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

DerWonderWaffles

Where did most of the mills, factories, refineries and assembly lines come from in the United States? What region of the United States shared more than a vast majority of their industry? For planes, trucks, tanks, artillery small arms, etc. etc...

Which crucial cities were most responsible for the war effort? How much percent did cities such as Detroit, Chicago, New York did industry come out of here? Does anybody know of documents that describe for the industry of the United States during the Second World War? I'm really interested in understanding the economics of World War 2 and would like to use the US economics and industrialization to compare to other countries(I know the US had outclassed everyone else so bad, but would like to see where the US succeeded, where the others had not gotten as far).

Does anyone know how many factories there were approx. on WW2? Any factories in general, I know the US industry was able to convert many factories to war production. For example, where a significant amount of factories or oil fields came from.
 

Carl Schwamberger

The short answer is there was no single region or knode. Perhaps the densest area extended from the north eastern & north central Atlantic states - westward around the Great Lakes & the Ohio River basin & west to the central Mississippi. But, to call this are a concentration is to misunderstand the size of the area.

Another industrial area was based on the petroleum industry & ranges across Texans & Oklahoma & eastwards to Louisiana. The Texas & Louisiana coast was also a ship building region. California was a robust industrial nation in its own right, as was the coastal area of Oregon & Washington states. Spotted across the Great Plains were industrial cities & a smaller number in the south eastern states.

DerWonderWaffles said:
Any information as to how much percent Detroit provided to the production of the entire war effort.
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The city itself & its suburbs? Perhaps 5%. The region arching from southern Michigan, along south shore of Lake Erie that included industrial cities like Toledo, Cleveland, had a larger portion. Detroit & the adjacent cities included the flagship factories of the large automotive companies & their corporate HQ, but was just one local knode in a web of industrial cities that covered a area rivaling western Europe in square kilometers. General Motors industrial plant extended far across the Midwest with outlying plants & subsidiaries across the continent. It was the same for Ford, or Chrysler. Allison did not make its engines in a single Michigan plant. Components were made in literally dozens of factories & as demand increased assembled in multiple locations.

The NE area I described earlier, from the NE/N central states & west between the Great Lakes & Ohio River basin, perhaps 20% of the area of the US contained possibly 50% of the industrial capacity in 1940. That changed appreciably as the industrial plant was expanded across the other states. From 1939 to 1944 the aircraft building capacity went from around 5,000 to 100,000 a year. Most of the new capacity was built west of the Mississippi River from St Louis to California. Tho Some southern states had large new aircraft factories built as well.
 
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Thomas1195

Banned
Well, for electrical and electronic, maybe around New York and NE, where GE was headquarterd. Automotive, Detroit and some regions and Midwest. Steel and machinery, it would be Pittsburgh, Pensylvania (Ohio region). Massachusetts and New England were also major industrial provinces. Shipbuilding was located in the NE coast.
 

Carl Schwamberger

DerWonderWaffles said:
...
Does anybody know of documents that describe for the industry of the United States during the Second World War? I'm really interested in understanding the economics of World War 2
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A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II: Maury Klein

... and would like to use the US economics and industrialization to compare to other countries (I know the US had outclassed everyone else so bad, but would like to see where the US succeeded, where the others had not gotten as far). ....
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For that you need to reach far back to the early 19th Century & study how the industrial development came over a period of over 13-14 decades.
 
Driftless

Driftless

Donor
Thomas1195 said:
Well, for electrical and electronic, maybe around New York and NE, where GE was headquarterd. Automotive, Detroit and some regions and Midwest. Steel and machinery, it would be Pittsburgh, Pensylvania (Ohio region). Massachusetts and New England were also major industrial provinces. Shipbuilding was located in the NE coast.
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To be sure, most ship building was done on the "outer" coasts, but there was plenty of building done on the Great Lakes as well. Manitowoc Shipbuilding was just one of the naval yards on the Great Lakes. Many smaller warships and cargo craft were built on each of those shores.
 

