The 1942 State of the Union address

On 6 January 1942, less than a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went to the Capitol and delivered his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. It was the first such address by a United States at war with Japan, Germany and Italy, and the President turned it into a survey of the whole war and a programme for waging it. The figures drew the most attention: in 1942 American industry was to produce 60,000 aircraft, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 anti-aircraft guns and 6 million tons of merchant shipping, and in 1943 a great deal more. Roosevelt also announced that American land, air and naval forces would take up positions in the British Isles.

The address is often summed up as a promise of more aid to Britain, including aircraft and troops. That reading is too narrow. The speech was not an announcement of help for an ally but the programme of a war that the United States was itself already fighting, on every ocean and continent, together with Britain, the USSR, China and the other states that had signed the Declaration by United Nations a few days earlier. The American troops in the British Isles were to be not a gift to London but part of a common strategy.

Between Pearl Harbor and Arcadia

The address was written in unusual circumstances. Since 22 December Winston Churchill, who had sailed to Washington for the Arcadia Conference, had been living in the White House. The British and American chiefs of staff were agreeing there on the “Germany first” principle, a unified command in the Far East and the dispatch of American troops to Northern Ireland. The news from the fronts was bad: the Japanese were advancing in Malaya, they had taken Wake on 23 December, Hong Kong had surrendered on 25 December, and on 2 January they entered Manila. In the Philippines General Douglas MacArthur’s forces were withdrawing to the Bataan peninsula.

The figures the President announced grew out of the talks held in those days. As early as the autumn of 1941 American planners had prepared the so-called Victory Program, an estimate of the forces and armaments needed to defeat Germany and Japan. The British Minister of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook, who had come over with Churchill, argued to Roosevelt and his closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, that the existing production plans were too modest for a war against three powers and that America could do much more. The President accepted these arguments and raised the targets beyond what his officials considered feasible. It was not the first time: in May 1940, in the days of France’s defeat, he had asked Congress for an industry capable of turning out 50,000 aircraft a year, which had also seemed a fantasy at the time.

A war against a plan of world conquest

Roosevelt began by declaring that the spirit of the American people had never been higher than it was now. He recalled that the Japanese had chosen a quiet Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, for their attack, but added that the blow had been no sudden whim. He presented it as the next step in a plan that, in his view, Japan had been pursuing for half a century: from the war with China in 1894, through the seizure of Korea and of Manchuria in 1931, to the invasion of China in 1937. He described the Tripartite Pact powers as confederates who had divided the world between them, with the ambitions of Adolf Hitler reaching further than those of Japan and Italy.

From this followed a political conclusion: the war could not be ended by compromise. “No compromise can end that conflict,” the President said, declaring that only total victory could reward the champions of tolerance, decency, freedom and faith. He praised the Allies who were fighting: the British; the Russians, whose armies were putting up stiff resistance to the Germans; and the Chinese, who had been fighting Japan for four and a half years. He admitted that the defeats in the Pacific were painful, and said openly that it had been bitter not to be able to land a million men from a thousand ships in the Philippines. He gave an assurance, however, that the United States would not wage a purely defensive war.

He announced that American armed forces would operate at many points in the Far East and would protect the Western Hemisphere and bases beyond it, and that American land, air and sea forces would take stations in the British Isles, “an essential fortress in this great world struggle”. The first part of this announcement was fulfilled three weeks later: on 26 January the first soldiers of an American infantry division landed at Belfast.

Figures that seemed impossible

The most important part of the address was the production programme. The President informed Congress that he had given orders for the production in 1942 of 60,000 aircraft – 10,000 more than the target announced a year and a half earlier – of which 45,000 were to be combat aircraft, and in 1943 of 125,000 aircraft, including 100,000 combat aircraft. There were to be 45,000 tanks in 1942 and 75,000 in 1943, and 20,000 and 35,000 anti-aircraft guns respectively. The shipyards were to build 6 million deadweight tons of merchant shipping in 1942, against 1.1 million tons completed in 1941, and 10 million tons in 1943.

