S5E10: Creating Destruction: US Industrial Mobilisation in the Second World War

Professor Mark Wilson explains how governments, industry and the military collaborated to forge the US’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ during the Second World War.

The prevailing myth is that the miracle of US industrial production was achieved by individual business leaders who were freed from the dead hand of government. The truth is more nuanced. The impressive efforts of business leaders relied on their workforce, government and the military. It was also a truly international effort. French and British orders started before the European war and long before Pearl Harbor, thereby expanding US industrial capacity and providing a springboard for success once the US was mobilised.

This episode’s guest, Professor Mark Wilson, is an historian from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He specialises in in military-industrial relations and war mobilisations in US history, having written important books on US Civil War mobilisation and the business and politics of US industrial mobilisation for the Second World War.