Although the Second World War brought death and destruction to the world, it ironically signified a breath of life into the stagnant aircraft industry. Aircraft manufacturers, limping along in the red from the scant prewar government orders, underwent an amazing metamorphosis and evolved into an intricate system with expansive components and a single goal: to produce immense quantities of the best military aircraft in the world. This goal fostered mass expansion, subcontracting and specialization, and the conversion of various civilian manufacturing facilities into aircraft subassembly plants. The most interesting and significant effect of the war effort in the aircraft industry was the "good will " and "together we win" attitude of the many aircraft manufacturing companies. This cooperation and teamwork approach led directly to the development of the revolutionary Aircraft War Production Council in April, 1942. (24A) The Council, comprised of the heads of most west-coast aircraft companies, played an invaluable role in securing allied victory in the air, and the war.

On May 16,1940, President Roosevelt electrified the nation when, addressing a joint session of congress, he asked for a defense budget of $1.2 billion to make "our defenses invulnerable, our security absolute." (25) Roosevelt went on to ask for a fantastic 50,000 planes a year. It was clearly time for the aircraft industry to "roll up their sleeves and get to work". Production, which had always occurred on a small scale needed to be carried out at tremendous levels. Manufacturers now faced the daunting task of overcoming the red tape and logistical nightmare of an industry-wide mass reorganization and production ramp-up for war.

The first order of business was mass expansion. A thousand different systems of "popgun" capacity had to be enlarged to handle the fantastic all-out war production program. The raw statistics of this mobilization are impressive, but their magnitude can not truly be appreciated until one realizes exactly what these numbers represent. "Expanding floor space" most often meant the construction of new buildings, and these new buildings had to be filled with the proper tools and machines. Expansion also required finding enough skilled people to run all of this added equipment. Experienced engineers and machinists were very hard to come by at this time, and many aircraft companies resorted to looking through college records to find men with engineering degrees who might be working in an unrelated field to fill their rosters. (26) After the dust had cleared, the Glenn L. Martin company had roughly doubled its size while quadrupling its workforce (27) , Consolidated had expanded by about 87 percent (28) , and Boeing's expansion program pushed their floor space to an incredible 148 acres of area devoted entirely to aircraft production. (29) Expansion was by no means restricted to bomber manufacturers as each of the United States' 13 aircraft companies undertook similar programs to try to keep up with the huge demand for every type of military aircraft.

It soon became quite clear that even at their accelerated production levels, the individual companies had no realistic chance of keeping up with the new flood of orders on their own. The ingenious solution for the industry came in the form of a threefold strategy: massive subcontracting, conversion of "non- essential" civilian plants, and cooperating production pools.

Subcontracting proved to be a very logical and efficient use of the manufacturing industry as a whole. By subcontracting various parts, the aircraft industry was able to utilize the talents and facilities of other plants and industries whose business had been curtailed by priorities or other restrictions.

Boeing's production of the B-17 was an excellent example of the benefits of subcontracting. In fact, subcontracting of the Fortress was so extensive that only the fuselage and inboard wing sections were actually built at the Boeing plant. (30) The real beauty of the Boeing program was that it was planned and developed before the actual big push of orders occurred. By placing various "educational orders" of selected parts normally produced at the home plant, farsighted Boeing officials developed a roster of perspective subcontractors, "by the time government requirements for increased production were voiced, Boeing was ready with a selected, tentative list of plants to which it could turn for assistance." (31) Another outstanding feature of the Boeing program is that rather than individual parts, entire assemblies were being produced by the "farm companies" and shipped completed, to Boeing so that all they had to worry about was final assembly. Finally, Boeing's subcontracting program "farmed-out" most of the tedious machining work, leaving their equipment relatively free to handle the various very important last minute design improvements, experimental "cut ant try" parts, and "Blitzkrieg" items; modified components that had to be rushed through so as not to delay production.

