The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

210. A 12-cylinder Liberty Engine generated 400 horsepower. The base 12-cylinder Merlin would produce 1,500 horsepower, and much more in later versions. The engine was named not after the Arthurian magician but after a species of small falcon. Packard’s iconic campus in Detroit, now a crumbling symbol of the city’s dereliction, was one of the earliest and greatest designs of Albert Kahn.

211. Hyde (2013, pp. 52–57); Lilley et al. (1947, pp. 52–56). 212. Sullivan (2008, p. 27).

213. Walton (1956, p. 283).

214. Hyde (2013, p. 65).

215. Lilley et al. (1947, p. 36).

216. Lilley et al. (1947, p. 17).

217. Kennedy (1999, p. 431).

218. Holley (1964, p, 540); Mishina (1999).

219. It was a source of fear in Washington and around the country that America’s aircraft

industry was located so near the coasts, where it would be vulnerable to hypothetical enemy strikes. The industry was becoming increasingly concentrated in Southern California, whose imagined vulnerability to Japanese attack generated frequent hysteria directed against Japanese Americans. Soon, like the aircraft plants, they too would be relocated to the interior. “A Jap’s a Jap,” said Eleanor Roosevelt (Kennedy 1999, pp. 748–56).

220. Holley (1964, pp. 308–9).

221. Baime (2014); Hyde (2013, pp. 87–105); Sorenson (2006, pp. 278–300).

222. Sorenson (2006, p. 280).

223. Nevins and Hill (1962, p. 218).

224. Baime (2014, pp 167–73); Sorenson (2006, pp. 292–94). The inspection trip would also

place the Roosevelts at the launch of Edgar Kaiser’s ten-day Liberty Ship in Portland. 225. Nevins and Hill (1962, p. 218).

226. Hyde (2013, pp. 102–3).

227. Holley (1964, p. 565).

228. In a widely cited 1936 article, an aeronautical engineer called Theodore P. Wright de- scribed this empirical regularity and explained it in terminology that would have been familiar to Adam Smith: not only can workers themselves learn by doing, but a producer can also take advantage of more specialized tooling (implying less-skilled labor) and of less-variable tasks

Notes to Chapter 7 625

(Wright 1936, p. 124). (Although apparently not related to the Wright brothers, Theodore P. Wright was working for the Curtiss-Wright Corporation at the time he published the article. By 1940, he was an associate of George Mead in the Aeronautical Section of the NDAC (Craven and Cate 1955, p. 308).) At the RAND Corporation after the war, Armen Alchian (1963) also examined this phenomenon. The detailed history and economics of the idea of “learning curves” or “experience curves” would take us too far afield. But on some aspects see Langlois (1999) and Thompson (2012).

229. US Army Air Forces (1952, p. 64). 230. Holley (1964, pp. 326–27).

231. Mishina (1999, p. 167).

232. Holley (1964, p. 547).

233. Collison (1945, p. 3).

234. Vander Meulen (1995).

235. Beasley (1947, pp. 366–72).

236. Gurney (1963, p. 12).

237. Vander Meulen (1995, pp. 50–51).

238. Holley (1964, p. 547).

239. Holley (1964, pp. 529–38).

240. Hyde (2013, pp. 65–70); Vander Meulen (1995, pp. 86–98).

241. Beasley (1947, p. 369).

242. Vander Meulen (1995, p, 54).

243. Boyne (1994, pp. 364–74); Kennedy (2013, pp. 326–28); Overy (1995, pp. 126–27). As

we saw, the pressurized-cabin B-29 was designed as a high-altitude precision bomber. But as in Europe, precision bombing almost never achieved its objectives, and in the end Japanese home defenses were so weak by the spring of 1945 that the planes could strike from as low as 7,000 feet. Like the atomic bombs, the napalm bombs were the creation of American applied science during the war (Gladwell 2021).

244. Kennedy (2013, pp. 21–22).

245. Boyne (1994, pp. 199–202); Overy (1995, pp. 50–62).

246. Kennedy (2013, p, 54).

247. Boyne (1994, p. 202).

248. Boyne (1994, pp. 287–300); Overy (1995, pp. 105–109).

249. Rockoff (2012, pp. 199–210).

250. Kennedy (2013, p. xx).

251. Although the raid is portrayed somewhat triumphally rather than as the disaster it was,

the movie as a whole is very much a depiction of the terrible losses suffered by the American B-17 fleet during this period.

252. Kennedy (2013, pp. 116–30). 253. Sorenson (2006, p. 273). 254. Hughes (1989, pp. 249–94). 255. Overy (1995, p. 185).

256. Hughes (1989, p. 251). 257. Recall: Tugwell (1927). 258. Overy (1995, p. 185).

626 Notes to Chapter 8

259. Kennedy (2013, pp. 362, 171).

260. Harrison (1988, p. 179).

261. Werth (1964, pp. 425–29). Stalin even found himself forced to back away from the official

anti-religion stance of Marxism and to reunite with the Orthodox Church, using for propaganda purposes such Christian figures as the medieval saint Alexander Nevsky, who had repulsed the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century.

262. Harrison (1998).

263. Nevins and Hill (1962, p. 95).

264. Overy (1995, p. 198).

265. Kennedy (1999, p. 648)

266. Zeitlin (1995).

267. In the words of one German historian, the Third Reich “was made up of a plurality of

rather autonomous authorities, which could under specific conditions come into conflict with one another” (Waarden 1991, p. 295).

268. Overy (1995, p. 201).