Why Germans Couldn't Explain How US Factories Replaced Tanks So Fast

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]In the second week of May 1945, on the rocky coast of northern Germany at a place called Gluxburg Castle, a thin man in a rumpled suit was led into a small interrogation room and seated across a table from two American economists.

[00:00:15]The thin man was Albert Spear. He had been Adolf Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War Production for the last 3 years of the war. The man personally responsible for keeping German tanks rolling off the assembly lines while Allied bombers flattened the cities around them. The two Americans waiting for him were Paul Nitsie, who would later help shape the Cold War, and John Kenneth Galbrath, who would later teach economics at Harvard. They were leading a survey called the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Their assignment was to find out how the German war economy had actually worked.

[00:00:50]They expected resistance. They expected evasion. What they got instead over 7 days of interrogation between May 15 and May 22 was something that surprised them so completely that Galbrath would write about it for years afterward. Spear, a man facing trial for his life, did not lie. He did not posture. He answered every question as carefully as a graduate student answering an oral examination. And when Nitser pressed him on the question of how he had thought in the privacy of his own mind that Germany could possibly win an industrial war against the United States, Spear's answer recorded in the United States strategic bombing survey transcripts came down to something simple. He had not thought Germany could win. He had thought at most that Germany could fight long enough to negotiate. He had not believed that any country in Europe could match what American factories were doing. He had read the figures every week. He had not been able to make himself believe them. The figures by that point were no longer secret. The Sherman tank, the medium tank that the United States had built as the main fighting vehicle of its armored divisions, had been produced in a quantity of 49,234 units between February 1942 and July 1945.

[00:02:07]That was 8 times the number of Panther tanks Germany had built in the same period. It was more than 25 times the combined production of Tiger and King Tiger heavy tanks. It was a number that no other nation on Earth, including the Soviet Union, had matched in any single armored vehicle program. And the Sherman was only one weapon among many. Across the same 40 months, the United States had also produced almost 90,000 tanks of all types, 300,000 aircraft, more than 2 million military trucks, more than 12 million rifles and carbines, 41 billion rounds of small arms ammunition, and a staggering tonnage of warships and merchant vessels. Spear, who had spent his career trying to ring more output out of German industry by every method he could imagine, had read those numbers and felt something he later described as the closest thing he had felt to despair during the entire war. He understood production, and he understood that he was not looking at a country that had been better at his own profession. He was looking at a country that was doing something his profession did not even have a name for. This is the story of why he could not understand it. It is the story of how a country that in the spring of 1940 was producing fewer tanks per year than Czechoslovakia transformed itself in the next 40 months into the largest war manufacturing organism the world had ever seen. It is the story of why the German army, the army that had perfected mechanized warfare in the 1930s, watched American Sherman tanks come ashore at Normandy in numbers that did not match any of its pre-war intelligence estimates. in numbers that did not match any of its midwar intelligence estimates, in numbers that by the end did not match any number the German general staff had been able to bring itself to write on paper. It is also, and this is the part that is rarely told, the story of a Danish bicycle mechanic, a Detroit architect with a German Jewish childhood, a Chrysler executive who had never seen a tank, and a 21-year-old gunner from a Pennsylvania coal town, who between them did more to defeat Adolf Hitler than most of the generals whose names are in the history books. The first man we have to introduce is the bicycle mechanic.

[00:04:23]His name was William Signius Kudson. He had been born on the 25th of March 1879 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The son of a customs officer, he arrived at Ellis Island in February 1900 with $30 in his pocket and almost no English. He went to work in a Harlem River shipyard where the foreman could not be bothered to pronounce his Danish name and shortened it on the time sheet to Bill. He took English lessons from neighborhood children. He moved to Buffalo and got a job at a pressed steel factory called Kim Mills, which began making parts for an obscure Detroit automobile maker named Henry Ford. In 1911, Ford bought Kim Mills outright. In 1913, he brought Kudson to Detroit. From 1912 to 1916, Henry Ford's annual automobile production grew from 78,440 cars to 533,921 cars, an increase of nearly seven times in 4 years. And the man who organized that expansion across 28 new branch assembly plants was not Ford. It was Kudson. He left Ford in 1921 over a personal quarrel and joined General Motors. He became president of Chevrolet in 1924 and turned it from a struggling brand into the highests selling automobile in the United States. In 1937, he became president of General Motors itself. By the spring of 1940, he was 61 years old, the highest paid corporate executive in America, and in the opinion of nearly every American industrialist who had worked with him, the most accomplished mass production manager on Earth. When Adolf Hitler's tanks rolled into Paris that June, Franklin Roosevelt asked his old friend Bernard Baroo to give him a list of the three best production men in the country. Baroo's reply has been recorded in multiple primary sources. He told Roosevelt, "First Bill Kudson, second Bill Kudson. Third, Bill Kudson."

