The American Workers That Helped The US Dominate WW2 | War Factories Complete Series | Timeline

this channel is part of the history hit network stick around to find out more [Music] the untold story of war production 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 factory [Music] 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 would decide the fate of the whole world gotta get back to work [Music] this is the industrial heartland of the american midwest here a half hours drive from detroit michigan sits willow run or what's left of it we're standing in the final assembly bay of the willow run bomber plant built at willow run airport back in 1941. the part we're looking at right now is a hundred and forty four thousand square feet of a 4.2 million square foot factory that was built to produce the b-24 bomber like so much of this part of the country the willow run factory has fallen into disrepair its place in history largely forgotten but the fall plant at willow run is perhaps more than any other factory a symbol of the economic and industrial revolution that won the allies the war [Music] when detroit and the factories of the american midwest were the arsenal of democracy this building is a manifestation one of the last one existing of that miracle of production that took place in the u.s and it's our duty here at the museum to continue preserving this artifact so that a hundred years from now people will come here and learn of this moment in american history when we stood up to the aggression in the world and made the world a better place just like they go to gettysburg today and visit d-day but before the great triumph of american industry would come the catastrophic collapse of europe may 15 1940 winston churchill has been prime minister of great britain for five days when he's woken by a phone call from the short-lived prime minister of france paul reynolds we are beaten he says we have lost the battle within a month of this phone call german troops are marching down the champs-elysees western europe has all but fallen in the battle of france the royal air force loses nearly half its aircraft britain's shores are left almost undefended fewer than 700 spitfires and hurricanes remain germany and the luftwaffe are camped across the channel with a force of over 4 000 fighters and bombers the speed at which the situation in europe goes from alarming to critical to virtually hopeless sends shock waves around the world and to one place in particular washington dc the german blitzkrieg has shown the world that modern warfare will be a battle for the skies british factories are working to full capacity to replace their decimated air force but britain is vulnerable and churchill fears that a german invasion may be imminent churchill realizes that they can't manufacture enough airplanes to stay in the war so what he does is send a commissioner to the united states to ask for help [Music] but there's a problem america may be the world's great producer of motor vehicles but it is not a nation known for its aircraft at this point in time the united states doesn't even have an independent air force america was by far the most motorized nation on earth it was the only country where working class very average people routinely owned a car hot ziggy boys ain't she a dandy americans had more experience in using automated factory processes than any other country and doing it on a large scale but there's still relatively few aircraft being manufactured history hit is a streaming platform that exclusively releases quality historical documentaries covering fascinating figures and moments in history from all over the world from ancient neolithic cultures to the dawn of the space race history hit has thousands of hours of content with unrivaled access to the world's best historians we're committed to bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a 14-day free trial and timeline fans can get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use code timeline at checkout at the end of the depression as world war ii breaks out in 1939 in 1940 total american aircraft production is barely 550 a month britain once a thousand per month one of things you have to realize which is hard to grasp now living as we do in a world where the united states spends more money on defense than the rest of the planet put together is that before pearl harbor the american armed forces particularly the army and the air force were minute since the 20s the us has been dramatically scaling back its military the us after world war one became an isolationist nation and they figured if we never had a military we would never again become involved in a war war industries our only function is to make a profit for their owners in a war setting that hurts everyone so they shut down all the defense industries they punished companies who owned production tools to make war weapons americans want no more war most of all they want no more participation in foreign wars since then governments had done everything possible to hinder war production they impose profit caps on the sale of war materials they ban the sale of arms to foreign powers in a few short years the american war industry is effectively destroyed but across the atlantic ocean europe is preparing for war in may of 1940 the germans in their blitzkrieg invaded the low countries of france belgium holland and this was a wake-up call to the u.s roosevelt is warned that with the current state of the american armed forces germany would only need five divisions to take the country the united states is faced with a difficult decision bring back the war economy or risk invasion asked this congress for authority and for funds sufficient to manufacture additional munitions and war supplies of many kinds to be turned over to those nations which are now in actual war with aggressor nations george c marshall head of the army went to president roosevelt and said you've got to bring the industrialists into this mobilization if we're going to succeed and roosevelt said i want the top manufacturing guys in this country and one of his top advisors said number one is bill newton of general motors number two is bill newton of general motors and we can all guess who number three was bill nudsen was the top man at general motors he'd emigrated from denmark at the age of 21 he had little formal education but had worked his way up to an important role at ford by 1911. he'd worked for ford through the company's development into the mass production icons they became before leaving to become president of chevrolet and then general motors knudsen was a famous organizer he really understood business industry and manufacturing like nobody else but this is going to be an enormous task you had almost no military infrastructure there was no large army there was virtually no air force it all had to be created from scratch in almost no time at all and the administration the government recognized very realistically that there was just no way they could do this by themselves what they had to do was to reach out to private industry uh the private sector and divert it to the war effort knudsen is going to try something radically different to the other war economies of the world knudsen is going to keep the american war economy free unplanned and open and he will allow the companies therein to turn a profit there are two different ways of getting people to do something that you want them to do and these are famously the current mistake you can give people orders with the threat of severe sanctions ultimately being shot if you don't do what you want or you can give them a reason for doing it because they will gain from doing it and what the american government basically chose to do during world war ii was to rely upon carrots rather than sticks they provided an enormous carrot in the shape of highly profitable government contracts to produce the material that the war effort required but despite this new unshackling of american industry the british are short of options when it comes to fighter planes there's at that time not one single fighter plane being produced in america that would meet the standards required in europe at the time eventually the british approach a small aviation company called north american aviation but at this stage north american don't produce any fighters so the british approached them with the designs of a fighter from another company the curtis p-40 warhawk mr knudson america's beaver brook with the assistant war secretary went to look at the tomahawk number 2000. north american uh looking at the designs pretty honestly and knowing they're not good enough so what they say to the british is you know what give us 120 days and we will build you a prototype of a new fighter even for an experienced aircraft company this would be an exceptionally short window in which to design construct and fly a brand new fighter but they're a modern manufacturing company run in the pioneering spirit of the american motor industry north american actually succeed in churning out a prototype with almost three weeks to spare and they put it in front of the british and they say ta-da the na73 and some brilliant british person says well that sounds absolutely rubbish and eventually we rename it the mustang the british place an order for 320 aircraft and north american go into production the mustang is a simple but elegant design it's built making use of all the most recent advances in american vehicle production by using new lightweight rivets the mustang is able to carry a new fuel tank massively increasing its range its various parts are produced separately and joined only later in the process keeping the final assembly as smooth as possible it was designed to be mass produced it was very successfully mass produced but completely set up to run in a different production mode from what was the standard or the norm for the british aircraft industry designed drawn and produced within 12 months which is incredible you couldn't do that now in 10 years but in britain the reaction to the mustang is mixed it is undoubtedly fast with a top speed of 380 miles per hour it's also highly maneuverable at heights of up to fifteen thousand feet but performance tails off dramatically at higher altitudes as a result the raf can only use it for low level operations and yusuf show no interest in the fighter whatsoever the mustang might well have ended up in obscurity had it not been for ron harker who was a test pilot at rolls royce harker joined rolls-royce before the war and he'd flown a large number of aircraft and he liked a lot about the p-51 the mustang harker realized that if it had a more powerful engine the mustang can actually be a great plane and of course because he's working for rolls royce he knows just the engine the rolls-royce merlin 61. everybody knows the merlin it powered all our aircraft to a greater or lesser extent and they decided to start fitting the merlin into the mustang to make that into the fighter it became the only problem is that britain simply does not have the capacity to produce enough rolls-royce merlin engines to power these planes their only hope is to have the engines produced in the united states when bill nudsen gets the phone call from the british there's only one company on his list who else would you go to to mass produce an engine but ford [Music] bill nutson is good friends with henry ford's son edsel who's by now president of the company so he gives him a ring and he tells him that britain has placed an order for 6 000 new merlin engines everything seems to be in place when knudsen receives a call from edsel ford his father the great henry fault has overruled him he refuses to make engines for the british war effort actually there are quite a few reasons why ford will not agree to this first of all he's anti-war he's also a massive isolationist and he simply doesn't believe that the us should be getting involved and there's another reason ford won't go anywhere near something that had roosevelt's paw prints on it [Music] in a meeting with knudsen henry ford vents his fury he warns knudsen that he's getting involved with bad people in washington many isolationists see roosevelt as a tyrant and see this government-backed production program as a play for power ford announces to the press that so long as he lives his company will not supply war materials to foreign powers he reneges on the deal and nutsam will have to look elsewhere the company he turns to to produce the merlins is the packard motor company packard's vast factory has loomed over the city of detroit since 1910. their main trade has always been luxury cars but they were of henry ford's generation and understood the principles by which he worked but when the plans for the merlin arrive at pacquiao the american engineers are baffled they'd come expecting a few papers instead the plans fill a crate the size of a freight car it becomes clear that the british way of doing things is not going to work for the mass production techniques of packard surprising as it may seem the packard motor company wanted rolls-royce to be much more precise in its measurements when it came to the rolls-royce merlin why because they were building machines to make these engines they wanted to make them on a very large scale and they understood very well the mass production was precision production measurements are adapted from british to american and broken down into the levels of detail required for mass production before long merlin engines are rolling off the production line rather than the small highly trained and specialized workforce at the british factories packard's production line means they can recruit unskilled labor and produce the merlins at a rate three times faster than their counterparts [Music] so now the americans are mass producing the merlin engine but they're also mass producing the muster and the real game changer is when they put the two together the p51 mustang in almost every respect was superior to the german fighters it's only by chance that they experimented with this merlin engine and the p51 airframe and you come up with this completely new kind of aircraft with the support of the american motor industry the battle for britain's skies is turning in the allies favor in 1940 german aircraft losses are twice as high as the british while they struggle to replace them at the same speed in 1939 germany produces four times as many aircraft as the united states by 1941 the us out produces germany by 50 percent by the end of 1940 bill nutson has already issued billions of dollars worth of war production contracts the germans during the nazi period saw america essentially through the lens of hollywood and also jewish banking they saw the united states as a combination of jewish finance and decadent jewish culture and they simply ignored the enormous productive power and capacity of the american economy for hitler and the nazis america had been corrupted by jewish culture hollywood was jewish capitalism was jewish and so they thought was america this is an economy that could produce enormous amounts of consumer goods that just shows how addicted to comfort the american public are what they did not realize of course was that an economy which was so enormously productive could equally produce enormous amounts of weapons systems and materiel what the axis powers realized by the end of 1941 is that the united states industrial program has barely started to realize its potential and if it ever does reach this potential they don't stand a chance well the japanese do see that the americans have a vast rearman program but until that mobilization fully kicked in which would be a couple of years japan had a window where they have tactical superiority on the 7th of december 1941 a japanese force of 400 aircraft launches a pre-emptive strike on the american naval base at pearl harbor hawaii 188 aircraft are destroyed along with three battleships [Music] the attack on pearl harbor does not affect america's war production really in the long term all they've done is hack off all of the isolationists that didn't want america to go to war and ensure that basically you've poked the bear [Music] the day after pearl harbor the united states declares war on japan germany and italy in their turn declare war on the united states at last america has entered another world war a national emergency is declared and america goes into full mobilization mode in an address to the nation roosevelt unleashes his plans for the new american war factory i believe that this nation should plan at this time a program that will provide us with 50 000 military and naval planes the way that the united states would reach these numbers would change the relationship between government and big business forever immediately before pearl harbor relations between the american political class in the shape of franklin roosevelt and his government 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 then like a bolt from a blue the japanese attack on pearl harbor and quite suddenly everything is changed now was the time to actually