War Factories: Willow Run Bomber Plant, Liberty Ships, Ural Tank Factory, Peugeot | FD Engineering

the untold story of war production all wars are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph over the other side Hitler knows he needs industry if he wants to build a war machine this is a war between the factories the real story of how the second world war was fought and won the United States is about to launch the single greatest program of armament production in human [Music] history they swamp the other side with a tide of mass production the secret War of the factories that would decide the fate of the whole world got to 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 Willer run airport back in 1941 the part we're looking at right now is 144,000 Square ft of a 4.2 million square foot factory that was built to produce the B24 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 Ford 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 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 US and it's our duty here at the Museum to continue preserving this artifact so that 100 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 15th 1940 Winston Churchill has been Prime Minister of Great Britain for 5 days when he's woken by a phone call from the short shortlived prime minister of France Paul Reno we are beaten he says we have lost the battle within a month of this phone call German troops are marching down the shaiz 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 lwaa are camped across the Chan 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 Blitz C 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 church WIll fears that a German invasion may be immin Churchill realizes um that they can't manufacture enough airanes to stay in the war so what he does is send a commissioner to the United States to ask for [Music] help 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 owner country where working class very average people routinely owned a car hot ziggity Boys Ain't Chandy 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 at uh the end of the depression as World War II breaks out 1939 in 1940 total American aircraft production is barely 550 a month Briton wants a thousand per month one of the 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 I 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 comp 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 imposed profit caps on the sale of War materials they Bann 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 Blitz Creek invaded the low countries of France Belgium Holland and this was a wakeup call to the US Rosevelt 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 I ask 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 Nation 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 advisers said number one is Bill nson of General Motors number two is Bill nson of General Motors and we can all guess who number three was bill nudson was the top man at General Motors he'd immigrated 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 nudson 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 Prim Private Industry uh the private sector and divert it to the war effort nutson is going to try something radically different to the other War economies of the world nutson 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 car the STI you can give people orders with the threat of severe sanctions uh 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 P40 war hawk Mr kutson America's Beaverbrook with the assistant War secretary went to look at the tomahawk number 2,000 North American looking at the designs very honestly and knowing they're not good enough to what they say to the British is do 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 3 weeks to spare and they put it in front of the British and they say Tada the na 73x and some brilliant British person says well that sounds absolutely rubbish and uh 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 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 far with a top speed of 380 mph it's also highly maneuverable at Heights of up to 15,000 ft but performance tails off dramatically at higher altitudes as a result the RAF can only use it for low-level operations and USAF 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 had joined Rolls-Royce before the war and he had 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 when 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 nudson 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 [Music] Ford bill nson is good friends with Henry Ford's son edel 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 nudson receives a call from edel Ford his father the great Henry F 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 po prints on it in a meeting with nudson Henry Ford vents his Fury he warns nudson 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 renes on the deal and nutson 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 Packard the American Engineers are baffled they'd come expecting a few papers instead the plans f 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 [Music] counterparts so now the Americans are mass-producing the Merlin engine but they're also mass-producing the Mustang and the real game changer is when they put the two together the P-51 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 P-51 airframe and you come up with this completely new kind of 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% by the end of of 1940 bill nudson has already issued billions of dollars worth of war production contracts the Germans during the Nazi period uh saw America essentially through the lens of Hollywood uh and also Jewish banking they saw the United States as the 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 weapon systems uh and material what the AIS 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 rearming 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 preemptive strike on the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor Hawaii more than 2,000 American servicemen are killed along with dozens of civilians 188 aircraft are destroyed along with three battleships the attack on PO Harbor does not affect America's war production really in the long term all they've done is pack off all of the isolationists that didn't want America to go to war and ensure that basically you've poked the bear 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 hey 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 plane the way that the United States would reach these numbers with 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 an Administration that was ideologically hostile to their interests and to the very existence of a free market economy then like a bol from a blue the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and quite suddenly everything is changed Ed now was the time to actually reach out to uh large business in particular uh make a deal with them and bring them on board as part of a process of producing what was needed uh to win the war effort as a wartime President Roosevelt is first and foremost a pragmatist he now puts his faith in nudson and the Business Leaders of the country I think the way to understand the working of the US 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 in the Battle of Britain the tide has been beginning to turn against the LT faffer the battle Britain Was Won by the few the Spitfires and hurricanes that rose up in the sky were defensive weapons to defend England the 4 engine bomber had been identified as the offensive weapon that would take the war to Germany and the demand for 4 engine bombers outstripped manufacturing by Ians the Allies desperately need a new bomber and in vast numbers the only bummer that might fit the bill is the B24 it carried more it went further and it went faster they wanted the B24 by the tens of thousands but in 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 KnockOn effects of the Great Depression mean that America is lagging behind in industry in 1929 us machine tool sales had amounted to $185 Million by 1932 they were only 22 million America's factories are ill equipped for the shift in production that lies ahead and the startup costs for producing 125,000 planes a year would be enormous to handle an operation on this scale nudson 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 never built before the first thing that has to be done is to work out a production process for the new Ford produced B2 Falls and the man that Ford sends to observe the US Air Force's current operation is Charles senson otherwise known as cast iron Charlie Charles senson was an oldtime Ford employee he'd 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 B24 Factory was a complete disaster senson went back to the cornado 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 subassemblies and at 4 in the morning he had designed a factory that would build one B24 bomber an hour and the Army said start this project right now on the basis of pencil drawings on the back of Hotel placements the Army awarded a $200 million contract to start the Willow Run bomber Factory the B24 would be the Ford Model te of the [Music] Sky Charles senson 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 B24 liberators they'll be constructing here consist of nearly 500,000 different parts and components senson 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 144,000 Square ft of a 4.2 million square foot factory that was built to produce the B24 bomber this is about 5% of the original Factory there were two 3500t assembly lines that started and moved these airplanes through the Factory assembly L station one movement per hour till they came out the door but while Willow Run is an incredible sight to behold its production levels are falling well under what senson had promised the US Air Force and it's becoming a serious problem werun 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 Ain 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 lumps of metal but the finish the Finesse the limits involved a world away in desperation senson turns to his old rival at General Motors Bill nutson World War II is full of cases where attempts are made to m produce that essentially fail and The Willow Run Factory is one example it's very easy to turn out identical airplanes but if you need to go back and change them you lose the advantage that you get from producing in a large scale in the first place nutson sees that constant revision to the designs of the B24 makes keeping the production moving almost impossible so Ford went to consolidate and said I can build bombers if you freeze the design of the airplane I can't build a 19 36 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 senson made in January 1943 only 31 liberat are completed at Willow Run but in February they produced 74 in March 104 by the end of the year Willow Run is achieving the incredible output senson had promised and then some at its peak 650 B2 Falls are rolling out the doors of Willow Run every month a liberator had cost 200,000 hours from start to finish before Willow Run senson nudson and Ford cut this time by 90% Ford mot company built about 8700 B24 bombers here these right here are the doors that would open once per hour to let the B24 bombers come off the assembly line 6700 of them flew away from this airport I'm a struck by the industrial Giants of Detroit and 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 a built at Willow [Music] Run this new plane can carry 4 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 b29 or the super Fortress [Music] by 1944 the Nazi strangle hold 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 um comprising hundreds of Island they're fiercely defended and every time you land on one it's going to cost you dearly defeating the entire Japanese empire you 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 B24 the only bomber capable of reaching Japan is the newly developed b29 the B24 is a very complex aircraft but now