As President Biden arrives in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, the magazine National Review has published an essay exploring in part the industrial miracle that made that invasion possible.
Conducted on June 6, 1944, the D-Day operation saw more than 160,000 Allied troops landing in Normandy as a prelude to the liberation of France. It is not only regarded as the largest seaborne invasion in history, but also a turning point in the war to defeat the Nazis.
“While Britain produced 28,000 warplanes and Russia and Germany produced 48,000 each, the United States produced no fewer than 98,000,” notes the National Review.
This “extraordinary industrial capacity” was such that “whenever a GI saw a plane flying above him on D-Day, there was a 99.2% chance that it would be an Allied plane.”
Even more, the industrial might of the U.S. as of 1944 meant that there were “no fewer than 18 shipyards across the country, producing three ships every two days.”
The country’s industrial output, joined by similar productive operations in Great Britain and other Allied nations, also meant that the Axis nations were soon being outproduced in everything from tanks to combat aircraft and machine pistols.
The giant auto factories of Detroit saw an almost overnight conversion during the early months of the war, resulting in an epic production of amphibious trucks, tanks, jeeps, and four-wheel drive troop transports – more than 50,000 in all.
Not surprisingly, unemployment dropped from 14.6% in 1940 to just under 2% by 1945, as U.S. factories worked to maintain the unprecedented output. By way of example, the Gulf Shipbuilding company in Chickasaw, Alabama saw its payroll increase from 240 at the beginning of the war to nearly 12,000 by D-Day.
According to the book The Weapons Acquisition Process, nearly a third of U.S. military production spending was devoted to aircraft manufacture, followed by 25% for weapons, and 15% for ships.
On the actual June 6 day of the invasion, roughly 5,000 ships were in action, buttressed by 13,000 aircraft. “The men who stormed the beaches of Normandy knew they had nations behind them that would keep them in ammunition till they bearded the Nazi beast in its lair,” notes the National Review.
Military historians have since concluded that had D-Day gone wrong, World War II could have easily lasted at least another year, well into 1946.
In a private handwritten statement he had prepared just before the invasion began, Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, expressed great confidence in the fighting abilities of the U.S., British, and Canadian forces, before adding: “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”
With the success of the invasion, notes the National Review, “Hitler’s downfall was now a matter of when, not if.”
By Garry Boulard
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Department of Defense