Ages of American Capitalism by Jonathan Levy

Author:Jonathan Levy [Levy, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

U.S. Lend-Lease Supply Route During World War II

The U.S. military’s wartime global logistics network set a foundation for postwar U.S. world political and economic hegemony.

By flipping the lights back on in the northeastern-midwestern manufacturing belt, constructing a new industrial corridor in the Pacific West, and fashioning global supply chains, the Americans won the “war of the factories.” The pivotal year was 1942, when the United States produced $20 billion worth of munitions, compared to Germany’s $8.5 billion and Japan’s $3 billion.67 Economic disparity reached the point of “overkill.”

The war still had to be won. In the Pacific, the decisive campaign was the Battle of Guadalcanal, fought from August 1942 to February 1943. Given the disproportionate burden of suffering by the Russian people, Stalin fumed while FDR and Churchill kept American and British forces on the sidelines, as they deliberated over how to bring the superior U.S. economic might to the European continent. Churchill favored operations in the Mediterranean, to shore up the British Empire, while engaging in “strategic bombing” of civilians on the European continent. The United States, with better-armed airplanes, capable of flying higher and conducting daytime sorties, preferred to bomb military targets. But eventually the Americans gave way to the British strategy. The British incendiary bombing campaign of Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city and a major industrial producer, commenced in July 1943. It did not harm industry much, but it did engulf the city in fire, killing over 40,000 civilians. In November 1943, the Allies commenced the bombing of Berlin.

Over the course of 1944, Allied planes dropped more than a million bombs over Europe. Estimates vary, but in February 1945 a British strategic bombing campaign killed approximately 135,000 civilians in the German city of Dresden. In June 1944, Rome was liberated, and the Allies finally landed in Normandy, France. The Soviets advanced across German territory, discovering the death camps of the Nazi Judeocide. In April, Soviet troops reached Berlin. Italian partisans shot Mussolini and strung him up by his heels for public viewing. In his underground Berlin bunker, Hitler committed suicide. On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies.68

In the Pacific, U.S. forces bogged down. In March 1945 a strategic bombing campaign killed almost 90,000 civilians in Tokyo and burned down much of the ancient wooden city. The incendiary material was magnesium dust “goop,” a by-product of a Kaiser San Francisco magnesium ingot plant.69 Then in April 1945 FDR died from a stroke. The new president, Harry S. Truman, decided to drop atomic bombs on Japan to end the war.

The atomic program used the three largest public investments of the war to produce metals that had existed before only in microscopic quantities. That included prodigious state capital investments in two Oak Ridge, Tennessee, enriched-uranium plants, run by Union Carbide and Eastman Kodak. TVA substations powered them. The top-secret Hanford, Washington, “site,” for producing plutonium, covered 586 square miles along the Columbia River and cost $339.7 million.70 Grand Coulee provided the extraordinary amounts of electricity necessary. DuPont ran the site, at no profit.

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