Fred Andrews: Review of Arthur Herman's "Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II"

Fred Andrews writes for the New York Times.

ARTHUR HERMAN has set out to right an injustice: the loss, down history’s memory hole, of the epic achievements of American business in helping the United States and its allies win World War II.

Dr. Herman, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a writer of popular histories, says he believes that American business has never gotten its due. He contends that it won the war but lost “the narrative.” Business was denigrated by envious New Dealers, he says, and upstaged by the Keynesian focus on the war years’ $300 billion in deficit spending that finally ended the Great Depression.

The author is avowedly pro-business, but you don’t have to share that perspective to enjoy “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II” (Random House, $28). It is indeed a rarely told industrial saga, rich with particulars of the growing pains and eventual triumphs of American industry as it exploded from negligible arms output to an arsenal of weaponry then unmatched in human history....