest selling car [Music] nutson immediately sets out to change the way cars are produced complex manufacturing tasks are broken down into simpler tasks which are carried out quickly and repetitively by unskilled workers on machines the core aspect of mass production is a process in which the production of a complex final product is broken down into hundreds possibly even thousands of much simpler smaller steps which can then be put together in various productive processes famously in an assembly line process you just needed the right raw materials and the right assembly line within four years output increases almost tenfold but knudsen grows frustrated because henry ford does not understand the new consumer society emerging in america knutson knows that ordinary americans want to be able to choose from different models of cars and when ford refuses knudsen quits and moves to general motors his movement from ford to general motors also shows in many ways how he evolves what general motors does and what knudsen does moves over there as part of this process is they realize the consumer wants change they want updating far better to have them buy a new car every few years by bringing up much better models that is how mass production actually works the entire production process has to become extremely adaptable and flexible knudsen becomes famous the father of modern mass production so when it comes time for the second world war he's as well experienced as a human being can be in the fundamentals of large-scale mass production and that proves to be enormously valuable when it comes to adjusting to the demands of a wartime economy by the end of 1940 germany makes 59 000 machine guns america a fraction of that [Music] so knudsen takes a browning machine gun and hands it to the gearing shop at gm practically every worthwhile advance in steering has borne the name saginaw saginaw steering a division of general motors agrees to supply the government with 280 browning machine guns this is a company that makes gearboxes they've never made a gun before but what they do have are really talented engineers and they can take apart a gun work out the best way of mass producing it now these guys are working about 100 hours a week to try and simplify the process just by changing the shape of the holes used for ventilation they come up with a drill that can bore three instead of one soon they're able to drill ten holes in a single operation this new method of making the perforated metal jacket which protects the barrel by stamping it from flat stock rather than machining the holes in a steel two cuts more than 56 hours time per hundred parts and that's not all they discover that using a different type of steel leads to reduced production costs and the guns also perform better [Music] one of the things you notice is that the higher the volume of production and the longer the production runs the more productive each individual worker becomes what happens is you learn very very rapidly on the job and so become much much more productive man hours per gun are reduced from 76 to 19. when the deadline arrives general motors is able to deliver not 280 guns but 29 000 what's more their brownings cost just a quarter of the originals the 29 000 is just the first installment during the war u.s factories will mass produce a staggering 2.6 million machine guns outgunning hitler's mighty wehrmacht by almost three to one [Music] but it will take more than machine guns to fight the coming war roosevelt needs the help not just of general motors but all american business the trouble is he spent the last seven years punishing u.s companies his new deal smothers industry with regulation and bleeds it dry with high taxes relations between the american political class and the american business class were probably at an all-time low the business class felt that they had administration that was ideologically hostile to their interests and to the very existence of a free market economy what changes everything is the nazi invasion of france and the low countries [Music] the low countries fell then once more the streets of paris echoed as they had in 1871 to the tread of hobnail german boots and paris under the swastika became a city of solid and in the city which had long been a symbol of freedom said hitler europe is ours for a thousand years if britain were to fall too the u.s would face the nazi empire [Music] alone our sympathies lie with those nations that are giving their lifeblood in combat against those forces it suddenly dawned on them that in order to fight and win that war they would have to get american business on-site by offering them generous contracts and terms which will give them a business financial incentive to produce ships guns tanks and all the rest of it roosevelt is surrounded by supporters of the new deal academics and bureaucrats who believe that america's war factories should be government owned and controlled but after 10 years of economic failure roosevelt knows this is a recipe for disaster the government recognized very realistically that there was just no way they could do this by themselves they took the pragmatic decision that now was the time to actually reach out to large business in particular make a deal with them and bring them on board as part of a process of producing what was needed to win the war effort the start of the war effectively puts an end to the new deal american companies are set free and allowed to work for a profit but even so there's a mountain to climb germany's war factories have been producing tanks at an increasing rate throughout the 1930s in the summer of 1939 the germans have more than 