TOO BAD WE DIDN'T FINISH THE WAR:

Even more than science and technology, however, was the role of the United States, which Winston Churchill called "that gigantic boiler." It did not matter that the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor--which sunk four U.S. battleships and killed 2,403 American servicemen--was the most disproportionate engagement of the entire war. Once the American war machine got moving, it was only a matter of time before it would irreversibly change the course of the war. 

The year the United States entered the war (1941), its warship tonnage was about equal to that of the United Kingdom, and a bit more than its primary naval adversary, Japan. The next year, U.S. warship tonnage was almost double that of Japan, and the following year about triple. By the time hostilities ended in 1945, U.S. war tonnage was almost ten times that of Germany and Japan. In 1942 alone, the United States built 47,800 aircraft (remember that Germany in the eight years preceding the war built 30,000); in 1943, America almost doubled aircraft production to 85,900 planes. The Germans, in comparison, built only 24,800 aircraft that year. 

By 1943, the British and American fleets were prevailing in all three oceans. By the middle of 1943, "a giant new productive force was affecting the war," observes Kennedy. The United States, he writes, was a "giant factory of war." America was,

sending toward the battlefields a flow of armaments and weapons far larger than the world had ever seen, all from one single nation that proved capable of doubling its aircraft output in one year and of dispatching a new aircraft carrier virtually every month of the Pacific fighting. This was not just a history of campaign events. This was the history of something far, far bigger. This was about a shift in the global power balances.

America was wealthy--in raw materials, industrial capacity, technological development, and capital resources. And it had a numerical advantage: the U.S. population in 1941 was 133.5 million, compared to Germany's 90 million. Thus the number of US naval personnel, not counting marines, doubled between 1939 and 1941; it more than doubled the following year; by 1945, it was almost thirty times its prewar strength. 

Once the American juggernaut got moving, it proved unstoppable. At the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, the Americans threw 15 fleet and light fleet carriers and 900 aircraft against 9 Japanese carriers and 750 aircraft. Part of that battle, called the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot," witnessed the Japanese lose almost half its aircraft, while the Americans lost only 30. It did not matter that American military leadership made several miscalculations in the Pacific, as they did at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. American technological and numeric superiority was simply overpowering.

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