Detroit's Wartime Industry: Arsenal of Democracy

From automobiles to tanks, planes, and ammunition, author Michael W.R. Davis captures a visual history of Detroit's industrial conversion guaranteeing victory at home and abroad.

Gentlemen, we must out-build Hitler, proclaimed General Motors President William Knudson. Through the course of the World War II years, Detroit did exactly that. But how did the Motor City so successfully shift its focus from automobiles to become the leading producer of America's Arsenal of Democracy?

Just as Detroit symbolizes the U.S. automobile industry, during World War II it also came to stand for all American industry's conversion from civilian goods to war material. The label Arsenal of Democracy was coined by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in a fireside chat radio broadcast on December 29, 1940, nearly a year before the United States formally entered the war. Detroit's Wartime Industry is the pictorial history of one Detroiter's unique leadership in the miraculous speed Detroit's mass-production capacity was shifted to output of tanks, trucks, guns, and airplanes to support America's victory and of the struggles of civilians on the home front.

Detroit's Wartime Industry is the perfect book for enthusiasts of World War II, automobiles, and Detroit's unbreakable spirit. Author, historian, and journalist Michael W.R. Davis is former Executive Director of Detroit Historical Society and has previously published books on Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors.

About the Author
Davis, Michael W. R.: - This is the fourth Arcadia book by veteran automotive historian and journalist Michael W. R. Davis, graduate of Yale and Eastern Michigan Universities and former executive director of the Detroit Historical Society. Previous books have related the histories of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors. Davis, a resident of the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, is a longtime trustee of the Detroit Public Library's National Automotive History Collection, the source of many images in this book. He also serves as a director of the Defense Orientation Conference Association, a nonpartisan educational organization of civilians devoted to understanding U.S. defense and foreign policy.