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US Military Industrial Complex. By mid-1942, World War II was looking bleak
for the Allied powers. The German Wehrmacht was blitzing ...
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since ... In briefing papers given before meetings to the US Undersecretary of ...
... Hoover's FBI), Rednecks and Oilmen (Right-wing Extremists), and the MIC (Military
Industrial Complex). ... did not own any land or power in the US/Cuban region ...
... Hoover's FBI), Rednecks and Oilmen (Right-wing Extremists), and the MIC (Military
Industrial Complex). ... did not own any land or power in the US/Cuban region ...
Submitted by Slaxative on July 6, 2005
Category: American History
Words: 1226 | Pages: 5
Views: 357
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By mid-1942, World War II was looking bleak for the Allied powers. The German Wehrmacht was blitzing through Soviet Russia, the Luftwaffe had laid waste to much of London, Rommel was about to take Africa, and the Japanese nearly had control of the Pacific. Then a funny thing happened on the way to global domination: the Axis started running low on materiel while America was simultaneously increasing the Allied supply dramatically. This enormous production capacity displayed by the U.S. was the product of their new military-industrial complex, as plants across the country geared into production of weapons and combat vehicles and the government began pumping resources into the creation of new military-oriented production facilities. The American industrial surge turned out to be not only the deciding factor in World War II, but also the greatest protection against the Soviet threat during the Cold War that followed.
In the wake of his defeat at El Alamein, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel declared, “The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without plenty of ammunition, and neither guns nor ammunition are of much use in mobile warfare unless there are vehicles with sufficient petrol to haul them around”. While Germany and Japan struggled to reproduce materiel at the speed at which it was being lost—leading to shortages for the Afrika Korps in the African desert and the Wehrmacht during Operation Barbarossa—the U.S. began producing it almost as quickly as it could be shipped out. There was virtually no military-industrial complex to speak of before 1940, and America went woefully under prepared into conflict after its losses at Pearl Harbor. However, by 1944 America was turning out 8 aircraft carriers a month, 50 merchant ships a day, one fighter plane every five minutes, and 150 tons of steel every sixty seconds (Walton 540).
While other factors certainly aided in the momentum switch that occurred in late 1942 and 1943 and...
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