Last night I finished watching the Ken Burns series on PBS called The War. Boy, was that ever informative and interesting. Names that I remembered or heard later of battles and cities were put into perspective. The sheer numbers and statistics were so interesting. We all knew that virtually all manufacturing was geared to the war effort but I didn't know that only 139 automobiles were built during the 4 years that we were at war.
And at the Willow Run plant here one airplane rolled off the assembly line every 63 minutes. That's just about 24 airplanes per day and the plant was running 24/7. Ok, so even with more than 165 airplanes per week coming off the line here in Detroit, how the heck did they get them all overseas to take part in those massive battles.
The next most interesting fact I learned was about the battle of the bulge. I thought "The Bulge" was a city or area in Europe and learned that it was a protrusion on the map where the Germans were able to push back part of our hard-fought advance line near the German border.
I thought the program was very well done, giving information about what was going on here at home as well as "over there".
3 comments:
I remember playing in Bennett schoolground and we all looked up and saw the sky covered with an armada of airplanes from Willow Run. We watched in awe for a long time, it was so unexpected. Then we returned to the ballgame. we did not expect to see anything in the paper about it, nothing like that was ever published. "Lose lips sink ships."
Scott was also watching this same program. I caught a little bit of it and thought it was also very interesting. How so many planes were made and the auto industry was converted over for the war effort.
I remember my mother, Rose working for a company called Morris Chain, she was also working on parts for planes during the war. I think they used to call this women, Rosie the riveter.
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