[00:06:23]Roosevelt called Kudson. Kudson took a train to Washington. He gave up the salary he had been earning at General Motors, $300,000 a year, and accepted a federal position paying him $1. When the chairman of General Motors, Alfred Sloan, told him that Washington would chew him up and that no Republican capitalist could survive a partnership with the Roosevelt administration, Kudson replied in the heavy Danish accent he never quite lost, that this country had been good to him, and he wanted to pay it back. On the 28th of January 1942, he was commissioned as a left tenant general in the United States Army, the only civilian in American history to enter the army at that rank.

[00:07:05]What he did over the next four years has no real precedent in the history of industry. He did not give orders. He did not draw up master plans. He traveled.

[00:07:15]He went to factory after factory across the country, sometimes three plants in a single day. walked through the assembly bays, looked at what the men were building, and asked questions in his quiet, methodical way. According to the family authorized biography written by Norman Beasley in 1947, he could shout the words, "Hurry up," in 15 languages.

[00:07:37]He understood machine tools the way a violinist understands a violin. When he walked into a factory that was supposed to be producing aircraft engines and saw that the production line was poorly arranged, he would pick up a piece of chalk, draw the corrected layout on the concrete floor, shake hands with the plant manager, and leave. In June 1940, very early in his Washington career, Kudson telephoned the chief executive of Chrysler Corporation, a Maryland-born industrialist named Calfman Thumer Keller, known throughout Detroit by his initials, KT. He asked Keller whether Chrysler could build tanks. Keller, by Arthur Herman's account, replied that he did not know what a tank looked like, but if Kunen would arrange to show him one, he would tell him whether Chrysler could make it. The two men drove to the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois that month, and Keller and his chief engineer for the project, a man named Eddie Hunt, climbed into a medium tank M2A1, and Hunt took it for a slow drive around the parade ground. Keller looked at the tank for a long time. Then he turned to Kudson and told him that Chrysler would build tanks, but they would not build them like that. They would build them on an assembly line. Within weeks, the United States government and Chrysler signed a contract for the construction of the first dedicated tank manufacturing plant in American history.

[00:08:57]The site was a3 acre former farm field near the village of Warren, Michigan, just north of Detroit. The architect chosen for the project was a man named Albert Kahn. You need to know about Albert Khn because his story is one of the strangest reverse echoes in the entire industrial history of the war. He had been born in 1869 in the Hunsuk region of what was then the German Empire. The son of a rabbi, his family had immigrated to Detroit when he was about 11 years old. He had no formal education in architecture. He had been apprenticed to a Detroit firm at 15 because his family could not afford to send him to college. By the time the German army marched into Paris in 1940, Albert Kahn was the most influential industrial architect alive. His firm had designed the Ford Highland Park plant where the moving assembly line was first installed. It had designed the Ford River Rouge complex, the largest integrated factory anywhere in the world. By 1937, Albert Kahn Associates was responsible for 19% of every architect designed industrial building in the United States. Now, here is the part the history books rarely tell. In May 1929, more than 10 years before the United States entered the Second World War, the Soviet government, then in the first year of Joseph Stalin's first 5-year plan, had decided that the only way to industrialize a backwards agrarian country in the time available, was to hire the man who had taught Henry Ford how to build factories. They came to Detroit. They asked Kahn to design a tractor plant at the vulgar river city of Stalingrad. He delivered the plans in record time. They asked him to design another plant and another. By the time the contract ended in 1932, Albert Khn's firm, working out of an office in Moscow staffed with 25 of his Detroit architects, had designed more than 500 factories across the Soviet Union. They had trained more than 4,000 Soviet engineers in American mass production technique. The Stalinrad tractor plant, the very first one KHN had designed for Stalin, was producing 50,000 civilian tractors a year by the late 1930s. By the time Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the plant had already begun turning out a Soviet medium tank called the T34, and within months, it was the largest single producer of T34s in the entire Soviet Union. By September 1942, when German troops fought their way into the burnedout shell of the Stalingrad tractor plant in the worst battle of the entire Eastern Front, the workers there were assembling T34s and driving them off the factory floor straight into combat with the German infantry that was attacking them. Albert Kahn had died in December 1942, shortly after the German Sixth Army was surrounded inside the city he had helped to industrialize.

