<text id=00he0500><title>Rearming for War: Introduction</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Rearming for War: Introduction</hdr><body>
<p>They stood in the hallway of the dormitory, listening to the slightly nasal, Harvard-accented voice coming from the loudspeakers of several radios tuned to the same station. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, just starting his unprecedented third term as President, was asking industry to build 50,000 airplanes a year for war.
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<p>The three, finishing their third year as aeronautical engineering students, dismissed the request with ridicule. They knew what industry could do; it was producing a few thousand planes a year. Now Roosevelt was asking industry to increase its production tenfold. It was clearly impossible, and they said so, loudly and jeeringly.
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<p>On 16 May 1940, Roosevelt's message did seem farfetched, if not impossible. The US aviation industry had built a total of 921 military aircraft during 1939. Spurred by foreign sales, it would turn out a noteworthy 6,019 during 1940. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the industry was crowding the 20,000 mark—it actually delivered 19,433 military planes during 1941—and within weeks would be outproducing any of the Axis countries and Great Britain.
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<p>Roosevelt was thoroughly aware of the reality of the world situation then. He had first addressed the subject in his annual message to the Congress early in 1938. The growing menace of military build-up in Europe was obvious to all except those who wouldn't see it. FDR asked Congress for a major increase in defense appropriations, mostly to be spent on naval strength. He got it.
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<p>Hardly a year later, he was back. On 12 January 1939, FDR told Congress that US air strength, then at an official figure of 1,700 planes, 1,600 officers, and 18,000 enlisted men, was "utterly inadequate". But it was even worse than Roosevelt said. Those 1,700 planes were obsolescent. The Army Air Corps owned a total of about 800 first-line planes. For comparison, the Royal Air Force fielded about 2,000 first-line airplanes then, and the Luftwaffe numbered about 4,000. Total RAF personnel exceeded 100,000, and the Luftwaffe counted half a million men and women.
