I'm reading Overy's The Air War: 1939-1945. I love numbers and came across this sentence and was amazed. "At its peak the Ford plant for B-24 bombers produced in weight the equivalent of 50% of the peak of German aircraft production on its own." Wow.
Check out these figures: Aerospace Aerospace provides one crucial example. American heavy bombers, like the B-29 Superfortress, were highly sophisticated weapons which could not have existed, much less contributed to the air war on Germany and Japan, without innovations such as bombsights, radar, and high-performance engines or advances in aeronautical engineering, metallurgy, and even factory organization. Encompassing hundreds of thousands of workers, four major factories, and $3 billion in government spending, the B-29 project required almost unprecedented organizational capabilities by the U.S. Army Air Forces, several major private contractors, and labor unions (Vander Meulen, 7). Overall, American aircraft production was the single largest sector of the war economy, costing $45 billion (almost a quarter of the $183 billion spent on war production), employing a staggering two million workers, and, most importantly, producing over 125,000 aircraft, which Table 6 describe in more detail. Table 6: Production of Selected U.S. Military Aircraft (1941-1945) Bombers 49,123 Fighters 63,933 Cargo 14,710 Total 127,766 Source: Air Force History Support Office http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/tassava.WWII Compare those figures with the ones in this Wiki chart for Germany, and remember that, in addition to the US, Britain and the USSR also need to be figured into the Allied total production. The dicrepancy is eye-opening. The American Economy during World War II | Economic History Services
This will be of interest: http://www.ww2f.com/weapons-technol...onths-july-1940-august-1945-a.html#post539701 Dave
Great links guys. Thanks. In a day or so I'm going to post more from Overy's book, numbers that put Germany's production in better perspective.
Army Air Forces Statistical Digest, World War II has several tables that should be of interest related to aircraft production (AAF only), in particular Tables 74 and 75 that can be found here: http://www.afhra.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090608-042.pdf