For comparison, in 1941 American plants had built about 26,000 aircraft, many of them trainers, and about 4,000 tanks. Roosevelt made no secret of the fact that this meant a leap, not gradual growth. “Speed will count. Lost ground can always be regained – lost time, never,” he said. The superiority of the United Nations in munitions and ships, he added, must be overwhelming, so that it could not be challenged on any point.

The price was enormous. The war programme for the coming fiscal year was to cost 56 billion dollars, more than half the estimated annual national income. The President said this meant “taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes”, and the cutting of luxuries and of everything that was not essential. Civilian industry was to be converted to war production, and strategic materials – steel, aluminium, rubber, copper – were to be allocated first and foremost to military needs.

Putting the economy on a war footing

Decisions followed the words. As early as 11 December 1941 the Office of Price Administration had halted the sale of tyres, since the Japanese were cutting the United States off from the rubber of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. From 5 January 1942, the day before the address, tyres were allotted by local rationing boards. They were the first commodity in the United States to be brought under a rationing system. Soon the production of civilian passenger cars was banned: the last ones came off the assembly lines in early February 1942, and the factories of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler began building tanks, aero engines, lorries and bombers.

On 16 January 1942, by Executive Order 9024, Roosevelt established the War Production Board. It took over the tasks of two earlier agencies, the Office of Production Management and the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board, and was given wide powers to direct industry and allocate raw materials. At its head was Donald M. Nelson, a former executive of the Sears, Roebuck department store company. On 30 January the President signed the price control act, which gave the government the power to set maximum prices.

The restrictions spread to more and more goods. In early May 1942 Americans received their first ration books, known as “sugar books” because they entitled each person to half a pound of sugar a week. In May petrol rationing was introduced on the East Coast, where German U-boats were sinking tankers, and in December across the whole country. Later coffee, meat, fats, cheese and footwear were rationed. Compared with Britain or the USSR these were moderate sacrifices, but for a society that had lived in the shadow of the Depression throughout the 1930s they marked a clear change in everyday life.

Were the targets met?

Some production experts considered the figures of 6 January unrealistic, especially for 1942. They were partly right. In 1942 American plants built about 47,000–48,000 aircraft and about 24,000–25,000 tanks, fewer than the President had announced. Industry needed months to convert its production lines, and in the course of the year the armed forces changed their orders, shifting steel from tanks to escort vessels and landing craft. As a direction, however, the programme proved right. In 1943 some 86,000 aircraft were built, and in 1944 about 96,000.

The shipbuilding targets were exceeded most spectacularly. Thanks to the mass construction of Liberty ships, the first of which had been launched in September 1941, American yards delivered about 8 million tons of shipping in 1942 and nearly 19 million tons in 1943, almost twice what the programme had envisaged. This growth in tonnage did much to ensure that German U-boats failed to cut the supply lines across the Atlantic.

Place in the war

The address of 6 January 1942 was the public announcement of what was being settled in secret talks with the British at the White House: the United States intended to win the war above all through a material superiority that Germany, Japan and Italy could not match. A year earlier, in the Four Freedoms speech and in the Lend-Lease Act, Roosevelt had promised to make America the arsenal of democracy for others. Now the arsenal was also to equip America’s own armies, built from scratch, while continuing to send arms to the British, the Russians and the Chinese.

The figures in the address also served propaganda purposes. Announced at a time when Japan was winning victory after victory, they were meant to convince Americans, allies and enemies alike that time was on the side of the United Nations. Hitler, when declaring war on the United States in December, had mocked Roosevelt and underestimated the potential of American industry. By 1945 the United States had produced some 300,000 aircraft, and its industry, which in 1942 was only just switching from refrigerators and cars to weapons, became the greatest asset of the anti-Hitler coalition. The arrival of the first soldiers in Belfast at the end of January, and of American bombers in England from the summer of 1942, marked the beginning of a presence that in 1944 grew into the invasion of Normandy.