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Of all the various ways that American participation in World War II contributed to Allied victory, the most critical, and in the end the most decisive, was American industrial productivity, and particularly shipbuilding. United States ship construction between 1941 and 1945 dramatically outstripped both its own allies and all of its foes combined. The United States was not only the "arsenal of democracy" (Franklin Roosevelt's phrase) but also the Allies' shipbuilder, and superiority in shipping is what allowed the Allies to win the Battle of the Atlantic, conduct the DDay invasion, and mount a simultaneous offensive in the Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguably the greatest self-inflicted catastrophe in human history, the Second World War resulted in an estimated 60 million dead. Unprepared when the war began, the United States quickly gathered momentum to become the decisive economic power, with an unprecedented ability to project that power through the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere. While in the European theater the Soviet Union emerged as the preeminent killing power among the Allies, the United States demonstrated logistical brilliance, firepower, mobility, mechanical aptitude, and an economic preponderance that produced much more than the Axis powers, all while committing a smaller proportion of the country's gross domestic product to the war than any other major belligerent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) alumni who served on the United States War Department General Staff during World War II. The author discusses the roles of officers General George Catlett Marshall, who served as chief of staff of the army, General Leonard "Gee" Gerow, who served as assistant chief of staff and chief of the War Plans Division (WPD), and General Thomas Handy, who served as assistant chief of staff and chief of the Operations Division (OPD).

This article identifies a significant hole in the literature of World War II. Few works discuss the everyday life of medical personnel and fewer still detail the lives of naval medical providers; those that do tend to focus on the exciting and bloody aspects of a medico at war. Filling this gap, this article argues that the most accurate picture of life at war should include life's routine features and then describes the everyday experiences of a U.S. Navy doctor in the Pacific from September 1944 to December 1945, whose daily existence was far different from and more typical than the one most often portrayed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have long believed that the Victory Program that formed the basis of U.S. military and production strategy during World War II was mostly the work of a sole genius—Major Albert C. Wedemeyer. This article makes the case that Wedemeyer's paper—"Ultimate Requirements Study: Estimate of Army Ground Forces"—had very little impact during the war. Its postwar prominence as an all-seeing document of remarkable foresight is a myth perpetuated for over fifty years by Wedemeyer himself. The true Victory Program combined a military strategy worked out by Admiral Harold Stark, and a production program worked out by three almost forgotten economists, Robert Nathan, Simon Kuznets, and Stacy May. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]