Where was most of the US industrial capacity during World War 2?

You could really write a treatise on the subject; the story is really one of the history of industrialization in the US from circa 1870 on up to the war and involves the location of natural resources like coal and iron ore and the placement of ports and railroads. It should also be noted that significant new capacity was built during the war as well. Ford's Willow Run plant outside Detroit (it built B-25s) was built from scratch in 1942 and was the largest industrial manufacturing facility in the world; current I-94 west from Detroit to Ypsilanti was built so workers could get there. Aircraft plants were built at Wichita, KS and Oklahoma City; Kaiser built shipyards on the West Coast. What made it all go was the production of steel, centered in Pittsburgh, but with major facilities in Youngstown, Birmingham, AL, Allentown and Gary, IN. Iron ore came from the Iron Range in Minnesota and was transported on the Great Lakes directly to the plants (why Gary was built) or to Cleveland and other ports for rail transport. Much of the auto industry, which was centered in Detroit but had assembly plants from coast to coast and parts suppliers all over the place, was converted to other forms of war production. Tanks, aircraft, military vehicles and other forms of materiel came out of what had been auto plants. The conversion of the US economy to war production was the one time in US history where it had a command economy, which was dedicated completely to producing war materiel. There was really no corner of the economy which was not affected, from heavy industry, to timber, to energy, to textiles and clothing manufacture, to agriculture. It was total economic commitment of all sectors of the US economy.
 
National Cash Register Company in Cleveland Ohio built the Turing designed decryption machines for the Brits. IBM built both decryption machines & encryption machines for the US, as well as fire control computers. IBMs overflow was subcontracted to companies like Singer. Back in 1984 I took a look at a 4.7" mortar company of the S Korean Army, Their mortar tubes were marked as built by the Whirlpool Corp in 1945.


You could really write a treatise on the subject; the story is really one of the history of industrialization in the US from circa 1870 on up to the war and involves the location of natural resources like coal and iron ore and the placement of ports and railroads. It should also be noted that significant new capacity was built during the war as well. ....

The ability to create so much new manufactoring plant in these regions was based on a already robust infrastructure of small local industry. ALCOAs decision circa 1939 to build the largest aluminum extrusion plant in the US on empty fields outside a small Midwestern town was based on the existance of water, electrical, and rail service to the site. Decades earlier local businessmen had built the infrastructure 12+ square mile industrial development that was larger than the adjacent town. Hundreds of similar developed and partially developed sites lay on the edge on as many cities. Those had a existing layer of small welding and metal fabrication, machine tool shops, lumber mills, construction companies to use as a starting point for adding industrial plant.

Kleins book 'A Call to Arms' illustrates how the centrally planned war economy of 1942-44 was executed through a decentralized & expoentially expanding series of subcontracts extending downwards and outwards from giants like Kaiser or GM to small shops in Kokomo, Bowlingreen, Billings, National City, Kirkland...
 

Delta Force

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Here's a map of where steel production increased, although it doesn't show where it started from:

1-2-BF7-25-ExplorePAHistory-a0j8l1-a_349.jpg
 
The Glenn L. Martin Bomber Plant near Omaha, Nebraska was one of the main production centre for the B-29 (including Enola Gay). Before that, they built B-26s.

I mean, if freaking Omaha was producing one of the heaviest bombers of the war in significant numbers, you can imagine how spread out the War Industry was.
 

Delta Force

Banned
The Glenn L. Martin Bomber Plant near Omaha, Nebraska was one of the main production centre for the B-29 (including Enola Gay). Before that, they built B-26s.

I mean, if freaking Omaha was producing one of the heaviest bombers of the war in significant numbers, you can imagine how spread out the War Industry was.

The Dodge Chicago Plant, the largest building up to that time, was built in Chicago to produce engines for the B-29 bomber. It was later purchased by Preston Tucker for his Tucker Car Corporation and would have been used to produce most of the components for the Tucker 48 (also known as the Tucker Torpedo) as a kind of 1940s Gigafactory. The building was so massive that it later become home to several automobile companies, and then 2/3rds of it became a Tootsie Roll factory while the other 1/3rd was torn down and the Ford City Mall was built in its place (the larges enclosed mall in Chicago outside the city proper).
 
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