you move to the b29 the b29 requires literally thousands of changes and adaptations during its design career Boeing's b29 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 effect it is a totally new conception of what a bomber can be from engine power weight to wingloading remote controlled gun turrets and cabin pressurization the b29 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 member 1943 disaster strikes during a test flight in Seattle the lead b29 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 is a man called Edmund T Allen he's immensely experienced he's the lead test pilot on the program and a man who knows more than anyone else about the project but as this aircraft is kind of storming towards a Runway even he can't control it and the b29 suddenly veers off course it cuts through these power lines above Seattle streets and it hurtles into the side of this local office building and all 11 crew members are killed along with some 20 office workers in the [Music] building the b29 program has been dealt a sickening Blow 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 um 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 4 years of work Boeing finalized their design for the b29 in 1943 now they can draw up plans for factory production Boeing quickly realized that they need entirely new warehouses for the super fortresses 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 fishlyn in the end the production plan uh 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 witchar Kansas right Aeronautics will work on the engines in Patterson 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 and liberators to medium bombers they were building the Boeing designed b29 super Fortress the production line they design at Boeing in witchar completely eclipses Henry for's Willow Run Factory it's to build the b29 which has got more than double the amount of parts of a B24 for over a million rivets and they even have to instigate a new process um 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 will 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 1,400 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 b29 rolls off the assembly line in April 1944 but within a year 2,000 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 um 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 b29 they know that they can sort of dull Japan into submission swiftly in July and August the Americans capture sipan Guam and tinan 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 new recreated 20th Air Force the man transferred to take control of the b29 campaign is General Curtis lame Curtis lame um surmises that most Japanese cities and towns are constructed mainly of wood so obviously wood doesn't like fire so incend bombing um will be the way to go L's first super Fortress firebombing attack is planned for Tokyo on the 9th of March 1945 he sends 334 b29 armed with 2,000 tons of incendies they reach the city under the cover of darkness and unleash hell on the unsuspecting population several hundred b29 firebomb Tokyo and Destroy 16 square miles of Tokyo in one raid is also the highest casualties of any single aircraft raid these firebombing raids are horrific it was said that you could still smell burning human flesh with a b29 landed back at the base but it is only a hint of the destructive power the super Fortress has Unleashed at 8:00 a.m. on the 6th of August 1945 an atomic bomb is dropped from the Bombay of a b29 over the city of Hiroshima two accompanying b29 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 radi ation sickness Japan surrenders 9 days later the war is over bill nudson is in Germany when he hears of Japan's surrender but this was of course never in doubt nudson 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 32 24,700 aircraft 170 airplanes had consistently rolled sold 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 will 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 nudson 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 nson really does for the United States is to p P 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 suffering when they got involved in the war has been eradicated unemployment is virtually non-existent the factories that had 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 ever seen the world's first [Music] superpower but Bill nutson 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 [Music] him World War II is a war of factories it is a battle to produce the most planes and tanks and bombs and everything else that goes into winning a war after the Nazis occupy much of Europe they take over some of the world's biggest Factories at the height of their power they control 1 fth of the world's population and almost a third of its wealth the Nazis should win the war easily this is the story of what goes wrong before the war Germany is an industrial giant with the size of its economy approaching half that of the US it is alongside America and Britain one of the world's three great industrial powers and when Hitler's troops take over much of Europe in terms of industrial resources at its disposal it far out strips the Allies war was about getting factories Industries Agriculture and being able to feed and clothe and house the German people using the things that they'd stolen from these occupied territories they were going to create an economy that would be a truly global economic power if you look at some of the large firms and production facilities that Germany got control of they're some of the largest in the world Germany already has in industrial giants like kup zemans IG Farin and diim leens but Conquest will bring the Nazis control of many more when they take over Austria he takes over the steel Works in Lin this gives him the idea this is actually really working very well you know I can take over lots of things the conquest of Czechoslovakia gives Hitler control of scod one of the world's biggest arms manufacturers shod produces all sorts of things I mean weapon system some tanks and trucks the German way of taking over skoda follows a pattern they'd walk in they take over the factories they put Germans in control and they say this is what's going to be produced now this is what's going to happen you either behave yourselves and and and join in and cooperate or else you're not going to have a job and you're finished the invasion of Poland gives Hitler control of coal mines and steel plants and oil refineries they've taken over the Loc countries Belgium which that time is a major coal steel textile producer they control Romania with some of the world's largest oil reserves they have access to an extraordinary amount of resources all this gives Hitler the economic might he needs to win the war and build the world dominating Reich he dreams of the Nazis absorb much of the industry they conquer into one giant industrial conglomerate called the reiches verer it absorbs over half of all Czech heavy industry a pattern that is repeated across Poland and the low countries by the early 1940s the company has half a million workers and it's possibly the largest industrial conglomerate anywhere in the world with the resources of Europe at his disposal Hitler believes he can beat the Allies even when America enters the war the US is the world's biggest industrial power and excels at the art of mass production at a time when most Germans can only dream of owning a car ordinary Americans are driving around in models from Ford and General Motors if Germany is going to win the war it has to learn how to mass produce if the Nazis were going to take on Continental siiz powers like the Soviet Union and the United States that requires a whole mass of productive industry you need military vehicles you need boots shoes uniforms that the troops require in action you need to supply the troops in the front the only country in Continental Europe that has cracked the mass production of vehicles is France and with France now under Nazi control Hitler has access to Giant manufacturers like perso Renault citen and michelan he believes French industry will deliver victory for the Nazis what France has is more trains more aircraft and more Vehicles than any other European country and its car industry is one of the most advanced in the world so France is as close to mass production as Europe has come France has actually been somewhat of a Pioneer companies like persio citran were very much in the business of mass manufacturer and we're trying to follow the example set by Henry Ford on the other side of the Atlantic I uh which the Germans had not quite managed to do by the time the war broke out at the time PUO is one of France's biggest companies it has a vast industrial complex in SoHo close to the border with Germany that employs no fewer than 60,000 workers ever since the early 20th century perso has been Keen to adopt the latest Technologies particularly when it comes to mass production [Music] in the 1930s America leads the world in mass production but in Europe only Britain and France are producing large numbers of affordable Motor [Music] Vehicles as War looms pu's production lines are turned to making military equipment aircraft engines Armored Cars and allterrain Trucks between September 1939 and June 1940 perso produces 24,000 military vehicles if Hitler had any sense and let's face it he really does persio would continue to make military equipment for the Germans but that's not what happens the national socialists dislike capitalism which they see as Jewish they do not understand it and see industry is something to be brought under State control the German military see industry in conquered territory as a prize of war the German intention was to exploit occupied Europe through various channels and everywhere they occupied there was a very large emphasis on plunder and looting Germany was looting everything Germans preferred to loot Germans prefer to plunder rather than to exploit France rationally soldiers were looting everything to send them to Germany that means clothes perfumes wines and so on so in fact the plundering was made on a very huge scale by everybody the Germans steal from shops and homes and mines and from the factories they steal the machines this is a really bad idea for one thing Machine Tools quite literally will not work typically as well when they're moved to a different kind of production facility but also what this does is to destroy Capital essentially why should anybody voluntarily put money into replacing those machine tools that have been robbed and plundered by the use of force by an occupying power the scale of Nazi looting is breathtaking from France Holland and Belgium they take over 4,000 locomotives and 140,000 Railway wagons as well as over 300,000 rifles 5,000 artillery pieces nearly 4 million shells and over 2,000 tanks the napis also seize hundreds of thousands of vehicles along with the fuel needed to keep them on the road if you want to stop a country producing anything this is exactly how to do it I think the problem really is that the military bureaucratic state it does not understand productive processes it's some how thinks that finnished products like tanks factories machines come from nowhere and doesn't understand that they're the product of a large complicated set of peaceful voluntary relations they think rather that they have conquered people and therefore essentially you're in a relationship where you can suck the life out of them the trouble with being a parasite like that is that ultimately you will kill your host the stupidity of the Nazis plundering soon becomes apparent Hitler is about to suffer his first military set back in the first battle in history to be fought in the skies the Battle of [Music] Britain phase one knock out the Royal Air Force and its bases get control of the air and the Sea Lanes across the channel that's all there was to [Music] it intent on wiping out Britain's air defenses the luwa launches a large scale attack the RAF came facing odds of 6 8 10 to 1 it's a battle of numbers which the Germans seem sure to [Music] win between August 24th and September 5th 35 Major attacks were launched they cost the Germans 562 planes while the British lost only 219 planes and saved 132 Pilots not only does Germany lose many more planes it is also producing fewer from a slow start Britain is making new combat aircraft at an astonishing rate the battle of the War factories has begun the Germans thought that this was going to be a short war Hitler always went in thinking knock out Poland knock out France low countries Britain kick in the barn door and the whole structure is going to fall in but that doesn't [Music] happen German plan charred and crumbled and Scattered Across The Good Earth of England were proof of their Victory Hitler will need the industrial might of Europe to win this war and to massively increase output in the factories he's been [Music] plundering all across the occupied territories men and women are forced to work for the [Music] Germans at scoda they're making tanks the vermark after it puts in an order for 325 Yak Panther 38 T's now this is a tank that scod originally designed but the Germans have adopted it for themselves after they used it so successfully during the blitz Creek there were new lines that were developed and tested and produced in the Scot plants during the war the Germans oversaw the development and use of scoda in the German war effort other armaments producers followed the same pattern the Germans would come in take over and they would allow the technicians and the engineers and the production workers to carry on in place or if they refused the Germans would bring their own people [Music] in the Nazis are no longer plundering the factories in the territories they are occupying they're placing orders with them having lost almost 2,000 war planes in the Battle of Britain Hitler turns to France France has one of the most advanced aircraft Industries in the world after all France is one of the first to mass-produce planes and their factories been lying empty since the occupation and they've lost more than 80% of their Workforce the Reich orders 2 and a half thousand planes and French factories flicker back to life German orders kept that industry going the Germans are rationing everything and it was the only way of getting hold of the raw materials they needed like oil and aluminum and it also meant that they could start building up their Workforce again almost all of whom were now unemployed Nazi State controlled firms like juner forcibly acquire Stak Holdings in French firms which have to supply them with engines and other parts yunas wanted complete control over how these engines were built and demanding shares of course is a great way of guaranteeing this because any kind of commercial transaction always favored the Germans they paid below the market rates and they often even didn't pay what they owed so if you refused to work for them they' threatened to shut down the entire Factory every single aspect of life was controlled by the Germans including whether or not you ate and so quite quickly people realized that if they didn't try and keep their jobs in the factories they were going to be unemployed and have nothing to eat french companies are now under orders from the Third Reich as for French workers they work or they starve and are shot the owners of factory were not happy to work for Germany but it was the only solution to preserve both their factories and also employment Germany was very often the sole customer possible so uh they had in fact no choice however French factories are failing to produce products to the same standard or the same quantities as they did before the [Music] war despite the presence of guards Persia workers are 86% less productive than they were before German occupation six out of every 10 trucks have faulty clutches the workers were working slow they were accidentally putting too few bull bearings into key pieces of Machinery it was much easier to attack these soft targets and you could cause immense damage to the German Army in November 1941 perso is ordered to produce 100,000 cylinder heads almost 3 years later the company has delivered am measly 1,000 100th of the [Music] [Music] order the German occupation was not popular for most of the French it was unbearable the main resistance was to a certain extent a passive resistance go slow go slow that was the Moto in French War factories sabotage takes many forms at you get Workers purposefully notching the dipsticks of the oil tanks in the wrong place so the reservoir looks full but it isn't so what happens is that you get these engine seizures not at the factory but out on the [Music] [Applause] road national socialism demands that economic life should be controlled by the state the price of goods are set not by the market but by Nazi officials they set the prices low in the short run your population will be delighted that food costs less for example uh or maybe companies will be delighted their raw materials cost less the problem is if you do it the people who are producing that good have no incentive to produce enough of it what you will do is reduce production in that area and the result is you'll ultimately end up with shortages you simply won't be able to get enough of the product that you're artificially underpricing fixing prices beneath Market rates leads to shortages everywhere and soon they are running out of [Music] food France is a substantial grain producer but it needs fertilizer that's based on nitrogen and that can only be supplied at the expense of making explosives so what happens the price goes up Nazi economic planners attempt to address production problems but every intervention only serves to make matters [Music] worse you've got high intensity dairy farms relying on imported animal feed which is unable to get through because of the British Naval blockade so what Danish farmers are forced to do is to call their herds one of the quite bizarre aspects of the Nazi occup ation of Europe is the way in which the command and control economy led to spectacular misallocation of resources resources were being directed not to economic ends but to political ends in other words to suit the interests of the people with power Nazi planners requisition horses from farms they also confiscate fuel from Farmers and remove Farm laborers this sets off a disastrous chain reaction because there are now no horses to PL the fields there's also no fuel for the tractors and so what you see are significant Falls in food production all over Europe grain imports from Yugoslavia and Hungary two of the reich's main suppliers Fall by almost 3 million tons in France the grain Harvest is less than half of what it was 2 years earlier Germany once again turns to simple plunder from France Germany Tak takes a million tons of Wheat and oats over a million tons of hay and straw and 160,000 tons of meat the consequences are devastating France like the rest of Nazi occupied Europe is starved of its own food the food shortage is France's most pressing problem France face to face with starvations shops were empty and so uh the French were not able to buy what they used to buy before the war it was very very very difficult for the French to survive throughout the war the average daily intake is just over 1,100 calories only half of what an adult needs to [Music] survive according to national socialism State economic planning would prove superior to the Anarchy of free market capitalism but instead across occupied Europe it is leading to chaos the great advantage of having at least a half functioning market economy as the cases of uh the United States Canada Britain show is that productive industry will be quite simply more Nimble they will be better able to solve problems they will be more able to work out practical Solutions rapidly and quickly to Major supply side bottlenecks for example Now by contrast in a command economy what you'll find is that actually it does not pay to point out that there's a better way of doing it far from getting you promoted this will actually get you into serious trouble in free market Britain and America companies are earning profits and workers are earning wages in occupied Europe industry is operating under Jess French workers were not induced to work a lot because they had not enough food because the wages were always late and this can explain to a certain extent the decrease of productivity disaffection in the workforce cost the Germans dearly especially in key sectors like coal mining when the Germans took over what they did was to abolish breaks and extended the Working Day and there was no increase in wages so as a result of longer hours and insufficient rations the miners went on strike those miners were really underfed and moral conditions were terrible because the Germans put Soldiers with weapons on the mines and so it was also a very very bad atmosphere to produce which explain the lack of enthusiasm of Co miners production quickly slumps by 20% soon the coal available to Nazi controlled French industry Falls to half its pre-war level and less coal means less steel if you've got laborers working down in Coal Mine and the coal is supposed to feed your steel industry and your locomotives and everything else but they're starving their production goes way down so you can't get the coal and then it has a knock-on effect on everything else less coal and less steel means less of everything you need to win a war the aircraft industry is especially affected every month it needs 120,000 tons of coal just to make the Alloys for the planes the Germans ordered but Germany's only able to supply 4,000 tons which slows production right down now when you couple that with a demoralized Workforce the French struggle to fulfill those orders by the end of 1941 France and the Netherlands produced just 78 aircraft substantially less than the Germans who by now are making almost 12,000 planes a year however the British are soaring ahead producing an astonishing 20,000 aircraft it's actually quite hard to believe that the Western European countries now dominated by Germany had been such a formidable economic force with a combined GDP greater than that of Britain but by the beginning of 1942 they are bar nearly function raw materials are running out everywhere a crippling shortage of oil brings France to a standstill thousands of liters of milk are discarded every day because there's no way of transporting it to keep food flowing from France Germany is forced to export fuel at a time when it is also running out the economic mism Management in the second world war in Central Europe is enormous the whole question of production and distribution becomes a huge problem for the Germans as the war progresses in fact rations are so tight that Opel is forced to shut down production at Germany's largest truck Factory because there's not enough petrol to check the fuel pumps of vehicles coming off the assembly lines it is a stark lesson for Germany have having stripped the occupied territories of their capital and resources they are no longer productive the Empire it craves is crumbling to dust the one resource the occupied territories can provide is manpower to replace the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who are being slaughtered on the Eastern Front young Germans were leaving fields and factories so they had to be replaced and Germany relied on forced labor French prisoners are thrown back to their families in exchange for able-bodied countrymen condemned to servitude in their stad at first Germany tried to attract French workers on a voluntary basis but the conditions of work were so harsh that it was a very bad propaganda when workers came back from Germany so Germany decided to enforce forced labor it's another stupid Nazi move thousands of French workers now flee to join the mcki hiding in the mountains this Guerilla resistance force will cause Havoc for the Germans as for all the forced laborers in German factories they now do everything they can to disrupt production for the leading Nazis the idea was that there was this population out there in Eastern