2 000 tanks the us army just 325 germany is out producing them on every level apart from the army's own arsenal there is only one american company making tanks and it produces just 13 a month so knudsen turns to kt keller the head of chrysler instead of mass producing cars how about mass producing tanks what you see in the united states economy is a system in which the key figures are not people who are experts in the particular thing that they're making but in the process the way in which you organize resources labor machines capital land to produce a particular product chrysler is a subsidiary of general motors and it's used to making regular changes to its production lines to meet the demands of its customers who want new models that requires money but it also then has a return that you start investing your money and retooling the machinery more often which is very valuable if you're going to build a factory in the second world war and quickly change what it does in many ways keller is the perfect man for the job but there's a problem neither he nor his engineers has ever seen a tank before no one in the united states had ever turned out giant 31 ton tanks in mass quantities such a task was a challenge to the men who over the years had been spurred on by our competitive american system of incentive and initiative to invent to build to achieve [Music] while chrysler's engineers try to work out how to build a tank work starts on a new factory in less than a month first ground was broken for the arsenal huge steam shovels like fabulous monsters foraging for food dug out massive chunks of earth to make way for deep foundations uncle sam had asked for action and action he got bricks and mortar steel and glass the american industrialists understood that not only do you need to build factories you needed to equip them with the proper kinds of machine tools because the americans had more experience in using automated factory processes than any other country and doing it on a large scale at the same time chrysler's engineers visit the us army's arsenal on rock island and it's there that they're able to see a tank for the very first time what they do is take it apart and they then go back to detroit and laden with blueprints working seven days a week ours meant nothing to them as they checked and rechecked rigid specifications laid down by the united states army and conceived and planned the tools and giant machinery needed to produce in quantity these important weapons the main us army tank is the m3 each one has thousands of parts some of which are simple to assemble others more complicated time was precious and certainly none was wasted here the final design of the m3 comes out in early 1941. single piece of machinery large and small had its predetermined foundation and location in the arsenal's layout where less than six months before had been only an open cornfield now a huge tank arsenal was producing its first sample two-room tanks by march 1941 detroit's arsenal tank plant is finished it is a quarter of a mile long and a tenth of a mile wide the first plant ever built in the us for the mass production of tanks the first crowning climax to this record-breaking achievement was achieved with a delivery to the army on april 24 of the first full-armed ready for combat m3 medium tank made by american industry client of accomplishments surged in the minds and hearts of the onlookers as the 31-ton giant was put through its pieces here was a giant weapon for streamlined modern warfare [Music] philip sanders a retired brigadier with the british army is at the tank museum in bovington south west england well this is the american m3 grand tank a tank commander needs a combination of fire power protection and mobility and reliability he wants to have a tank that keeps going and this tank has excellent running gear right the way through and a first-class american engine and american engines were noted for their ability to keep going highly reliable mass-produced huge expertise went into their manufacture and they did the job [Music] to speed up the production of tanks detroit's car makers want to change the design most machinery had been put together through the process of rivets before the second world war and what that is is rivet is basically a fastener so say you were going to build a tank you would rivet parts of it together and that would be how you would fasten [Music] but it's time-consuming and requires skilled labor so they decide to weld the tank instead that's a far quicker job through welding and that's the kind of changes they make in production that start allowing you to churn it out far more quickly [Music] welding not only speeds up production it also uses less steel which makes the tank lighter and cheaper and it also makes the tank safer [Music] this is the last of the american tanks which were went through the assembly lines as a riveted tank the rest were welded or cast the rivets were a problem if a rivet was hit by a shell bits would fly off on the inside and were dangerous to the crew rivets were not a great idea for tanks and so the sooner the tanks moved away from riveting and onto welding and casting the better before chrysler gets to work america is producing one tank every two or three days within six months chrysler is turning out eight tanks a day and that number is rising fast the interesting thing about tanks is that any country that has a motor vehicle industry can design and produce a tank the process of building track vehicles is well known in america so the americans have the engines suspension systems transmissions but the americans are very good at building all this the