reach out to a 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 as a wartime president roosevelt is first and foremost a pragmatist he now puts his faith in knudsen and the business leaders of the country i think the way to understand the working of the u.s war production system is that it's essentially a kind of corporate capitalist model of the economy it's not a radical free enterprise approach but at the same time it is an explicit rejection of a command socialist economy since the german failure to take control of the skies and the battle of britain the tide has been beginning to turn against the luftwaffe the battle britain was won by the few the spitfires and hurricanes that rose up in the sky were defensive weapons to defend england [Music] the four engine bomber had been identified as the offensive weapon that would take the war to germany and the demand for four engine bombers outstripped manufacturing by eons the allies desperately need a new bomber and in vast numbers the only bomber that might fit the bill is the b-24 it carried more it went further and it went faster they wanted the b-24 by the tens of thousands but in 1941 american industry is still in a state of decline the depression and stagnation of the 1930s has left industry crippled new deal profit caps and over unionization had held back industry since roosevelt had taken power american industry might be willing and able but it wasn't ready when war was declared the knock-on effects of the great depression mean that america is lagging behind in industry in 1929 u.s machine tool sales had amounted to 185 million dollars by 1932 there were only 22 million america's factories are ill-equipped for the shift in production that lies ahead and the start-up costs for producing 125 000 planes a year would be enormous to handle an operation on this scale knudsen knows he will need an experienced manufacturer once again he turns to ford ford remain reluctant to enter the military economy but after the german declaration of war there can be no more question selling arms to the british empire is one thing but providing weapons in the defense of his own nation is another now that the us has officially declared war ford finally agrees to be part of the war economy but he doesn't want to build engines or parts he and his team are going to be building planes this factory will be called willow run and it's going to be bigger than any factory ever built before the first thing that has to be done is to work out a production process for the new ford produced b-24s and the man that ford sends to observe the us air force's current operation is charles sorensen otherwise known as cast iron charlie charles sorensen was an old time ford employee he had been at ford 35 years and he'd worked his way from pattern maker to vice president of manufacturing he was the guy that designed the model t line he mastered cast iron in place of forging he was a master of manufacturing what he saw at the consolidated b-24 factory was a complete disaster sorensen went back to the coronado hotel which still stands in san diego and after dinner he went to his room and he took his notes from the day and he started on small scraps of paper flows to the middle of the room parts to minor assemblies major assemblies sub-assemblies and at four in the morning he had designed a factory that would build one b-24 bomber an hour and the army said start this project right now on the basis of pencil drawings on the back of hotel placemats the army awarded a 200 million dollar contract to start the willow run bomber factory the b-24 would be the ford model t of the sky charles sorensen will build his new factory here in the industrial suburbs of detroit it will be called willow run and it will be unlike anything the world has seen the b-24 liberators they'll be constructing here consist of nearly 500 000 different parts and components sorensen breaks down the assembly of these parts into a few thousand sequences that will themselves be divided into nine different departments the part we're looking at right now is a hundred and forty four thousand square feet of the 4.2 million square foot factory that was built to produce the b-24 bomber this is about five percent of the original factory there were two 3500 foot assembly lines that started and moved these airplanes through the factory assembly iron station one movement per hour until they came out the door but while willow run is an incredible sight to behold its production levels are falling well under what sorensen had promised the u.s air force and it's becoming a serious problem willa run did not get off the flying start in fact it earned the nickname will it run the timetable they had built which would allow them to start making production tooling to build airplanes was based upon the blueprints they developed in san diego in early 1940 but the airplane had been modified so much that much of the blueprints were obsolete and they had to go back and redesign the airplane the b-24s were not cars the technology was state-of-the-art and still being perfected it's not an easy leap to sort of be making door panels for a car one day and then making wing ribs or putting together a flap or an aileron for an aircraft a couple of weeks later the tolerances are far far greater the materials are much tougher to work with yes you're still dealing with drilling holes in luxury metal but the finish the finesse the limits involved a world away in desperation sorensen turns to his old rival at general motors bill nudsen world war ii is full of cases where attempts are made to mass produce that essentially fail and the willow run factory is one example it's very easy to turn out identical aeroplanes but if you need to go back and change them you lose the advantage that you get from producing in the large scale in the first place knudsen sees that constant revision to the designs of the b-24 makes keeping the production moving almost impossible so ford went to consolidated and said i can build bombers if you freeze the design of the airplane i can't build a 1936 ford and then a 1937 ford and then a 1935 ford on a moving assembly line i will build 400 bombers no changes to these bombers once they agreed to freeze the design of the airplane now they could schedule production and the production line took off to match the bomber per hour prediction that sorensen made in january 1943 only 31 liberators are completed at willow run but in february they produce 74 in march 104 by the end of the year willow run is achieving the incredible output sorensen had promised and then some at its peak 650 b-24s are rolling out the doors of willow run every month a liberator had cost 200 000 hours from start to finish before willow run sorensen knudsen and ford cut this time by 90 ford motor company built about 8 700 b-24 bombers here these right here are the doors that would open once per hour to let the b-24 bombers come off the assignment line 6700 of them flew away from this airport i'm awestruck by the industrial giants of detroit when they understood how to produce a product by now american bomber production is dwarfing the germans by far the most widely produced german bomber class was the junkers the us produces almost twice this number of b-24s the b-24s will be the most widely produced bomber in the war almost half are built at willow run this new plane can carry four tons of bombs and the allied air forces make the most of its destructive capacity raining fire upon the cities of europe north africa and asia but while ford and the men and women of willow run have been constructing the largest class of bombers ever assembled another bomber has already been in the works for several years in strict secrecy boeing have been developing a bomber since before pearl harbor that could change the course of the war they would call the plane the b-29 or the super fortress by 1944 the nazi stranglehold on europe is starting to weaken thousands of aircraft swarm the skies and the allies prepare for the end but on the other side of the world the war is only intensifying as the americans press further into the japanese empire the casualties on both sides are enormous japan is problematic because it's a coastal empire and comprising hundreds of ireland they're fiercely defended and every time you land on one it's going to cost you dearly defeating the entire japanese empire you're potentially looking at a cost of millions of men without a vast invasion force the only way to reach japan is with a bomber but this job is well beyond the b-24 the only bomber capable of reaching japan is the newly developed b-29 the b-24 is a very complex aircraft but now you move to the b-29 the b-29 requires literally thousands of changes and adaptations during its design career boeing's b-29 has been in development since the start of the war but progress has been slow and millions have been poured into the project before a prototype ever leaves the ground in almost every respect it is a totally new conception of what a bomber can be from engine power weight to wing loading remote controlled gun turrets and cabin pressurization the b-29 bomber was the most advanced airplane in the world at the time it was being designed and built and it was the foundation of the airline industry following world war ii but the early designs are riddled with problems and over the meat packing district of seattle in december 1943 disaster strikes during a test flight in seattle the lead b-29 prototype suffers this appalling engine cooling failure shortly after it takes off and as it tries to come into land all these witnesses can see smoke billowing from this engine now the pilot's a man called edmund t allen he's immensely experienced he's the lead test pilot on the program and the man who knows more than anyone else about the project but as this aircraft is kind of storming towards the runway even he can't control it and the b-29 suddenly veers off course it cuts through these power lines above seattle streets and it hurtles into the side of this local office build by the end of 1943 only 15 airworthy b-29s had been delivered they're implementing technologies that haven't ever been used on aircraft before and that's not just for a prototype they're at the same time envisaging that they will have to mass produce this and turn them out at a rapid rate as well it's a completely chaotic process bringing the b29 into being when they do though it's remarkable how quickly they can turn them out after four years of work boeing finalized their design for the b-29 in 1943. now they can draw up plans for factory production boeing quickly realized that they need entirely new warehouses for the super fortress's assembly no plant that they or indeed anyone else has access to will suffice for a project of this scale to make matters even more complicated it will all have to take place in total secrecy the whole project is becoming so fiendishly complicated that the war production board won't go anywhere near it so in the end the production plan will be this incredible coordinated project of boeing along with north american bell aircraft right aeronautics and general motors the site chosen for boeing's new plant is just outside the little town of wichita kansas wright aeronautics will work on the engines in paterson new jersey while general motors will operate another smaller plant in cleveland ohio this is rapidly becoming the largest and most expensive project in aeronautics history they were building a plane for the army air forces that would reduce the huge fortresses of liberators to medium bombers they were building the boeing designed super fortress the production line they design at boeing in wichita completely eclipses henry ford's willow run factory it's to build the b-29 which has got more than double the amount of parts of a b-24 over a million rivets and they even have to instigate a new process to be able to mass produce them and that's called multi-lining in the multi-lining process six assembly lines work in tandem eventually joining at their ends and merging to form three lines which finally come to a head at the vast main warehouse of the plant there four whole super fortresses would be pulled together by dozens of cranes and hundreds of workers all dwarfed by the scale of their equipment to keep the production line moving they have to ensure that the 1400 different suppliers of all the various parts that went into the assembly were also functioning smoothly and on time this means general electric bendix dupont and goodyear one stoppage in the chain could bring the entire assembly line to a standstill this was by 1943 not only the most expensive airplane ever produced but the most expensive machine of any kind despite this the production speed is incredible the 150th b-29 rolls off the assembly line in april 1944 but within a year 2000 have been built by the beginning of 1944 you know that japan are done but it's still costing an obscene amount in men and material to continue fighting there with the result that the american solution is just instead of trying to overcome the japanese forces in japan is just to bomb the living daylights out of them so with this new fleet of super fortresses the b-29 they know that they can sort of dull japan into submission swiftly in july and august the americans capture saipan guam and tinyan in the mariana islands far closer to japan and five new airfields are hastily built to accommodate 180 super fortresses and the men of the newly created 20th air force the man transferred to take control of the b-29 campaign is general curtis lemay curtis lemay um surmises that most japanese cities and towns are constructed mainly of wood so obviously wood doesn't like fire so incendiary bombing um will be the way to go lemay's first super fortress fire bombing attack is planned for tokyo on the 9th of march 1945. he sends 334 b-29s armed with 2 000 tons of incendiaries they reach the city under the cover of darkness and unleash hell on the unsuspecting population several hundred b-29s fire bomb tokyo and destroy 16 square miles of tokyo in one raid as also the highest casualties of any single aircraft raid these firebombing raids are horrific it said that you could still smell burning human flesh with a b-29 landed back at the base but it is only a hint of the destructive power the superfortress has unleashed at 8am on the 6th of august 1945 an atomic bomb is dropped from the bombay of a b-29 over the city of hiroshima two accompanying b-29s record the event who knows what revolution it may affect in the life of the individual in the organization of the world already people are calling this the atomic era some 70 000 people are killed instantly 70 000 more will die in the coming weeks and months from their injuries or from radiation sickness japan surrenders nine days later the war is over bill nudsen is in germany when he hears of japan's surrender but this was of course never in doubt knudsen had left his post some months before the end of the war his work had already been done under his system the united states had produced 324 700 aircraft 170 airplanes had consistently rolled out of american factories every day since the beginning of 1942. in 1939 the japanese were producing twice the number of aircraft as the americans the germans were producing four times as many by 1945 the americans are out producing both of them by a factor of six the legacy of little run is in a world gone mad the institution of democracy was under a tremendous threat and they turned to the masters of manufacturing in detroit who understood how to mass produce the machinery that would be needed to protect freedom and allow the world to move forward what knutson had completely understood was that total state control a command economy like nazi germany was not in wartime or any other time the key to productivity in fact the very opposite was true what nutson really does for the united states is to pull off the shackles that american industry had been stuck with since the new deal as the many millions of american veterans return home they find a country transformed it's not only in how much they produce in america um that that symbolizes victory the total economic output for america had doubled wages had risen by 70 so to all intents and purposes the depression and the economic decline that they were suffering when they got involved in the war has been eradicated unemployment is virtually non-existent the factories that have converted themselves to war production convert themselves back and they stay open when ford released their first car model since the war there are lines of people in the street the rebirth of american industry would continue for two decades and propel the united states to become the most powerful country the world had ever seen the world's first superpower [Music] but bill nudsen did not live to see any of this in 1947 he died in his family home in detroit only a few miles from the factories that made him he's 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 factory 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 