In "Freedom's Forge," U.S. Industry as War Hero - Review ARTHUR HERMAN has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history's memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II. Dr. Herman, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a writer of popular histories, says he believes that American business has never gotten its due. He contends that it won the war but lost "the narrative." Business was denigrated by envious New Dealers, he says, and upstaged by the Keynesian focus on the war years" $300 billion in deficit spending that finally ended the Great Depression. The author is avowedly pro-business, but you don't have to share that perspective to enjoy "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II" (Random House, $28). It is indeed a rarely told industrial saga, rich with particulars of the growing pains and eventual triumphs of American industry as it exploded from negligible arms output to an arsenal of weaponry then unmatched in human history. Strange to our eye, big business in that day was still dominated by willful, roll-up-the-sleeves men who built companies from the ground up. Dr. Herman centers on two of the most remarkable of these self-made men: William S. Knudsen and Henry J. Kaiser. Mr. Knudsen was a raw young Danish immigrant, handy with his fists, who worked his way from the shop floor to become Henry Ford's production ace. Wearying of Mr. Ford's crankiness, he quit and proceeded to build General Motors into an even greater Goliath than Ford. In May 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him to spearhead industrial mobilization, Mr. Knudsen was at the pinnacle of American industry. He agreed without quibble, saying he wished only to repay the nation for his success. He had mastered Detroit's discovery: the enormous power of using precisely tooled, interchangeable parts to break down complex manufacturing into far simpler steps. He also knew everyone who was anyone in industry. When he urgently needed a thousand tanks a month, his way was to call up K. T. Keller, Chrysler's president. Can you do it? The answer was, "Sure." For the engines, he phoned Jack Reese at Continental Motors, who welcomed the business. For welding heavy steel plates, never before done with tanks, it was Bill Smith at A. O. Smith. In that way, and well before Pearl Harbor, Mr. Knudsen enlisted the entire auto industry, even persuading it to free capacity by giving up its annual model changeover. He believed that only big business had the expertise and sheer size to get the job done - and that business needed to make money. As Dr. Herman notes, Adam Smith would have been pleased. But Mr. Knudsen was politically indifferent, if not naïve. Roosevelt gave him little authority beyond the power to exhort and orchestrate. In a year and a half, he did yeoman's work to begin mobilization, but was ground down by Washington politics. After Pearl Harbor, when Roosevelt was free to reorganize for outright war, Mr. Knudsen, with his volunteer philosophy, was out, his office replaced by a War Production Board with greater authority. He was faulted in the press as having done too little, but, in fact, the armaments makers were on their way. Dr. Herman seems to believe that zealous New Dealers and fractious labor unions were the enemy here. He writes that after Mr. Knudsen was gone as mobilization chief: "The New Dealers thought they had won. They were too late. America was indeed in production now, with 25,000 prime contractors and 120,000 subcontractors making products they had never dreamed of making, and thousands more to come. And nothing the people in Washington or the Axis could do now would stem the tide. Unlike Mr. Knudsen, Mr. Kaiser, a politically astute Democrat, enjoyed Roosevelt's favor. A self-made construction magnate, he understood the brute force of thousands of men pouring millions of yards of concrete, creating huge structures like Hoover Dam. Where Mr. Knudsen was best of the manager's breed, Mr. Kaiser was an insatiable empire builder. As such, he was ideal to lead the effort that became one of World War II's most unlikely successes: the ugly, ungainly Liberty ship. Liberty ships were desperately needed to keep Britain resupplied. They were brilliantly designed to be just good enough, indeed expendable, and simple enough for novice shipbuilders. They were bare-bones, with no electricity or running water for their crews. A consortium led by Mr. Kaiser jumped at the job, first building the shipyards and then the ships. On mud flats on the east side of San Francisco Bay, his crews had a yard running within weeks; it was later renowned as his Richmond No. 1 yard. By mid-1941, Dr. Herman writes, some 4,000 employees were at work there; by the end of 1942, the number had grown to 80,000. Some 2,700 Liberty ships were built; they kept not only Britain but also Russia in the war. The first ships took seven or eight months, but with novel and relentless reliance on piecing together prefabricated sections, Mr. Kaiser hammered down the shipyard time to 10 days. Once, going all-out, he built and launched a ship in less than five. The pace of change all across America was staggering. By the end of 1942, the author says, three million women were working in a war industry, up from barely 80,000 six months after Pearl Harbor. In due course, America's arsenal turned out two-thirds of the Allies" total war needs, an astonishing outpouring of aircraft carriers, battleships, destroyers, submarines, bombers, tanks, artillery pieces, trucks, jeeps, machine guns and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. Yet America had done all this while remaining the least mobilized of all the belligerents. In percentage terms, fewer men had gone off to fight, and fewer women had taken factory jobs. The output of civilian goods was larger for every war year than it had been in 1939. Like the war itself, "Freedom's Forge" is a sprawling affair. As it faithfully recounts the travails of the M3 tank and other weapons long forgotten, it also numbs with repeated recitations of so many ships, airplanes, tanks, cannons and machine guns produced. It is much better when it zeros in on specific cases, like that headlong scramble to produce the Liberty ships or the staggering efforts to build, revise and deploy the endlessly complex B-29 bomber. Taken together, these often-chaotic industrial efforts were indeed monumental - and it is still hard today to grasp such a breathtaking national achievement.