Europe the Jews we kill the slaves can become our servants and the only motivation they need is the threat of the Whip or the Hammer by the Autumn of 1944 one in three workers in vermar armaments production is from a Nazi occupied territory of that third most are from the Soviet Union Poland and France they under compulsion starving and angry driven by fear alone many of the slave laborers are kept in concentration camps like natov natv is also one of the most murderous camps in the Nazi system out of its 52,000 detainees almost half die here mistreatment malnutrition and torture are the main causes of death in total the Nazis abduct approximately 12 million people from almost 20 European countries over the course of the war this is bson where people from all parts of Europe were HED here the living walked among the Dead typhus and starvation killed over 60,000 slave labor freed up German labor but it was a profoundly mistaken policy as well as being inhumane and ethically wrong that's because slave labor is never as productive as free labor why should you be productive work hard make an extra effort much less be Innovative when all of the benefits of that extra effort and Innovation are going to go to your owner or Master whom you almost certainly hate and despise you tend to be having a whole group of people who do not want to be where they are and uh are usually motivated to work against the regime that's forcing them into this horrible situation and so slave labor typically will be mingering foot dragging and will'll find all kinds of ways to uh interfere with production and be less productive than it might be simply being slipshod and not very efficient in producing Parts can have disastrous results we must have the world's most powerful Club forget ours forget working conditions no Freedom here no labor unions no overtime the fur tells you where to work when to work how long to work how much your workers wor so there were many many examples of sabotage for example pouring concrete that looked as if it was well mixed but it was actually too weak in a few weeks the walls will crumble and falling on their nazy heads changing the calibration of instruments in such a way that the shells wouldn't work there are many many examples of trains that broke down about a month after they left the factory tanks the same guns the same for the Nazis it's a spectacular own [Music] goal by 1943 Allied War factories are massively out producing the Axis powers the Allies produce over 70,000 tanks seven times more than the axes they make five times as many guns and three times as many combat aircraft Nazi war production is being disrupted on every level day and night Allied bombers are dropping huge numbers of bombs destroying German War factories the Nazis desperately need to increase arms production so perso is put under the command of Ferdinand Porsche an honorary member of the SS its workers are now told to make specialist aircraft Parts what they don't know is that they're actually building fuselage parts for V one [Music] Rockets the V1 is the first of hiters of the gun vafin these are Vengeance weapons and they're designed to terrorize London into submission so when British intelligence discovers Persia's involvement it rapidly becomes number three on their list of targets to be destroyed on the night of the 15th of July 19 43 the residents of Soho are woken by the ominous Rumble of Halifax bombers the Germans being German draw much of their industrial strength from factories in the occupied country obviously those factories must be put out of action just as if they were in Germany itself over 700 large bombs fall on the perso factory below Britain knows that workers at France's War factories are doing everything in their power to subvert the Nazis so it desperately seeks some other way to close down production and it was realized in London that there was a more effective way to destroy the factory get in uh a sabur and start blowing this Factory to pieces and they recruit Harry Ray from the Special Operations executive to help them out I want you to go to occupied fronts what do we do when we get there organize resistance act as leazar officers with London all right I'm on the British smuggled in Harry Ray with one instruct blow up key pieces of Machinery key bits of Machinery that are very very hard to replace Ray is part Jewish and hates the Nazis with a passion Britain's Special Operations executive airdrops the explosives [Music] needed they had to get the owner of the factory m m PUO himself on board he um was approached on on the quiet by London said can you help us blow blow up your factory he sort of spluttered into his wine say what me blow up my own Factory but that's exactly what they required of him he was anti-nazi he agreed to do it Rolf perso himself provides detailed plans of his Factory and which machines are key to [Music] production he really put the factory out of action for many many weeks that's the time it took for the Germans to replace this key piece of Machinery as soon as they got the thing in situ and the factory was back and up and running again what did they do they sabotaged the same piece of machinery and put the factory out of action again and it showed that sabotage was highly effective it was a brilliant way of bringing Hitler's mechanized Army to its knees all over the occupied territories resist against the Nazis is becoming Bolder people of Denmark striking back at the Germans wrecked this large Armament Factory in Copenhagen the local Factory produced cellulos before the war then the enemy turned it over to explosive manufacturer and the partisans burnt it down as you can see they made a good job of the factory and the railway you were supposed to impede sabotage slow down uh and make it difficult for the Germans in any way you possibly could sure of for example killing Germans because that always brought reprisals of 50 or 100 to be killed if a German was shot with every brutal reprisal the Nazis become more deeply despised resistance began to uh wage open [Music] Warfare when the Germans took a resistor with a weapon he was shot down on the spot French civilians women and men murdered by the Nazis the kind of horror that roused the bitterest hatred despite the threat of execution sabar are running extremely effective campaigns against the Germans all over Europe when the gabu is not around to check up on shipments our fish package flavored a dried codfish with a dash of nice tasty kerosene severely disrupting their ability to wage war the Nazis are having a great deal of trouble to keep the railroad lines open the tracks cannot be guarded everywhere so in the country boys have learned how to handle wrenches and crowbars it is dangerous but it's worth taking a chance anything is better than living like slaves under Nazis and quislings if your train transportation system is Conant being sabotage you can't distribute food or or all the production coal or anything else you need uh not to mention troops and weapons and so on so everything starts to have a KnockOn effect and this becomes worse and worse as the situation deteriorates and it becomes an enormous problem for the Nazis trying to keep this whole machine running day and night many targets are being hit in the occupied countries in the Nazi righted itself the goodr Tire Factory on the outskirts of Paris responsible for one quarter of the whole French Tire manufacturing output before the raid after in the last full year of occupation the combined deliveries to Germany of military equipment from France Belgium the Netherlands Poland Denmark Norway and Serbia amount to just 9% of Germany's already diminished Armament [Music] production despite the threat of Terror Germany's Empire is simply refusing to cooperate in France due to shortages the production collapsed France is really destroyed the Germans are still fighting a losing battle because they're really relatively speaking quite a small country with very limited Li mited resources they start running out of raw materials they start running out of coal they start running out of fuel and even though they may still have arment's production capability the whole war effort starts to grind slowly and surely to a halt the regime is crumbling from within and after D-Day and the successful Allied invasion it isn't long before the Germans are finally defeated one of the quite clear policy decisions that the allied military make after they enter Europe is that they are not going to Simply take stuff they will actually pay a fair and reasonable price for anything that they they need from the civilian population what this also does of course is to create um a much more friendly relationship between occupying troops and the population of the territory they've occupied if you are confronted with occupying troops even if you feel you don't like them you're going to respect them and you're going to have much more benign view of them World War II is a war of factories it is determined In The End by the vastly greater industrial output of the western [Music] Powers mass production standardization have been the key elements for success for example planes for example tanks Germany has been unable to produce on a wide scale the national socialists do not like capitalism Nazi Germany drove its economy by Terror and the results were catastrophic although the Nazis certainly do exploit the occupied territories they aren't capable of harnessing their full industrial potential what the Nazis do is they take away every incentive to produce and they leave behind this demoralized disgruntled labor force who are working against and not for them in theory the Nazis might have won the war Germany was one of the world's most dynamic industrial Powers the number of factories and mines within the territory it controlled was awesome but the national socialists never understood that free people will always be vastly more hardworking and imaginative than a population of slaves driven by [Music] fear today the Baltimore docks are quiet the water is still the keyside 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 2/3 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 then 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 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 it sees are patrolled Day and Night by wolf packs of ship killing OTS in the summer of 1940 the German forces are across the channel and they've got much greater access for their aircraft and their uots 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 uots the uboat campaign leads to the sinking of a very considerable proportion of all British shipping and creates a potential crisis in the British capacity to import 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 OTS 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 turned to to is Henry J Kaiser in true American tradition Kaiser 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 inter War period a sort of a celebrity businessman he' worked on some of the great projects these huge kinds of federal projects which change 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 [Music] money 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 uh taking on war contracts and then uh delivering the goods so to speak one of the best not 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 ship building 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 auster accommodation they don't have great seeke 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 ship building 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 here to 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 6 months to dredge the Santa Fe Channel and and clear enough land to start work on the shipyard Kaiser's men do it in 3 weeks incredibly Kaiser builds his first Shipyard in just 3 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 subcomponents once this production line is is up and running it will be able to become rapid mass [Music] production Kaiser's new shipyards will be unlike any other Shipyard in the country because Kaiser is not a ship