Flexibility and Mass Production at War: Aircraft Manufacture in Britain, the United States, and Germany, 1939–1945

Abstract

Flexibility and Mass Production at War: Aircraft Manufacture in Britain, the United States, and Germany, 1939-1945 JONATHAN ZEITLIN The relationship between military enterprise and mass production is a central theme in the history of technology.1 Military demand, military finance, and military ideology, it is widely agreed, provided a crucial stimulus for the technological breakthroughs necessary for mass pro­ duction. The origins of the “American system of manufactures” during the 1830s and 1840s, as Merritt Roe Smith has shown, lay in the U.S. Army’s determined quest for a rifle with interchangeable parts, itself inspired by the earlier visions and experiments of military engineers in 18th-century France.2 During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as David Hounshell has demonstrated, American industrialists successfully adapted the techniques of “armory practice”—notably, sequential manufacture of interchangeable parts using special-purpose machinery, jigs, fixtures, and gauges—to high-volume production oflight, standardDr . Zeitlin, associate professor of history and industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, is completing a book on flexibility and mass production in the British metalworking industries, 1830-1990, with support from the Guggenheim Foun­ dation and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He is grateful to the following friends and colleagues for generous provision of advice, comments on previous drafts, research materials, and unpublished manuscripts: Herrick Chapman, David Edgerton, John Guilmartin, Howell Harris, Gary Herrigel, Paul Hirst, I. B. Holley, Jr., David Hounshell, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ned Lorenz, Eric Schatzberg, Jim Tomlinson, and Jacob Vander Meulen. The usual disclaimers apply. 'For a general survey, see Merritt Roe Smith, “Introduction,” in Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (Cam­ bridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 1-38. ’Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), and “Army Ordnance and the ‘American System’ of Manufacturing, 1815-1861,” in Smith, ed., pp. 39-86; Ken Alder, “Terror and Technocracy: The French Origins of Interchange­ able Parts Manufacturing” (paper presented at the Society for the History of Technology meeting, Uppsala, Sweden, August 16-20, 1992). For a dissenting view that argues for the independent origins of the American system in the private sector, see Donald R. Hoke, Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector (New York, 1990).© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3601 -0002$01.00 46 Flexibility and Mass Production at War 47 ized equipment such as sewing machines, typewriters, agricultural implements, bicycles, and ultimately automobiles.3 Both military and economic historians also concur that the resulting capacity of civilian firms to manufacture large numbers of standardized weapons became increasingly central to the conduct of industrialized warfare, while the great munitions drives of World War I in particular played a key part in diffusing mass-production methods from the United States to other combatant powers such as Britain, France, and Germany.4 World War II, by all accounts, marks the apogee of this symbiosis between mass production and military prowess. For the Allied victory surely de­ pended, as contemporaries themselves believed, on the ability of American (and Soviet) mass-production industry to turn out military aircraft, tanks, and other weapons systems in unprecedented quantities.5 Historians of technology are well aware that international military rivalries have often centered on complex weapons systems such as naval battleships produced to customer specifications in small batches or single units using skill-intensive methods. And they have likewise docu­ mented the importance of military objectives and material support for the development of flexible, general-purpose technologies such as computers and numerically controlled machine tools.6 Yet the prevailing view has been that the military’s overriding concern with what Roe Smith calls “uniformity and order” has shaped and reinforced two central premises of modern industrial management: control and standardization. Insofar as military procurement objectives are recognized to diverge from the mass-production model—for ex­ ample, by emphasizing performance over costs—this has often been seen as an institutional distortion of normal economic processes that inhibits defense contractors from competing successfully in civilian product markets. For contemporary critics of the “baroque” technolo- 'David...