would decide the fate of the whole world gotta get back to work today the baltimore docks are quiet the water is still the keysight largely deserted but on the 27th of september 1941 these docks were thronging with people thousands of workers gathered to celebrate the launch of a new ship the first of a new kind of ship that will change the course of history they will be called liberty ships though they will play a key role in the allied victory in world war ii only three liberty ships survive captain brian hope is dedicated to preserving this incredible bit of maritime history liberty ships are the general category is a merchant ship they're designed to carry cargo [Music] two-thirds of all the cargo that left the united states during world war ii was carried in liberty ships every conceivable kind of cargo from beans to bullets absolutely crucial to the winning of the war if we didn't have a merchant fleet and no victory more than any other single vessel the mass production of liberty ships reflected the astonishing industrial might of america today we have a little less than 100 american flag merchant ships at the end of world war ii we had slightly less than 6 000 ships it was a ship building effort literally beyond belief [Music] at the end of the war their work done shipyards like this one would close or shrink but in the war years they would see a flurry of industrial activity the likes of which the world has never seen before or since the story of the american shipyard is the story of how the allies won the war but the story begins on the other side of the atlantic in the summer of 1940 britain is fighting desperately to stay in the war the speed of the german advance through northern europe has caught the western democracies completely off guard france has fallen and britain's skies are overrun with nazi aircraft its seas are patrolled day and night by wolf packs of ship killing u-boats in the summer of 1940 the german forces are across the channel and they've got much greater access for their aircraft and their u-boats and warships via norway or via the french coast so suddenly the war is on our doorstep the threat goes up exponentially from 1940 onwards particularly as germany can produce more u-boats the u-boat campaign leads to the sinking of a very considerable portion of all british shipping and creates a potential crisis in the british capacity to import [Music] britain is a small island nation cut off from europe desperately relying on trade with america its merchant fleet is its lifeline without imports of food and supplies britain will collapse but in 1941 alone german u-boats sink 1 300 ships month after month hundreds of thousands of tons of british imports are being sent to the bottom of the sea in desperation churchill turns to the americans the british need freight ships and they need them fast though america is not yet at war it's willing to help its closest ally but american shipyards are too few and too busy they have no merchant ships to spare so the british offer to pay for the rapid construction of new shipyards the man they turn to is henry j kaiser in true american tradition qaeda is actually a completely self-made man he had left school and skipped town when he was just 13 and within 10 years he's running his own construction company kaiser had been in the interwar period sort of a celebrity businessman he'd worked on some of the great projects these huge kinds of federal projects which changed the landscape one of the largest things ever built by man was the hoover dam kaiser had no education and no training but in the hoover dam he built one of the great man-made wonders of the world he'd started out with nothing but he had an incredible natural talent for organization and a sheer bloody-minded determination to get on and make money [Music] as war approaches british and american governments will turn to men like henry kaiser to build their armies and their fleets one of the basic decisions that the war planning board and the administration make is that they are going to encourage companies to produce the goods materials they need by making it profitable for them to do so by offering them generous contracts and terms which will give them a business financial incentive so a large number of firms actually are set up during the war on the back of taking on war contracts and then delivering the goods so to speak one of the best known examples is the henry j kaiser shipyards kaiser offers to build shipyards and then ships kaiser has barely been on a ship let alone built one but then he didn't know anything about dams and that didn't stop him he's not naturally a ship builder but he's used to big ambitious projects and what he sees is an opportunity now to take his skills and move them into shipbuilding kaiser is not a qualified engineer but understands the principles of mass production he just needs a contract to prove that the same methods can be applied to ships kaiser meets with the british who already have a design for a simple basic freight ship based on the ss empire liberty these designs would inspire the largest single class of ship ever produced the liberty ship they're described by president roosevelt as ugly ducklings so they are blunt ships they are crude ships they have relatively austere accommodation they don't have great sea keeping they don't have great speed but you can produce them quickly and they will take a large volume of cargo for their size kaiser tells the british he can build them large numbers of liberty ships in record time but only if he's allowed to do it his way the british are skeptical britain is the world's great naval superpower they've been building ships for hundreds of years henry kaiser a man with no shipbuilding experience is telling them he can do it better nevertheless kaiser gets the contract and buys land to build a new shipyard here on the mud flats of richmond and the san francisco bay well kaiser is terribly ambitious and willing to take risks so what he realizes is you need to set up the infrastructure to build the ship and you're building ships on a scale never heretofore attempted and he's willing to do that starting in a sense from scratch so he can change the productive process kaiser is told by engineering experts that it will take six months to dredge the santa fe channel and clear enough land to start work on the shipyard kaiser's men do it in three weeks incredibly kaiser builds his first shipyard in just three months it opens its gates in april 1941. it hasn't just gone up quicker than other shipyards ships will be made here like they've never been made before he can see an efficiency in having a production system that is designed from day one to deal with the bringing in an assembly of sub-components once this production line is up and running it will be able to become rapid mass production [Music] kaiser's new shipyards will be unlike any other shipyard in the country because kaiser is not a shipbuilder instead he has modelled his yards on the warehouses of motor city and the production lines of ford and general motors these automobile companies completely changed the game in their own industry producing motor cars for mass consumption the processes they developed remain much the same today america has been turning out probably more than any other economy a large number of very standardized products in large scale and those methods are then applied to wartime so effectively this is providing forward manufacturing production techniques to the shipbuilding industry what the american production begins to favor as the world goes on is the idea of welding so instead of putting all these rivets you would actually use acetylene torches or different kinds of heat sources to melt the metal together riveting requires forming welding only two it takes six months to train a riveter a welder only three welding allows kaiser to turn ship building into a production line breaking up complex tasks into a series of simpler ones instead of crafting one ship at a time kaiser will mass produce them in sections then weld them together once you move to sectional construction and welding you can put together components from a wide range of places that are just brought together for the final construction and so potentially you can speed up the construction of simpler ships very very quickly the man who built golden dam has revolutionized shipbuilding from blueprint to template henry j kaiser's west coast yards are sliding liberty ships into the water as from an assembly line a triumph of american genius and popular science to the disbelief of traditional shipbuilders kaiser's first liberty ship is constructed in just 124 days now this new liberty ship is assembled a bit like flat pack furniture piece by piece 95 of each ship would be pre-assembled but you've got to remember a 14 000 ton ship has a lot of parts the finished hull of a liberty ship is made of steel plates cut into no fewer than 435 shapes and sizes each ship contains 7 500 different mechanical components supplied by 600 different producers across the country but by dividing up the production process and building ships in parts a complex process is made simple what the americans do essentially is to apply the techniques that american industry had already developed to the mass production of consumer goods to the production of munitions and water supplies and so essentially it's the great triumph of american mass production capitalism [Music] liberty ships have kept britain alive and in the war soon they will be transporting supplies to american troops abroad and vast numbers of american weapons and vehicles to help the red army liberty ships are absolutely critical in keeping the allies in the war british fighter planes came over from america russian tanks and and most of them are carried on liberty ships captain brian hope works aboard the liberty ship the ss john w brown in baltimore the john w brown is 75 years old and she's not a spring chicken anymore but we keep her in as good a condition as we possibly can [Music] the space is called the tween deck which means it's between the main deck and the ship's lower hold only on the inside of the liberty ship does its scale become apparent there we go the ss john w brown staffed 45 merchant sea men and 41 navy guards fully loaded she could carry almost 3 000 jeeps there we go this is the number three lower hold this is one of the five cargo holds on the ship uh of course it's empty now we use it for storage but when the when the ship was filled with cargo the water line was way up near the top of this hole this hole is actually one of the smaller holes on the ship believe it or not the purpose of the liberty ships was to get cargo from the united states to the battlefronts and the cargo was carried in these holes so this hold represents the victory for the allies in world war ii but across the pacific war is about to find america whether they want it or not the united states is about to launch the single greatest program of armament production in human history america will never be the same again the uss arizona memorial pearl harbor honolulu in the waters below lies the wreck of the arizona on which over a thousand american servicemen lost their lives the attack on pearl harbor does not affect america's war production really in the long term all they've done is hack off all of the isolationists that didn't want america to go to war and ensure that basically you've poked the bear japan knows that if america can produce warships with the same mass production techniques they've used for the liberty ships they will be unbeatable so japan decides to strike first the japanese do see that the americans have a vast rearman program which was voted in by congress to expand the navy and the army and the in the air force but until that mobilization fully kicked in which would be a couple of years japan had a window with its ten carriers would have approximately parody at the opening with the western powers now every month that you go past december 1941 the power ratio starts moving away from the japanese four days later germany declares war in the united states against all its best intentions america has been dragged into yet another world war in january 1942 roosevelt addresses the nation he announces a vast expansion of the american shipbuilding program these figures will give the japanese and the nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished in the attack at pearl harbor roosevelt sees the astonishing progress made by the kaiser shipyards so instead of the navy building ships he plans to open up american shipbuilding to private industry it's a way of thinking about the war productive effort as being like a competitive mass production market in which you have large firms which compete to supply the needs of this market consumer is the us government roosevelt's new deal had been anti-business it had suppressed competition and confiscated profits regulated output and prices now faced with war all of these government controls have been swept aside in every other country war brings more government control in america it brings more freedom and the results are electrifying as kaiser wins orders he'll need to attract tens of thousands more workers but the richmond shipyard is miles from any major town or city well there was a demand of course for workers in all sorts of war industries at the time it truly was competition there were great deals available to work in the aviation industry building airplanes so the shipyard workers were offered better deals to come and work in the shipyards to tempt workers to his shipyards kaiser introduces a healthcare scheme covering them and their family's medical costs for 80 cents a week 91 of the employees subscribe making it the largest voluntary health plan in america kaiser healthcare begins as a ways to protect his own workers health and from that he creates a healthcare company he basically franchises it out as a private insurance scheme still exists to this day it's one of the best health care systems in america with the offer of high wages medical benefits and the promise of learning a trade workers flock to kaiser's shipyards from all over america this sudden explosion of industry is providing jobs in numbers the united states hasn't seen since the great depression [Applause] as henry kaiser's new shipyard expands the population of the surrounding areas soars the little town of richmond experiences a population boom of over 600 percent in just three years by 1943 it's grown to a town of 150 000 kaiser and the maritime commission start work on the construction of 23 000 new homes to cope with the sudden migration of workers to the richmond area this didn't just involve putting up houses for 30 000 people in the middle of nowhere this meant creating an infrastructure of ferries buses trains anything nearby to help move people in order to get them to factories richmond shipbuilders topped the nation in the share of the ride principle averaged more than four riders per car because of the shift patterns that everyone's working it means that cinemas restaurants bars shops will need to be opened 24 7. it really did create a lively place to be they just treated the the workers exceptionally well they advertised to a great extent all over the country for people to come and work in the shipyards a lot of black workers were recruited from the south and they moved up to baltimore they were integrated very well into into the workforce there was a large proportion of women in the shipyards maybe close to 25 percent of the workers were female and they did just about every job in the shipyard they ran cranes they they served as guards they drove trucks they did all sorts of jobs to accommodate the large number of women now working on the ships daycare centers are introduced to look after the children women are free to work alongside their husbands often for the first time in their lives new schools are opened as well and filled almost instantly by the children of shipyard workers this is a time of incredibly rapid social change america's great depression is finally coming to a close in 1933 only 50 000 shipyard workers have been employed 10 years later 1.7 million people are working in shipyards across the country actually funnily enough standards of living in the united states actually increase quite dramatically after the beginning of the war everyone's in employment and wages are rising year on year so actually this is truly a sort of rebirth for america but on the other side of the ocean the japanese stranglehold over the countries of the asia pacific grows ever tighter well the japanese are obsessed by the fact that they have a small island country with limited resources and they believe to be equal to a great power which is where they should be in the world in their view that they must have the resources of their own today tokyo is one of the largest cities on the planet now as in 1940 built up urban areas covered the islands of japan like britain wartime japan is not self-sufficient either in food or raw materials instead it will extract