The Rise and Fall of the War Production Board

The war production board or wpb Roosevelt announced that Nelson would have final say on production and procurement. He was expected to cut back production of the regular goods that customers were used to like cars washing machines and vacuum cleaners And speed up military production to unprecedented levels. To do this he had to figure out which factories should produce which goods and he needed to decide how best to divvy up raw materials across a sprawling marketplace. Over the next six months the wPB grew to employ 18,000 staff members as more than 100 billion in military orders poured out to the nation's factories.