Hand in hand with subcontracting came product switchover. Many small companies that were producing civilian products were "switched over" to produce various components for the aircraft industry. In these plants, their products were most often a total mismatch, but the way they were producing them lended itself, after a few simple changes, to creating a new bomber part factory. The following is a typical example as related by Martin director of procurement T. J. Dunnion:

The third leg of the aircraft industries' production triad was the production pool system. This system truly showed the spirit of cooperation of the day as one manufacturer sacrificed his own designs and completely retooled his plants to produce another company's aircraft that was judged to be more vital. As a result of pooling, the B-17 was being built by Boeing, Lockheed, and Douglas (33), while the B-24 was built by Consolidated, North American, Ford motor corporation, and Douglas as well. This system, which required some companies to turn over all designs (and design secrets) to "competitors" to facilitate greater production of essential aircraft, was an incredible testament to cooperation within the industry. "It was an intricate swirl of production. The AAF was doing the quarterbacking and coaching of this giant team. The AAF worked out the plays and called them, named the players, sent in substitutes to meet strategic situations, and finally rammed the ball over the line on the fighting front. Never before had there been such team play in industry." (35)

Amid the tide of cooperation that flowed through the industry, and the country, in early 1942, there was talk among officials of the need of an "aircraft council" to dominate and coordinate the aircraft manufacturers' efforts. In fact, the idea was not new. For some time the group of eight Southern California aircraft heads had met every fortnight at the Santa Monica Douglas plant to brainstorm for solutions to the common problems that the industry's explosion had thrust upon them. These informal director's meetings proved very beneficial to their respective companies as for almost every problem, one builder had devised an approach that helped the other seven.

Finally, the eight west coast presidents "officialized" their meetings by forming the Aircraft War Production Council. The council originally consisted of: Harry Woodhead, Consolidated; Donald Douglas, Douglas; L. Cohu, Northrop; "Dutch" Kindelberger, North American; T.C. Ryan, Ryan; Richard Millar, Vultee; C. Gross, Vega; and R. Gross, Lockheed. The Council was later reduced to seven when Consolidated and Vultee merged, Lockheed and Vega merged, and Boeing -an associate member- joined. (35A) The AWPC's first president, J. H. "Dutch" Kindelberger of North American, summed up the council's new procedure when he told his department heads: "from now on, were going to give our competitors all we've got, with no hedging or holding out. They're going to do the same for us. " North American engineers, as well as those from the other seven companies, sent outlines of their trade and manufacturing secrets to the AWPC offices to be circulated. (36) Once manufacturers on the east coast caught on to the benefits the consortium offered, they formed a similar committee, and merged with the AWPC in April 1943. The entire industry now had a common data base of knowledge and pooled resources to work from.

Douglas' advanced research in wing and fuselage aerodynamics was dumped into the pool, as was Northrop's Heliarc Welding Technology. In fact, Northrop offered to donate the special torches, (which took two years of engineering to produce) to the council. Similarly, Boeing offered its advanced plastics research, and pledged to continue the research of behalf of all the companies. And so on down the list. Each company offered what they had. A total of almost 18,000 technical reports were shared, an exchange that had saved over one million engineering man hours by early 1944. (37)

Often, designs for whole sections were provided by one company to another, saving countless hours engineering time. Such was the case for the landing gear of the P-61 Black Widow and the dive-brake flaps for the P-51 Mustang. Northrup, who had little experience with tricycle landing gear, received detailed plans from North American for the landing gear which had performed well on their B-25. With a few slight modifications, it worked equally as well on the Black Widow. Under similar circumstances Vultee sent North American blueprints for necessary dive-brake flaps for the P- 51, a $250,000 (38) gift to the war effort.

Designs and plans were not the only thing "shared" by the AWPC. The member companies together owned a massive quantity of raw materials. In order to prevent production stoppages when one company ran out of a material, the "AWPC's" materials were channeled wherever necessary. These "over the back fence" borrowings of materials averaged about 1,375 per month in 1943 (39), and each one represented another production stoppage avoided.

Machine time was another valuable commodity swapped within the AWPC. It was not uncommon to see one company do another's work for the benefit of a third, when in 1942 when a seemingly contagious string of equipment breakdowns plagued the industry, every company inevitably wound up doing machining work for another. Finally, a list of "key" machines and times they were available appeared in the council office as a standby for any company who needed it. (40) And the production lines kept rolling.

William F. Peters, manager of the AWPC for the second half of the war, stated the following as the AWPC's major contribution toward victory: "pooled engineering built quality into all of our airplanes. It saved time and built them faster, of course, but the most important factor was quality. This was a qualitative war, as was proved. ..on every front where modern airplanes fought yesterdays planes and shot them down, sometimes ten to one or better." (41)