the supplies it needs from the populations of its new overseas colonies in china korea and southeast asia the japanese are quite ruthless in how they get hold of all the raw materials and food that they need in that they just go out and pillage it from everywhere in the pacific and they're utterly reliant on their own merchant fleet to bring it home to feed itself and maintain its empire japan needs to control pacific shipping lanes without its merchant fleet japan's empire will collapse what the allies swiftly realize is that if they can disrupt japanese supply lines just as the u-boats are done to britain they'll be completely unable to sustain their war effort their many overseas colonies are going to count for nothing america does have submarines with the range required to reach the japanese merchant fleet some 4 000 miles away but it doesn't have many of them this is the gato class submarine the gateo class submarine has been around since the beginning of the war and the americans have only ever produced a handful of them and the reason is that they're completely labour intensive and not geared up for mass production at all for mass production to make economic sense you need to be producing large numbers of identical items or machines so if you're going to invest huge amounts of money in machine tools that only produce parts in small numbers it's simply not worth the investment that's common sense when the designs are finalized that's when you begin sending prototypes out to manufacturers and to get them done in sufficient numbers and create a submarine fleet from scratch they're going to have to employ kaiser's methods before long five different contractors are mass producing gatos across the country the first gato is completed in november 1941. in january 1942 american shipyards are producing two gatos a month by the summer they are sending out a new gato every eight days the gato class is america's first mass-produced submarine [Music] the impact on the japanese merchant fleet is felt immediately dozens of merchant ships are lost within a few months disrupting japanese supply lines and damaging military production submarines account for less than two percent of u.s naval vessels but they will be responsible for 30 of all japanese ships sunk the united states submarine was a hugely important weapon of war in the east they essentially destroyed the japanese capacity to transport goods and troops in the pacific large parts of the japanese empire are effectively separated from japan long before the end of the war and japanese ability to produce anything at home and even to feed the home island is falling catastrophically for the loss of only 52 submarines the fleet wipes out over a thousand japanese ships half their merchant fleet five million tons of vital japanese shipping but to hit mainland japan directly something else something bigger will be needed [Music] in the autumn of 1942 roosevelt visits kaiser's shipyard in oregon by now kaiser and the liberty ship's success have become a national sensation roosevelt's tour of the yard is like a victory parade addressing the crowd the president the united states says have been here today to see that launching and realize what it means in the winning of this war at the start of 1942 the construction of a liberty ship had taken an average of 210 days by may 156 by july 106 and some are produced in just a few days and henry kaiser is becoming a national celebrity jay kaiser the miracle shipbuilder shows how his yards launch liberty ships in record time the man who cuts months to weeks now you're talking about ships being turned out you know in the matter of just over a month from the starting of a ship for getting it to sea in order to fit it out in 1942 germany produces 244 major vessels japan only 68. but this is dwarfed by the output of the u.s shipyards which produce an incredible 1800 liberty ships have been great for keeping britain and her allies in the war in terms of going across the atlantic um once the war in the pacific explodes they're no longer enough kaiser's shipyards are going to have to up their production significantly once again pearl harbor showed that naval warfare had changed a modern navy needs planes battleships on their own are slow and vulnerable the battleships day had passed the battleship was dike at bombard beaches but in terms of ship to ship combat aircraft carriers were now the key weapons so what kaiser wants to show is he can now build those as well the need for aircraft carriers is obvious but carriers are enormous the essex class the united states favorite ship is 900 feet long it weighs 30 000 tons and has a crew of two and a half thousand men a single carrier this size takes literally years to build and war in the pacific will not wait as the war goes on though these ships will take several years to produce and can only be in a handful of places working with the main battle fleet so you start looking at what were called escort carriers so they're much smaller and they're operating perhaps 20 aircraft compared to the 60 or 70 aircraft on a fleet carrier kaiser offers to build the navy aircraft carriers the same way he builds liberty ships they'll be smaller than the navy's existing carriers but kaiser will build many more of them at a much faster rate kaiser is a self-made man very rich man very successful man and there's consequently a lot of ego and bravado that goes with him and when he goes to put a bid in front of the u.s navy to produce escort carriers he just rubs them completely up the wrong way with the result that they just turn him down flat kaiser has spent an entire career schmoozing washington so being rejected by the head of the navy board is like so all he does instead is to set up a meeting with roosevelt and have another chat and then with with the instant result that he's got a contract to produce 50 escort carriers kaiser's new mass-produced escort carriers would be known as casablanca class carriers the kaiser shipyard set to work immediately organizing the most efficient production line possible for their new carriers every ship will be standardized every part mass-produced each ship running with reciprocating steam engines with four boilers no variation no frills with lighter armor and increased speed again they could be made in a much wider range of shipyards following the example of things like the liberty ships you're producing a simple ship that you can put a simple flight deck on and you can operate for a limited number of tasks 20 aircraft so we have a kind of mass production of small ships rather than the building of a very few very large ships but ship builders build ships they don't do lighting they don't do radar and they don't do radios within the ship's enormous outer shell a vast infrastructure of electrical components needs to be provided to assemble the inner workings of their ships naval yards across the country turned to manufacturing giant general electric they churned out a lot ships radios searchlights winches ammunition hoists they even organized ventilation steering control and even radar equipment now this coordination and cooperation between companies simply does not happen in a planned economy what kaiser says is that we need someone producing the lighting for his ships and he goes straight to general electric he needs electrical components for cranes he goes to general electric the kaiser shipyards can only run because of this coordination with their many hundreds of subcontractors the first aircraft carrier to be launched from the yard of henry kaiser now geared for mass production america's miracle shipbuilder promises to deliver six carriers a month general electric and the kaiser shipyards keep to their deadlines they produce a staggering 50 escort carriers in two years over the course of the entire war japan only produces seven kaiser breaks all records more casablanca carriers are built than any other kind of aircraft carrier before or since and they wreak havoc in the pacific u.s fighter planes swarm the slow and hulking japanese battleships this is chuuk lagoon it was once the main base for the japanese imperial fleet it is now home to the ghost fleet operation hailstone i'd say is revenge for pearl harbor um in 1944 540 american aircraft um take off from carriers and proceed to destroy the japanese fleet over 200 000 tons of japanese shipping is lost to the bottom of the sea and 17 000 tons of fuel destroyed operation hailstone is the death knell for the japanese fleet the next step for the americans will be invasion but getting to dry land won't be so easy [Music] by the middle of the war american military production is dwarfing that of japan in 1943 japan produces 122 major naval vessels america builds a staggering 2654 identical ships with identical walkways unload identical stalls in identical ways under this new production program crews and troops need less familiarization and can operate more efficiently [Music] but the fighting in the approach to japan is brutal [Music] in their advance across the islands of the pacific each landing is like breaching a castle as the allied troops try to land their ships on japanese beaches they're greeted with volleys of bullets you can isolate the islands that the japanese forces are on but there's no deception about where you're going to land and generally there are very limited areas in the pacific as the americans realize you have coral atolls you have much more difficult landing operations often sort of smaller patchier beaches reefs just offshore from the beach that can wreck normal landing craft coming in the landings in tarawa in 1943 end up being a disaster something must be done to limit the american losses and fast the solution lies with a hard-drinking irishman named andrew jackson higgins who lived and worked here in bayou country louisiana throughout the 1920s and 30s higgins had supplied the developing oil and gas wells to service these sites he had designed and built several shallow draft craft capable of carrying heavy loads in depths of less than two feet of water now higgins has read about the problems faced by the american troops in those early pacific landings and he realizes that these boats of his could be the answer they could actually save american lives higgins boats are tested effective and can be easily mass produced but once again the government's monolithic military bureaucracy has other ideas somewhat predictably you've got these bureaucrats at the u.s navy board who are absolutely determined to use the landing craft that they'd commissioned and designed internally despite the fact they were obviously bad so what they do is they continue to purchase thousands of these inferior internally designed ships even though it's costing american lives now this is a theme that you see going on throughout the entire war you've got this real pushback of army bureaucrats against the expansion of military production into the private sector now that of course is going against men like higgins and kaiser who really know what they're doing but higgins like kaiser is not easily beaten he demands that congress investigate the navy board and wins a hearing with senator harry truman truman himself was no great fan of the new deal and truman was certainly on the side of the conservative democrats in the 1940s that thought that the staunch roosevelt democrats had gone too far with government regulations truman calls for a head-to-head operational test the navy's boat versus higgins so what happens is when they pitch the two designs up against each other everything that higgins would have wished for happens so he shows the navy designers up as vastly inferior his design dazzles everybody truman is stunned by the corruption of the navy board he launches a full-scale investigation and concludes that the navy board have shown a flagrant disregard for the facts if not the safety and success of american troops higgins is awarded the contract to mass produce his design d-day happens in june 1944 a few weeks later the united states invades the marianas islands cypantinian and guam they send a naval force 10 times larger to invade those islands than they send today the u.s fleet has already grown to become the largest ever assembled they're transporting hundreds of thousands of troops and tens of thousands of tanks trucks and transports the problem is how to get this fast floating army ashore [Music] you need to build more complex landing craft that can carry heavy loads and you need to build those in a way that had never been conceived of before and kaiser yet again begins to involve himself in the building of these more intricate landing craft [Music] the solution is the landing ship tank lst is a landing ship tank and it's one of the best inventions of the war they were designed in britain but they were manufactured in kaiser's shipyards um they can they're they're monsters they're capable of holding 20 tanks 27 vehicles and almost 200 men and carrying them all to shore but these ships are 100 meters long and sturdy enough to transport dozens of heavily armored vehicles the construction of this new design of ship will be no simple task the building of lsts is listed absolute top priority the shipyards set to work immediately orders for materials have already been placed before the design is even completed and before a test vessel has even been constructed the blueprints are sent off and the contracts fought over and awarded the kaiser shipyards take one of the largest lack of planning is useful because it enables the whole productive process to be much more nimble if you have a rigid plan with fixed targets rigid designs as to what you're going to produce how you're going to produce it then if something unexpected happens or you find that something you're doing is not working it's very hard to change course to suddenly reallocate resources retail factories the whole system has a quality of much greater flexibility april the 1st 1945 the americans are ready to launch what could be the decisive battle for the pacific [Music] the battle of okinawa the largest amphibious assault in the pacific theater of war [Music] 1457 landing craft and warships approached the island of okinawa the size of the american force landing at okinawa is astonishing and the battle lasts almost three months on august 15 1945 japan surrenders the history of world war ii is often depicted as a story of generals and wartime leaders of competing military strategies but more than any war before or since the second world war was a war of production and it would transform america leaving it with a role on the world stage it had not wanted during the attack on pearl harbor the united states has four aircraft carriers by the end of the war they have over a hundred these are extraordinary apical transformations in the capacity of the united states to act at a world level by the end of the war the u.s navy was very much larger than the royal navy it's a great world historical transition that takes place on the morning of the attack on pearl harbor the united states navy had 17 battleships eight aircraft carriers 112 submarines and no amphibious vehicles a total of 790 active naval military vessels by vijay day the navy had expanded to 23 battleships 99 aircraft carriers 232 submarines and 2547 amphibious vehicles a force of staggering size totaling 6768 active naval military vessels the u.s navy accounted for 70 percent of the total naval force on the planet but at the end of the war the richmond shipyard shut down so did bethlehem fairfield they had worked at breakneck speed for four years they had changed the course of the war and of history but their task was complete the american shipbuilding programme is symbolic of america's uh pioneering spirit of industry at the time 1.7 million americans worked in shipyards during world war ii and today that figures dropped off by 95 percent about 100 000 it was truly an impressive operation we couldn't do it today we couldn't even manage the paperwork today in the length of time that they they built ships back then it was it was pretty amazing while the united states navy today is only a fraction of its size in 1945 it remains a dominant force in the world's oceans and seas the untold story of war production wars are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph this is a war between the factories the real story of how the world wars were fought and won it may sound strange but modern wars they're not won by battles they're won by factories [Music] they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production and those factories would shape the modern world volkswagen fiat mitsubishi they're all household names now but they made those names as war factories gotta get back to work [Music] in august 1939 a group of scientists composed a letter to president franklin delano roosevelt the letter was written by albert einstein the most famous physicist in the world at this time and he says that due to recent research on uranium it was possible that you could create a massive amount of power by splitting the atom and that if you could