Builder instead he has modeled 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 Ford manufacturing production techniques to the ship building industry what the American production begins to favor as the war goes on is the idea of welding so instead of putting all these rivets you would actually use aslene torches or different kinds of heat sources to melt the metal together riveting requires four men welding only two it takes 6 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 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 older Dam has revolutionized ship building from blueprint to template Henry J Kaiser's West Coast yards are sliding Liberty ship into the water as from an assembly line a Triumph of American genius and Popular Science to the disbelief of traditional ship Builders 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 the mass production of consumer goods to the production of Munitions uh and War supplies and so essentially it's the great Triumph of American mass production [Music] capitalism 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 Ely critical in keeping uh 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 uh she's not a spring chicken anymore but we keep her in as good condition as we possibly can the space is called the tween deck which means it's between the main deck and the ship's lower hole only on the inside of the Liberty ship does its scale become apparent there we go the SS John W brown staffed 45 Merchant cammen 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 hold this hold 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 holds now 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 out of the Clear Blue Skies on the 7th of December 1941 almost 400 aircraft launched from a force of six Japanese aircraft carriers strike the American Naval Base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii thousands of US servicemen and civilians are killed in the attack four US battleships are sunk as well as88 aircraft destroyed this is far from The Knockout blow that Japan was looking to land but it serves to wake the United States from its non-interventionist Slumber the United States is about to launch the single single greatest program of armament production in human history America will never be the same [Music] 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 PO Harbor does not affect America's war production really in the long term all they've done is hack off all of the isolationist 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 rearm program which was voted in by Congress to expand the Navy and the Army and the and the Air Force but until that mobilization fully kicked in which would be a couple of years Japan had a window with its 10 carriers would have a 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 4 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 ship building program these figures will give the Japanese and the Nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished in the attack at quir har Roosevelt sees the astonishing progress made by the Kaiser shipyards so instead of the Navy Building ships he plans to open up American ship building 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 town or city well there was a demand of course for uh workers in all sorts of uh 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 uh 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 families 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 way to protect his own Workers Health and from that he creates a healthc care company he basically franchises it out as a private insurance scheme it still exists to this day it's one of the best Healthcare Systems in America with the offer of high wages medical benefits and the promise of learning a trade workers flock to Kaiser's ship yards from All Over America this sudden explosion of industry is providing jobs in numbers the United States hasn't seen since the Great Depression as Henry Kaiser's new Shipyard expands the population of the surrounding areas sves the little town of Richmond experiences a population boom of over 600% in just 3 years by 194 3 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 faeries buses trains anything nearby to help move people in order to get them to factories Richmond ship Builders T the nation in the share of the principle averaged more than four Riders per car because of the shift patterns that everyone's working it means that uh Cinemas restaurants bars shops will need to be open 24/7 it really did create a lively place to be they just treated the the workers uh 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% of the workers were female and they did just about every job in the shipyard they ran cranes they they served as guards uh 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 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 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 strangle hold 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 builtup urban areas cover the islands of Japan like Britain wartime Japan is not self-sufficient either in food or raw materials instead it would 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 uots had 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 require ired to reach the Japanese Merchant Fleet some 4,000 M away but it doesn't have many of them this is the gate class submarine the G 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 labor 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 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 um 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 gate 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 gate every 8 Days the gate class is America's first mass-produced [Music] submarine 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 2% of US 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 uh 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 5 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 says I wish that every man woman and child in the United States could 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 ship Builder shows how his yards launch Liberty ships in record time the man who cuts months to weeks now you're talking about ships being 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 US shipyards which produce an incredible 1,854 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 um 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 battles ship's day had passed the battleship was day could 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 ft long it weighs 30,000 tons and has a crew of 2 and 1/ 12,000 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 we're 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 existing carriers but Kaiser will build many more of them at a much faster rate Kaiser is a self-made man um 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 US 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 shooing Washington so being rejected by the of the Navy Board he's like so all he does instead is just set up a meeting with Roosevelt and have another chat and then with with the instant result that he's uh 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 can 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 search lights wind cheers ammunition hoist they even organize 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 ship Builder 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 2 years over the course of the entire war Japan only produces seven Kaiser breaks all records more cablanca carriers are built than any other kind of aircraft area before or since and they wreak havoc in the Pacific us fighter planes swarm the slow and hulking Japanese battleships this is chuk 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 it's 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 177,000 tons of fuel destroyed Operation Hailstone is the death nail for the Japanese Fleet the next step for the Americans will be Invasion but getting to dry land won't be so [Music] easy 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 2,654 identical ships with identical walkways unload identical stores in identical ways under this new production program Crews and troops need less familiarization and can operate more [Music] efficiently but the fighting in the approach to Japan is [Music] brutal 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 it's a blood bath once you move to the Pacific you can isolate the islands that the Japanese forces are on but there's no deception about where you going to land and generally there are very limited areas in the Pacific as the Americans realize you have Coral atols 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 Tara in 1943 end up being a disaster cuz they simply don't have the right charts troops get stranded they get machine gun in the water they never get ashore in the first stages of amphibious invasions monthly us casualties increase by 1,000% 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 2 ft 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 US Navy Board who are absolutely determined to use the landing craft that they had 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 push back 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 uh certainly on the side of the conservative Democrats in the 1940s that thought that the stch 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 uh everything that Higgins would have wished for happen so um he shows the Navy designers up as as vastly inferior his design dazzles everybody Truman is stunned by the corruption of the Navy Board he launches a fullscale 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 dday happens in June 1944 a few weeks later the United States invades the maranis islands sipan tinian and Guam they send a naval Force 10 times larger to invade those islands than they send to dday the US 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 vast floating Army ashore 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 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 they're monsters they're capable of uh holding 20 tanks um 27 vehicles and almost 200 men and carrying them M to shore but these ships are 100 m 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 shipyard 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 retool 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 the battle of Okinawa the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater of War 1,457 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 3 months and in that space of time 20,000 Americans and 110,000 th Japanese are killed it's the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War from here the Americans have their platform to reach the Japanese Mainland on August 15th 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 100 these are extraordinary epical transformations in the capacity of the United States to act at a at a World level by the end of the war the US Navy was very much larger than the Navy it's a great world historical transition that takes place on the morning of the attack on pole 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 VJ Day the Navy had expanded to 23 battleships 99 aircraft carriers 232 submarines and 2,547 seven amphibious vehicles a force of Staggering size totaling 6,768 active naval military vessels the US Navy accounted for 70% 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 4 years they had changed the course of the war and of history but their task was complete the American ship building program is symbolic of America's uh pioneering Spirit of Industry at the time 1.7 million Americans worked in shipyards during World War II um today that figure's dropped off by 95% to about 100,000 it was truly an impressive uh 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 [Music] seas of all the countries that fight in the second world war by far the largest is Russia a land mass twice the size of the the USA and 70 times bigger than Britain if war production were about resources Russian