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fate of the Philippines. The Japanese were now undisputed masters of the central Pacific. Yet the sacrifice at Wake had not been in vain. Even though they never sent the radio signal “Send Us More Japs” that rumor said they did, the Marines and Morrison’s men had shown that Americans were ready to fight and die, even against steep odds.
    They inspired a nation. They also sent Washington an urgent message.
    Give the armed forces the right tools, and in the right numbers, and America just might win. That’s what the Army’s new head of logistics, General Brehon Somervell, was thinking about, too.
    Under his boss, Undersecretary Robert Patterson, the Army had grown like a field of mushrooms. From 260,000 men in May 1940, it had expanded to more than a million, thanks to the Selective Service Act. The new U.S. Army had two armored divisions, whereas in 1939 it had none. In 1939 it had 1,500 planes. Thanks to Knudsen and his friends, it now had 16,000, and 22,000 pilots. Already, British and American war production was equaling that of the Axis powers combined.
    With the coming of war, Somervell was now looking at an army that was going to expand from a projected one million in 1942 to seven million by the end of 1943. He also figured that the Army’s supply of tanks, trucks, and planes would rise to 50 percent of its Victory Plan goals by the end of 1942. That meant America would be ready to go on the offensive. Until then, he told the War Production Board in one of its first meetings, the U.S. armed forces’ job would be to keep the lines of communication open to our allies Britain and Russia. 43
    That made Kaiser’s Liberty ship program more vital than ever.
    ----
    * Meigs, however, was more than just a booster. It was Meigs who proposed forming a Joint Aircraft Committee to standardize the parts and designs of airplanes being ordered by both the British and the Americans, including the Navy. The committee worked out how to supply the fifty-five different types of airplanes in American production with the same screws, parts for landing gears, tires, bombs and bomb releases, and hundreds of other parts—in addition to identifying which were more likely to suffer battle damage and need larger numbers of replacements and which were not. The Joint Committee’s work proved a major step forward in keeping both the RAF and the U.S. air force in the air, and a huge step toward bringing mass production to the world of aviation.
    † Passed in 1934, it had legitimated collective bargaining for America’s labor unions and also immunized them from court injunctions.
    ‡ There were so many migrant workers from the border states that a joke began to circulate around wartime Detroit. “How many states in the Union? Forty-six, because Tennessee and Kentucky are now in Michigan.”
    § The gigantic and ultramodern Volkswagen plant at Wolfsburg, for example, started the war with enough machine tools to produce 200,000 vehicles a year. Barely one-fifth of its capacity was ever used; one worker there recalled “there seemed to be no plans at all” what to do with the rest. Later, bombing by American Flying Fortresses and B-24s made the issue moot.

 

    Henry Kaiser cartoon from the
Phoenix Republic and Gazette
, circa 1943.
Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
    You can’t work as hard as I am getting production and pay any attention to personal relations.
    —Henry Kaiser, June 22, 1943
    AS FOR HENRY Kaiser, he was sitting on top of the world.
    The entrepreneur
Business Week
described as “the Man of Mystery” back in March 1941 was a mystery no longer. “He’s terrific; he’s colossal; he’s completely unbelievable,” gushed respected news commentatorFrazier Hunt in a CBS broadcast. “He’s the master Doer of the world.” 1 Kaiser’s bald head with its spectacles and irrepressible grin was plastered across the covers of magazines and inside newspapers. Every other month, it