harness that power then you could conceivably make a really powerful bomb essentially the fear was the nazi germany could build this potentially war winning weapon a weapon capable of destroying cities and potentially rendering all current armament and military capabilities obsolete roosevelt doesn't get around to reading the letter till about october and when he does he realizes he has to have the research done when something matters to his felt he can act very quickly and what's fascinating is how quickly he gets the physicists in to talk to him and how soon he starts putting into place an american program and it was in response to albert einstein's letter to the president that the manhattan project was born but the manhattan project was just the beginning of an apocalyptic tale about the nuclear war factory that would span the american continent and ultimately threaten the world [Music] on the 19th of january 1942 just over a month after the japanese attack on pearl harbor president roosevelt gave his official approval for an accelerated a-bomb project to go ahead but progress was slow getting the idea of an atomic bomb off of paper and into reality is not easy at all they're trying to make a weapon that doesn't exist it's not like designing a new aircraft or designing a tank in this case it's designing a weapon that no one has ever seen before it exists in sort of physicist's mind the science took time it took dozens of the leading brains in the world to really think this through how to be done and overcome many scientific problems that had never been addressed before the people that are going to have to mastermind it are spread out all over the country at different scientific institutions and getting them all together on the same page to do something by one centralized process is like herding cats also by the way spreading it out provides some secrecy in essence it was the most complex war factory ever put together we have to get beyond our mind of seeing a factory as some sort of satanic mill of industrial production belching out smoke and producing heavy metal goods the atom bomb is in many ways the most extraordinary example of a factory production because it's sources of supply sources of production are spread out around the country president roosevelt soon realized that he couldn't just leave this to the scientists so to manage this project through it's a massive construction project you want an establishment that's already there to manage it for you you don't want to create one it's a time of war so you're going to pick between the army and the navy and for this purpose the army are the ones with all of the experience in organization on massive construction projects they're the one you choose so in august 1942 president roosevelt sets in train the manhattan engineering district under the command of general leslie groves the organization is generally known as the manhattan project everybody including general leslie groves thinks that he is the wrong man for the job not only does nobody like him but he wants a battlefield command and he had no interest in what he perceived as a desk job so it's not where he wants to be at all but groves turns out to be an inspired appointment what he's got is the experience to get it done he's already overseeing army construction projects and they're worth billions of dollars so he's a very responsible guy but not only that he's a real force of nature when he's given the job some comedian tells him at the beginning yeah all of the research and development's already done all you've got to do is take it off a paper and put it into being and then you're going to win the war for us and he pretty much immediately realizes this is absolute bull because to build the bomb general groves needs five things in place he needs a design for the bomb he needs a vast source of uranium he needs a nuclear reactor to put it in and then he has to replicate that never done before reaction on an industrial scale and then he needs to put it in an airplane which will fly at 3 000 miles and drop it with pinpoint accuracy onto an enemy target yeah when he takes up the job he's got none of those things groves does have one thing in his favor the appointment of j robert oppenheimer to oversee the scientists designing the bomb though at first glance he might not have seen it that way the relationship between the two is uneasy at times they do clash but they actually are productive in terms of war now what brings them together i think is that they're worried about germany the idea of nazi germany out of hitler developing an atom bomb is so terrifying to these physicists that they're willing to accept the kind of military authority needed to put the whole operation into being once he was established in the secret research facility at los alamos new mexico oppenheimer and his team started working on two different types of bomb the first one is nicknamed thin man after fdr a bomb casing that had a machine gun barrel in it that fired a plutonium projectile down the length of that barrel it creates a critical mass which creates a chain reaction which releases lots and lots of energy which is where you get the bank the second bomb is nicknamed fat man after churchill in this case putting for example a subcritical piece of plutonium in the middle of a spherical bomb design surrounded by electronic charges and detonations that's why it's more of a circular detonation device is you would send pressure in on the atoms from all sides by exploding inwards that pressure would cause it to fuse and release the energy but it won't matter what they do if groves can't get the fissile material they need to put into the bombs so he sources over one million kilograms of high quality uranium from the belgian congo sourced a supply of fuel the next step was finding a way to turn it into fissionable material capable of generating a nuclear explosion the man entrusted with this task was enrico fermi at the university of chicago he's a complete nut case because he sets up his operation in a squash court next to a football field and at this point there's no guarantee that when he sets off a reaction he isn't going to blanket chicago in radiation so rather than fill in any health and safety forms or do any risk assessments he just doesn't tell anyone that he's about to do it and he tests it anyway and luckily for him it works without destroying chicago but creating a nuclear reaction was only the first step now groves had to turn that process into a factory groves had already picked the site for his nuclear factory um so much so that the day after he bought his uranium he signed up to have three factories in oak ridge in tennessee and they're all located in valleys you know well away from the town and that of course provides security and containment in case of well frankly explosions but groves knew that just building a nuclear factory wasn't enough he needed a working company infrastructure with experience in this kind of project to run it he found it in dupont this is a huge chemical manufacturer with an impeccable safety record and their track record went all the way back to the reign of louis xvi in france where to make them focus on safety that the guys running it would have to build their houses within range of any explosions or anything that went wrong so that they would put an emphasis on safety and and no risk and they're still holding to that by the time world war ii comes around so dupont was the perfect choice to run a brand new weapons factory making the most dangerous material on earth only problem was dupont didn't agree dupont however don't want anything to do with the project for a start they produced forty percent of all of the explosives used by the allies in world war one they made so much money they were branded as profiteers and they don't want to be branded with that again and so what you've got you've got this sort of last ditch effort from general groves and he tells the company that the atom bomb project is the president's top priority and i could actually win the war and so you know with the president behind it this is becoming more of a question of a patriotic duty to do it rather than something that's going to enhance the bottom line so dupont actually agrees but they want to still avoid these accusations of war profiteering and so what dupont insists is that its fee for the project would only be one dollar dupont immediately recognized that oak ridge wasn't going to be large enough to produce fissile materials in the quantities they needed so they began building another facility at hanford in washington state between them these two plants would employ almost 100 000 people building and managing the nuclear reactors capable of handling more than 2 000 tubes of uranium it was a massive project the magnets in the reactors needed so much copper that eventually they robbed the us treasury of 15 000 tons of silver as a substitute in order to make the coils for the reactors by june 1944 groves had a functioning factory working to create the world's first atomic bomb that activity centered around oak ridge tennessee alum gordon new mexico los alamos new mexico and hanford washington they fit together in many ways extremely well but they just have huge vast distances between them it is not what we traditionally think of as a factory but it works on the process of sort of large people doing tasks but war waits for no man and while groves is getting his factories up and running the doomsday clock keeps [Music] ticking september 1944 the allies have landed at normandy on d-day and the germans are on the run it is now obvious that the a-bomb will be targeted at japan and groves wants it ready by august 1945. to do that he wants to turn uranium into plutonium but when dupont activates the hanford reactor it doesn't work so there's this key moment when dupont switches on the reactor pile at hanford and that's just after midnight on the 27th of september 1944 and the whole thing runs absolutely perfectly for about three hours and at three a.m the power level mysteriously just begins to plummet and it basically stopped working less than 24 hours later at which point it then started working again got to the same level as the day before and again plummeted and stopped working which was utterly baffling so something really weird is going on it turned out what was happening was a process called xenon poisoning what happened is that when the reactor fires up it floods the system with a byproduct called xenon which would then cause the reactor to shut down at which point the zenith would then decay and the reactor would be fine again and then it would start working and then the same process would continue to happen luckily despite the objection of some scientists who thinking that the whole thing is incredibly over cautious dupont have installed a large number of extra tubes into the system this design feature is essential because it means that the pile can be expanded to reach a power level high enough to overwhelm the xenon poisoning so actually dupont safety protocols you know rooted in decades if not centuries have actually saved the day as the deadline races towards them the team at los alamos gets a working bomb in place by mid-july by some miracles they've got a test device called gadget ready to go the automatic control's got it now within 40 seconds we'll know but no one was prepared for the magnitude of what they're about to witness when gadget was set off at the trinity test on the 16th of july 1945. [Music] you've got one of the leaders of the manhattan project and he recalls seeing this this burst of blinding white light you know which burns his retinas and just leaves him completely stunned as you can well imagine and this light just seems to go on forever and years later he admits that for a split second he he really believed that something had gone horribly wrong and that they had set fire to the entire atmosphere and that the world was just gonna you know disappear effectively there must have been and i'm sure there was many of the scientists are feeling of what have we done the bomb was now no longer a theory it would become very real three weeks later on 6th of august 1945 the enola gay leaves tinian air force base in the pacific on its way to mainland japan it flew to its primary target the city of hiroshima the southern part of the island of honshu the people of hiroshima to this point had actually felt themselves lucky in fact they had been surprised how little hiroshima had been attacked compared to other japanese cities what they didn't understand is they had deliberately not been targeted to make them one of the possible targets for the atom bomb the bomb explodes above the city by doing this it maximizes the blast as opposed to dropping the bomb and making it explode on the ground it's almost like a little sun being released it's estimated that as many as 80 000 people may have been killed by the immediate blast of the weapon itself you go from a big japanese city going to work to basically a moonscape in rp three days after hiroshima the americans dropped the fat man device on nagasaki within nine days japan had surrendered there continues to be a significant debate about the wisdom efficacy need morality of dropping the atomic bombs in 1945. of course no one should have sat there and thought it was okay to kill a hundred thousand people it's actually really a difficult question what i'm more perplexed about is why people be so sure that they know whether these things should or should not have been dropped but there may have been another equally pressing reason to demonstrate the power now in america's hands this is because the cold war's already started soviet forces outnumber the western allies and there is no way if stalin decides that he's going to invade europe that any conventional force could stop him so the americans adopt a policy of nuclear deterrence essentially where they sit there and wave a nuclear bomb in stalin's face and say well do it if you want but this is what's waiting for you so you could make the case certainly that the dropping of the atomic bomb was as much about essentially saying you may have lots of troops if you push on this is how we're going to respond to hammer home the point the americans staged a grand demonstration at bikini atoll in the pacific in 1946 the united states conducted operation crossroads and this i think again was about sending a very strong signal about what atomic weapons could do in warfare essentially what happened here two devices were detonated [Music] they blew up an entire empty fleet spewed thousands of tons of water into the air and created a blast that was equal to 21 000 tons of tnt so what they were saying is do it if you want to mess with us but just be prepared this is what's going to happen to your army your navy if you mess with us from now on but it was all a bluff in september 45 so actually after the war general groves is told to prepare enough atom bombs to drop onto 66 soviet sites and then he also needs to have three nuclear weapons per target but you've got to realize there was one little problem with the plan at the time america owned precisely six bombs in the post-war world it soon became clear that the manhattan district simply could not meet america's nuclear demand so they replaced it with the u.s atomic energy commission this would become the main steering body and overseeing body of the us nuclear industry what shifted the american nuclear program into another gear was the speed of the soviet response to the atom bomb much to the surprise of the united states many in the west the soviet union tested its first nuclear device in 1949 just four years after the first use by the united states the nuclear arms race had begun [Music] 29th of august 1949 the soviet union tests its first atomic bomb codenamed joe 1 by the americans only four years after hiroshima now this really shouldn't surprise us because the soviets have this incredibly vast well-established spy network and that's sending back nuclear secrets from the united states the soviets after all had spies at the manhattan project and so stalin knew about the plan to develop a us bomb before truman did in fact crazily enough there were in fact three brothers who were all spies reporting to the soviets who had perhaps people think provided the blueprint for the atomic bomb to the soviets so the key thing that the americans thought they lacked was nuclear fuel but what they didn't know was that the soviets had had a windfall because at the end of the war they find tons of fissile material that had been developed for the german abortive atomic weapons development program the reason that the nazis don't have an atomic bomb is because they're the nazis instead of pulling all of their resources together they decide to have multiple teams competing to make an atomic bomb they would need like a thousand cubes of uranium to be able to reach critical mass one team had just over 600 and the other had 400 but instead of being sensible and working together and achieving it they basically squandered it