New “machines of wizardry,” David Lilienthal gushed in 1944, spun out “the stuff of a way of life new to this world.” New tools invented or vastly transformed and popularized by the war also reshaped American relations with nature-atomic weapons, synthetics like plastic and nylon, new metal alloys such as aluminum, drugs like penicillin, DDT, insecticides and herbicides, bulldozers (what Pyle called the “magic instruments” of the war), airplane technology including jet engines, sonar, assembly-line house construction, and the first computers. To begin with, great changes flowed from the nation’s vastly expanded productive capacity, which grew by 50% from 1940 to 1945, as well as from the extraction of materials from farms and mines needed to fuel it. World War II ushered in an age of new techology, such as atomic weapons, seen here being used on Nagasaki in 1945, and aluminum, like the rolls this worker is manufacturing. These are in truth poured into the furnace of war.”įuelling the furnace of war in the mid 1940s reconfigured American relations with the natural world in long lasting ways. “Obviously the areas where war is actually being fought are violently injured,” the conservationist Fairfield Osborn wrote in 1948, “Yet the injury is not local but leaves its mark even in continents far removed from the conflict because of the compelling demand that war creates for forest and agricultural products. The war also remade landscapes far from battlefields-through extraction, transport, processing, and pollution, but also through new technologies, organizational strategies, and ideas. In World War II, geography and weather shaped battles, and battles re-made landscapes, often dramatically. Roosevelt understood the importance of supply lines, and knew that America's farms and mines were vital to the war effort. Wars can be understood many ways-strategically, politically, economically, socially, personally. It begins on the farms of this country, and in the mines of this country.” “Well it begins at two places practically. “When we send an expedition to Sicily, where does it begin?” observed President Franklin Roosevelt two weeks into the campaign. That meant it was also a war that shaped and was shaped by nature. Tanks rolling off a German assembly line in 1943. It was a total war-a mobilization of nearly all human and natural resources. World War II was a war of thousands of guns, tanks, and planes-a “gross national product war” according to one historian. “To a large degree, the improvement in the military situation ,” historians Robert Coakley and Richard Leighton have written, “was a result of the huge outpouring of munitions from American factories and of ships from American yards.” That power of production helped win the war. It was America’s long-awaited power of production finally rolling into the far places where it had to go.” Watching the mountain of supplies on Sicily’s shores grow higher and higher, an idea dawned on Pyle: “Suddenly I realized what all this was. “We kept pouring men and machines into Sicily,” Pyle observed, “as though it were a giant hopper.”Īmerican abundance of natural resources-and the ability to mobilize and focus them-gave the Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen a tremendous advantage.Īn assembly line near Niagara Falls, NY producing fighter planes for the American war effort. In subsequent days, other supplies would follow: food, fuel, ammunition, spare parts, medicine, maps, cigarettes, tents, radios and telephones, and much, much more-everything that a modern army needed, and modern armies needed a lot. Many landing craft carried not people but supplies 20 carried water alone.
Those ships delivered 180,000 soldiers onshore but also 14,000 vehicles, 600 tanks, and 1,800 large guns-half of this huge quantity during the attack's first 48 hours. tanks in Tunisia in July 1943 prior to Operation Husky. It covered half the skyline.Even to be part of it was frightening." "On the horizon it resembled a distant city. “There is no way of conveying the enormous size of that fleet,” wrote Pyle. Pyle had sailed with Allied troops across the Mediterranean from North Africa.īefore D-day in Normandy eleven months later, the Sicily campaign-Operation Husky-was the largest seaborne invasion in history, involving an astonishing armada of nearly 3,000 ships. Seventy-five years ago, in late summer 1943, famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle sat above a newly constructed port in Sicily-the island near Italy's toe that Anglo-American forces had invaded in early July-taking in the scene below.
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