War factories should have outproduced the rest of the World by a huge margin but Britain though only a tiny fraction of the size of Russia will produce more fighter planes more bombers more military vehicles and many more warships us production will dwarf that of communist Russia even in the production of tanks for which Soviet War factories are best known the US and UK combined will produce over 25,000 more than Russia the story of Soviet War production is one of the most remarkable of the second world war but behind the heroism depicted in the propaganda news reels is a dark tale of Oppression forced labor cannibalism and mass killing this is the story of the Soviet War factories After the Revolution Russia's Communists set out to create a terrifying military regime Stalin spends years building a vast military force Soviet War preparations began long before Hitler was a threat in the west or long before Japan was a threat in the East if you go back to the 1920s what you find is the general staff being told to think about future War to defend the new socialist regime from external threats and to suppress opposition within the Communists seek to become a military superstate and that means building War factories lenon admired the Germans for centralization he admired the Americans of mass production and he admired his own zinski for inventing the secret police and you put those together and you have kind of the that's the Soviet economy of the 1930s though the Communists Envy American mass production they hate the society that created it based as it is on free markets private property and individual freedom in Soviet Russia things will be different in the west industrialization was um a very um natural process in the Soviet case it was a state driven campaign regulated from Moscow very consciously the communist state will be in charge of production the trouble is communist bureaucrats don't know how to build or run factories so for help they turn to America Albert KH is an American engineer who designs the General Motors headquarters and almost all of Henry Ford's mass production automobile factories it's KH who will Design Ford's famous War Factory Willow Run he is dubbed the architect of Detroit they were the industrial Giants of Detroit the masters of manufacturing who understood how to mass produce the Machinery understood how to get things done and get it done rapidly to produce a product in 1930 he car was given a contract by the Soviets for his firm to go over there and put up factories in the Soviet Union his firm basically established a buau in in Moscow and they created dozens and dozens of industrial designs of many plants and factories that were erected and trained hundreds of Soviet Engineers K's firm designs no fewer than 521 Soviet plants and factories including some of the giant factories in chelin hundreds of tons of American machine tools are shipped to the Soviet Union KH attempts to recreate the American mass production conveyor belt system in the factories work continues according to the 10e plan Stalin proudly shows off his new factories the beginning of a brave New Era of communist industry evidence he claims of the superiority of socialism and its ability to outproduce the west but not only are these factories designed by American Engineers from Detroit some of them like the Starling grad tractor plant are even built in America Albert KH had designed and built it in the states and then it was taken into Parts sent to the Soviet Union and under the supervision of American Engineers it was erected at Stalingrad the Soviets are incredibly proud of this Factory it's held up as an example of Soviet success actually it was built in America and overseen by American engineers in the 30s there was a lot of deliberate copying of American mass production you know the building of Magneto gor is really based upon steel production in Gary Indiana the first motor factories these were very much modeled on the idea of Ford and fordism for its factories the Soviet Union has turned to America and for its tank design it turns to Britain in 1930 Stalin sends kazars to the UK they will return with tanks tractors and cars to reproduce the Soviets want a functional effective easyto produce tank it's actually the vica's 6 tonon tank that they end up producing as the Soviet t26 the t-26 Russian copy of the British vica's 6 ton is the most produced tank of the decade but by the late 1930s it has evolved into the famous t34 this tank re-engineered by Alexander marov is one of the most heavily produced tanks of World War II many will be captured by the Nazis marked with swastikas and used against the Russians themselves this tank was intended to be mass-produced from the outset this was going to be the tank the Soviets used the slabs of armor welded together the casting of the turret on the fire control equipment was absolutely made for Russian industry quite roughly engineered right the way through but where it needed to be finally engineered it was finally engineered it was fit for purpose in every sense Stalin devotes vast resources to his War factories but at a terrible cost cost to the Russian people the War factories absolutely dominate Soviet industry they produce more than the agricultural sector tractor production and car production combined they occupy over a tenth of all machine building and metal work production in sharp contrast to its Detroit built War factories homegrown state-run Soviet industry is a disaster the Communists are unable to mass-produce low price quality goods for ordinary consumers 20 years after the Russian Revolution Ordinary People in this socialist Utopia are struggling to feed and clothe themselves but the welfare of the people it seems is not a priority despite the grinding Poverty of ordinary Russians Stalin is spending twice as much on armaments as America and Britain combined output from Russia's Armament factories grows 70 fold in the year 1939 alone the Soviet War factories produced nearly 3,000 tanks over 10,000 aircraft over a 100,000 machine guns and over 1.5 million rifles and carbines when you look at the amount of armament production going on in the Soviet Union in the 30s it's pretty clear that it's not done to protect the Soviet people and their welfare you wouldn't be doing this much unless you were going to pursue an aggressive stance at some point in future but the Soviet Union is not alone in this Germany's War factories have been busy too by 1939 Hitler's vermar is armed to the teeth it is the only army in the world that compares with the Red Army there are two countries that are leading war production around about 1939 1940 one's Germany the others the Soviet Union between the two of them they're producing more than half of the world's combat aircraft even Nazi Germany can't compete with Stalin in tank production by 1941 the Red Army has more tanks than the rest of the world combined as many as 22,000 nobody but a fool would invade the Soviet Union or so Stalin thought on the 22nd of June 1941 German forces pour into the Soviet Union catching Stalin completely off guard when the blow came it was from five different directions and from the north one extra just for luck Hitler has the advantage of surprise he's meant to be Stalin's Ally they' agreed to divide Poland between them with Hitler taking the west and Stalin taking the East Hitler has assembled the largest Invasion force in history and it is now sweeping across Russia they send in 5 1/2 million troops 5,000 aircraft to use 3,000 tanks they stomp their way through the country the speed of the German Advance is breathtaking within just one week German forces are 200 miles deep into Soviet territory for Stalin this is a perilous moment he's in danger of losing his precious War factories the territories that are falling to the Nazis immediately contain most of the War factories and something like 40% of the Soviet population the loss of Stalin's western territories could mean the loss of 85% of pre-ww aircraft factories nine major tank factories 70% of Soviet capacity for cing coal and iron or over half its steel making Iron Coal and aluminium capacity and 40% of its capacity for electric power and Railway Freight Stalin's immediate response is to send people out there civilians military anyone to protect industrial cities this is a absolutely critical period zukov is telling his troops attack attack attack even if you have no weapons if there's one rifle between two the two of you go into battle when one of you is killed the other one picks up the rifle and the casual is at this stage of the war are horrifying somehow or other they have to hold off this attacking Behemoth some factories along with their workers are told to stay and continue production as the Nazis approach Russian factories already working over time even increased The Temper of their war production there were tank factories in Leningrad and in Stalingrad and the tanks were being produced unpainted taken out of the factories and straight to the front line the Soviet are unable to hold off the invading Force they are completely out machined and Stalin knows it you've got to see World War II as a war of production it's absolutely imperative these factories are saved if Stalin stands a hope of defeating the Axis powers so what Stalin does is to order one of the most extraordinary logistical Feats of the war Stalin now issues one of the most incredible orders of World War II that no fewer than 1 and a half thousand factories should be taken apart transported 700 mil to the East and then [Music] reassembled in 1941 Stalin has a large number of War factories some of the biggest in the world the trouble is they are in the wrong place as the Nazis move further into Russia Stalin demands that 1 and A2 thousand of them be relocated 700 miles to the east Beyond Hitler's grasp so the loss of this territory could easily have lost the war for the Soviet Union but the orders were there very early on Burn everything that you can't take take what you can as the German armies Advanced while the decision to move the factories is taken quickly actually doing it is a challenge of breathtaking proportions to begin with nobody really knew where it was going they had no field telephone equipment everybody was cut off nobody could communicate all news was old news they didn't know how far they were going to have to retreat which had all sorts of unfortunate consequences a lot of stuff was lost on the way Mis rooted fell into the hands of the enemy some of it was moved too far and never quite reached his destination one of the men involved in moving the factories is Alexander mazov he has worked on Russia's famous t34 tank and manages one of its factories mazov helps to relocate skills engineers and laborers as well as machinery and stock to new sites in the East 30,000 Soviet civilians will be mobilized to move 10,000 pieces of factory equipment machines are totally taken apart and Tool rooms are completely disassembled everything's boxed up in thousands of crates and train upon train arrives to take them by rail as much as about 1,400 miles to n tagil a million Railway truck loads of equipment will be moved if these were placed end to end they would form a solid line stretching along 10,000 km of track but it's not just buildings and Equipment more than 16 million people must go too the population of the urals will be transformed forever it goes from being responsible for about 40% of the workforce in 1940 to within a couple of years it's almost doubled the Ural simply aren't prepared for this great influx in people and Industry where are all these workers going to be housed how they going going to be fed often people were just setting up Machinery in the Open Fields without power without worker accommodation probably something of the order of a 10th or an eighth of Soviet industrial capacity was physically moved hundreds of kilometers and that means not only machines but also materials plans instructions the whole infrastructure that makes a factory was picked up put on trucks and shipped out but transporting the War