American Tank Industry Resilience

^[1]Zachary Shuttle

American Tank Industry Resilience

Introduction

The Tank since Second World War has long been seen as one of the greatest sources of morale and strength in the United States Army. Mass produced since World War II and consistently improved on in every way once the Tank Corps became a separate unit from the Army itself. The industry that is constantly seeking to evolve the armor, firepower and speed of the American tank has flourished since the World War II, due to the constant need to have greater more heavily armed and armored tanks than America’s competing countries as a sign of strength. This industry is one of importance today in the number of jobs it supplies’ as well as politically and financially, thousands of people worldwide. This essay is an attempt to explain how the Industry grew out of war, why it continued to grow and gain more power, and how now that there is very little chance of large scale tank battles today, it seeks to remain powerful.

The American Tank Industry is Born

Since World War I, American military tank power has been largely synonymous with American industrial might because the large number of factories in America would enable the production of ten of thousands of these vehicles for use on the front lines. During World War the commanding General of American Forces in Europe John Pershing decided that large numbers of light and heavy tanks would be needed for the American forces. The first truly American tank the M1917 was based off of the French designed Renault FT. The army at the time immediately ordered over 4000 of the vehicles, but only 950 were delivered to the army before the end of the war, with very few of them making it to France. These tanks were created in a number of different private factories in order to speed production. The number of tanks and factories however, combined with the inefficient organization of this new branch of the military at the time, slowed the rate at which the vehicles were delivered. This slowed the rate at which profits were created for these companies and made an inefficient mess out of the orders requested by the AEF.

After the war the newly created tank branch was immediately given control of over too wholly infantry officers, who wished to see the tank remain subservient to the army in the military, and who also had no imagination as to how the tank could be operated in a combat zone. Funding for researches into new designs of either light or heavy tanks were sparse, and the prototypes expensive to build, especially during the isolationist period of the 1920’s and Great Depression. Before the Second World War, Army engineers produced many different experimental models at the Rock Island Arsenal, such as the M1921 Prototype Medium Tank, the M1 Light Tank/M1 Combat Car, the M2 Light Tank and the M2 Medium Tank and the M6 Heavy Tank^[2]. Although not produced in large numbers all of these different vehicles created throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s were instrumental in the evolution of the American medium and heavy tanks, which are easily recognized today. They all had various faults or had their designs abandoned. The M1921 Medium Tank was abandoned due to a decrease in military spending and it was heavily influenced by French designs. Armed with a .50 caliber machine gun and a .30 caliber medium machine gun the Combat Car, had to be discontinued due to most nations adopting cannons as the primary armament during the inter-war period. The M2 light tank heavily influenced later designs during the war and did in fact see combat, due to large numbers being produced. Armed with primarily machine guns until after the Spanish Civil War, where the machine gun armed tanks proved to be ineffective. During the war the Army also used it as a training tank before Operation Torch.  The M6 Heavy Tank saw several different variants be designed before and during the war, however none of them saw combat due to the large numbers of Sherman’s the Army was able to produce. The M6 was heavy and a complicated vehicle to create, armed with a 76.2 mm cannon and several machine guns for an armament the tank never reached production and only 40 were created with most of them being scrapped.^[3] The M2 Medium Tank had been also put into production in the period directly before the Second World War. Steve Zaloga wrote “The basic concept behind the M2 medium tank was flawed because its armor was too thin to defend against antitank guns and it was armed with a dysfunctional mixture of sponson machinces and a single 37mm gun.”^[4] Due to not involving the large-scale Industrial companies this work was largely inefficient, and in fact the companies could have advanced the design and makeup of the tanks tremendously if allowed to help design the vehicles like in later years. This work could have also seen at least parts of the Great Depression vanish quicker as this mechanical work became available.

Companies Take Over Production

After World War I many of the automobile companies and larger industrial companies had worked well with the military, creating armaments, trucks and other war materials. It was not until during the Second World War with large industrial companies under contract by the federal government, that this business relationship was exploited in full. The American Industrial sector became involved in manufacturing new tanks, due to the US Army’s insufficient industrial capability to keep up with number of machines needed to fight. “The famous American motor companies were being called ‘Arsenals of Democracy’.”^[5] The military approached Chrysler in 1940 through William Knudsen, who was in charge of America’s manufacturing might during the war, to build a wholly tank constructing factory for 54.5 million dollars the largest contract for tanks at the time had been $11 million.^[6]

“In the suburb of Warren, the steel skeleton of Chrysler’s $20 million Detroit Tank Arsenal was in place, a factory that would soon swell to 1.25 million square feet. The company’s imperturbable workaholic boss, K.T. Keller, had bulldozed some of the land himself. Even before the walls were up, production men began building Twenty-Eight-ton M3 Sherman tanks destined to roll over the borders of Nazi-occupied territory. Keller brought in a steam locomotive on the plants railroad siding just to heat the place. The plan: to build more tanks in this one factory than Hitler was producing in all of Nazi Germany.”

 Albert Kahn designed the Detroit Tank Arsenal and as it was being built the first tank was already moving off the assembly line. The Arsenal later produced 22,234 tanks a quarter of the tanks created in American factories, and rolled off the assembly line at least 700 tanks per month when fully running in 1943, the factory also employed at least ten thousand people working around the clock, in the whole complex to manufacture the tanks and other armaments. The sheer size of the facility and the fact that its only purpose was to build military vehicles, demonstrated the level of time and resources the federal government was willing to put into creating tanks. Chrysler had created billions of dollars worth of war supplies including tanks, through this contract and others all of which had been fulfilled through the Arsenal or Chryslers other factories dedicated to the war effort. Chrysler was not the only large scale industrial company to produce tanks for the military during World War II.