[00:11:53]He did not live to see what happened next. He had built the factories that built the tanks that killed the army of the country he had been born in. And he had also in the meantime built the Detroit Arsenal tank plant. Construction at Warren began in September 1940. The first M3 Lee tank rolled off the assembly line on the 24th of April 1941 when most of the building around it was not yet complete. Kahn had designed the plant with 3- foot thick concrete walls in case of bombing, even though Detroit was further from any potential enemy bomber base than any city of comparable industrial importance on Earth. By the end of 1942, with 5,000 workers on the floor, the Detroit Arsenal had switched from the M3 Lee to the new Sherman M4 medium tank, and in a single calendar month in late 1942, the plant produced 896 Shermans. By the time the war ended, it had built 22,234 tanks. That was all by itself nearly as many tanks as Germany produced in the entire war from every plant of every type combined. It was about a quarter of all American tank production for the conflict. And the Detroit Arsenal was just one factory among many. There were nine others producing Sherman tanks.

[00:13:13]There was the Lemur locomotive works in Ohio where the prototype Sherman, the first one ever built, was completed in February 1942. There was the Pacific Car and Foundry plant in Reton, Washington near Seattle, which had built railroad freight cars before the war and now produced 926 Shermans. There was Pullman Standard in Hammond, Indiana. There was Press Steel Car at the Hegish Yards on the south side of Chicago, which built more than 8,000 of them. There was American Locomotive Company at Skenkity, New York. There was Baldwin at Eddiestone, Pennsylvania. There was Federal Machine and Welder at Warren, Ohio. There was Fisher Body at Grand Blanc, Michigan. There was Ford itself at Highland Park. The total American Sherman production from February 1942 to the summer of 1945 came to 49,234 units with peak production reached in 1943 rather than 1944 when the army's tank acquisition priorities had shifted.

[00:14:16]The total German production of the famed Panther tank from December 1942 to April 1945 was approximately 5,984 units. The total production of the Tiger 1 tank was 1,347.

[00:14:32]The total production of the King Tiger was 492.

[00:14:37]Add them all together. The combined production of Germany's three best tank designs across the entire war did not equal the production of the Detroit Arsenal alone. It did not equal the production of the pressed steel car plant alone. It would not have equaled all by itself what Kudson and his factories were shipping in any given 5-month window of 1943.

[00:14:59]This is the gap that paralyzed Albert Spear. But the gap on its own does not explain everything. Quantity by itself does not win battles. There is a second piece of the story and to see it you have to look at one specific battle in which the Germans holding superior tanks in adequate numbers lost anyway because of something the Americans had that the Germans had no name for. In September 1944, after the breakout from Normandy and the long pursuit across France, General George Patton's third army was running short of fuel near a small town in Lraine called Arakort. Adolf Hitler, desperate to halt the American advance before it reached the Rine, ordered a major counterattack against Patton's exposed flank. The attack was assigned to General Hasso von Mantofl's fifth Panzer Army. The spearhead was provided by two newly formed Panza brigades, the 111th and the 113th. Equipped with brand new Panther tanks, fresh from the assembly lines at the Mashn Fabric Agsburg, Nuremberg, the brigades brought to battle 262 tanks and assault guns.

