But as Baime points out, “Americans believed that no single Detroit industrialist was contributing more to the war effort than Henry Ford.” To be sure, this was one of many planes produced for the war, and Ford was neither the only car company to manufacture planes nor the largest military contractor. Baime’s fast-paced book, “The Arsenal of Democracy,” the Ford Motor Company and its production of the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber take center stage. Whether the air war was ultimately decisive remains a matter of historical debate, but Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin and Hitler all believed these planes were essential to victory because they could bring the fight to their opponents by destroying their industrial capabilities, pulverizing their military hardware and terrorizing their populations into submission. Perhaps most impressive were the 299,293 airplanes that rolled off the assembly lines. American industry, converted almost overnight from civilian to wartime production, produced 1,556 naval ships 5,777 merchant ships 88,410 jeeps 2,383,311 trucks 6.5 million rifles and 40 billion bullets between 19.

The war proved both men correct, and the numbers are staggering. Toasting President Roosevelt in 1943, he stated that “the most important things in this war are machines” and that the United States was “the country of machines.” “England’s battles, it used to be said, were won on the playing fields of Eton,” the American labor leader Walter Reuther declared in 1940, but “America’s can be won on the assembly lines of Detroit.” Joseph Stalin agreed.

Nation Builder by Charles N. Edel