ORIGINAL: niceguy2005
It is true that America invented mass production and that regionally there were some large factories for autos and other items. Also, America was blessed with a large number of factories for converting raw materials into building material. However, as you say many of the factories had fallen silent during the Great Depression, as America had started to revert from the industrial nation it was becoming in the 1910s and 1920s back toward a farming nation. While the US was still a mighty industrial power compared to smaller or less developed countries, it had lost a fair amount of its former production capacity.
ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl
Sorry, you're still Wrong. "Underutilized" does not mean "unused" or "closed". It means not being used to it's full capacity, such as a GM or Ford plant only running one 8-hour shift 5 days a week instead of 3 shifts a day, 6 or 7 days a week which would be "maximum production". You need to remember that even at the height of the Depression, the USA was still the largest "consumer market" in the world, and the output of either Ford or GM was greater than the rest of the world's automotive output combined.
This is a much more accurat picture. At the height of the depression, the US had about 25% unemployment. That still meant 75% were working. Back then the US imported very little in the way of consumer goods. By the early 1900s the US was the largest exporter in the world and the largest creditor nation by the end of WW I.
It is regarded by many that the Great Depression started with the crash of the US stock market in October 1939. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. Because of the strains of the Versailles Treaty, Germany's economy went under in the early 1920s causing a drag on the world economy. The US economy was able to keep the world economy afloat for another 8 years. When the US economy imploded, the international impact was so large, it took the rest of the world with it.
ORIGINAL: niceguy2005
Added to this was the fact that the US military had fallen into disrepair and was poorly equipped at the start of the war. The amount of weaponry and equipment that needed to be produced was astounding. This meant a refit of existing factories. My statement about factories being small and few referred to the equipment and weaponry needed to make an army. Germany and Japan had a big head start in production capabilities of weapons.
ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl
Here your points are more valid, although the revitalization of the US Military was well underway in the late 1930's. The Navy was laying down the fleet that would force Japan to go to war by 1942 or give up and go home forever. The Army was being enlarged, and the Air Corps was recieving new facilities and equipment. Roosevelt used the notion of Helping the Allies and later "Lend Lease" to authorize huge expenditures in new plants and equipment as well as large growth for the US Military. His call for 50,000 Aircraft a year came well before December 7th. US Aircraft Production exceeded that of Germany by 1940, and more than doubled it in 1941..., before America was in the war. The American Military may not have been quite ready yet on December 7th, but it was well on it's way.
The handwriting was on the wall for anyone who wanted to read it by the late 1930s. It was obvious that the naval treaties were failing. Japan had laid down super battleships and two large carriers in excess of the treaties. An arms race was on. Roosevelt made his pitch for a 2 Ocean Navy and he got it. First another Yorktown was laid down as a stop gap, which became the Hornet. Plans were made for a super Yorktown which incorporated all the lessons learned from previous carriers. The first Essex carriers were under construction when Pearl Harbor occured. The bulk of Essex carriers to see action were all approved before the US went to war.
Germany was slow to convert their economy to full war production. Hitler was aware of how the deprevations of WW I had led to public unrest and he kept the manufacturing of consumer goods going until 1942. Throughout the Battle of Britain, the UK was producing enough fighters to replace losses. The main shortwage was pilots to fly them. Germany was unable to produce enough aircraft to replace losses and it wasn't until the following spring just before Barbarossa that most air units were back at full strength.
The US was considered backwards in science and technology by many Europeans in the 1930s, but it wasn't. US technology was just different. After WW I, the US became very issolationist. The attitude was that the US got nothing out of WW I and it shouldn't get involved in other people's wars. The US economy became an almost purely consumer based economy. Military budgets were slashed because the thinking was that the US only had to protect its own borders. With a very friendly nation to the north, a weak one to the south, and oceans everywhere else, this was a pretty east mandate to achieve.
The B-17 was developed as a ship killer. It was envisioned as bombing possible invasion fleets into oblivion.
In many civilian technologies, the US led the world. Radio took off in the US in the 1920s. The 1920s radio boom was actually very similar in what it did to the economy as the dot coms of the 1990s. I have seen graphs of the stock value of RCA throughout the 1920s and AOL throughout the 1990s. The curves are almost idenitcal.