[00:16:07]The American unit they were attacking, Combat Command A of the Fourth Armored Division, had perhaps a third of that number. The Panthers had longer guns, thicker armor, and could destroy a Sherman frontally at 2,000 m. The Shermans, in many cases, could not penetrate a Panthers frontal armor at any range. The battle began on the morning of the 19th of September, 1944, in heavy fog that lay over the rolling Lraine farmland. The Panthers came forward. Combat Command A under Colonel Bruce Clark was waiting. What followed over the next 11 days has been studied at the United States Army's armor school at Fort Benning ever since. Because by every traditional measure, it should not have happened the way it did. The American crews used the fog. They used the terrain. They used the fact that because the fifth Panzer army had no integral reconnaissance units, the Germans were attacking blind. The Shermans would let columns of panthers pass at close range, sometimes within 50 meters in the fog and then engage them from the flank where the side armor was thinner. Captain William Spencer of a company, 37th Tank Battalion, won the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions on the morning of the 19th, leading his company against a numerically superior German force in close range fighting that destroyed multiple enemy tanks. Lieutenant Colonel Kraton Abrams, who would later become Chief of Staff of the United States Army, commanded that battalion. They were running tactical formations the German doctrine writers would have recognized, but they were running them with sergeants and left tenants who had been promoted within the past year in tanks that were inferior on paper to almost everything they were fighting. By the time the German offensive collapsed at the end of September, the fifth Panzer army had lost approximately 200 tanks and assault guns destroyed or so heavily damaged that they could not be recovered. American losses in the main battle phase from the 19th to the 22nd of September came to 14 Sherman tanks completely destroyed and roughly 30 more damaged but repable. But here is the part that mattered. The 14 Shermans that the Americans wrote off in three days of combat in Lraine were replaced from depots in France within weeks. By mid-occtober, the fourth armored division was at full strength and continuing to push east. The German tanks lost at Aracort were never replaced. The brigades that had attacked were disbanded. There were no more Panthers coming. There were no more crews. The men who had survived were sent to other units to fight in inferior vehicles for another 6 months. and most of them did not come home. This is the asymmetry that destroyed the German army in the west. It was not that the American tanks were better. It was not that the American crews were better. The German crews, particularly the experienced veterans who had survived two years on the Eastern Front, were probably the finest armored soldiers of the entire war. It was that the United States, having put a tank on a battlefield, could replace that tank faster than the Germans could destroy it. The Germans could not replace theirs at all. The reasons the Germans could not match this output have been studied for 80 years and most of them come down to a series of decisions made in Berlin between 1941 and 1944. Almost all of them bad. The Panther itself is the perfect illustration. When the German army first encountered the Soviet T34 in the summer of 1941, General Hines Gudderion, the most influential armored theorist in the Vermacht, recommended that German engineers simply copy it.

[00:19:45]The T-34 was a brilliantly simple design with sloped armor, wide tracks, and a powerful gun. And it was being built by Soviet workers at a rate the Germans could not begin to match. Two German firms, Daimler Benz and the machine and fabric Agsburg Nuremberg, known by its initials as MN were assigned to design a German equivalent. Daimler Benz produced a design that was essentially a Germanized T34 with a diesel engine, leaf spring suspension, and a low silhouette. The man firm produced a more traditional German design with a torsion bar suspension, a gasoline engine, and a higher and more complicated hull. Spear, the field commanders, and even Hitler himself in early March 1942 all initially preferred the Daimler Ben's design. Then in May, a special Panther committee appointed by Hitler reversed the decision and chose the M design instead primarily because the existing Rhinol turret could be fitted to the M hull faster than a new turret could be designed for the Daimler Ben's hull. The decision was made for schedule reasons.

[00:20:54]It had nothing to do with which tank would actually fight better. The result was the Panther tank as we know it. It was beautiful. It was in many ways the best armed tank either side fielded until the very last weeks of the war. It was also, in the words of the postwar French army evaluation report on captured Panthers, a manufacturing nightmare.

[00:21:17]It required specialized machine tools that German industry did not have in adequate quantity. It used scarce alloys of nickel and chrome that Germany could not import once the Allied blockade tightened. According to the French postwar tests, the Panther's final drive, a critical mechanical component, had a mean fatigue life of approximately 150 km of road travel before it broke down, less than the distance from Paris to Brussels. At the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, where the Panther made its combat debut, more Panthers were destroyed by mechanical failure than by Soviet anti-tank fire. By the summer of 1944, the three firms that built the Panther, M, Daimler Benz, and the machinan fabric Neidosaxon Hanover, were trying to produce 600 Panthers per month and consistently failing. The peak monthly production they ever achieved was 380 units in July 1944, after which Allied bombing started taking the figure down again. Compare that to what the Americans were doing with the Sherman. The Sherman's 75 mm gun was inadequate against the later German tanks, particularly the Panther and the Tiger. Its armor was thinner.

[00:22:33]Its silhouette was high enough to be visible at long range. American tank crews knew by the spring of 1944 that they were fighting in vehicles inferior to most of what they would meet on the other side of the line. But the Sherman had been designed from the very first sketch around one principle. It had to be possible to build it in any auto factory in the United States with minimum retooling. Its hull was either welded or cast in a single piece. Its drivetrain was modular and could be swapped out by mechanics in a forward repair depot in less than 4 hours.

