Built for War

A decisive account of how Franklin D. Roosevelt used federal power and taxpayer capital to build the industrial machine that won World War II—before the first American shot was fired.

When France fell to Germany in the summer of 1940, the United States lacked the factories, shipyards, and industrial facilities needed to fight a global war. Built for War examines how the United States created the industrial foundation required not just to fight but to win a global war. Beginning with the crisis sparked by the German victories of 1940, author David Rigby traces how President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a network of government agencies moved to expand the nation’s productive capacity long before Pearl Harbor. 

Federal agencies including the Defense Plant Corporation, the War Department, the Navy Department, and the Maritime Commission oversaw the construction of aircraft factories, ordnance works, synthetic rubber facilities, aluminum smelters, and giant shipyards on a scale never seen in the United States. These facilities produced the equipment, munitions, ships, and aircraft that sustained Allied operations in Europe and the Pacific. Rigby describes aircraft factories with mile-long assembly lines, Liberty Ships and tankers being launched in rapid succession from new government-owned shipyards on all three coasts, and sprawling munitions complexes spread across thousands of acres.  

At the center of the wartime construction effort were talented government bureaucrats like Clifford Durr, William Jeffers, James Forrestal, and others who determined where taxpayer-financed factories would be built and which companies would operate them. Drawing on government records, wartime studies, and contemporary accounts, Rigby proves that many industrial facilities most closely associated with the Arsenal of Democracy—including famous aircraft factories and shipyards operated by private companies—were financed and owned by the federal government. 

The wartime factory building program reshaped communities across the country. Farmers lost land through eminent domain proceedings, isolated rural areas became centers of military production almost overnight, and millions of workers migrated to new defense hubs in search of jobs. The industrial expansion that supplied the war effort transformed the American landscape and economy for decades after the fighting ended. 

From the construction of new munitions plants in 1940 and 1941 to the massive output that supplied Allied armies around the world, Built for War presents a history of the institutions, policies, and infrastructure behind American production. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on how the United States mobilized for total war and how the Arsenal of Democracy was actually built.