War Production Board

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War Production Board

Agency overview
Formed
January 1942
Preceding agency
• Supply Priorities and Allocations Board
Dissolved
November 3, 1945
Superseding agency
• Civilian Production Board
Jurisdiction
United States Government
Headquarters
Washington D.C.
Agency executives
• Donald M. Nelson, Chairman, 1942–1944 • Julius A. Krug, Chairman, 1944–1945

The War Production Board (WPB) was an agency of the United States government that, for a few chaotic years, attempted to impose order on the sprawling, untamed beast of American industry during World War II. It was summoned into existence by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1942 through Executive Order 9024. [1] One imagines a puff of smoke and the faint smell of sulfur in the Oval Office. The WPB was tasked with supervising the nation's war production, a role it inherited from its less-than-successful predecessors, the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board and the Office of Production Management, which were unceremoniously absorbed. [2]

Its mandate was brutally simple: convert a nation obsessed with peacetime consumption into an arsenal. The WPB directed the jarring transition of companies from making consumer goods to fabricating the tools of war. It was given the unenviable power to allocate scarce materials, establish priorities in the labyrinthine distribution of materials and services, and flatly prohibit any production deemed "nonessential." [3] This meant it rationed commodities that civilians had come to see as birthrights: gasoline, heating oil, metals, rubber, paper, [4] and plastics. The agency was the bureaucratic hammer that reshaped the American economy, and it was dismantled almost exactly two months after the surrender of Japan in 1945, its functions passed on to the newly minted Civilian Production Administration.

Between 1942 and 1945, the WPB oversaw the production of an almost incomprehensible $183 billion worth of weapons and supplies—a figure that translates to roughly$ 2.52 trillion in 2024 dollars. [5] This industrial tidal wave accounted for about 40 percent of the entire world's output of munitions. For context, the UK, the USSR, and the other allies combined produced an additional 30 percent, while the Axis powers, for all their bluster, managed only the remaining 30 percent. A quarter of this American output was warplanes; another quarter was warships. And somehow, amidst this all-consuming effort, the civilian standard of living remained more or less level. [6] A miracle of logistics, or perhaps just proof that people can get by with fewer new toasters when the alternative is global fascism.

Organization

The first chairman to sit at the head of this bureaucratic behemoth was Donald Nelson, who held the post from 1942 to 1944. [7] He was later succeeded by Julius Albert Krug, who saw the board through its final days from 1944 until its dissolution.

The national WPB was a committee of predictable power players: the chair, the Secretaries of War, Navy, and Agriculture, the lieutenant general overseeing War Department procurement, the director of the Office of Price Administration, the Federal Loan Administrator, the chair of the Board of Economic Warfare, and the President's special assistant for the defense aid program. It was structured with divisions for advisory, policy-making, and progress-reporting—the holy trinity of any government agency determined to justify its own existence.

Less predictably, the WPB employed mathematicians. Their job was to construct and maintain staggeringly complex multilevel models of the resources required for the war effort. These weren't simple spreadsheets; they accounted for manufacturing defects, materials lost to the bottom of the ocean when ships were sunk, and all the other inconvenient variables of global conflict. After analyzing field reports that revealed systematic shortages—a recurring nightmare for any quartermaster—the mathematicians made a decision of beautiful, pragmatic absurdity: they simply told the board to increase all allocation requests by a factor of ten.

To extend its reach beyond the Beltway, the WPB managed 12 regional offices and operated 120 field offices across the country. These outposts worked in concert with state war production boards, which kept meticulous records on state-level war production facilities and, more importantly, helped local businesses navigate the bureaucratic maze to secure war contracts and loans.

The primary mission of the national WPB was the forced conversion of civilian industry into a war machine. It held the power of economic life and death, assigning priorities and allocating essential materials like steel, aluminum, and rubber. It prohibited what it deemed nonessential industrial production, which is why nylons and refrigerators became relics of a bygone era. It also controlled wages and prices, a necessary evil to stave off wartime inflation. All of this was wrapped in a relentless campaign of patriotic propaganda, urging citizens to "give your scrap metal and help Oklahoma boys save our way of life." [8] The agency initiated nationwide events like scrap metal drives, which were executed at the local level with surprising fervor. A national drive in October 1942, for instance, yielded an average of nearly 82 pounds (37 kg) of scrap per American citizen, proving that people will part with almost anything if you ask them nicely and remind them of their mortality. [8]

The board's orders had far-reaching consequences. WPB order M-9-C, for example, dealt with the conservation of copper. In May 1942, the entertainment trade paper The Film Daily dutifully reported that this order would halt the production of new motion picture sound and projection equipment, though it graciously allowed for the delivery of units that had already been manufactured. [9] Even Hollywood had to do its part.

Effects

The impact of the WPB and the nation's factories was nothing short of a seismic industrial shift. Military aircraft production, which stood at a modest 6,000 planes in 1940, skyrocketed to 85,000 in 1943. The transformation was absolute. Factories that once wove silk ribbons were now producing parachutes. Automobile factories retooled their assembly lines to build tanks. Typewriter companies began manufacturing rifles, undergarment manufacturers sewed mosquito netting, and in a particularly surreal turn, a rollercoaster manufacturer converted its operations to produce bomber repair platforms. [8] The WPB's role was to be the grand conductor of this cacophonous orchestra, ensuring that each factory received the precise materials it needed to produce the maximum amount of war goods in the minimum amount of time.

