The Home Front

By Hugh Sidey

88,410 heavy, medium and light tanks

469,000,000 lbs. of cabbage

6,552,290 rifles

15,603,000 shaving brushes

The astonishing materials of war. To save a Europe that had lost virtually its entire industrial capacity to the Germans, and to carry the war to Japan, the U.S. turned on a great gusher that armed and propelled Allied forces back onto the Continent. Without that, there would have been no D-day, no march toward Berlin, no victory of any kind. "The American war-production job was probably the greatest collective achievement of all time," said Donald Nelson, chairman of the War Production Board from 1942 to 1944. "It makes the seven wonders of the ancient world look like the doodlings of a small boy on a rainy Saturday afternoon." A boast perhaps, but the men who stormed into Normandy 50 years ago succeeded in large measure because of the helping hands of 60 million Americans who waged the war in factories and farms back home.

In the first 24 hours of D-day, more than 156,000 Allied fighting men and their weapons and 50,000 vehicles -- from motorcycles to bulldozers -- were delivered over 100 miles of water in 5,333 ships of all types, supported and protected by 11,000 airplanes that for the most part had only been a dream three years before. Behind them were 10 or 20 or 100 times more of the same, marshaling to go into battle.

4,490,000 bayonets

519,122,000 pairs of socks

634,569 jeeps

237,371,000 cans of insect repellent

In 1964 historian Stephen Ambrose was talking to retired General and President Dwight Eisenhower, who had commanded the invasion. Ike suddenly asked Ambrose if he had known Andrew Higgins. Ambrose had not. "That's too bad," Eisenhower said. "He is the man who won the war for us. If Higgins had not designed and built those landing craft, we never would have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different."

Andrew Jackson Higgins a pivot of history? No doubt, claims biographer Jerry Strahan. Higgins was a hard-drinking, tough-talking swamp rat and boat genius in New Orleans who developed the square-front wooden tubs that ferried Allied soldiers and their equipment onto the beaches. On the morning of June 6, 1,500 Higgins boats nestled aboard the larger transports, the crucial link between sea and shore.

Three years earlier, Higgins was asked to bid on a Navy design. He scrawled across their plan, "This is lousy." Higgins had a better idea for a light, maneuverable boat with a protected propeller that did not easily foul in the shallows. Show us, said the Navy. Higgins took over an entire block of New Orleans' Polyminia Street, set up floodlights, put machines and people to work around the clock. Fourteen days later, with the last paint applied as the freight flatcars clacked east, nine Higgins boats rolled into Norfolk, Virginia. The Navy would use 20,094 of the homely floaters before the war ended.

On D-day, Higgins was at the Rotary club in Chicago talking up the nomination of Harry Truman as Vice President. He wired his 30,000 workers / -- New Orleans' first fully integrated force of women, men and blacks -- a message that was read over the company's loudspeakers: "Now the work of our hands, our hearts and our heads is being put to the test."

Graham Haddock, 77, then the Higgins plant superintendent, can still feel the tension of that June morning, even though the waterfront where he used to watch the landing craft take shape is home port to gambling boats and yachts today. "The news of the invasion came about the time we went to work," he recalls. "We wondered whether it was going to work or not. There was no feeling of victory at first. Not until the 10 o'clock radio news did we get confirmation that we had a toehold in Normandy. I got up and marked it on the war map I kept. We were already through with Europe at the plant. We were making boats for the war in the Pacific."

3,076,000,000 lbs. of beef

7,570 railway locomotives

2,679,819 machine guns

597,613 leg splints

As D-day drew nearer, few workers were certain of the exact date, but they could detect the quickening pace. Bernard Taylor, 84, was superintendent of a Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas, making PT-17 flight trainers. One day in November 1941, Taylor noted a harried congregation of high military brass outside his plant. Then he was called in by his boss, who declared, "You're in the glider business."

Taylor and his workers swung into action with steel tubing, wood, fabric, paint and wooden wings. By the spring of 1943 they had turned out 750 Waco CG- 4A gliders that would be towed behind C-47 transport planes, the silent landing craft for men and weapons in the farm fields behind the Normandy beaches. One G.I. had just stumbled ashore on D-day when he saw what he thought was a great cloud rising across the Channel and coming toward him. It was the first wave of U.S. gliders bringing in more troops and guns. As the news of the invasion spread in Kansas, Taylor wondered how his fragile craft had fared. But he never paused: by then the plant had turned to production of B-29 bombers.

25,065,834,000 rounds of .30-cal. ammunition

1,024,000 pairs of panties for WACs

476,628 antitank bazookas

1,397,000,000 lbs. of coffee

Embedded in the stories of World War II is the legend of Spam, the manufactured ham substitute put out by the Hormel Co. in Minnesota. Spam was a wartime triumph, but the legend is mostly wrong. Several months ago, Hormel celebrated the production of the 5 billionth can of Spam and tried again to explain that the stuff was not included in G.I. rations or fired, as cartoonists claimed, at the enemy or dropped from planes to neutralize hostile populations. Spam -- 15 million cans a week -- went to feed the British and the Russians through lend-lease, the $50 billion aid program the U.S. began in 1941 to keep its friends supplied.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher recalled "feasting" on Spam as a girl in the war years. Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev claimed, "Without Spam, we wouldn't have been able to feed our army." G.I. ration or not, Supreme Commander Eisenhower got a taste and encouraged the fiction. "I ate Spam along with millions of soldiers," he claimed. Hormel glories in the tales and lets the jokes continue to roll: "The ham that didn't pass its physical. The meatball without basic training."

7,309,000 500-lb. bombs

3,242,017 hot-water bottles

113,967 combat vehicles

106,466,000 tent pins

Sometimes Harry Mettee, 72, drives by the old Martin Aircraft Plant 2 at Middle River in Baltimore, Maryland. It is lifeless now, a warehouse for government documents. Fifty years ago, when he was a quality-control inspector on the B-26 production line, five combat-ready Marauder bombers came off the line every 24 hours. At first, the stub-winged, medium-range plane was dubbed "the widow maker" and "the flying prostitute: no visible means of support." But once the wings were extended three feet and young pilots mastered its speed and dexterity, the B-26 became a star.

Mettee was on the night shift. By the time he was awake and on his way to work June 6, the invasion was in full swing. He grabbed a Baltimore American extra, which he still has, and read of the great attack. He learned that B-26s had spearheaded the air assault, planes named Rat Poison and Bar Fly and Ye Olde Crocke, sweeping low over Utah Beach just 10 minutes ahead of the infantry, dropping 4,404 bombs, each weighing 250 lbs., pulverizing German gun emplacements. The troops on Utah Beach met little resistance. Mettee and others from the Marauder days still gather to talk with pride of how Plant 2 at Middle River did its bit in the war.