In other areas, the US movie industry was world dominant almost from the start. The US civilian aircraft industry was huge too. Private airplane ownership blossomed in the 1930s as did commercial air travel. The Museum of Flight in Seattle has an exhibit showing how airliner technology evolved in only 8 short years. The Boeing Model 80 was introduced in 1928. It was a fabric covered biplane with an enclosed cabin and room for 18 passengers.
Boeing's next airliner was introduced in 1933, the 247. The 247 had all metal construction and larger passenger capacity. It's sales were virtually wiped out by one of the most famous airliners in world history: the DC-3, which was introduced in 1935.
Articles on all 3:
http://www.boeing.com/history/boeing/m80.html
http://www.boeing.com/history/boeing/m247.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-3
The DC-3 introduces something that British fighters didn't start using until the beginning of the Battle of Britain: the constant speed propeller.
American advances in civilian aviation gave it a leg up when it needed to gear up for war. Many great engines had been developed for airliners which were adapted for military use. Airliners need ultra reliable engines, so the military versions carried over that same legacy. Airliner technology was also applied to bomber designs, leading to some of the finest multiengine bombers of the war.
These technological advances weren't as directly applicable to fighters, and the US lagged behind in fighter development, at least initially. The Seversky P-35 went through a couple of revisions, first becoming the P-43, but when mated with the new Pratt & Whitney 2800 along with a large turbo supercharger, the USAAF had an excellent high altitude fighter in the P-47, which was later found to be an excellent ground attack plane too.
The P-38 was initially conceived of as a bomber interceptor. This was inline with the US military's issolationist mandate of the 1930s. The USAAC needed a fast fighter with a high rate of climb to shoot down any bombers that might encroach on US airspace. A young aeronautical engineer by the name of Kelly Johnson came up with a radical proposal that became the P-38.
The P-51 was proposed by North American when the British were looking for somebody to build P-40s for them to serve in the ground attack role. North American didn't want to build someone else's fighter and proposed their own. The P-51 prototype was flying in record time, but the initial design was done by an engineer working in his spare time before the British came calling. The P-51 was probably the most radical advance in fighters the US did during the war.
When Pearl Harbor occured, the P-38 was starting mass production, the P-47 was in the prototype stage, and the P-51 was under development. On the Navy side, the F4U was in the flight testing phase with plans to start replacing the F4F by mid-1942. When the F4U had so many teething problems, the Navy went to Grumman and asked them to develop a stop gap version of the F4F with more power and landing gear that retracted into the wings. The F6F became the only US aircraft to see significant action that was not conceived of until after Pearl Harbor. The F6F was not as radical looking as the F4U, but it had 95% of the performance with none of the problems.
In Navy bombers, the TBF and SB2C were both well advanced in development by Pearl Harbor. The SB2C had many teething problems, largely due to the Navy's specs which forced Curtiss to make the plane too short and it was unstable. (The Navy requiements included the plane be small enough to fit 2 on a standard carrier elevator.) The TBF was delivered right on schedule. VT-8 was scheduled to be the first unit to reequip with the new TBF. The new bombers arrived at Pearl Harbor in May 1942 and 6 were sent to Midway as a stop gap. The rest were transferred to the Hornet right after the Battle of Midway.
The B-29 program was started during the Battle of Britain when there were concerns that the US might have to strike Nazi occupied Europe from North America. An even more advanced design that became the B-36 was started soon after the B-29, but the design was put on the back burner until after the war when it became apparent that the US was going to have to gear up to produce those planes already in advanced development and put off pie in the sky ideas.
Other major US weapons were also under development before Pearl Harbor. The US realized during the Battle of France that it was badly outclassed in tank technology. The Lee/Grant was a stop gap. The US didn't have the technology to make big turret rings, so they put the big gun in the hull and put a 37mm in the turret. The Sherman was what was planned for mass deployment all along. Up until the late 1930s, the Army built all its own tanks in a factory it owned. It became obvious that the Army didn't have the capacity of knowledge to build the number of tanks needed, so they turned to the car industry and hired some experts on car building to build new factories and gear up for mass tank production.
As someone else said in this thread, the Japanese attacked when they did because even looking down their nose at the US, the realized that the US was going to be too tough to fight once fully mobilized, which was going to happen by mid-1942. The needs of the war in early 1942 slowed down US mobilization because it destroyed a lot of equipment used in penny packets to try and stop the Japanese. Ultimately, US production fully filled out the TOEs of all US units and shortages of military equipment were rare after 1942.
Bill