HOW IT WORKS: WW2 Tank Factories

The logistics of such engineering feats just boggles my mind.

This is the Detroit Arsenal Tank plant when it was built and Closed in 1995. It was sold to the city of Warren which today still stand and Dana Corp are the current tenants. This building will never be taken down by agreement between the US Government and the State of Michigan. It is also in the National Registry as a Historical Marker. I proudly worked there in 1983 to 1986 as a Active duty soldier,a job I will never forget.

Hand-drawn blueprints and slide rules. Not a computer around, at least as they're now known. Genius.

7:50 Pretty badass to just park a locomotive in the building to heat it.

I read all these comments putting down the Sherman tank. Actually it was the most reliable tank in the field, the most likely to survive in if hit, because of the angle of its front armor had the equivalent thickness of a tiger 1 and with the numbers built it made this design a war winner. Remember, exclusive tank on tank battles were extremely rare. America's war doctrine was to simply overwhelm an enemy through fire power from land, sea and air, in this role the Sherman fit perfectly.

My dad drove a M-3 Lee tank, then transferred to M-4’s. This was America’s finest moment!

7:22 the flooring they are putting down are wood blocks. Helped absorb the noise and made the floor warmer to stand on.

Unbelievable hard work.

Both my granddads were in ww2. One did very similar work to this. Wasn't the coolest job and its not glamorized today like the combat troops are but I'm still proud of him. Thanks for putting this up! RIP Grandpa Lee!

I worked there from '74 to '95 in Master Mechanics as a Tool Designer & Manufacturing Engineer. We built the M60 & Mi series. Great job, people & product. I gained a lot of experience & worked with some great folks.

It always amazed me how much work it went into building tanks and planes and huge ships. And for a lot to be immediately destroyed . Along with the men in them

At 3:17-3:47, The sight of those drafting tables with French curves and triangular engineering rulers reminds me of when I first entered engineering in the mid-1960s.

The greatest generation.that says it all.

Amazing that plant was built in 6 months. During the war it built a quarter of the 89000 tanks produced. Cool history.

The Drafting room is where I'd be. With just Ceiling Fans and a small ocillating fan on your table. A good tank book that covers the production process that was published in 1946, Tanks are Mighty Fine Things.

Great historical video. Thanks for posting, enjoyed it.

What's remarkable no computers were used to design and plan this endeavor. American production won the second world war.
I recently retired as a Machinist. In the late 70's and early 80's I "ran" a number of machine tools labeled as war production property. They were high quality and built to last.

amazing what we can do when we work together and have a purpose

The scale of this blows my mind. Almost all of WWII production is remarkable. The tech back then was so archaic (compared to now) but they still could build this huge building in 6 months?! Not to mention thousands of tanks, which require some very precise bits. And not only was the US doing this.. but Russia, Germany.. even Japan's Royal Navy is mind boggling to pull off such feats with such "basic" tech. Wow

A friend of mine from German class in high school (1970's) brought his father to class, because he was a captain in the German army in Africa when he was captured by the Americans. He was eventually interred in a prisoner of war camp somewhere down south in the USA. Anyway, he spoke English pretty well and was making fun of the American tanks as being flimsy, and poorly built, so the MPs took a detour (he was riding in the back of a jeep), and the MPs drove him past a stockpile of tanks waiting for deployment, He asked why there were no markings on them. The MPs said no outfit had requested them yet. The kept driving for over 20 minutes, past seeming endless rows of tanks. After that my friends father (the captured German Captain), said he realized that no matter how crappy the American tanks were, if they had so many of them they could just give them out to whatever outfit requested them, that the war would be lost by Germany. He said every German tank was allocated to a unit and given a crew before it was even built. So they may have been crappy, but we built a zillion of them. My father was also in that theater of the war, and he said that he saw a tank crew bring a tank in for a 20 minute repair, but the quartermaster core just gave the crew a new tank because they did not have time to repair them, but had plenty of tanks to give out.