factories East is not enough Soviet workers must now reconstruct these factories and get producing for the Red Army time is of the essence for the Soviet Union the Nazi Vermont is making Fast progress in September 1941 the Nazis reach Leningrad Stalin needs to reassemble his factories and fast for the Reconstruction of a steel works just outside chileab bins workers are given 75 days to get these factories up and running again that's very little time they've got to reestablish 18 production shops together with railway lines water supplies and air shafts this is a huge task it's a really inhospitable climate so the people that have been told to start building these factories they can't even break the ground to do so cuz it's frozen something like 2 m down so in these horrible conditions they're having to try and throw the ground out or plant explosives in it to try and blast through so that they can even begin the task of putting up a factory this is Round the Clock tireless work the job is finished ahead of schedule in just 6 weeks the progress of the navi Vermont is quick but the mobilization of Soviet workers is quicker some of the Soviet Union's most important War factories are being successfully moved and reconstructed in the 1941 scramble one example is chabin they take seven industrial plants including kirov which has 15 th000 workers which is a huge shift in people and materials Kia bins gets transformed over the course of the war into essentially the world's largest tank Arsenal it actually gets named tankograd or tank City tank City will come to employ a Workforce of 60,000 out of it will come over 18,000 tanks and over 17 million units of ammunition but Soviet tank production is not confined to tank City one of the most important factories to move to the urals is the jinsky rail car factory Alexander Moro merges it with a local Factory and turns it into the Stalin Ural tank Factory now this is the largest tank Factory of the entire war and it produces vast quantities of moroso's t34 Tanks the evacuation of Industry to the east was a tremendous accomplishment following the Nazi invasion of 1941 over 1,500 large-scale factories are moved and reassembled on top of this the Soviet state begins a vast new program of factory construction they will build over 3,500 big new factories from scratch during the War years this is a rate of 780 a year when you consider the ever looming Nazi presence in the west the sheer scale of Soviet construction of brand new factories is absolutely astonishing what the do is realign their production economy for the war so civilian places like car and truck manufacturers are suddenly told you make tanks now throughout 1942 the Soviet Union is losing still more ground to the Nazi war machine this loss is a huge setback for Soviet wartime production but despite this the USSR Begins outproducing the access powers in tanks by a huge margin in 1942 only a year after Nazi invasion the IET Union is producing almost four times as many tanks as Germany it is not just tanks that the Soviets produce in large numbers though less commonly remembered for it Soviet War factories are matching the Nazis in aircraft production factory 18 is evacuated to NIS tagil after the German invasion and they produced something like 15,000 uan 10 Fighters you can compare that with the Willow Run Factory the Ford Motor Company that produced 7,000 liberators now liberators were four engine bombers and I know a four engine bomber is a much more complicated thing than a single- engine fighter but nonetheless 15,000 from a single Factory that's well over 10% of total Soviet wartime aircraft production from one Factory and the Germans couldn't get anywhere close in terms of numbers Soviet War factory production beats that of the Nazis they produce over 20,000 more aircraft than the Germans more than 300,000 and more machine guns and more than 2 million rifles and carbines Russian production during World War II is at First Sight very very impressive and this appears to be a Triumph for the command and control economy of the Soviet Union but behind the numbers is a story not only of inefficiency and shoddy production but also of Terror torture and the shocking inhumanity of Russia's communist rulers [Music] by 1942 Stalin's relocated War factories are churning out vast numbers of tanks and other military equipment but Victory against the Nazis is far from inevitable Soviet production is not the unadulterated success story it first appears Soviet War factories are riddled with production problems and they are underpinned by a system of fear Terror and imposition to understand Soviet War factories it is crucial to understand that the state has complete control over the lives of everybody in the Soviet Union the Soviet Union was founded in opposition to capitalism there was to be no private property or individual Pursuits instead everything was to be owned collectively and individuals were to be harnessed to Collective goals this worldview is connected essentially with a vision of human life in which individual human beings are not seen as autonomous agents with purposes goals of their own instead the idea is there is some grandio collective goal which trumps individual well-being and individual happiness and that's a central part of the ideology of both Nazi Germany and Soviet communism in capitalist America there are hundreds thousands of private firms competing to win customers they must offer products that are cheaper or better than their rivals but in Russia's planned socialist economy competition has been extinguished Soviet producers are effectively operating as monopolies there is simply no competition and of course what this gets rid of is something really important in business the whole idea of incentive they're not competing to deliver products to either price or quality as a result the Soviet War factories are turning out really shoddy Goods the Soviet Union's got a really huge problem with quality control and American firms must please their customers to survive but Soviet state monopolies just have to hit the output targets the famous Soviet era joke was about the factory that was given a target of nail output in weight and which met that Target by producing one single enormously large and very heavy nail that joke is funny because it captures exactly what did happen under that system which was people meeting targets through production but in ways that produced a product that was ultimately useless Innovation and quality take a back seat what counts in Russia's plannned economy is numbers the only thing that matters is hitting those production targets because that's what's going to save the factory manager skins so to the dismay of Pilots the quality aircraft is never going to improve tanks were produced with defects which in peace time would probably have led to them being sent back back but this is war we you know what is an army if it doesn't have tanks so these tanks were sent off to the front line where the defects became apparent when they run into battle the tanks that do make it to the front often lack the vital support they need to keep going the Soviet Union during the entire course of World War II produced less than 200,000 Motor Vehicles they're producing almost more tanks than they are trucks or Jeeps it's great to have masses of Tanks but you you need Motor Vehicles to bring the ammunition and the fuel forward and to keep the logistics moving and this is something the Soviet Union had not thought of you would assume that places like the Soviet Union and Germany where the state is in control of the economy would lead to the most efficient production but actually it always leads to deficiencies the introduction of Market incentives might have driven up production but the Communist rulers regard any weakening of State control as a threat every time Stalin and Molotov are faced with a proposal that will sacrifice a little bit of control for the sake of more efficiency they say no power is what it's all about not efficiency we must have the power to direct resources while it was a way of ensuring control consumers never really got what they wanted even the Army in a way almost all factories are converted to war production the rest of the economy is starved of resources this Factory would turned out shells and other Munitions far in excessively estimated a mon we have these priorities everything for the front more aircraft more tanks more guns Nothing Else Matters outside the defense industry the rest of the economy is is really collapsing factories are told to stop producing farm machinery like tractors and instead they've got to produce armaments and farms are not sent sufficient fuel to power what tractors are still in operation in the interior of the country that wasn't occupied young men went off to fight horses were taken into the army the supply of machinery and fertilizers completely disappeared so agriculture became a much more primitive business and yields fell in the unoccupied regions as well so by the time you get to 1942 43 living standards for ordinary civilians are probably 30 40% understand of what they were before the war agricultural output Falls greatly over the course of the war and a significant part of this decline can be attributed to the policies of the Soviet state in 1942 and 43 the worth of agricultural output is less than half of what it was in 1940 the Soviet government isn't stupid they know that if you ignore agriculture you're not going to be able to feed everybody they know that the death toll will be massive they don't care the philosophy is that the state is important the individual people are not the Soviets did have that perception that human being as an individual is irrelevant and the state needs are Paramount and of course that exacerbated the uh death to humans suffering aside a chronically underfed Workforce is not a productive Workforce people are simply too weak to work and you've got a lack of focus on civilian needs that doesn't make any long-term economic sense the average Soviet worker is offered few positive incentives to work much harder the Soviet state has got a massively deprioritize civilian production so even basic Goods like food and clothes they're all scarce shops empty why would an already underfed Workforce work hard in difficult factory conditions as this policy carries on Russians begin to die in their Millions not from German bombs and bullets but because of the actions of their own socialist government who were dying from what was called Elementary distrophy and that basically meant extreme nutritional decline people were dying from a total lag of protein and kind of turned into living skeletons and then died the Soviet people are led to Desperate Measures to survive there's documented cases of cannibalism Mass piles of bodies ready for burial had all the fleshy Parts cut out of them and even if people eating their near relatives to keep Ordinary People from rising up in Revolt the Soviet state uses Terror in the Soviet system no descent is allowed so if you move the workers thousands of miles the other side of the eurals and establish them the new Factory and you give them tents to live in in freezing conditions and you know that if you complain you'll be shot then there'll be no complaints so you can provide an absolute bare minimum for your your population because all descent is crushed one of the functions that the Soviet Secret Police fulfill is to terrorize the population and to Spur them into productive activity simply through the fear that if they do not do things if they are declared to be an economic sabur as it's called they will be shot and not only they will be shot but typically their friends and their family will be shot as well it was completely illegal to joke about the authorities to spread rumors to pass on information that you were not supposed to have people were arrested for slendering a party leaders or criticism of the government grumbling in the cues for example and the sentences for this particular crime were even more severe than for theft so people could be