u.s which has barely entered the war is already producing more tanks than germany by the end of 1941 america produces just under 4 000 tanks more than twice the number of the previous three years it even out produces germany by 1942 car plants and other factories all over the us are being converted to produce tanks and other armaments it's a big changeover where we used to make hubcap now we're making helmets but we used to work on brake lining now we're doing this it's mass production same as before of the things that count today when it comes to fighting a war an army needs trucks troops are no use if they're immobile and tanks can't function without a steady supply of fuel and spare parts to win a modern mechanized wall vast quantities of men and materials must be moved at speed that means trucks and lots of them fortunately the americans are already skilled in making trucks and other vehicles it's a special car for special times look at those lines there's true streamlining for you unlike in germany lots of people in the u.s know how to drive and there are mechanics who know how to fix cars there is simply more of a motoring infrastructure in the us particularly when it comes to car ownership [Music] the germans struggle to produce enough army trucks and jeeps the german army goes into the second world war relying much more on the horse than the truck there is no equivalent of detroit in germany and hitler is forced to rely on 2.75 million horses to transport his army around europe in many ways horses are much less efficient than motor vehicles if a motor vehicle runs out of gas it sits there till you bring up more gas if a horse runs out of food it dies this is where american interwar car production makes a huge difference they can turn on the taps of truck production in a way the germans can't while america concentrates on just a few vehicle models german factories are producing dozens of different designs what's absolutely key is standardization which is something that the germans will never master what the us army understands is the benefit of having four-wheel drive vehicles with simple four-speed transmissions standardized vehicles are also a lot easier to maintain they're not perfect vehicles but they're good they do the job and you have the simplicity of maintenance you have the simplicity of supply when at just a few vehicle times if you're fighting a war what do you prefer to have a dozen six-wheel drive staff cars for your senior commanders or a couple thousand nice simple quarter ton jeeps the quarter ton truck or jeep as it's better known is an all-purpose vehicle and one of the most indispensable of the conflict [Music] so they can come up with this incredibly rugged easy to maintain very difficult to break vehicle and they just produce it like they're producing toothpaste from the word general purpose it's just a g and a p they called me i was getting turned out one every two minutes 30 jeeps an hour what do you think of that in terms of the production of machinery on an assembly line what you want to have is the fewest steps possible the fewest steps possible means the quicker and more efficient you can produce the jeep's genius is it requires very few steps because you don't have lots of different intricate medical parts you basically stamp a large piece of metal to create the overall frame of the jeep but then you can throw it in through the chassis over that engine block chassis below wheels tires bob's your uncle and off your drive that's just three days work standing there makes you feel good doesn't it this is one area where the allies fundamentally have a massive advantage they simply have more and better trucks than the germans within months of entering the war the us army is equipped with 250 000 trucks while the vast majority of hitler's army is on foot or horseback it is already clear that this is a war he cannot win hitler profoundly underestimates the flexibility and productive might of american industrial capitalism the whole system has a quality of much greater flexibility so if you suddenly find that one of the aircraft you're making simply isn't doing the job it's got the wrong kind of design it's not suited to actual combat conditions then you can just stop making it by the end of the following year america is trouncing the germans they're making four times as many tanks twice as many combat aircraft and almost six times as many machine guns the first test of america's mass-produced tanks is in north africa large numbers of its m3s are sent to fight germany's africa core but tank crews soon discover there are problems with its design as well as the machine guns on this tank it has a 75 millimeter gun mounted in a side sponson and a 37 millimeter gun mounted in a turret not a great combination but the best that was available at the time this tank was built [Music] it's way too high the silhouette you can see everywhere and of course its main gun has a very limited uh traverse because it's in a forward sponson so you have to move the tank and then the gun has a very limited angle of fire in march 1942 chrysler gets the go-ahead to produce an updated model the m4 or as it's better known the sherman [Music] a company like chrysler after all already has experience of updating cars so when someone says we need to change this engine or that they can say okay this is what we need to do to make it work if you are going to make changes you want it to be as painless a process as can be what you don't want to do is shut down the factory for a long period to then make all these changes you want to be able to have you know as seamless a transition and then how do we bring