History

American Overdrive

How the United States Out-Built, Out-Thought, and Out-Produced the World in Four YearsBy Paul Mac

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Length1h 14m

About this audiobook

In 1940, the United States Army ranked nineteenth in the world, behind Portugal. Five years later it had built the atomic bomb, produced 300,000 aircraft, launched 2,710 Liberty Ships, mass-manufactured penicillin, invented radar systems that changed the course of the war, and assembled the largest amphibious invasion in human history. American Overdrive tells the story of how — through eleven case studies of wartime innovation, from the proximity fuze to the Red Ball Express, from Willow Run to the Manhattan Project. Each chapter follows the people, the decisions, and the organisational design that turned a peacetime democracy into the most productive industrial machine the world has ever seen. This is not a story about generals. It is a story about engineers, factory workers, scientists, and bureaucrats who parallelised everything, tolerated failure, and moved at a speed that still defies belief.

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