LOOMING DISASTER

LOOMING DISASTER
an estimated $1 billion. 1 Even those who were from more humble
means did not assail the wealthy.
On May 8, 2016, the seventy-first anniversary of V/E Day, we
celebrated the triumph of this promised land over Nazism, another
destructive form of disinformation. At the start of World War II in
1939, the armed forces of the U.S. were ranked as eighteenth in the
world, just ahead of the Netherlands. The U.S. Army had only 325
tanks, while Hitler had more than 2,000. The Army Air Corps, the
forerunner of the U.S. Air Force, had only 1,700 planes, mostly
fighters and trainers, while Hitler’s Luftwaffe had nearly 8,500
bombers and fighters. 2 Time magazine summed it up: “The U.S.
Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.” 3
A congressional commission – in which the legal counsel was
Soviet spy Alger Hiss – proposed nationalizing our military industry.
Fortunately, President Franklin Roosevelt was a capitalist himself. He
asked the “capitalist” industry to rearm the country, and appointed a
“capitalist” – William S. Knudsen, chairman of General Motors – as
chairman of a “capitalist” commission charged with coordinating
that huge task. “This country has been good to me, and I want to
pay it back,” Knudsen said. He was an immigrant like me.
Japanese admiral Yamamoto once famously said he was afraid the
attack on Pearl Harbor had “awakened a sleeping giant.” 4 Yamamoto
was right. That attack awakened capitalism’s spirit in America – a land
of opportunity unparalleled in all of history – which in the following
months created the most powerful military industry on earth, eventually
producing two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment used
in World War II. That included 96,000 tanks, 2,5 million trucks and
a half million jeeps, 286,000 warplanes, 8,800 naval vessels, 5,600
merchant ships, 2,6 million machine guns, and 42 billion rounds of
ammunition. That also included the atomic bomb, which ended the
war and brought the world into the nuclear age. 5
After World War II, that same spirit of capitalism generated an
unprecedented technological explosion that threw open the gates
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