Arming the Nation for War: Mobilization, Supply, and the American War Effort in World War II

Robert P. Patterson

oct 2014 · Univ. of Tennessee Press

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A decorated World War I veteran, Federal Judge Robert P. Patterson knew all too well the
needs of soldiers on the battlefield. He was thus dismayed by America’s lack of military
preparedness when a second great war engulfed Europe in 1939–40. With the international
crisis worsening, Patterson even resumed military training—as a forty-nine-yearold
private—before being named assistant secretary of war in July 1940. That appointment
set the stage for Patterson’s central role in the country’s massive mobilization and
supply effort which helped the Allies win World War II.

In Arming the Nation for War, a previously unpublished account long buried among
the late author’s papers and originally marked confidential, Patterson describes the vast
challenges the United States faced as it had to equip, in a desperately short time, a fighting
force capable of confronting a formidable enemy. Brimming with data and detail, the book
also abounds with deep insights into the myriad problems encountered on the domestic
mobilization front—including the sometimes divergent interests of wartime planners and
industrial leaders—along with the logistical difficulties of supplying far-flung theaters of
war with everything from ships, planes, and tanks to food and medicine. Determined to
remind his contemporaries of how narrow the Allied margin of victory was and that the
war’s lessons not be forgotten, Patterson clearly intended the manuscript (which he wrote
between 1945 and ’47, when he was President Truman’s secretary of war) to contribute
to the postwar debates on the future of the military establishment. That passage of the
National Security Act of 1947, to which Patterson was a key contributor, answered many of
his concerns may explain why he never published the book during his lifetime.

A unique document offering an insider’s view of a watershed historical moment, Patterson’s
text is complemented by editor Brian Waddell’s extensive introduction and notes.
In addition, Robert M. Morgenthau, former Manhattan district attorney and a protégé of
Patterson’s for four years prior to the latter’s death in a 1952 plane crash, offers a heartfelt
remembrance of a man the New York Herald-Tribune called “an example of the public-spirited
citizen.”

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Brian Waddell, an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut,
is the author of The War Against the New Deal: World War II and American Democracy and
Toward the National Security State: Civil-Military Relations during World War II.