Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

by Ian W. Toll

In 1942, the nation would manufacture 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft weapons, 60,000 aircraft, and 6 million deadweight tons of cargo shipping. Those targets, Roosevelt added, “will give the Japanese and the Nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished in the attack at Pearl Harbor.” The numbers had been revised by Roosevelt himself, apparently with no actual basis in the estimates that had been given to him—he simply crossed out the estimates he had received and rewrote them with his own hand on the night before the speech. When Hopkins worried that these arbitrary, back-of-the-envelope figures might not be feasible, the president serenely replied: “Oh—the production people can do it, if they really try.” Roosevelt, Bob Sherwood observed, “was never afraid of big, round numbers.”