A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II

by Maury Klein

Hardcover, 2013

Status

Available

Call number

D769 .K54

Genres

Publication

Bloomsbury Press (2013), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 912 pages

Description

"The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents-and to do so it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts.The Axis powers might have fielded better trained soldiers, better weapons, better tanks and aircraft. But they could not match American productivity. America buried its enemies in aircraft, ships, tanks, and guns; in this sense, American industry, and American workers, won World War II. The scale of effort was titanic, and the result historic. Not only did it determine the outcome of the war, but it transformed the American economy and society. Maury Klein's A Call to Arms is the definitive narrative history of this epic struggle, told by one of America's greatest historians of business and economics, and renders the transformation of America with a depth and vividness never available before"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Schmerguls

This massive book was created by examining magazines, diaries, and memoirs telling of the events here in the USA during the years 1939 through 1945. Some of the detail could have been omitted but much is full of interest to one such as myself who lived through those years as a high schooler avidly

caought up in everything pertaining to the war. There is little effort to assess the events retrospectively, but one gets a good idea of what things were like as the months and years went on. The author's views on the political events of those years found me approving of those views. And it helped to know that the end of the book would and did show total victory for the good guys.

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LibraryThing member VGAHarris

This is information by the pound. If you are looking for the definitive coverage of World W. II mobilization, this is certainly it. Unfortunately you get lost in the morass of agencies, who ran what, and all the internecine rivalries in the competition for resources and finances. It certainly

demonstrates that converting the U.S. to be the "arsenal of democracy" was hardly a coherent or patriotic effort, despite all the post-war propaganda to the contrary.

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LibraryThing member neddludd

Note: I only read half of this title. FDR coined the phrase "the arsenal of democracy," and this vast work focuses on the period 1939-1945. At the beginning, the U.S. was totally unprepared for modern warfare. FDR, charting a path between an obstructionist, isolationist Congress, and his belief

that the U.S. must become a world leader in defending democracy, took baby steps toward creating what we now know as the military-industrial complex. From his first speech in Congress and "Fireside Chat" (alerting the nation to the dangers posed by fascism), it took two-to-three years of procrastination, ineptitude, and resistance before U.S. industry began churning out war supplies. Klein, who clearly believes that more is more, takes readers to every meeting ever held on the topic, every Congressional vote, every attempt by the private sector to avoid the debacle they had suffered following WWI, when so many arms factories were destroyed once the threat had been resolved. FDR, a notoriously bad administrator, kept creating an alphabet soup of agencies seeking to rationalize the transformation of a peacetime economy to a wartime economy. The book became fatiguing and boring to be privy to every decision, every committee meeting, every personality in the transformation. Maybe Klein was paid by the word; the book runs to over 800 pages.

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