Without American production the Allies could never have won the war.

— Joseph Stalin during a dinner at the Tehran Conference, 1943 [10]

Despite these successes, Donald Nelson's tenure was plagued by extensive criticism from the military. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin described him as "habitually indecisive," a fatal flaw in a man tasked with making decisions that could alter the course of the war. Nelson struggled to reconcile the conflicting, often hysterical, requests from various agencies. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was a particularly harsh critic, regularly condemning Nelson for his "inability to take charge." The friction with Robert P. Patterson of the War Department was legendary. Patterson consistently and forcefully argued that civilian needs should be relegated to the lowest priority, as military supplies were the only thing that mattered for victory. It was an argument that, unsurprisingly, usually prevailed. [11] The situation grew so tense that in February 1943, Roosevelt invited financier Bernard Baruch to replace Nelson as the head of the WPB. However, presidential advisor Harry Hopkins, a master of palace intrigue, persuaded him to reverse the decision, and Nelson, for a time, remained. [12] [13] [14]

From 1942 to 1945, the WPB ultimately directed the production of $185 billion in armaments and supplies (equivalent to$ 2.55 trillion in 2024 [5]). Once the war concluded, most production restrictions were swiftly lifted. The WPB was officially abolished on November 3, 1945, with its remaining functions handed over to the Civilian Production Administration. [ citation needed ]

Members

Some of the individuals who served on the board included:

William Beverly Murphy, president and CEO of Campbell Soup Company
Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric
T. S. Fitch, president and CEO of Washington Steel Corporation
Faustin Johnson Solon, a chair of the War Production Board, representing O-I Glass
Irving Brown, representing the American Federation of Labor [15]
Matthew M. Fox, vice president of Universal Pictures

Civilian Production Administration

On October 4, 1945, Executive Order 9638 formally created the Civilian Production Administration and terminated the War Production Board. [16] The new Civilian Production Board was subsequently consolidated with other agencies to form the Office of Temporary Controls, an entity nestled within the Office for Emergency Management of the executive office of the president. This office itself had been established under the authority of the Reorganization Act of 1939. [17] A later executive order provided for a Temporary Controls Administrator, appointed by the president, to head the Office of Temporary Controls. This administrator was vested with, among other things, the functions of the Price Administrator, tidying up the last vestiges of wartime economic oversight. [18]

Notes

^ Executive Order 9024 – Establishing the War Production Board (January 16, 1942)
^ Herman 2012, pp. 164–65.
^ Herman 2012, pp. 164–65, 193–94, 197–99.
^ Butler, Pierce, ed. (1945). "War and the book trade". Books and libraries in wartime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 88–104. OCLC 1349001.
^ a b Johnston, Louis; Williamson, Samuel H. (2023). "What Was the U.S. GDP Then?". MeasuringWorth. Retrieved November 30, 2023. United States Gross Domestic Product deflator figures follow the MeasuringWorth series.
^ Industrial Mobilization for War: History of the War Production Board and Predecessor Agencies: 1940–1945. United States Bureau of Demobilization, Civilian Production Administration. 1947. pp. 961–62. hdl:2027/uiug.30112041826683.
^ Herman 2012, pp. 80, 164–65, 194–99.
^ a b c "War Production Board". Archived from the original on November 29, 2009. Retrieved October 10, 2009.
^ "No More Copper for New Motion Picture Equipment". The Film Daily. New York. May 19, 1942. pp. 1, 6. Retrieved June 5, 2016.
^ One War Won, TIME, December 13, 1943
^ Keith E. Eiler, Mobilizing America: Robert P. Patterson and the War Effort, 1940–1945 (1997) pp, 405–406.
^ Bernard M. Baruch, The public years (1960) pp 310–320.
^ Goodwin, Doris Kearns (1994). No Ordinary Time. Simon & Schuster. pp. 181–82. ISBN 978-0684804484.
^ Arthus Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, (2012). pp. 192–95, 206–07, 247.
^ Fowler, Glen (February 11, 1989). "Irving Brown, 77, U.S. Specialist On International Labor Movement". New York Times. Retrieved September 19, 2012.
^ Executive Order 9638 – Creating the Civilian Production Administration and Terminating the War Production Board (October 4, 1945)
^ Reorganization Act of 1939, Pub. L. 76–19, 53 Stat. 561, enacted April 3, 1939
^ Executive Order 9809 – Providing for the Disposition of Certain War Agencies (December 12, 1946)

Selected publications

Studies in industrial price control by United States Office of Temporary Controls. U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1947
Problems in price control: legal phases by United States Office of Temporary Controls. U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1947
Problems in price control by United States Office of Temporary Controls. U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1948
The beginnings of OPA by United States Office of Temporary Controls. Office of Temporary Controls, Office of Price Administration, 1947
Guaranteed wages by United States Office of Temporary Controls. U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1947

War Production Board