American military history. And today were going to continue our conversation about the second world war. And specifically were going to look at an aspect of the war through the lens of industrial mobilization. Industrial mobilization is often understood as a key to allied victory in this war. It is often said the allies win because they outproduce the axis powers. Im sure many of us heard it, encountered it, youve read it, but one of the problems with that line of reasoning is that if it is simply amount of stuff that produces victory, at the beginning of the war the axis powers possessed more. So the 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, thats understated, oversimplified in almost all literature you consider related to the war, we have no clear sense of how the stuff is buil