all in competition with each other so it's just it's just hitler and the nazis all over and the soviets got their hands on massive amounts of german uranium and so they ship that to the soviet union and that provides the uranium for the first soviet reactors one year later in june 1950 communist-backed north korea attacked american-backed south korea and started the korean war they took the north korean communist attack on the south starting the korean war to really show the americans that this threat from communism was a military threat because it seems to vindicate the idea that communism is an expansionist ideology democracy is on the back foot globally there is a push from communism whether it be in china whether it be in europe that this is something global that the united states and the west and of course formation nato in 1949 has to push back so a u.s military response was going to be necessary and the military industrial complex with the factories producing weapons uh both conventional and nuclear were gonna have to shift more into high gear and the 1950s was about to elevate the nuclear arms race to a whole new level because on the 1st of november 1952 the usa detonates the world's first ever thermonuclear device at any wetoc at all in the south pacific [Music] the iv mic shot in 1952 represented another sea change in nuclear weaponry while this was still technically an atomic bomb it relied on a very different mechanism to release its power the basic concept is that you have a small nuclear explosion um but in a bomb that contains a whole load of hydrogen as well and that by the time one reacts with the other it creates a super explosion iv mic would be the first test and would begin the generation of bombs that we measured in the mega tons that's millions of tons of tnt three years later the soviets joined the thermonuclear club in november 55 the soviets test their first true thermonuclear weapon now there's almost now no limit to the size of an explosion that either superpower can now create when you get to the hydrogen bomb you are now talking about planetary extinction you are now getting the point where you have if you have enough of these weapons and you can blanket you know the soviet union of the united states you're not only destroying those countries you're probably destroying the world to blanket these countries with nukes you need to build them in industrial quantities remarkably that mainly took place in just two sites the burlington and pantex plants and only one of those is still in operation today while the u.s nuclear enterprise is spread across the country and involves lots of different people and companies the actual bonds are the responsibility of just one place in amarillo texas that's the pantex facility today pantex concentrates on decommissioning and upgrading america's current nuclear arsenal but in 1975 it became the sole source of nuclear weaponry in the usa it's this one plant where nuclear warheads were assembled during the nuclear arms race it's initially simply a world war ii munitions base so all pretty conventional but in 1951 it becomes something else entirely because it's then when it's quietly refurbished to serve its new cold war role the facility had a number of reinforced bunkers shielded bunkers which is where they would actually fuse the nuclear material to the warhead or the weapon itself inside these bunkers you have 3 000 old ex-farmers and people who would have done normal jobs around amarillo in texas who have been bought into a nuclear industry walking around in suits with gloves on assembling these parts for use in the nuclear arms race they were then moved to different parts of the facility where other components would be attached firing mechanisms actual bomb casings and in some cases the directional fins that are used to sort of guide the weapon if you really think about it pantex was actually the heart of the nuclear industrial weapons complex in the united states but to get nukes into and out of pantex you need a transport system coming in and out of pantics you have these really innocuous looking white trains every day these trains they roll into pantex and they carry plutonium from georgia and washington and bomb triggers from colorado and uranium from tennessee and they all roll out again carrying these fully assembled nukes all over the country the white trains remained in operation until public protests made them untenable during the 1980s now in the 1980s there was a lot of pushback and a lot of public protest against what was going on at the pantex facility protesters would actually line up and wait for the white trains to leave the facility with their nuclear weapons cargo and try and disrupt them with some publicity stunt and you've got this one occasion in which you've got a nun who actually stands in the middle of the tracks and she comes really close to being run over so they come up with this ingenious ploy to paint the trains a different color unfortunately i don't think it matters which color you paint the train because if it comes out with whopping great big sniper turrets on every other carriage then you're pretty safe to assume that there's nuclear material on board the protesters feared the inherent danger that lurked at the heart of the nuclear industry the threat of nuclear devastation [Music] now there's a study carried out by the americans and what that aims to do is to consider how many thermonuclear weapons might be needed and after a lot of maths it finds that after about 400 or so detonations there would be nothing left worth attacking further detonations would simply make the rubble bounce and yet by 1985 america has more than 20 000 nuclear warheads and the soviet union has over 38 000 going into that area of mutually assured destruction where the idea of a nuclear exchange is not anything that will be a limited war or a short-term war it'll be an exterminatory war because the principle is if you launch yours they will know about it quickly enough to launch all of theirs which means that if one side launches and the other retaliates you all die so basically it's a game of chicken so this was the sort of the insane um threatening environment of the cold war i mean it's called mad by his detractors and it is mad but it's also brutally simple essentially they have these massive arsenals of nuclear weapons and they're just going to sit and stare each other out as the world stared oblivion in the face governments began to plan for the worst the united kingdom solution can be found behind a nondescript door at the foot of a radio mast in the middle of a muddy field in essex locals were told that this was a water reservoir but here buried more than 30 meters underground at the end of a 110 meter long tunnel lies the remains of a top secret facility with which the british government hoped to counter the madness you're now inside the government hatch secret nuclear bunker there would be home of some of central government in the event of a nuclear attack you're 100 foot underground you've come into the hill by 120 yards long tunnel and it's from here that the inhabitants would allocate surviving resources to those of us that had survived the people down here have been sent here obviously to help us survive after a nuclear attack and so this is the plotting floor this is a map of the region around london these are cold perspex plans that would have told us where bombs had gone off on it also are the little royal observer core bunkers and they're the ones that are going to pick up the size of the bomb from the flash and the distance and the radiation and the wind and feed all that technical information into this bunker here the red bursts there are ground bursts they're the worst the ground burst picks up all the dirt into the atmosphere and that's what carries the radiation and so that is spreading with the wind they mark the direction of the wind there the size of the the bomb and then they would be trying to evacuate us from in front of the radiation if that was indeed possible the general public don't have access to this this is home office and so this is civil servants this is people who are going to be able to make decisions on our behalf of course we're underneath our kitchen tables uh hiding away in our uh under our stairs places like kelvin hatch were designed for the worst case scenario if the threat of mutually assured destruction had failed to prevent an attack but as the nuclear age hurtled towards the 21st century the fatal flaws at the heart of the nuclear factory started to become all too apparent [Music] nestled in the heart of the ural mountains is the hidden city of azirsk and behind its kind of guarded gates and its barbed wire fences there is this absolutely beautiful landscape city and it's it's like a kind of oasis and if you go to the northeastern city you've got this government-protected east euro nature reserve and it looks like an idyllic place to go and live within the soviet union but behind the idle lurks a deadly secret both the u.s and the soviet union had top secret facilities where they were manufacturing nuclear weapons but in the soviet union these were called secret cities they brought scientists and their families there they are disappeared in that very start in his way from the records that we're not allowed to have contact with anyone in the outside world not even their families as far as their families were concerned they were missing because what happens there is every citizen works in some way shape or form for the mayak nuclear factory until the 29th of september 1957 that is in september 1957 there was an issue at mayak with the cooling system on a waste storage tank there had been indications for a year that there was a problem with the cooling system but they didn't do anything about it and suddenly it blew up sending this radioactive plume of smoke across what i've seen estimates as high as 20 000 square miles what did the soviets do of course they didn't announce this instead of actually acknowledging what's happened you know there's a cover-up and what the soviet government does it just conveniently turns the disaster zone into the east euro nature reserve and it prohibits any unauthorized access there are still high levels of radiation there in this part of russia today in fact one of the lakes is called the lake of death because the radiation levels are so high higher even than the chernobyl disaster registered in 1986. even today in azersk residents have to check their fruit and vegetables with a geiger counter to make sure it's safe to eat it the kishtim accident as it is called because ozyask was not supposed to exist is just one example of what can happen when nuclear power goes wrong now of course kishdim isn't the only nuclear disaster we all know of better known examples like fukushima three mile island and of course the big one chernobyl but actually kissed him it's forgotten but it's the third most serious nuclear disaster recorded in history i just find that extraordinary because you know what it does is it demonstrates a key danger of nuclear power because when it goes wrong of course it can go spectacularly wrong the same can be said of mutually assured destruction while it's impossible to prove a negative it is likely that the advent of nuclear weapons has had a significant role on preventing major interstate war you gotta remember that the 20th century you know was the most violent and brutal century in human history but you know for half a century no major global power has declared war on another major global power had it been a a different time in pre-1945 maybe there would have been a war at some point of some kind of direct american soviet confrontation so in that sense it does keep the direct peace but mad only works if both sides have something to lose the concept of mutually assured destruction relies on rational people facing off against each other and realizing the consequences of what will happen if they unleash this stuff on each other unfortunately the people that are in charge of things aren't always rational mad worked we now know during the cold war neither side dared to launch nuclear weapons against the other what the situation is now with countries like north korea or iran countries building the bomb who have the bomb will they also be deterred from using it perhaps even more worrying is the idea that mad may not always work mad isn't a doctrine it is a condition and it is based on some things that are uncontrollable and can go wrong one amazing story usually used as an example of the dangers inherent in the system of mutually assured destruction may actually provide a ray of hope through the gloom so it's the 26th of september 1983. you've got this man called lieutenant colonel stanislav petrov and he works for the soviet air defense and he's the duty officer at the command center in this place called the occu nuclear early warning system he's sitting there doing his job and all of a sudden the system lights up and tells him that a nuclear weapon has just been launched from america and he thinks oh god so he's looking at this and the computer then tells him that another four have been launched as well this is the moment he'd been trained for and he sat there thinking this this can't be happening he picked up the phone because of course he was supposed to call his superiors but he kept holding the phone in his hand thinking if i tell them they're going to definitely push the button to respond because of course you know under the doctrine of mutually assured destruction if you detect your enemy attacking you you attack him back straight away and then you just wipe each other out so he kept watching he said later he just had this gut instinct that it wasn't really an incoming strike because he thought to himself five missiles this isn't the way the us is gonna launch a major strike on the soviet union you're gonna use a lot more than five missiles so we sat there for five minutes with the phone in one hand his intercom to announce to his colleagues in the other hand just watching and you know what well that's why we're sitting here today while we're watching he's proved right it was a false alarm and it was caused by these really unusual atmospheric conditions it later turned out that what caused those images on his radar system was the way the sun had been shining on the top of a cloud it just appeared that way on his system where it might be missiles but they weren't so on the one hand you can say that we came this close to armageddon um in the shape of a computer glitch or you can say that at that point there was a rational sensible human being who said no way and he waited and it didn't happen yeah for my money the story of petrov uh tells you that actually human beings especially if they're well trained you know do react rationally and also you know when it comes to being faced with the prospect of destroying the planet you tend to think twice it may be a fragile hope to rely on but as the factories of the military-industrial complex churn out enough missiles to destroy the world more than 50 times over what may protect us from oblivion is the sheer madness of their existence we don't know whether people would have pulled the trigger quite as as easily as we would think and as that basic human instinct or is that the power of mutually assured destruction where no one wants to actually cross that line i don't know the human element in all of this is so strong is there always going to be that rational sensible human being there to stop it i hope so i think in most cases you would hope so but are we not walking a really fine line now um because what if they're not there is no doubt that the bombs produced by the manhattan district's war factories have fundamentally changed the world it's very hard to stop technology i think maybe that's what the second world war shows that once you have a technology out there it can spread and it's very hard to roll back on the technology arguably the use of nuclear weapons in 1945 helped create a taboo whereby the use of nuclear weapons was seen as something that was unimaginable i suppose the good news is that they've only been used in one conflict and i don't want only two occasions but you know those two examples have shown us just how horrific they are and of course it's made us all collectively terrified of using them ever since so we can only hope that it's going to stay that way this is the story of two guns one would revolutionize the way we make things the other would revolutionize revolution but behind their success lay a very simple concept they were incredibly reliable you could use them just about anywhere they would keep firing whether it was in the desert of the american west the jungles of vietnam the mud of northern france the weapons just worked you've got to be absolutely damn sure that if it does break down you can fix it yourself right on the spot and that's what these guns do [Music] colt and kalashnikov two iconic names that conjure images of showdowns and revolution but behind their success lay factories when you think