[00:23:06]Its early engine was an aircraft radial that any aviation mechanic in the country could service. The later M4A3 model used the Ford GAAV8, a gasoline engine descended from a failed Ford aircraft project that had been redesigned specifically for tank duty. The whole vehicle could be shipped in pieces and assembled in the field. It used standard automobile electrical components. The radio was the same model used in fighter aircraft. Spare parts were interchangeable not just between tanks of the same model, but between tanks built in different factories thousands of miles apart, sometimes years apart. It was, in other words, a production engineers tank designed by men whose first question was not how thick should the armor be, but how fast can we build it? And it was that question, that quiet mass production reflex that the Germans never matched and probably never could have matched because it was not a question that occurred to the men who made German weapons. In a city in western Germany on the 6th of March, 1945, the difference came down to a single intersection. By that morning, the city of Cologne, which had been the third largest in Germany before the war, had been reduced to rubble by years of Allied bombing. Only the cathedral, the great twinspired Gothic church begun in 1248, still stood intact above the destroyed streets. The Americans were in the city. The Germans were retreating across the Rine. In the streets near the cathedral, an experienced Panther tank commander named Wilhelm Bartleborth, attached to Panza Brigade 106, had set up a perfect ambush. He had positioned his Panther in a covered firing position with a clear field of fire down a long narrow street.

[00:24:51]He was waiting for American tanks to come around the corner. The first American tanks that appeared were two Shermans of F Company of the 32nd Armored Regiment, Third Armored Division. They came around the corner expecting nothing in particular, and Bartleborth's Panther destroyed both of them in less than 30 seconds. The lead Sherman was commanded by Second Lieutenant Carl Kelner, born in 1918, originally from Shboan, Wisconsin.

[00:25:17]Kelner had been wounded twice already in the war, had been awarded the Silver Star in Normandy, and had received his battlefield commission only two weeks before. The Panthers first shell tore through the turret of his tank, killing his gunner and his driver instantly and amputating Kelner's left leg. He climbed out of the burning hull and collapsed into the street. A young sergeant from the army newspaper Stars and Stripes, a man named Andy Rooney, who would after the war become one of the most recognizable journalists in American television, ran out under fire with another soldier and tried to stop the bleeding. Kelner died there in the street near his burning tank. He was the first man Andy Rooney watched die at close range, and Rooney wrote about it for the rest of his life. One street away, an American tank crew was about to do something the German plan had not accounted for. They were not in a Sherman. They were in one of the very first M26 Persing tanks to reach the European theater of operations, a heavy tank with a 90 mm gun and frontal armor as thick as a Panthers. Only 20 experimental Persings had been shipped to Europe by that point in the war in an operation called the Zebra mission. 10 had gone to the third armored division.

[00:26:32]The rest had gone to the ninth armored.

[00:26:34]The Persian on its way to relieve Kelner's burning Sherman was named Eagle 7. The crew, all from the third armored division, included a 21-year-old gunner named Clarence Smooyer, who had been born in 1923 in Parville, Pennsylvania, and had been working at the Lehi Portland Cement Company in nearby Lehighton when he was drafted in 1943.

[00:26:56]With him in the tank were the commander, Sergeant Robert Early, 29 years old of Fountain, Minnesota, the loader, John Deriggy of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the driver, William McVey of Jackson, Michigan, and the bow gunner and assistant driver Homer Davis of Morehead, Kentucky. When the call came in that Lieutenant Kelner had been hit, Smoyer's crew was ordered to move down the parallel street and engage the Panther from the flank. As Eagle 7 edged into the intersection, Bartleborth, looking through the periscope of his Panther, saw the unfamiliar silhouette and hesitated. He had never seen an M26 Persing. The vehicle in front of him did not match any Allied silhouette he had been trained to identify. He told his gunner to hold fire. According to research collected decades later by the historian Adam Maros, Bartalborth's surviving family said he had thought the tank he was looking at might be German.

[00:27:52]It was not. Smooyer rotated his 90mm gun while his driver McVey gunned the engine to make Eagle 7 a moving target. Smooyer fired without waiting for the tank to stop. His first round struck the Panther under the gunshield. Derigi rammed home a second shell. Smooyer fired again. The shell penetrated the Panther's side and continued through, exiting the other side of the hull. He fired a third round. The Panther erupted into flames.