this to the line with as few as possible disruptions and that's the ability as they update the tank they also develop even more efficient ways of building it giant multiple drills of sufficient weight and size to machine the heavy parts marring dozens of holes in one downward motion had to be designed and built the oxygen pentagraph torch cutting out the sprocket gears that will guide the caterpillar tracks these are cut in triplicate now the waste metal sheet is removed the material will be reclaimed melted down used again [Music] efficiencies like this are made everywhere and tanks become much cheaper as a result the designers and engineers now they work closely with the army and there's a clear chain of command which is very different from germany where there are lots of competing voices now even hitler gets involved with the design and that simply doesn't happen in the united states [Music] the first 300 shermans to come off the production line are immediately dispatched to the british eighth army in egypt where they're tested in the blistering desert at the second battle of el alamein this is an absolute turning point in the entire north african campaign it's the only land battle the second world war that british and commonwealth forces won without the united states but they couldn't have done it without the sherman tanks the germans at the second battle of el alamein are equipped with tanks but they're largely obsolete italian models and they don't stand a chance there's this quote the british tank specialist said that the battle of waterloo might have been won on the playing field of eaton but that the second world war was going to be one on the drawing boards of detroit [Music] we learned something that month and so did the enemy never before had they been driven into headlong retreat but this time they were forced to retreat for one thousand miles and at the end of those grim thousand miles they were hurled off the continent of africa never to return shermans go on to become the most widely used medium tank by allied forces throughout the war it's a success for the us and for general motors they're light they're mobile so they're really easy to ship and better still they're reliable parts are standardized so they're easy to fix or to replace if things go wrong in 1942 germany's war factories produced just over 2 000 tanks the same year america produces almost 25 000. u.s war factories are churning out tanks at a rate of roughly 68 a day but as japan sweeps through southeast asia america's war factories suffer a terrible blow [Music] heavy guns on giant tires are wheeled into position no war has ever moved as much as this one it moves on fire quite suddenly the us is cut off from 90 percent of the world's supply of natural rubber [Music] it'd be disastrous for the us to run out of rubber because it's not just tyres everything you can think of requires some aspect of rubber without rubber they really wouldn't be able to carry on and at the time the u.s has no real synthetic rubber program the american industry now shows how fast it can move in early 1942 the government finances the construction of 51 synthetic rubber plants these cost around 700 million dollars and they're given to the big rubber companies to run [Music] are doing a top dirty job rolling rubber onto the roads airports and battlefields of many lands now of course these companies are all rivals but what they do is to work together to achieve something really extraordinary it's a joint venture between big business the government and the petrochemicals industry and in just four years the synthetic rubber industry goes from producing 231 tons a year to 70 000 tons a month now that is an astonishing achievement though the rubber crisis is averted another begins to bite four million men are away serving in the armed forces so companies like general motors set out to recruit women in plants and factories all over the country this was the common sight at quitting time not so long ago today we see a different scene women have joined the men in the production lines and the percentage of women in industry is expected to be much higher very soon america didn't have the experience that britain had of the first world war of embracing women into industrial roles and so there's some reticence at first they still suffer from this kind of old-fashioned perception that women are hopeless at engineering but actually whether someone's good at engineering or not is irrelevant male or female because the whole point about mass production is that you don't need a skilled workforce women can be trained up to use the machines just as easily as men women are soon employed in almost every part of war work at general motors over 30 percent of its workforce is female instruments of uncanny precision now manufactured by gm men and women helped to aim the demolishing gun fire of land and sea batteries roller bearings make our gigantic war machine run smoothly many hands in the community are transferring from peacetime luxury work to wartime critical work how does your husband feel about it he feels fine about it every evening when i come home i get an extra kid by the end of 1942 there are three million women working in the armaments industry helping to produce military hardware for allied troops to transport their mass-produced war materiel america must mass-produce cargo ships in a dockyard at baltimore harbor the ss john w brown is one of only two surviving liberty ships in the us mass production was the key to the rapid building of liberty ships once the design was set very few changes were made workers were assigned to specific jobs and the ships were