of cult you think of the wild west but you shouldn't you should think of assembly lines factories and mass production from the cold war struggle in berlin to far-flung places such as vietnam the kalashnikov was used by all because these guns wouldn't just change the nature of warfare they would change the world [Music] sometime in 1830 on board a brig bound for calcutta a young man called samuel colt had an idea the story goes that colt was just 16. and he's persuaded his father to let him go to sea to study navigation first hand and it was there that as he was watching the other sailors use something called a capstan which is essentially a rotating device to pull in sails he was struck by the way that the revolving mechanism had a lock which stopped it from winding in reverse colt recalls that he had his great insight what if he could use that same rotational mechanism for a revolver for a new kind of gun that would revolutionize repeating weapons and maybe make him a large amount of money so every moment of his spare time on that voyage he sits down and he whittles a model prototype out of wood and so the revolver was born but the truth behind the myth is very different that's the romantic version the historical reality is that various other inventors had actually beaten colt to at least some of his ideas importantly the revolving pistol and this example made by a guy called anali 150 years before colt got things going is actually an eight shot revolver so if you're looking for firepower it's even more high power than a cult you simply [ __ ] the gun and the cylinder revolves it's just like a cult revolver in that respect so colt was definitely not the inventor of the revolver his genius lay in borrowing existing technologies and combining them together but just as critically with him was his marketing genius you have to remember that colt was a salesman and he was as interested in telling a story about his product as he was in selling you the product he wanted a narrative he wanted an origin story and and so he wove this great moment of insight while he was at sea as a teenager [Music] the annalee revolver was not very reliable which is why we've hardly ever heard of it but the problem it was trying to solve was one which had bedeviled firearms since their invention at the beginning of the 19th century this is what you're armed with as a cavalryman you only get one shot to make up for that he's got two draw one fire one draw two fine number two but that's really it and that leaves you pretty much thrown back in time to the medieval period not much different than a medieval knight different shape of blade but nonetheless it's a sword if you could invent a weapon that fired quickly that fired multiple shots much faster than the others you would have not only a great advantage on the battlefield but if you were trying to sell it you would have an enormous advantage in the business world cold had the idea for the weapon but he needed money to get his new invention off the ground the story of how he went about getting that money is almost crazier than the actual story of the weapon itself the thing we all know about entrepreneurs is that they don't let anything get in their way at least no decent entrepreneur and you know these are the kind of people you know they don't they don't just make lemonade out of lemons what they do is they invent a lemon press and then they figure out how to bottle this stuff so they can sell it to people by the million um and if they don't have the money to do that then they come up with a creative way of making money what samuel cole did in an incredibly entrepreneurial fashion was he started touring the country and he sold people hits of laughing gas and then what he does with all the profits he makes from his roadshow he sinks them into hiring a gunsmith to build his prototype and he uses that to take out a patent for what's called the colt paterson revolver on the 5th of march colt's patent arms manufacturing company was born and colt built a factory at paterson new jersey but it didn't go well colt turned out to be better at the road show than he was actually at the production of the revolver you're trying to sell a whole load of new stuff new ideas to your client and it was just too much for the us government especially the us military who actually would have to issue these things at one point the u.s army actually said that the revolver was too innovative and thus it would be dangerous to buy he's managed to sell a few firearms during the seminole indian wars in the late 1830s but it's not enough to keep him afloat and in 1842 he goes bankrupt but those few firearms would eventually make samuel colt's fortune sometime in 1846 colt had a meeting with a u.s cavalryman called samuel walker which would change his destiny walker believed that colt's revolver had actually saved his life his unit's attacked by 70 comanche indians his men are able to fend them off because they can fire so many shots so quickly the fact that the colt patent revolver could fire five shots without reloading saved them from being overrun and killed had they had the single shot pistols it would have been two shots and done walker suggested a few improvements which would transform colt's gun we have two pistols here this is the original cult the so-called colt patterson it's a very technically sound design uh it's rather small as is very obvious so when colt comes back he comes back big what's called the cult dragoon which is what we have here right away you can see the difference very small very large and it's not just about looks the size really does matter here bigger size means bigger caliber a bigger bullet it's going to do more damage a much bigger cylinder means a much bigger charge of gunpowder behind it faster bullet harder hitting bullet that's critical the larger cylinder also means you can fit in one more shot because five shots is good six shots is even better times two two pistols gives you twelve uh really quite a leap forward so for the time this is the ultimate cavalry weapon thanks to this new design the us government ordered 1 000 colt walker revolvers colt was able to raise the money to build a brand new factory in his hometown of hartford connecticut but this wasn't just any old weapons factory this was something the world had never seen before [Music] now it's often said that actually the first ever mass-produced object was the gun now there's some people who say that it really might have been the clock uh but the one that we know that was perfected was the gun and the man at the forefront of this none other than colt because actually what he did was to hire an organizational genius called alicia k root to run his factory and what they created was essentially the world's first assembly line colt's factory was 500 feet long and 60 feet wide and it was filled with a variety of machines to build each part of the revolver so you had different areas of the factory floor doing different tasks and then the gun would effectively come together down a production line just like a modern factory eighty percent of the work was done there in the hartford plant on these enormous machines that are driven by steam there are machines that board out holes in the cylinders for the bullets then you have machines that board the barrels and then you had machines that fashioned the whole firing mechanism there were machines for every part of the revolver all of these individual parts being put together by this enormous workforce to assemble the gun that colt had imagined what that does is streamline manufacturing to the extent that parts can come from all over a workshop floor and they simply descend on one person who assembles the final firearm at the end with parts that are interchangeable from everything that was made inside that factory colt's factory was one of the first sort of war munition factories in existence it's not just that the revolver was innovative it's that the factory itself was a new thing what we're looking at here is a classic assembly line you know we think assembly line henry ford model t cars i mean this is way before that colt was doing it decades before in hartford colts hartford assembly line churned out 150 guns a day cheap fast firing and dependable their reputation for reliability was built on one very simple concept before colt if you have a gun and part of it breaks you have to go to a gunsmith who will make a part that will work purely and only for your gun if you take it out it won't work in another gun even if it's the same broad kind of gun by contrast with colt what you find is that if you take the rotating barrel out of one cult and put it into another cult it will work perfectly well the part is identical this may seem easy and obvious but it took genius to produce the challenge is that producing the machinery that will produce the interchangeable parts in the first place is technically very demanding just to put it in perspective during the 20th century long after the industrial revolution when assembly line production techniques are in full use there are times where multiple manufacturers are producing one firearm and parts won't interchange but the truth behind the sales pitch is very different because what i'm holding in my hands is a reproduction a modern replica of the 1851 navy revolver made on modern machine tools to modern standards so it interchanges without a problem let's just try that out with original 1851 navies so disassemble the gun we want to place the part on moment of truth it doesn't go not only does it not engage and turn and [ __ ] it doesn't even fit the frame so if you were to show this to one of cult's prospective customers they wouldn't be very impressed you know what it's all marketing because what cult is is a supreme self-publicist his genius lies in convincing people that he could achieve the impossible before it had even been done to achieve that he's basically got to cheat he's got to pre-select guns that already fit together quite well maybe even get a gunsmith to hand file them all so they fit each other they rigged it essentially so that it would look like the parts were interchangeable when they really weren't this sort of faking of of interchangeability is a really strong sign of how colt was as much a salesman as he was an inventor so in that way he was kind of like the steve jobs of his day selling this whole idea of the technological revolution long before he had actually achieved it and he convinced people to pay him to make it a reality once it was a reality colt was quick to protect his investment samuel colt is a great entrepreneur but he's also one of the world's first and most prominent patent trolls he patents his innovations as almost as soon as he makes them and he then spends an amazing amount of time throughout his business career suing people who have violated his patents the very name of the colt company to this day is colt's patent firearms manufacturing company and they don't just maintain that because it sounds old world and fun in the early 19th century when everyone is inventing all of the technology we now take for granted it's absolutely essential to not only file patents for your novel designs but also to have a team of lawyers going after you if you so much as look like you're infringing on his patents but what would really make colt's fortune was the world's first truly modern war on the 12th of april 1861 artillery attached to the south carolina militia opened fire on fort sumter in charleston harbour firing the first shots of the american civil war it would prove to be the making of cult the american civil war is in some ways the world's first great industrial war because ultimately it's won by the sheer industrial might of the union producing more men material and guns in the southern confederacy and many of those guns were provided by samuel colt and not only do you need 100 of these thousands of these you need tens of thousands of these weapons and this is an enormous opportunity for coal you have a guaranteed source of demand by the u.s government you can then plan on producing mass amounts for numbers of years by this point colt was so wealthy that he had created his own workers city around the hartford factory coltsville coltsville in many ways was like the google or apple campus is today what it was was a kind of self-contained city within the bigger city of hartford and it's got its own ferry boat it's got its own shops railway depots school recreational facilities it was this giant open area of land with sculpted terrain that had wildlife like deer and peacocks it's even got its own church and a social hall for dances and lectures and this is a big place it can seat a thousand people colt was a man of ideas and those ideas fizzed and sprawled all over the place he would spend the money to make his workers happy and fulfill his dreams all of this was designed to attract skilled workers to his factory complex they worked to a strictly regimented regime colt worked his men hard and he wanted to make sure that they understood they were going to have to work hard there was a sign over the door to his factory that said every man employed in my armory is expected to work 10 hours during the running of the engine and no one who does not cheerfully consent to do this can be expected to be employed by me cult is working these people hard but colt was also interested in making sure his workers could sustain their efforts he didn't want them to just work one day and succeed he wanted them to be able to work day after day after day he wanted 150 guns to come out of his factory every day and the way to do that was to make sure that his workers had the support that he needed he was one of the first people to create the hour lunch time for his workers and in a number of other ways he made sure that they not only worked hard but were supported in that work during the american civil war almost 1 000 employees produced up to 27 000 muskets and pistols a year by 1863 the company had sold 300 000 copies of the colt army revolver alone samuel colt was an integral part of the union defeating the confederacy in the american civil war and the confederacy knew it on the morning of the 5th of february 1864 the armory was destroyed by fire the fire is believed to have been the work of confederate arsonists and all that remains the original armory today is simply the forging shop with dozens of these uh crappy coal furnaces where steel and iron were cast into all the different pieces that made up the guns pretty hard to burn down a coal furnace but samuel colt did not live to see his beloved factory burn down and the person who turned his weapons into a truly household name was not a man called samuel it was a woman called elizabeth [Music] colt actually died in 1862 of complications of gout he was only 47 years old his wife elizabeth took over the company from him and amazingly she was probably a better and more effective leader of cold firearms than he was because she's living in an age where she can't vote um but what she manages to do is to kind of take the reigns of this company all the way through to 1901 and she becomes one of the most prominent female industrialists the united states has ever seen the most famous guns that colt ever made came not under samuel colt but under elizabeth cult and it seems like cold didn't really hit its stride until after samuel was dead most of us have heard i think of a cult 45 it's one of those iconic names in the firearms world 45 refers to caliber of the barrel chosen by the us military as big enough to reliably put down a man it was a what's called a single action revolver which means as we've all seen in the western movies you had to [ __ ] the hammer back before you then pulled the trigger the americans the cowboys the gunfighters anyone that needed a gun grew to love this design and the simplicity of the single action trigger this is really colt's legacy and it soon attracts the marketing name of the peacemaker then gets described as the gun that won the west most people know what you're talking about when you say cult 45 elizabeth colt turned the cult 45 into an american icon and she was helped by the unique nature of the american dream the fact that cole's product is a firearm it's important for success in the american context for two reasons the first is the existence of of course the frontier where a firearm is a necessity the other reason of course is the veneration of the right to bear arms as being written into the u.s constitution the fact that civilian ownership of firearms is written into the american constitution ensures that people will be armed as they move out into the frontier as they move into the west and they are more often than not armed with a cult firearm the united states is a continental sized country now what this means is that in an area the size of europe there are no internal barriers so if you have a product which catches on is going to sell to this enormous geographical area colt democratized the ownership of commercially produced firearms for a general shooting public he not only