300,000 Airplanes
Individual effort and mass production are equally represented in a new book celebrating World War II aircraft factories.
- By The editors
- Air & Space magazine, May 2007
Overhead lights at a factory in Santa Monica, California, are reflected in row upon row of Plexiglas noses destined for Douglas A-20 attack bombers.
Courtesy Harry Gann
In 1939, U.S. aircraft factories manufactured 921 warplanes. By 1944, the annual output was a staggering 96,318 units. Total U.S. wartime production of military aircraft surpassed 300,000. A new book, The American Aircraft Factory in World War II (Zenith Press, 2006), documents the industry’s transformation from an enterprise of craftsmen building airplanes by hand to a powerhouse of men and women toiling with assembly-line efficiency. “The aircraft manufacturers were dedicated to engineering and manufacturing excellence, but arguably no more so than they are today,” says the book’s author, Bill Yenne. “What happened was that the whole nation came together for a single purpose, and successfully committed itself to doing all that was necessary. All aspects of what the United States did during World War II, both at home and on the global battlefronts, were unlike anything before or since.”
Over the years, Yenne has written histories of the great U.S. airplane makers, including Boeing, Convair, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and North American Aviation. “While doing this, I was time and again amazed by their Herculean wartime effort,” he says. “This book gave me an opportunity to tell the story in both words and pictures.” In addition to Yenne’s meticulously researched text, the book offers 175 photographs, many of them candid black-and-white images that reveal the sculptural beauty of airplane parts precisely arrayed on factory floors. The book also has plenty of posed, beautifully lit color photographs of workers on production lines.
The federal government’s Office of War Information and company photographers made the images in an effort to publicize the war effort. In Yenne’s book, they remind us that the work was not just an exercise in patriotism, but a giant step forward in transforming aviation into one of America’s biggest industries.
Comments (1)
Your claim that there is no carbon emission in the nuclear segment of the energy production forecasts denies the reality of the nuclear fuel cycle.
Uranium is widely distributed in the earth's crust but it is very diffuse. The industry to explore for ore, mine the ore, concentrate the nuclear fuel, machine it into fuel rods, and deliver it for use in reactors, and the necessary processing of the spent fuel and store it uses massive (non-nuclear) fuels. The constant need to retire aged plants, and build the replacements for decommissioned facilities requires enormous commitment from financial institutions as well as the nuclear exclusion laws only governments can provide.
Perhaps the hidden agenda of the nuclear proponents is the development of the fast breeder reactor industry and this needs to be carefully examined.
There are very compelling reasons why nuclear technology has not gotten the financial support of private developers. The economic analysis of nuclear power must be realistically assayed.
Posted by RICK VIERHUS on December 11,2008 | 04:24 PM