Production Miracles
In the December 1942 National Geographic Magazine, Albert W. Atwood authored an article titled "The Miracle of War Production." Atwood penned the following words:
This country which we love is producing all-out for war. At first there was only a trickle, then it became a mighty stream, and now it is a deluge [an overwhelming amount] of ships, planes, tanks, and guns roaring down the assembly lines of America.
True, the war finally must be won on the battlefields, but it cannot be won without production, and it can be lost in the shops and factories….
This war has an incredibly voracious, an unbelievably stupendous appetite for materials, supplies, equipment, machines, munitions, and armaments….
By a sheer miracle of production America is now satisfying the yawning maw [mouth or jaws] of the war god….
Hence this country has become the most gigantic factory the world has ever seen, turning its plowshares into swords, transforming itself into an all-embracing, universal arsenal—all to meet the Axis challenge.
In his article Atwood relates the seemingly impossible requests for production that President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45) made: 45,000 tanks in 1942 and 75,000 in 1943; 800 merchant (cargo) ships in 1942 and 1,500 in
1943 (only 4 had been built in America from 1922 to 1938); and in 1942 alone, 60,000 aircraft, more than triple the number built since the Wright brothers' first successful flights in the early twentieth century.
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