D-Day "myths". Actually not a bad article at all...

[Habbaku]

IIRC, the US produced more artillery and airframes (?) in 1944 than the Japanese did over the entire war.

That sounds much more believable, and likely.

[MadBurgerMaker]

There is an excellent website that I can't find that goes into details on US vs Japanese production (and provides what looked like reputable sources, as well). There were several categories where US production was much higher than Japanese - IIRC, the US produced more artillery and airframes (?) in 1944 than the Japanese did over the entire war.

Here's a thing that covers a bit of ship production: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm

[OttoVonBismarck]

Something to keep in mind with production is that the United States was realistically the only modern industrial economy (modern like in the present tense sense of the word) in the war. Yes, the Germans, Soviets, etc had factories. They did not work like American factories. A typical German tank factory had two shifts (and was idle for a portion of every day since these shifts didn't provide 24 hour coverage.) Each shift you had crews, there was a master mechanic/engineer type guy on each crew who was a real craftsman of sorts. He oversaw maybe 3-4 tanks being built simultaneously by his underlings. Each crew would work on a few tanks at a time, building it essentially from the ground up. No assembly line, no extreme reduction of the work to tasks any rote imbecile could perform, instead you had to really know what you were doing. It wasn't until deep in the word, Speer (I believe) reformed this a bit to at least make the factories run 24 hours.

American factories already ran 24 hours--not just for war production, but they had been doing that just to build consumer products like cars before the war. When we fully switched over to a war economy we started rolling shit down assembly lines that were vastly more complex than anything that had ever been built on an assembly line previously. Willow Run (which was actually not even necessarily one of the most successful factories), once it was fully up and running was rolling a new B-24 out of the assembly line every 63 minutes, 24/7/365.

This actually is a pretty major feat of industrial engineering, business management etc--and really no one else was doing it. Other countries could build complex machines, but to actually work out the process to build them on assembly lines and at massive scale isn't easy, and only the United States really achieved this during WWII. This is important in a lot of ways, just from raw production throughput on a national scale, but also because it means we could pretty much hire anyone off the street to start working in factories. My grandmother on dad's side had never worked outside the home and she was able to be a productive worker at an industrial plant. This is because it took all of about a half day's training to know your job. This is because the process had been broken into very simple steps.

[Gups]

I've not read a book on Overlord. What do you guys recommend? Hastings, Beevor or Ambrose? Or are there others? I'm leaning towards Hastings as I like his prose style.

[Admiral Yi]

It's not an x's and o's type of book but Five Armies at Normandy by Keagan is bloody fookin brilliant.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Enjoyed Ambrose's book a couple of years back.

[dps]

IIRC, the US produced more artillery and airframes (?) in 1944 than the Japanese did over the entire war.

That sounds much more believable, and likely.

I'm doing this off memory, so it might not be quite accurate, but I believe I've read that the U.S. produced more aircraft in the last six months of 1944 than all the other countries in the world combined produced during the entire war.

[Berkut]

Yeah, I was going from memory - it might have been some other item they produced more in a month than Japan produced during the war - tanks maybe? Not really sure. :embarrassed:

[Richard Hakluyt]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_production

[Razgovory]

It's interesting to note that the US was only in full war production for about two years.

[Malthus]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_production

Some fun with those figures:

Total aircraft production: 824,102 (the total on the page is wrong)

Total Allied aircraft production: 604,911

The Allies produced nearly 3/4 of the total ... 

[Monoriu]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_production

Some fun with those figures:

Total aircraft production: 824,102 (the total on the page is wrong)

Total Allied aircraft production: 604,911

The Allies produced nearly 3/4 of the total ...

The craziest figures are the German and Japanese ones.  Contrary to the allies, they knew they were going to war.  Yet they don't prepare themselves for it.  Compare the 1941 vs 1939 figures for the UK, Germany and Japan.  In the case of the UK, they increased production by more than 200%.  Germany, only around 50%.  Japan, which was the first nation to go to war in 1937, only increased production by 10-20% from 1939 to 1941. 

[KRonn]

Good article. I hadn't realized that the UK air force were such a majority of air forces. I did know that the UK navy was a larger presence of warships but didn't realize it was as much as stated in the article.

The article bought out other good points. Such as the training differences by 1944 and how the allies were at least as good or better. Also how the allies used the rigid practices of the German army against them, such as drawing them to do their usual counter attacks to get them into the open.

However, I wasn't surprised at the part of the not Allied forces getting off easily. A while ago I was looking at some of the unit histories of my father's division in Europe and saw casualty rates of 50% up to and over 100% in some of the combat units. That was a stark view of just how bloody the fighting was and the turn over in personnel and replacements. I found the same thing when I looked at unit histories of other units in Europe.

[The Minsky Moment]

This actually is a pretty major feat of industrial engineering, business management etc--and really no one else was doing it. Other countries could build complex machines, but to actually work out the process to build them on assembly lines and at massive scale isn't easy, and only the United States really achieved this during WWII.

That puts the waste issue in context.  US production was benefitting from increasing returns to scale.  Building an extra unit at the margin was very low cost.  Having the part or piece of equipment you need at the right time at the right place at the front is of very high value.  So there is a logic to high amounts of redundancy and "waste" on the production side. 

[Malthus]

This actually is a pretty major feat of industrial engineering, business management etc--and really no one else was doing it. Other countries could build complex machines, but to actually work out the process to build them on assembly lines and at massive scale isn't easy, and only the United States really achieved this during WWII.

That puts the waste issue in context.  US production was benefitting from increasing returns to scale.  Building an extra unit at the margin was very low cost.  Having the part or piece of equipment you need at the right time at the right place at the front is of very high value.  So there is a logic to high amounts of redundancy and "waste" on the production side.

There is also this: there is essentially no downside to being massively better supplied than your enemies, and massively more powerful. Total war, unlike most other activities, does not necessarily benefit from "efficiency" in the sense of having just enough material and men to win. True, having ten times as much as you need may rob resources from civilian life; but the US was in the unique position of having enough to massively over-kill in war, and yet also have enough left over to preserve civilian applications as well.