In WW2 the US built 3 Liberty ships every 2 days over a four year period

[lostnfound]

Not to mention spooling up fast to build 300,000 airplanes. And 17 aircraft carriers. And 86,000 tanks.

Luckily, those needs must have been less complicated than mass-producing cotton swabs and N95 masks.

Watched the new Tom Hanks movie, Greyhound, which I definitely enjoyed. Got us to thinking about destroyers, Liberty ships, and the incredible Can-do presidents we had.

Can-Do Presidents back then. President Do-do now.

You can pronounce that — “President Do-do” — however you like. It works either way.

[3Hotdogs]

1. I recall, after WW2, there were about 20 Liberty Ships

docked in the Hudson River, by Haverstraw, N.Y. They were later sold for scrap.

[Ilsa]

2. If you get a chance, watch

Midway, from 2019. It's playing on HBO this month.

It's a really well-told recreation, I think. Good acting. The pilots of the Enterprise and other carriers are heroes. I think they'd be turning over in their graves if they could see the corruption in our government now.

[flying rabbit]

6. +1

Saw it today. Enjoyable movie, and they paid attention to a lot of historical details.

[Ilsa]

14. The movie with

Charleton Heston gave tribute to lots of pilots whose names grace practice flying fields and streets on naval air stations, etc. I believe Heston's role was entirely made up.

[lostnfound]

11. It was a good movie

Put tears In my eyes to see the dedication at the end, “This film is dedicated to the Americans and Japanese who fought at Midway.” I feel a great kinship with Japan and have an interest in Japanese history. Their 1932-1945 history is a cautionary story for any country in which power is in the hands of ideologues and corrupt moneymen, and a naive public (naive at the time, not now) is duped or frightened into a common delusion or cult mentality.

See any parallels in that description?

Then they became our close allies, yet peace-advocates, for 75 years.

[jmg257]

3. And had 10 major contractors and lots of small ones build

Build over 6 million m1 carbines.

And we here and now have to sew our own pandemic masks out of t-shirts.

Pitiful.

[abqtommy]

4. WWII was a perfect storm of competent/extraordinary leadership and responsive

constituents/workers.It's no wonder we call that time "The Greatest Generation"!

[lostnfound]

12. We need to resurrect some of those values

The grounded resourcefulness of swaths of American citizenry in the 1930s were well suited to the challenges. Perhaps the misery of the Great Depression had plowed the ground to grow such leaders.

[Ilsa]

15. There are too many "me me me" spoiled

brats in the nation now that think hardship is having internet speed too slow to stream a movie. They won't wear masks to help protect the person next to them in line.

[lostnfound]

16. I'm spoiled rotten, especially when it comes to internet hardships...but I believe in love.

I wear a mask because I was taught to have love in my heart for all my brothers and sisters. The whole human race. That was my catholic upbringing.

[brush]

5. In FDR we had great leadership who set the example for the nation...

to follow and work towards our goal. Now we have no national leadership in the WH or the Senate.

In fact, we have the worse president ever at the worse time ever.

[Wednesdays]

7. And Americans weren't afraid to sacrifice a little.

Namely, the rationing/scrap drives of the time.



There weren't packs of crazies toting guns at rubber collections screaming, "No one's gonna take mah TAHRS! 'Cuz FREEDOM!!"

[Lancero]

8. Fun fact, but most of those scrap drives were more for morale/psychological reasons than materials.

Scrap rubber, since you mentioned that one, was extremely difficult and costly to reprocess into a usuable form. Natural rubber is chemically complex, and each 'recycled' type of rubber item had additional additives to it for its own purposes that made it even more difficult to reprocess. And even after being reprocessed, the rubber was low quality.

For rubber, their drives were more to drive home the fact that you're not likely going to be buying anything made with it for the foreseeable future.

In modern times, see plastic. It's another pain in the ass to recycle item that is pushed as recyclable for psychological reasons.

[Lancero]

9. It's pretty easy to get to that point when you have years of forewarning, and minimal risk.

It's easy to point to WWII and say 'look, economy so easy to do!', but that's ignoring that the deck was stacked entirely in our favor. We had years forewarning. We were far enough away that our 'core' infrastructure was never in any danger. We had a strong economy and manufacturing base because, due to distance, we didn't have to go through rebuilding post-WWI - Rather, we pretty much rebuilt everyone elses economy.

And, in a more pessimistic light... We also didn't have as many worker protections in those days as we do now, and far fewer environmental protections. It's rather easy to scale up production when the workers and the environment are, at best, secondary concerns.

As the the Liberty ships themselves, their quality wasn't exactly 'good', even by the standards back then. Many of them suffered from severe deck and hull cracking issues - A small number of them got these issues so bad that they just up and broke in half. Still though, these flaws were considered acceptable - The goal wasn't to create a 'quality' ship, the goal was to create a ship that could be cheaply and rapidly replaced when they were inevitably sunk by U-Boats. Basically, the ship was designed from the ground up to be expendable.

[lostnfound]

13. Point still holds. Quantity of supplies should not be an issue for such simple things as masks

Of course, the parallel is that inferior boats sacrificed some loves, and so would inferior N95 masks. But I don’t see any effort that is commensurate with the challenge.

[gratuitous]

10. But instead of national leadership like FDR, we have DJT

The really amazing effort of the American people from March through May was utterly wasted by the Trump administration. We bought them three months of time, and that dumbass squandered it in endless nontroversies over masks and testing and other pointless squabbles. Tens of thousands will die unnecessarily, billions of dollars will be wasted, and Trump will take no responsibility for any of it and piss and pule about how unfair it all is.

Words fail me when I try to express myself on these revolting developments.

[ThoughtCriminal]

17. The "New Deal" is not given enough credit for victory in WW-2

The New Deal created much of the infrastructure and preserved the industrial capability that made all that possible. We probably could not have ramped up our arms manufacturing as quickly if we had not made that investment.

Another forgotten lesson.