[00:28:21]Bartleborth's surviving crew bailed out of the burning tank and ran. The whole exchange was filmed by a United States Army Signal Corps cameraman named Jim Bates, who happened to be on the second floor of a building above the intersection. The footage, which was distributed to news reels around the world within weeks, became the most famous tank duel of the entire war. What Bates's footage captured, although nobody at the time knew quite how to put it into words, was the moment at which the German tank arm finally lost its qualitative edge. For 3 years, the Germans had built better tanks than the Americans in much smaller numbers, and accepted that the trade was worth it because their tanks could kill several Allied tanks for every one they lost. By the spring of 1945, the Americans had begun to ship a tank that was the equal of the Panther in protection and firepower, and they had begun to ship it in increasing numbers. By the 8th of May, 310 Persings would be in the European theater. About 200 would actually reach frontline units in time to fight. There was no German equivalent. There was nothing. The factories that might have built one were under bombing every day. The reason there was nothing brings us to the most uncomfortable part of the story. The part that the German generals, when they thought no one was listening, kept circling back to. Between 1942 and 1945, the British Directorate of Military Intelligence working through a unit called MI19 had been running one of the most successful surveillance operations of the war out of a country house in North London called Trent Park. The house had been turned into a comfortable prisoner of war camp specifically for highranking captured German officers.

[00:30:06]The food was good. The grounds were beautiful. The prisoners were given chest sets and books and the run of the gardens. They were not told that microphones had been installed in the light fittings, in the fireplaces, behind the skirting boards, inside the billiard tables, and even in the trees of the garden. They were not told that approximately 100 British intelligence officers, many of them German-speaking Jewish refugees who had escaped Hitler in the 1930s, were sitting in a basement transcribing every word the prisoners said when they thought they were alone.

[00:30:39]The transcripts run to about 150,000 pages across the British and American archives. They were sealed for decades and rediscovered in the British National Archives at Q by a young German historian named Son Nitel in 2001. The volume he eventually published in 2007 contains 167 of the most revealing transcripts. They capture German generals talking honestly to other German generals with no expectation that anyone outside their own circle would ever hear what they said. They are not the polished and self-serving accounts the same men wrote in their postwar memoirs. They are something else. And what those generals said about American production when they were unguarded was different from what they said in print after the war. They did not in the transcripts claim that American victory was simply a matter of crude material superiority.

[00:31:32]They did not blame the Americans for cheating. They kept saying instead in different conversations, sometimes years apart, that they had not been able to predict, even when the figures were placed in front of them, how a country could do what the United States had done. The German generals had spent their careers in an army that valued the skilled craftsman above all else. The German worker who assembled a Panther engine was a master mechanic with years of training, working with handfitted parts that often had to be filed and adjusted to fit one specific vehicle. If you took that worker out of his factory and replaced him with a man off the street, the next panther would not run.

[00:32:10]The American worker who assembled a Sherman engine was in many cases a black sharecropper from Alabama or a farm girl from Iowa or a teenage boy from a coal town in West Virginia who had never held a wrench before 1942. The components that worker was bolting together had been designed so that they could only fit one way in one place with no adjustment. The factory had been designed so that the work moved past the worker on a moving line and the worker did one operation over and over for an 8-hour shift. A new worker could be productive in days. An entire workforce could be turned over in weeks without affecting output. By 1943, more than onethird of all American war workers were women, and they were producing tanks and aircraft engines and bomber fuselages at a rate the German army had not believed any country could produce them, regardless of who was doing the work. This was the mass production revolution that Henry Ford had pioneered four decades earlier. The Germans had read about it. Spear himself, before the war, had visited American factories and written reports about what he had seen.

[00:33:19]They understood it as a concept. They could not implement it as a system because they did not have the social materials.