made the guns that armed the army and the navy and the marine corps he armed the guns that were carried by frontiersmen as they went west these are guns carried by these really iconic figures of the wild west you know wyatt up jesse james wild bill hickok and all their you know firearms came from these factories at coltsville colt's advertising even ran god created man cult made them equal [Music] and as world war loomed at the start of the 20th century two names synonymous with the evolution of firearms would get drawn into the story of colt one would make the colt 45 the most famous handgun in the world the other would give its name to the machine gun to win a war it's often said you need boots on the ground and it doesn't matter how many tanks how many planes how many ships you've got if those poor bloody infantry grunts don't take that hell and hold it for you you can't control the territory you need and you don't get the resources that you need for victory the most basic part of an army is the individual soldier with their individual weapon occupying their individual part of ground you can't fight war without the soldiers and soldiers can't fight without their weapons the kinds of guns that colt was building was absolutely necessary to the wars that the united states fought in the 19th and the 20th century general george patton was famous for carrying an 1873 cult peacemaker in a holster on his hip whilst leading his tanks but he wasn't the only us soldier carrying a colt 45. so for many people this is still the iconic cult 45 from all of those westerns but there's another equally important cult 45 and this is it designed in 1910 1911 by a genius gun designer called john moses browning it's actually the government model of 1911 designed for the military still 45 caliber still had that great big bullet coming out the end but a completely different design it was incredibly reliable often firing thousands of rounds between malfunctions and unlike the revolvers that the army had used it was actually a semi-automatic which meant that once you fired a bullet it automatically reloaded the next one and was ready to go it was exactly the weapon that the army needed it's so reliable it's still in use during the korean and vietnam wars decades later and people absolutely love it i mean even soldiers and civilians and you can see this iconic gun in unit photos from the first world war you know these are men who once would have been posing with swords or rifles and they've now got you know posing proudly with their cult m1911s you know held across their chests the browning cult 45 would arguably become the most successful handgun in the world i mean the numbers are huge because by 1918 you've got over 425 000 m1911 pistols being sold and by the end of the second world war that number of course is going to go even higher and it goes to well over a million but colt wasn't just famous for its pistols its factory was at the forefront of another revolution in weapons design made infamous by the first world war the machine gun so at the same time as you've got browning designing this whole new breed of pistol for cult you've also got the vickers arms manufacturing company in britain buying out hiram maxim and was converting his famous maxim gun into the vickers machine gun the vicar's design for machine gun was in fact so good that rather than create its own version of it the united states brought the design over to america and actually handed it over to the colt company to build cult eventually produces more than 12 000 vicars guns they initially struggled to provide enough weapons in time for america's entry into the war in 1917 and actually in fact there were so few operational vickers guns in service by 1917 that you've got new recruits being forced to train with dummy wooden models rather than a real thing not ideal frankly demand was so great that colt expanded its factory and employed large numbers of women to help in the war effort if you look at photographs of the colt hartford factory during world war one you see large numbers of men and women building m1911 handguns and the vickers machine gun it's an enormous project it's an enormous factory during that time you've got hartford's industrial population growing massively from 20 000 to 30 000 and then you've got the yearly factory payroll jumping from about 14 and a half million dollars to 45 million dollars so it's basically trembling but the vickers was just the tip of the iceberg during world war ii colt also manufactures another firearm designed by the great john moses browning a firearm called the anm2 50 caliber machine gun every b-17 bomber or b-24 bomber that's in the sky is flying with a m-250 caliber machine guns every p-51 mustang or f6f hellcat or f4u corsair they're flying with a m2 50 caliber machine guns it's the true unsung hero of firearms production throughout world war ii and yet another truly revolutionary design by john moses browning would help carry america into a whole new era of infantry warfare the collaboration of colt and john moses browning didn't end with the 1911 pistol they went on to produce together the browning automatic rifle 1917 it's the first world war trench warfare the allies are trying to break through become more dynamic what browning was proposing and what the army wanted was essentially an automatic rifle so a rifle that wouldn't just fire a shot every time you pull the trigger but would keep firing until you let go of the trigger big heavy cumbersome but the idea was you would walk slowly towards the enemy with the gun on your hip looking where you're aiming and firing um probably in short bursts but you're fully exposed to the enemy it's not actually the best way to use a weapon like this and actually the tactics evolved to fit the gun the second world war is where this thing really shines by which time they've wised up a little bit the walking fire thing is not happening we have added a bipod which is the critical piece of equipment and a carrying handle and that's enough to turn this into a very good light machine gun it already has a 20 round detachable magazine press the button out it comes fire 20 shots slap in 20 more on you go that's what you want for a light machine gun and the troops loved it all told this thing is in use from the end of the first world war from 1918 all the way through to the 1970s which is pretty extraordinary more modern more specialist better weapons emerge but this thing is a great jack of all trades it's reliable it's bomb proof and it has a long service life [Music] what colt failed to realize is just what a step change their bar had brought about this was the first of a new era of firearms the automatic rifle and as colts struggled to keep up its star would be eclipsed by a new gun in town its name was kalashnikov [Music] in late 1941 a soviet tank commander is recuperating in hospital when he hears some wounded soldiers complaining about their weapons he hears them rabbiting on and they're saying that the rifles they had were old and antiquated and unreliable and there are never enough of them to go around he felt frustrated that the germans seemed to have better rifles that could kill more people more quickly than the soviets did the commander's name was mikhail kalashnikov an engineer who also dabbled in weapons design and so he set out quickly after world war ii to develop a high-speed rifle that can be mass produced in huge quantities and what was really crucial could be really reliable and could operate in all weathers and what he comes up with is the ak-47 that's the story the truth is a little more complicated and it has to do with factories during world war ii the soviet military was fighting with a number of different types of firearms rather than have one factory producing bolt-action rifles and another factory producing pistols and yet another factory producing this version of the submachine gun they wanted something that could do it all they wanted to make one firearm for everyone their solution came from a very surprising source the nazis what the germans realize pretty much for the first time when they invent literally the assault rifle is that you need a rifle that's kind of dialed down a bit and when the soviet high command get wind of this they go ah this could be the solution to our problem so they launched a design competition and then comes this really promising model and it's from this young designer called alexa who's developed automatic weapons for the defense of leningrad but unfortunately he has a fever and dies before he can actually take this forward so the soviet high command passes his notes onto a design team led by one mikhail kalashnikov in 1947 they introduced a prototype its design was quite surprising i mean let's face facts the kalashnikov is incredibly rough and ready it's got bits and bobs sticking out all over the place it's not that smooth streamlined shape of a traditional military rifle notably you've got this gigantic curved bit of metal sticking out the bottom you've got cheap looking sheet metal all over the thing it's no wonder then that when the american military got hold of a copy to evaluate they were less than overwhelmed they're really not impressed at all you know it's individual parts are really quite heavy and they're fitted with really very loose tolerances they were interested in the accuracy or lack thereof they tested these things and they found them not accurate outside of 100 yards but the evaluators were missing the point every ugly little detail is a deliberate part of the ak-47s design good gun design isn't just about creating a really accurate weapon it's about creating a weapon that is just so reliable and cost effective that you can put it into the hands of just about any soldier no matter how much of an idiot he is and they know how to make it work the sites are quite close together again the americans would have looked to scouts at this sites further apart are more accurate you can more precisely align them sites close together mean you can very quickly bring up the rifle sight in your target and pull the trigger and the magazine is curved well that's there to account for the tapered shape of the cartridges they pass smoothly up and into the action and are then thrown out with great force when they've been fired that was a key design feature actually to have 30 rounds on the weapon and not have to reload 30 rounds is three times what military rifles were carrying at that time in truth the aftermath kalashnikova 1947 or was the product of a long drawn-out process involving several different designers but the soviets wanted a better story so mikhail kalashnikov became a hero of socialist labor and his odd-looking gun became its saviour specially designed for the unique needs of the soviet soldier freezing icy snowy conditions muddy wet conditions boiling hot conditions the soviet union's territory encompassed all of these at different times of the year for an effective military weapon you need to to keep running in all of those conditions and you've got to be able to fix this thing right out in the middle of nowhere and there are a lot of middles of nowhere in russia and you don't have factories for thousands of miles this thing feels quite wobbly and loose and rattles when you move it around it has designed in loose clearances between parts so if mud sand dirt gets in there it's liable to keep functioning regardless and to just ignore it and carry on and that was designed in from the start kalashnikov becomes a superlative for rugged dependability everywhere and always people recognize that the ak-47 it will just run and it will never fail more importantly this is a weapon that can be easily mass produced so that you can equip your entire army you no longer have this soldier armed with a rifle this soldier is armed with a carbine this soldier is armed with a submachine gun everyone carries the same type of firearm and for the soviet union in the aftermath of the second world war that firearm was mikhail kalashnikov's ak-47 this need for mass production led to the adoption of an unusual production technique one pioneered a century earlier by another gun designer samuel colt the soviets spent a decade figuring out how to use one sheet of metal where you simply just stamp or you cut a piece in the shape of a gun you bend it under great pressure into a u-shaped box and you bolt all of the other bits you need screw rivet all those bits onto the core of the gun and of course what this is doing is to cut down the cost of labor and raw materials so much that the average price of an ak-47 could be a little more than about three to five hundred dollars i mean that is dirt cheap more than 100 million copies were made spread across the military and insurgent forces of at least 106 countries and it's a game changer what the ak-47 is a technology does is to give an enormous boost and an advantage to insurgent forces rather than the forces which are trying to maintain the established order i mean it's so ubiquitous even some countries have it on their flags in this way the ak became a factory for insurrection and nowhere was the ak-47s disruptive power more obvious than in vietnam what you've got are these kind of local farmers you know not properly trained but they're armed with this rifle that shows the americans that their m14s are incredibly cumbersome in jungle warfare eventually the u.s military came to the conclusion that they needed a lightweight fully automatic rifle of their own they were going to have to invent their own kalashnikov so what colt does is to team up with armor light to create the now iconic m16 now the m16 is air-cooled it's gas-operated it's a magazine-fed assault rifle and of course it's a lot more sophisticated than the ak-47 so really what we have here is a piece of precision design and engineering it's wonderfully light beautifully made latest alloys and polymers and all of that great there's only one problem it doesn't work the early models of the m16 were always sort of kind of clogging up and jamming in the jungle atmosphere which is obviously really sort of fetid and sticky and the soldiers simply saw it as a liability the ultimate insult there's a story of a gunnery sergeant walking through a camp he's got an ak on his back and a lieutenant colonel remarks what are you doing carrying that gunny and his response is because it works sir soldiers were picking up kalashnikovs because the m16 was letting them down one can argue that one of the reasons the communists won the vietnam war and the americans lost was because of the more reliable kalashnikov eventually colt managed to fix the issues with their gun once those problems were resolved after 1968 they went away forever and the m16 is a completely reliable weapon system in fact it's one of the most reliable weapon systems out there but there is another reason why the ak-47 was so popular since it wasn't patented you didn't have to pay for a license to make one and that was very deliberate from soldiers guarding the berlin wall and preventing east germans from escaping to people in africa fighting for their independence from colonial powers to countries in the middle east this is sort of the long arm of communism but as the cold war played out across the world the inventors of the ak-47 would discover they had unleashed a frankenstein's monster the massive risk of course in proliferating your own weapon around the world is that the people you give them to might not necessarily agree with your outlook on things soon the guns were being used by guerrilla groups against the very governments that produced them so we see in countless places but notably in afghanistan those same kalashnikovs that are provided to local fighters get turned on the soviet troops when they come in in the late 70s mexican drug cartels or a more established group at this point isis they're all relying on ak-47s so this soviet invention is with us to this day the ak is estimated to have caused an enormous amount of deaths and in fact it's often said that it's actually meant to have caused more deaths than artillery fire air strikes and rocket attacks combined now you know some people think that actually probably about a quarter of a million people a year are gunned down by bullets that have come out of kalashnikovs one could argue that the factory that developed the kalashnikov is one of the most successful ones of all time it may not be a happy sign of success but it certainly has proved the durability of the kalashnikov [Music] colt and kalashnikov two names synonymous with death one democratized gun ownership the other democratized resistance both have changed the way the world works [Music] [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 12,577,305

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, ww2 history, ww2 america, henry ford, general motors, colt factories, ww2 production race, american industry, american ww2 industry, wartime industry, homefront documentary, american home front

Id: 1T0xpD7J8nA

Length: 168min 54sec (10134 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2022