Carl Schwamberger

longtimelurkerinMD said:
From an American Society of Metals article have read that Pittsburgh, PA singlehandedly produced more steel than the entire axis combined.
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John Ellisis 'Brute Force' has a lot of charts and tables comparing industrial and weapons output of the assorted nations. Its a useful reference & a good companion volume to Toozes analysis of German industrial capability.
 

GeneralBoomstick

Most of the world's iron ore came from the iron range in Minnesota during that period too. This was largely due to the literal mountains of high grade iron ore and remained such a larger portion of the world's production until the hematite ran out.
 
Driftless

Driftless

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GeneralBoomstick said:
Most of the world's iron ore came from the iron range in Minnesota during that period too. This was largely due to the literal mountains of high grade iron ore and remained such a larger portion of the world's production until the hematite ran out.
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The Mesabi, Vemillion, Gunflint, and Cuyuna ranges
 

longtimelurkerinMD

I want to learn said:
I think Bethlehem steel near Allentown Pennsylvania produced a large amount of the armor for USN warships.
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And naval guns to - 8" ISTR. Went into and toured National Forge in the early 2000's up in Irvine, PA - another place that made 8" guns. At the time they were making a lot of perpetrator bombs - derived from 8" gun barrels if I remember.
Place looked like a shell magazine on a ship. There's literally something elemental about seeing a raw hot wad of steel the size of a pick-up being hot pounded. A history/gamer friend and I coined the term "The Church of 1945" from talking about this kind of stuff.
Like being able to make a pontoon bridge of CVL's and CVE's from GB to Europe :cool:.
 

Usili

GeneralBoomstick said:
Most of the world's iron ore came from the iron range in Minnesota during that period too. This was largely due to the literal mountains of high grade iron ore and remained such a larger portion of the world's production until the hematite ran out.
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If I recall, the US pretty much exhausted it [the Iron Range] from WWII and Korea just from how much was utilized.
 
Driftless

Driftless

Donor
Usili said:
If I recall, the US pretty much exhausted it [the Iron Range] from WWII and Korea just from how much was utilized.
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The high quality hematite ore is mostly gone, but they are still mining smaller volumes of lower grade taconite, much of which goes to China
 

CalBear

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Thomas1195 said:
Well, for electrical and electronic, maybe around New York and NE, where GE was headquarterd. Automotive, Detroit and some regions and Midwest. Steel and machinery, it would be Pittsburgh, Pensylvania (Ohio region). Massachusetts and New England were also major industrial provinces. Shipbuilding was located in the NE coast.
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That was the set-up prior to the war.

Kaiser shipyards (established in 1939, especially to produce tonnage for the U.S. Maritime Commission) located on the West Coast produced 787 ships, including the entire Casablanca class CVE (50 ships). The Todd Pacific Yard across the Sound built 19 Commencement Bay class CVE. A large number of DD, DDE and LST were also constructed on the West Coast.
 

Locke01

Driftless said:
To be sure, most ship building was done on the "outer" coasts, but there was plenty of building done on the Great Lakes as well. Manitowoc Shipbuilding was just one of the naval yards on the Great Lakes. Many smaller warships and cargo craft were built on each of those shores.
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Yup. Which actually involved a certain amount of diplomatic finessing in terms of working around certain legal limitations on such on account of treaties dating to the War of 1812 which more or less demilitarized the Great Lakes region in terms of naval capacity. Irony at work.
 
Wallet

Wallet

Banned
All 48 states, even states that never had industry before

-weapons testing in Nevada and New Mexico
-plane production in Washington state
-food production in Georgia
-electricity and urnaiumn in Tennessee
-ship building on the gulf

Plus all the factories and farms working full speed
 

Nick P

Donor
Locke01 said:
Yup. Which actually involved a certain amount of diplomatic finessing in terms of working around certain legal limitations on such on account of treaties dating to the War of 1812 which more or less demilitarized the Great Lakes region in terms of naval capacity. Irony at work.
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Don't overlook the "Corn Belt Fleet" of the US Navy's only coal-fired paddle-steamer aircraft carriers, USS Sable and Wolverine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Wolverine_(IX-64) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Sable_(IX-81)
 
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