“What If America’s ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ Had Failed to Materialize?” by Mark Grimsley

As a rule, I shy away from ‘what if’ kinds of historical accounts. I understand they can be very interesting and thought provoking but my thinking is that there is so much I want to learn about actual history and, having so little time in which to learn it, I cannot afford to spend time with history that never happened. 

The thing that piqued my interest in Mark Grimsley’s article was not the ‘what if,’ but the ‘arsenal of democracy’ part. In my day job, at a Training and Doctrine Command center of excellence, my work and the work of dozens around me, is all about capability development.  If you add to our work the work of those in acquisition and those in planning, programming, budgeting, and execution, then what you would essentially have is the Arsenal of Democracy, 21^st Century Edition.  So it was with some expectation that I would get to read something about how my job was done in the World War II era that I selected this article.

General of the Army
George C. Marshall

Moreover, several weeks ago I finished reading a book about General George C. Marshall who was the Army chief of staff during WW2.  The book contains a fascinating account of how the Army, the Army Air Corps, and the Navy were mobilized, under Marshall’s leadership, to fight that war.  The sheer weight of numbers—of planes, tanks, trucks, ships, boots, blankest, rifles, bombs, barracks, and all the things it takes to fight a war, plus the mobilization all the men and women who fought in it—was phenomenal.  It gave me a look at what my current job might be under the circumstances that prevailed circa 1939.  In short, I expected this article to sort of go behind the whole ‘arsenal of democracy’ cliché and tell something of what might have befallen the nation had there been no George Marshall.

I was disappointed.  For one thing, Grimsley never even answered his own question.  In places, the article is vague, or contradictory, and even corny.  Nowhere in the article was there even a hint of what might have happened if the famous ‘arsenal’ had failed to materialize.  The core of Grimsley’s story is about a “Battle of the Potomac” fought between civilian and military planners.  He builds his account of this battle around an obscure government agency, the War Production Board (WPB), and its head, a guy named David Kennedy, a senior vice president at Sears, Roebuck and Co., which in the end figured not at all in averting any economic or military crisis.

In 1300 words, Grimsley explains how the following military capabilities were fielded as if Mr. Kennedy, the WPB, and an investment banker by the name of Ferdinand Eberstadt were the primary movers and shakers:

“Between July 1940 and September 1945, American shipyards and factories produced 2,261 major warships, 66,055 landing craft, 297,000 aircraft, 86,000 tanks, and 2 million trucks. It not only equipped its own forces but produced a quarter of all weapons used by the British Empire, as well as 427,000 trucks and 13,000 combat vehicles used by the Soviet Union. All in all, American output amounted to two-thirds of Allied military production. It exceeded that of all the Axis powers combined.” [1]

To support his thesis, Grimsley offers the observations of a sociologist, Dr. Gregory Hooks, who said that the “prodigious output” described above “’was not inevitable.’”  By that, Dr. Hooks meant that there hadn’t been very much of an industrial output to support the First World War and that U.S. troops had had to rely upon ‘planes and artillery acquired from Great Britain and France.’ [2]

That may be true but it is terribly misleading.  The United States spent $23.5 billion [3] on World War I. Obviously it was an ‘arsenal of democracy’ then, too, though not at large an arsenal, and without a fireside chat to declare it so.

The ‘arsenal of democracy’ was a phrase used by FDR in a fireside chat after Germany attacked Poland.  He spoke of expanding the nation’s industrial base to supply weapons to Britain.  Without doubt, it was a policy greatly influenced by Marshall who had opened the president’s eyes to extremity of the unpreparedness of his own armed forces shortly after becoming chief of staff.  General Marshall’s tenure as chief of staff ran from September 1, 1939 to November 26, 1945.  When he was sworn in, the U.S. Army was “the seventeenth largest army in the world,” with a force of “just 174,000 officers and men.” [4]  By the time he stepped down six years later, he had built an Army of “9 million men and women” and supplied them with “more than 88,000 tanks … “2.5 million Jeeps and trucks” … “tens of thousands of howitzers, mortars, and anti-aircraft guns” … 12.6 million rifles and carbines, and 2 million machine guns” … and “129,000 combat air craft.” [5]

Grimsley fails to mention General Marshall even once in his article about this ‘arsenal of democracy.’  In fact, the only military officer mentioned in the article is Brehon “Bill” Somervell, one of Marshall’s deputies, a 1-star who headed the War Department’s G-4 (supply) and later served as commander of the Army Services of Supply. [6]  He mentions FDR, the commander-in-chief only in connection to the president’s naming of Mr. Kennedy to head the WPB and that, inexplicably, this presidential decision proved to be wrong.  It is as if both the president and his Army chief of staff were only bit players, at best.

Interestingly, Ed Cray, the author of an 800-page historical biography of Marshall, never mentions David Kennedy, the War Production Board, or the investment banker, Eberstadt at all.  This suggests that Mark Grimsley, author of the subject article, selected an extremely irrelevant and inconsequential topic upon which to write.

General Brehon Burke Somervell

In the course of the research conducted to write this analysis, I learned that Dr. Gregory Hooks, the sociologist quoted by Mr. Grimsley in his article, is a member of the faculty of Washington State University and that his areas of research interest are economy and society, political sociology, and social organization.  He has written several publications.  Among them is a book entitled, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War II's Battle of the Potomac, which “presents a theoretically-informed analysis of the World War II economic mobilization.” [7] This, obviously, was a primary source for the Grimsley article.

Mark Grimsley, author of the subject article, is a member of the Ohio State Department of History and for three years, until June 2000, was a visiting professor at the U.S. Army War College. He is the author of several books on the Civil War and the recipient of several teaching awards. [8]

General Bill Somervell—mentioned in Grimsley’s article as part of the problem (while David Kennedy, the War Production Board, and Ferdinand Eberstadt were, supposedly, the solution)—received prominent mention in Ed Cray’s biography of Marshall.  Described as a “dapper, energetic man … with no patience for incompetence,” and “efficient,” Somervell was apparently resented by “more bureaucratic-minded men” because of his “take-charge attitude.”  General Marshall consistently “turned back requests” to throttle the young general, frequently stating that “he spent his whole life lighting fires under generals and that when he got a self-starter, he wasn’t going to change him.” [9]

Notes.

1.  Mark Grimsley, “What If America's "Arsenal of Democracy" Had Failed to Materialize?” History Net (March 30, 2011), http://www.historynet.com/what-if-americas-arsenal-of-democracy-had-failed-to-materialize.htm (accessed December 18, 2011).

2.  Ibid.

3.  Ed Cray, General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman (New York: Norton and Co., 1990), 85.

4.  Ibid., 143-144.

5.  Ibid., 553-554.

6.  Ibid., 263.

7.  Gregory Hooks, PhD., Washington State University, http://libarts.wsu.edu/soc/people/ghooks/ (accessed December 22, 2011). 

8.  Mark Grimsley, Ohio State University, http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/grimsley1/ (accessed December 22, 2011).

9.  Cray, 263.