America's Munitions 1917-1918

Benedict Crowell served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War I, and in this report, published just months after the armistice, he tells the story America needed to hear: how the nation went from a peacetime army of 200,000 to an armed force of four million in eighteen months. This is not dry bureaucratic documentation but a vivid account of industrial triage, improvisation, and extraordinary scale. Crowell takes readers inside the partnership between Washington and American factories that produced millions of rifles, billions of rounds of ammunition, and the artillery that would finally fall silent on November 11, 1918. The book opens with the last shells falling on the Western Front and then traces the full arc of mobilization: the chaos of 1917, the factories that had to be built from nothing, the railways strained beyond capacity, and the men who made it happen. For anyone curious about how America first learned to wage war on an industrial scale, this remains the definitive contemporary account.