ABSTRACT
Assemblies and engines were built for the Thunderbolt and Corsair. Assemblies alone were built for a further ten aircraft, including the Boeing Flying Fortress, and engines alone were supplied for a further eleven aircraft, including the Mustang, the Bell Airacobra, the British Lancaster bomber, De Havilland Mosquito and even the Spitfire. In 1940 the United States armament industry was limited and much of the machinery needed for wartime use, such as machine tools and presses, was obsolescent. Sorensen visited an aircraft plant personally, not to identify components but to see how whole planes were assembled. He found that the process owed nothing to mass production, workers scrambling over the planes in an uncoordinated and chaotic fashion. Government’s role in expanding industrial plant proved crucial in the aircraft industry, already under pressure in 1939 with export orders for Britain and France. Powerful links were created between business and the armed forces, in the forging of a military industrial complex.