[00:33:27]German manufacturing had been built on a guild tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages. American manufacturing had been built deliberately on the absence of any such tradition on the assumption that the worker would be unskilled and that the machine and the line and the design of the part would do the skilled work for him. There was another factor and the German generals at Trent Park talked about this one too. American factories did not stop. They ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the entire duration of the war. They were not bombed because they were thousands of miles from any enemy air base. The German factories that built the Panther and the Tiger were under continuous bombardment from 1943 onward by the United States Army Air Forces and the British Royal Air Force. By 1944, German tank production had been scattered across hundreds of dispersed subasssembly sites in caves and forests just to keep some part of the line functioning at any given moment. Major components were being moved across Germany on rail lines that were under attack. The labor was increasingly being supplied by prisoners of war and by forced laborers brought in from occupied countries. Men and women who had no reason to do good work and many reasons to do bad work. There is a darker piece of this that has to be said honestly because it is the part Spear himself refused to face during the war and only partially faced afterward. Spear's much praised production miracle from 1942 to 1944 in which German tank output more than doubled was achieved through the use of forced labor including concentration camp prisoners brought to the henchel works at castle for tiger tank production and worked in many cases to death. After the war, Spear at the Nuremberg trial admitted his role in this and was sentenced to 20 years at Spandow prison. In the famous passage of his memoir written years later in his cell, he would write that from a fear of discovering something that might have made him turn from his course. He had closed his eyes. He had not asked Himmler. He had not asked Hitler. He had not investigated because he had not wanted to know what was happening at the camps the prisoners were coming from.

[00:35:40]because he failed at the time. He wrote, he still felt to that day responsible for Avitz in a wholly personal sense.

[00:35:47]The German production system, in other words, was not just less effective than the American. It was less effective in part because it had been built on a foundation that destroyed the human beings it depended on. While the American system, for all its own injustices, and there were many, was at least built on people who could go home at the end of their shift. By the end of 1944, the gap was beyond closing. The Germans, even with everything Spear had done, were producing about 18 to 19,000 armored vehicles per year of all types.

[00:36:19]The Soviets, working out of factories that Albert Khn had designed for them 15 years earlier, were producing roughly 14 to 15,000 T34s per year, a peak monthly rate of about 1,200 tanks. The Americans were producing more than 30,000 tanks per year of all types. in 1943 at peak, plus tens of thousands of halftracks, tank destroyers, armored cars, and self-propelled guns. The Vermacht was being outbuilt 3:1 on the Western Front by the Americans alone, and outbuilt another 3:1 on the Eastern Front by the Soviets, with the Soviets using factories an American architect had designed. This is the asymmetry that decided the war on the ground in Europe.

[00:37:03]Not the doctrine, not the courage of the soldiers on either side, not the genius of any one general. The decisive factor was that the United States, by some combination of geography and history and accident, had built a manufacturing organism that the Germans could not imagine and could not match, and had then chosen to point that organism at the destruction of the German army. When the German officers at Trent Park were asked in the indirect ways that intelligence officers ask such things what they thought would happen after the war was over, several of them gave the same answer. They said that the American army would go home. They said that the factories that had produced the Sherman tanks would go back to producing automobiles. They said that the strange unsustainable industrial effort they had been watching for four years would end the moment the war did because no peacetime country could keep building weapons at that rate. They were correct about that part. The Detroit Arsenal tank plant suspended tank production at the end of the war and did not resume it until the Korean War broke out in 1950.

[00:38:07]The other Sherman plants closed their tank lines almost immediately. Within 18 months of the German surrender, the United States was producing roughly the same number of tanks per year that Germany had produced in 1937, which was almost none. But the men who had built those tanks did not vanish. They went back to their lives. William Kudson returned to Detroit and tried to get his old job back at General Motors. Alfred Sloan turned him down, and his daughter would write later that the rejection broke him. He died in April 1948. A national hero who had refused as long as he lived to accept any payment beyond his $1 a year for what he had done in Washington. KT Keller continued to lead Chrysler and oversaw in the same Detroit Arsenal where the Shermans had been built the production of the M47 patent tank for the Korean War. The architectural firm Albert Kahn left behind is still in business in Detroit today, designing factories. The German officers from Trent Park were eventually repatriated. Most lived long enough to write memoirs in the 1950s and60s in which they described the Western Front in terms quite different from the ones they had used when they thought no one was listening. They blamed Hitler. They blamed the SS. They blamed the weather.

[00:39:26]They wrote less about American factories. The transcripts of what they had actually said on tape when they thought they were alone remained sealed in the British archives until the men themselves were almost all dead. Albert Spear served his full 20-year sentence at Spando prison and was released in October 1966.

