This week, a lecture about World War II amphibious vehicles.

Weber State University professor Brandon Little teaches a class about military vehicle innovations

and the role of American factories during World War II.

The FMC had always built its factories close to a rail line, so it could simply

offload equipment that it had manufactured, put them on rail cars, and ship them away. But in this

case, when it got its war contracts from the Navy, it built new factories just on the opposite side.

So it expanded its operations and was able to actually do both.

Professor Little also focuses on types of amphibious vehicles used in the Pacific

and describes the process of testing production and battle application.

Well, good morning, class, and welcome back to History 329, modern American military history.

And today we are going to continue our conversation about the Second World War.

And specifically, we're going to look at an aspect of the war through what we could call the lens of industrial mobilization.

And industrial mobilization is often understood as a key to allied victory in this war.

It's often said that the allies win because they outproduce the axis powers. And I'm sure many of us

have heard this before and perhaps encountered it. You've read it. But one of the problems with that line of reasoning is that if it's simply a amount of

stuff that produces victory, well, at the beginning of this war, the Axis powers possess

more.

And so that argument about stuff cannot absolutely establish ultimately the trajectory of Allied victory.

Because the Allies for a long time are deficient in that quantity of stuff.

The other aspect of the material argument, if you will, that the Allies outproduce,

that's understated and oversimplified,

in almost all literature that you could consider related to the war,

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