Like many others, I am watching the Ken Burns documentary on World War II. The third episode shows a U.S. secret weapon without noting its importance. A photograph of a farm near Luverne, Minn., features an Allis Chalmers model WC tractor pulling a New Idea single-row corn picker. The WC was not a Sherman tank or B-24 bomber, but it helped win the war.
For millennia, wars were primarily decided by numbers of warriors. Leadership and discipline made a difference. Leonidis and his 300 Spartans could hold off thousands of Persians because of these factors.
Technology and management also played a role. A legion of Romans armed with short swords and organized into specialized ranks could defeat milling hordes of barbarians armed with sundry weapons.
But for a long time, manpower predominated. “God is on the side of the big battalions,” Napoleon and others famously said.
A nation’s productive base was less important. That ended with the U.S. Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War a few years later. The superior industrial base of the North made defeat of the Confederacy inevitable, even though Southern generalship was much better. By WWII, industrial capacity came to dominate everything else
The United States, with 131 million people, had a larger population than any other combatant except the Soviet Republic at 196 million. Eventually, over 14 million Americans served in the military, and 418,500 military personnel and civilians died. As terrible as those losses were, the number of deaths was relatively small, compared with other combatants: just under one-third of 1 percent of our population.
The principal reason the United States got through the war with so few deaths is that we substituted capital for labor more than any other country. Our country produced enormous numbers of ships, fighters, bombers tanks and other weapons. By 1944, the United States accounted for half of the world’s industrial output.
There were a number of reasons for that. We produce many raw materials ourselves. Our location in the Western Hemisphere spared U.S. industry from bombing. But we gained a critical edge from U.S. labor productivity that was higher than other countries and rising.
From before independence, the United States had been long on land and short on labor. We went from capital scarcity to relative capital abundance by the 1920s. And so we had lots of mills, machines and factories per worker.
High levels of literacy and basic skills also helped. The average U.S. worker had substantially more education than British or French workers and somewhat more than Germans.
Our ability to move labor from rural areas to urban industry without sacrificing food or fiber production was an additional advantage. That leads us to the Allis WC with the little corn picker.
While primitive by contemporary standards, in 1940 the United States led the world in agricultural mechanization. Over the course of the war, some 15 million Americans served in the armed forces. Even so, the civilian labor force grew by 17 percent. Workers in agriculture dropped from 9.5 to 8.5 million, yet total farm output burgeoned.
All combatant countries struggled to maintain farm output during the war. The United Kingdom had its famous “Land Army” of young urban women who went to work on British farms. Germany dragooned hundreds of thousands of Poles as forced farm laborers. Women and the aged struggled with little equipment on Soviet collective farms. All struggled to maintain pre-war production.
Life on U.S. farms in the 1940s still entailed much physical toil, but mechanization proceeded apace even after we entered the war. Harvesting of wheat and other small grains was semi-mechanized since the invention of the mechanical reaper a century earlier. The mechanical corn picker was very recent. Practical self-propelled combines only emerged in mid-war, when Massey Harris got special permission to build 500 of them for a special “Harvest Brigade” of custom harvesters. (While mechanical cotton pickers existed, the revolution in cotton harvesting would occur only after the war.)
The government’s War Production Board limited supplies of steel and other material to make farm machinery. All the major implement manufacturers produced war equipment. Nevertheless, we went from 1.6 million tractors in 1940 to 2.4 million in 1945. Most were in the 30 horsepower range like the Allis WC and were used on family-operated farms.
Overall U.S. crop output increased by 20 percent during the war. Corn went up by a third. Such productivity increases would come to haunt the country as farm surpluses and low commodity prices prevailed in the 1950s. But U.S. farm productivity helped win the war, because it freed up labor to produce war materiel. And our vast output of materiel saved the lives of U.S. soldiers and sailors.
© 2007 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.