sentenced for 10 years of hard labor for just talk Stalin will employ a vast Army simply to keep his population under control these are able-bodied men who should have been at the front and they were monitoring people's telephone conversations and looking at letters and any slight criticism of Joseph Stalin would get one sent to the gulock so you will have a decorated Army artillery Captain like Alexander saniton who in early 1945 because of a humorous remark that might be construed as critical of Stalin in a letter at home is arrested by the enav and sent to the gulock the Soviet Union is actually not a country that belongs to the workers as the propaganda always claimed in fact during the war gags provided Soviet factories with more forc labor than was even used in Nazi Germany in the camp system as a whole in 1942 probably a fifth of prisoners are dying and that's largely hunger H hunger and overwork but largely hunger in these few short years more Soviet soldiers will be shot by the secret police the nkvd then all of the Americans killed over the course of the war by 1943 despite the Communist regime's single-minded focus on war production despite the vast resources available to them despite terrorizing their own population into total obedience the Soviet Union is still struggling to repel Hitler's forces they have not enough trucks and jeeps not enough fuel and steel and food not even enough boots for their soldiers they will need help to defeat the Nazis it will come from the capitalist [Music] West 1944 is the year of Stalin's 10 victories the Red Army successfully conducts 10 offensives driving German forces from Soviet territory Soviet propaganda depicts this as a victory of war production the capacity of the Socialist system to mass-produce t34 tanks but Soviet success in 1944 is not due to any Triumph of Soviet War production at the beginning of 1944 the Eastern Front is still closer to Moscow than it is Berlin the push to expel the Nazis from Russia and ultimately to invade Nazi Germany will require the Red Army to move thousands of miles west but Soviet War factories are not producing the vehicles let alone the food that this will require fortunately in 1944 the Red Army is not relying on Russian War factories alone here at Bethlehem Fairfield dockyard Baltimore sits one of the few remaining Liberty ships a ship that was mass-produced in Wartime America and is often credited with doing much to help the Allies win the war but this is not a battleship it is a cargo vessel a total of 2,710 Liberty ships were built and They Carried 2third of all the cargo that left the United States during World War II Liberty ships like this carried vast amounts of military and other supplies from the United States and Britain to the Soviet Union the ships sail through the dangerous Arctic route and Persian Corridor on their way to Russia what's delivered will change the course of the wall a huge amount of material and Personnel came from the United States ammunition bombs machine gun bullets airplanes trucks tanks every conceivable kind of cargo as we say beans to bullets little things like quinine big things like trucks or still bigger like 50 ton tanks we had to get the tools to where they would do the most good one of of the reasons why the success of the Soviet economy during World War II in producing military equipment and like is actually losery is that through great degree this was done on the back of massive assistance from the west and particularly from the United States the Soviets are only able to carry on offensive Warfare in modern sense because during the war the American Lend Lease provides over 400,000 Jeeps and trucks to the Red Army this is more than twice the total production the Soviets have during the war so General zukov one of the great Soviet commanders is being driven around in vehicles produced in Ohio it's sometimes said that the red Army's Firepower was mostly hom produced but its Mobility came from America and it's not just the 400,000 trucks and jeeps the US also sends over 35,000 motorcycles almost 10,000 Railway flat cars and almost 2,000 steam locomotives the mobility of the Red Army is also dramatically increased by provisions of cammed food over the course of the war the Soviet Union is given 4 million tons of food stuffs what soldiers needed on the move was concentrated calories and proteins and going into battle with a stale Loaf and a couple of girkins was not the same as American span Memoir as of read army soldiers talk about these big tins of American beef stew that sustained them it is not just America making these contributions to the Soviet effort the first of the tanks move off on their way to the Eastern Front good luck to them and good luck to our Gallant allies they want more tanks let's make sure they get them from the port of Liverpool in Britain left many of the cargo ships Bound for Russia the British and tanks Spitfires hurricans even radar ambulances medical supplies and 15 million pairs of boots for the Red Army soldiers it's astonishing that Britain which is a fraction of the size of the Soviet Union is supplying it with all that Aid it is not just in quantity that British and American War factories Excel the complexity in quality of armaments coming out of say Britain and America is much higher than it is in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944 the USSR will produce 46.5 billion worth of armaments that is barely more than Britain's $ 32.4 billion which is shocking when the disparity in population size is considered whilst the USA will produce an enormous $ 140.6 billion worth of armaments the Allies do not just provide weapons and military vehicles Allied Aid enables Soviet War factories to continue production despite the Soviet neglect of its wider economy the US provides Soviet factories with over a million tons of machinery and Industrial Equipment 6 million tons of steel and non-ferrous metal and a million miles of telephone wire and much else besides the Americans will provide Russia with 2.6 million tons of oil products during the war this is mostly high octane aviation fuel it is still cheaper for the Allies to extract oil build a tanker send a tanker across the planet protect the tanker while it's out on the water and deliver it to the Soviet Union than helping the Soviet Union extract their own oil of which they have an abundance within their own borders I think there's quite a lot of irony in the fact that you've got a capitalist Society fueling a communist war effort the west of course stands for everything that Soviet ideology had built itself in opposition to and actually the West isn't that fond of of the Soviet Union either but nevertheless they've both got to help each other if they want to defeat the Axis powers the alliance between the capitalist West and communist East was often strained it was not easy for everyone to stomach an alliance with the Soviet Union Stalin was generally understood to be a bloodthirsty and completely unreliable partner the reality was that Allied hopes of defeating Germany did rest very largely upon Soviet resistance so it was just enlightened self-interest to send Aid to the Russians over the course of the war the Soviet Union will receive $127 billion worth of supplies in 1944 the Red Army is using vast amounts of equipment produced by the capitalist West but they're still using communist methods of fighting The View that human beings are a kind of raw material to be used by the planning power extended also to the way in which Wars are fought decisions were taken where the question of what kind of likely casualties will be incurred by military operations was hardly thought of by the high command the Soviet idea of an offensive is to throw waves of troops and tanks and if the first wave is largely wiped out that creates a breakthrough opportunity for the follow on waves the Russian way of war is extremely generous in throwing away human lives throwing away material in order to get Victory this is a massive loss of life that is simply from dictators that are unrestrained and in fact encourage their generals and encourage their officers and leaders to be brutal the British American way of war is much more mechanized it's much more reliant on equipment it's much more careful about human lives and losses great suffering and loss of life is not only the fate of Soviets on the battlefield it is also the reality for ordinary civilians on the home front under the rule of their own State the home front story is actually a really sad one although on the surface bolik leaders claim to be progressives socialists fighting for the equality and prosperity of the people in reality it was brutal dictatorship that killed its own population in hundreds of thousands and with huge mismanagement caused the deaths of millions despite the threat of torture and execution the nightmare of living under communism caused many people to Rebel unlike most other European nations the Soviet Union has lots of wartime traitors in 1941 and 42 millions of ukrainians bellerians Russians will collaborate willingly with the Germans not because they like the Germans and because they hate Joseph stallen so much World War II will directly cause the premature deaths of 50 to 60 million people throughout the world but up to half of these some 28 million were Soviet citizens 9 million Soviet soldiers die but more than twice that number of Soviet civilians will lose their lives as well the Soviet home front is a story of deprivation repression and death as the end of the war comes into sight this relationship between the Soviet Union and the Western allies deteriorates rapidly the expediency of collaborating is being replaced by this old animosity that existed well before the war and actually what you can see here are the paving blocks of the Cold War starting to be laid both Powers want to make it to Berlin first in order to be able to influence the fate of Germany after the war so in a way this is a race between the capitalist West and the Soviet East they were both pressing forward to Berlin and Stalin wanted to get there first but what carried the Soviet assault again was American trucks the Red Army reaches Berlin at the end of January 1945 the war in Europe ends in September 1945 the Cold War has begun the growing struggle between two great power powers to shape the postwar world the ideological battle between communist East and capitalist West is well underway what you find after the war because of this apparent success of uh Soviet mass production of War material is the idea that the Soviet economy was something which had not only been successful then but was a model for the future in fact we now know it was a total disaster socialist politicians in the west including in the British labor party point to Soviet War production as an example to be followed after the war at Le's government come forward and say that in matters of economic planning they agree with the Soviet Union they're looking at the figur for what the Soviet Union produced during the war but not the cost of having that kind of command economy and how detrimental it was to the population in the postwar Years Britain will introduce a heavily planned State controlled economy with disastrous results one of the great delusions of the 20th century after both the first world war and the second world war was the idea that the experim of the war proved the superiority of planning over a free economy and a free Society the war sees the defeat of fascism in Germany but this is achieved only by strengthening the grip of communist totalitarianism in the Soviet block it is a cruel irony that this is done with the help of the capitalist West and their immensely productive War [Music] factories [Music]

Channel: Free Documentary - Engineering

Views: 275,392

Keywords: free documentary, free documentary engineering, engineering, engineering documentary, tech, tech documentary, constructions, constructions documentary, technology documentary

Id: FM7NG7pF3xc

Length: 169min 47sec (10187 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2024