Episode 10: Creating Destruction: US Industrial Mobilisation in 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.

Mark R. Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861-1865, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

Maury Klein, A Call to Arms: Mobilising America for World War II, (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Thomas Heinrich, Warship Builders: An Industrial History of U.S. Naval Shipbuilding, 1922-1945, (Naval Institute Press, 2020).

Alexander C. Field, The Economic Consequences of the U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War, (Yale University Press, 2022).

Larrie D. Ferreiro, Churchill's American Arsenal: The Partnership behind the Innovations that Won World War II, (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Katherine C. Epstein, Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State, (University of Chicago Press, 2024).