Dear Editor:Now is the time – is history repeating itself? Although we entered World War II in December 1941 (with the attack on Pearl Harbor), the United States was building tanks, planes and armaments in 1940. Besides our military, our homefront rose to the challenge!From the book Freedom’s Forge by Arthur Herman, this is the story of our homefront during World War II.This is an epic story of American businessman, engineers, production managers, and workers; both male and female who built the awesome military in history: the Arsenal of Democracy that armed the allies and defeated the Axis powers. Working together, they produced two-thirds of all allied military equipment used in World War II. That included 86,000 tanks, 2.5 million trucks, one half million jeeps, 286,000 warplanes, 8,800 naval vessels, 5,600 merchant ships, 2.6 million machine guns, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition – not to mention the greatest superbomber of the war, the B29, and the atomic bomb.The book centers on two key figures, William Signius Knudsen and Henry Kaiser. Knudsen was a Danish immigrant who worked his way up from the shop floor to become president of General Motors.At President Roosevelt’s request, Knudsen left General Motors in 1940 to spearhead America’s rearmament, first as Director of the Office of Production Management and then to accept a Lieutenant General’s commission as head of industrial production for the U.S. Army (the first and only civilian in American history to receive this honor). By October 1940, Bill Knudsen could report that he had overseen some 920 contracts worth $3 billion for the Army and $6 billion for the Navy. More than 500 companies had been drawn in to make everything from ships and tanks and aircraft engines to eleven new gunpowder plants.Henry Kaiser became America’s most famous ship builder and the living symbol of the productive power of the Arsenal of Democracy with his launching of the Liberty Ships. A 1945 Roper Poll named Kaiser as the civilian most responsible for winning the war, right after Franklin Roosevelt.Freedom’s Forge vividly re-creates American industry’s finest hour, when the nation’s business elites put aside their pursuit of profits and set about saving the world. In doing so, they transformed America’s military into the biggest and most powerful in the world.William Knudsen wrote, “American ingenuity is at work day and night finding new methods of production. American industry was raised on a free land,