built faster and faster because the workers were skilled at doing things very rapidly when it comes to transporting trucks general motors discovers something quite astonishing if you transport them in parts you can carry a lot more fully assembled army trucks are driven into a disassembly plant where they're knocked down section by section for compact shipment to fighting front a complete assembly line in reverse the trucks are boxed due to a crate in a matter of minutes many carloads of cratered trucks leave this plant every day a train load at a time to be put into use against our enemies eight liberty ships can carry the same number of two and a half ton trucks in parts as 100 can carry fully assembled all you need is somewhere to do the assembling once the trucks arrive so general motors builds new assembly plants all over the world and ships out 40 thousand employees to reassemble their trucks and jeeps the most astonishing frontline factory it builds is believe it or not in eastern iran now there you have 140 degrees heat where you have men constructing a makeshift factory but they soon turn out two and a half thousand military vehicles every month iranians are trained in entirely the same mass production methods as detroit so they can put together a complete truck in less than 30 minutes that's pretty incredible american war factories are so productive that they're even supplying stalin's red army in 1941 america sends 360 000 tons of war material to russia by the end of the war it has supplied the red army with over 400 000 jeeps and trucks 12 000 tanks and other armored vehicles and 11 400 planes two-thirds of the red army's vehicles were built in the u.s [Music] as 1944 begins 90 of general motors operating divisions are focused on wartime production behind locked doors and almost 100 general motors plans throughout the country live thousands of secrets military secrets that hitler would give his best panzer divisions to know general motors is making 10 of everything that america produces to fight the war that's an extraordinary achievement them firing that's the slogan in gm plants where they are making shells and cannon that are now being used by our fighting forces making them better and faster than anyone has ever made them before in the run-up to d-day you have endless freight trains taking raw materials and finished war goods to the east coast and then across to britain [Music] all these goods will be used by the american and allied forces for the largest ever seabourn invasion in history [Music] during the big build-up england had become a vast staging area for troops and the material of war awaiting invasion port embarkation were thousands of trucks and support vehicles row upon row of tanks and a wide range of artillery weapons thousands of ships from all allied nations are preparing for the invasion signal hitler is about to get his comeuppance as the nazis are overwhelmed by the products of american war factories as allied troops swarm across europe they're supplied by a never-ending stream of gm trucks it's called the red bull express now that's a truck convoy of nearly 6 000 vehicles which at its peak is carrying 12 and a half thousand tons of supplies every day from ports in france to allied troops nothing can be allowed to stop its advance this one-way highway is a revolution in the science of military supply it starts at the beaches of normandy and extends for hundreds of miles past paris and into the front lines of battle over this great turnpike american tires carrying american equipment have changed the tide of war american wall factories are hitting hitler hard from both east and west and everywhere he looks there are gm trucks gm jeeps and gm shermans [Music] by the time the war ends general motors is a leviathan of armaments production [Music] these workers in these great plants are the miracle men and women of production they're doing the job well putting their skill and sweat and machines into speedy production of tools for our fighters on a shell we'll blast an enemy trench or a submarine a propeller will pull an american plane over its objective and pull it home again general motors and ford and studebaker and the other great automotive companies did everything they were asked to do and they did it very well i can't imagine them doing better when the war ends the united states is the world's super power it has earned its name as the arsenal of democracy if you compare the american capitalist way of doing things to the state-run regime of the nazis then you you have to say that the americans work the floor with the opposition such is the dynamism of american industry that it switches with astonishing speed from producing tanks and guns and jeeps to new and exciting models of cars televisions washing machines and a thousand other things america's post war boom has begun [Music] it's a big job and they're doing it march forward americans blogged men and women than ever before producing even greater qualities of the thrills of victory producing for a war that will conserve our way of life the united states of america bye

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 2,637,631

Rating: 4.798965 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, wag tv, war factories, general motors, ww2, american ww2, ww2 history, american history, american ww2 history, military history

Id: wp3wQhDpQG8

Length: 43min 16sec (2596 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/el_tinkerer]

"The uploader has not made this video available in your country.".

Waaah. why ????

[u/dekdekwho]

This was interesting!

[u/MrBeer4me]

Where’s Eisenhower’s warning about the MIC?