358 Chapter NineBattlefield experience was fed back speedily to expert committees
charged with correcting faults in existing machines and designing new
ones with improved performance. Generations of new tanks, air
planes, and artillery came tumbling off assembly lines as a result, each
notably superior to its predecessors and requiring the counter inven
tion of new defensive hardware and tactics. Choices between quantity
and quality had always to be made, for if every desirable modification
were incorporated into an existing machine, the number of airplanes,
tanks, or guns that could be manufactured would have had to be
sharply cut back. Interesting national differences manifested them
selves. German and British managers tended to prefer quality and
made many modifications, whereas the Americans and Russians pre
ferred quantity and refrained from modifications which obstructed full
utilization of assembly line techniques. Yet when circumstances
seemed to require quantity, the Germans could and did reverse their
practice, freezing their designs in the last phases of the war in order to
produce maximal numbers of weapons.^95
The concept of a complete weapons system in which each constitu
ent fitted conveniently with all the rest emerged from World War II
design experience. Standard package sizes to fit standardized cargo
spaces in railway cars, airplanes, and trucks could save much time and
energy in transport, for example. Standardized ammunition for rifles,
pistols, and machine guns made supply in the field far simpler. Tanks,
infantry carriers, and self-propelled artillery that could travel at the
same pace, whether along a road or cross-country, constituted a far
more formidable spearhead than when discrepancies of speed or ca
pacity to get across obstacles invited straggling. In these and many
other ways the pattern of a smooth flow-through of all the factors of
production that allowed modern business corporations to prosper was
applied to the assemblage of the factors of destruction with predicta
ble success in reducing costs and increasing output. War, in short,scale and systematic character of scientific involvement in weapons design, especially
pp. 433–58, 472–85. For the United States, James Phinney Baxter III, Scientists against
Time (Boston, 1946) is a well-written official history. P. M. S. Blackett, Studies of War:
Nuclear and Conventional (Edinburgh, 1962), pp. 101–19 and 205–34 offers a more
personal view; Reginald Victor Jones, Most Secret War (London, 1978) is even more
personal in describing counterintelligence coups. I have not found any serious account
of German, Japanese, or Russian scientific mobilization.
- Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945 (Berkeley, 1977), pp.
184–93; Postan, British War Production. The British Spitfire underwent more than
1,000 technical modifications between 1938 and 1945, adding 100 miles per hour to its
top speed in the process.