[00:39:45]He spent the rest of his life writing books in which he tried with limited success to come to terms with what he had done. He died of a stroke in London in September 1981. He never gave a satisfying answer to the question Paul Nitsie had asked him at Gluksburg Castle in May 1945.

[00:40:03]The question of how he had thought in the privacy of his own mind that Germany could match what American factories were doing. The honest answer is that he had not thought it. He had hoped. Hope when an entire economy was riding on it was not enough. Clarence Smooyer, the gunner in Eagle 7, came home to Pennsylvania, took a job at the Lehi Portland Cement Company, and never told his neighbors what he had done in the war. He was an unassuming man. He liked to fish. He played the saxophone at his church.

[00:40:35]Years later, an author named Adam Makos went looking for the surviving members of the Eagle 7 crew for a book he was researching. He found Smoyer in a small house in Allentown, and the two became close friends. Through that friendship, Marcos learned that the rest of the crew had been awarded the Bronze Star for the Cologne action, but Smooyer never had been. He spent years working with the army to correct the record. On the 18th of September 2019, Clarence Smooyer, then 96 years old, accepted his bronze star at the National World War II Memorial in Washington. The army awarded postuous bronze stars to John Derigi, Homer Davis and William McVey at the same ceremony. He died on the 30th of September 2022 at his home in Allentown at the age of 99. He was the last living member of the Eagle 7 crew and very nearly the last living American who had killed a German Panther tank in the Second World War. He was buried at Leah Heighten cemetery a few miles from the cement plant where he had spent most of his working life. The verdict on American tank production in the Second World War, the honest one is not a triumphant one. It is a strange one. The Americans did not win the war on the Western Front because their tanks were better. Most of the time their tanks were worse, sometimes much worse. They won because when their tanks were destroyed, they could replace them in days or weeks. While the Germans could not replace theirs in months, they won because a Danish bicycle mechanic who had taken English lessons from neighborhood children in the Bronx had spent a 40-year career helping to build an industrial culture no German bureaucrat could understand. They won because a Detroit architect whose family had escaped a German rabbi's quiet provincial life in the Hunsuk had spent the years before the war designing factories that by accident of timing taught both the Soviets and the Americans how to outproduce the country he had been born in. They won because in the end the question Germany had asked of its industry was how good can a tank be? And the question America had asked was how many tanks can we ship by Friday? And only one of those questions led through 10,000 factory floors and 49,000 Sherman tanks to victory in Europe. The factories that had built those weapons were converted within months of the German surrender back into producing dishwashers, station wagons, and washing machines for the largest consumer market the world had ever seen.

[00:43:08]The men and women who had built the tanks had clocked in, clocked out, sent the work down the line, and gone home to neighborhoods in Detroit and Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Allentown and Shboan and Fountain and a thousand other places. Most of them never spoke much about it afterward. By the time the country thought to thank them, most of them were gone. When American tanks crossed the Rine in March 1945 and met the Red Army at the Elb in April, the war on the Western Front was effectively over, decided not by the courage of any one soldier, but by an accumulation of small industrial decisions made years earlier in cities. The men dying in the snowdrifts of the Arden had never seen by men whose names they had never learned. Konudson, Keller, Kahn, Smooyer, the black women who riveted bomber wings at Willow Run, the farm boys who welded turret rings at pressed steel car. None of them had asked to be at the center of human history. They had asked mostly for a steady wage and the chance to do the thing they were good at. The country gave them that chance.

[00:44:17]And what they built in the 40 months between the summer of 1940 and the summer of 1945 was the thing the German generals at Trent Park in the privacy of their bugged country house kept reaching for words they could not quite find. If your father or your grandfather worked in a war plant during the Second World War, in any city, on any product, the comments below this video are for you.

[00:44:41]Tell us their name. Tell us where they worked. tell us what they built. The story of American victory in the Second World War is not only the story of the men in uniform. It is also the story of the people who clocked in for the night shift at the Detroit Arsenal in the winter of 1943, who welded the hulls of tanks they would never see used, who packed lunch pales for the morning crew coming on at 6, and who never considered any of it especially remarkable.

[00:45:09]They deserve to be remembered. The tanks they built outlived the men who fought in them. And the lives those tanks saved are still being lived today by grandchildren of soldiers who came home only because somewhere in Michigan or Ohio or Pennsylvania, a stranger they would never meet had welded a hatch shut or wired a radio or talked a bolt on a vehicle that arrived on a beach in France in time to bring their grandfather Back.