Planning D-Day

A little shout out to the economists for D-Day. We rightfully praise the brave men who stormed the beach that day. We pay less attention to the planners who set them up for success rather than tragedy. This from Michael Lind's Land of Promise.

In 1942, American policy makers were engaged in a secret debate about the feasibility of of a US-British invasion of German-occupied Europe in 1943. In a classified report for the War Production Board, two economists, Robert Nathan and Simon Kuznets, concluded that it would not be possible to produce the necessary material until 1944 at the earliest. The army's chief military supply officer, General Brehon Somervell was furious. He denounced "this board of 'economists and statisticians' .... without any responsibility or knowledge of production." He called for the suppression of the report, which should "be carefully hidden from the eyes of all thoughtful men." But the argument of Nathan and Kuznets prevailed, and D-Day was a success in 1944 instead of a disaster in 1943.
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In 1944, the United States completed one plane every five minutes, launched fifty merchant ships a day, and finished eight aircraft carriers a month.
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On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Germans could deploy only 319 aircraft. The United States and its allies deployed 12,837.

P.S. Kuznets won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1971.