Comment by thrower123
6 years ago
Things were built quickly in that era. Most skyscrapers wenr up in a year or so, like the Empire State Building. The whole Hoover Dam project took less than five years.
6 years ago
Things were built quickly in that era. Most skyscrapers wenr up in a year or so, like the Empire State Building. The whole Hoover Dam project took less than five years.
The war production in particular was incredible: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm
> Japan, an island empire totally dependent on maintaining open sea lanes to ensure her raw material imports, managed to build just sixty-three DDs (some twenty or so of which would have been classified by the Allies as DEs) and an unspecified (and by my unofficial count, relatively small) number of 'escort' vessels. In the same time span, the US put some eight hundred forty-seven antisubmarine capable craft in the water!
> The United States built more merchant shipping in the first four and a half months of 1943 than Japan put in the water in seven years.
> Again, the United States had to devote a lot of the merchant shipping it built to replace the losses inflicted by the German U-Boats. But it is no joke to say that we were literally building ships faster than anybody could sink them, and still have enough left over to carry mountains of material to the most God-forsaken, desolate stretches of the Pacific. Those Polynesian cargo cults didn't start for no reason, and it was American merchant vessels in their thousands which delivered the majority of this seemingly divinely profligate largesse to backwaters which had probably never seen so much as a can opener before.
Agreed, it is nuts. The Liberty ships being built in just days. Planes and tanks and trucks streaming off the assembly lines in the tens of thousands. Millions of tons of high explosives. Truly incredible.
Nowadays, it takes us the better part of a decade to get a minor bridge project done, and building a four-story apartment building is a multi-year endeavor.