Cost of WW II Weapons

[indy1919a4]

Came across this looking for something else

Cost of manufacturing Weapons during WW II.. There are a few others that do this, But I like
the range of guns. Nice overview. So much of the cost depends on the year...

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/rough-guide-costs-of-wwii_guns.html

What blew me away, was the cost of the 1918 BAR put that in todays dollars that about 4500..

That is just about spot on to the price that Ohio Ordnance charges for their 1918a3 today.

https://www.oowinc.com/exclusives/semi-auto/1918a3-slr/

Also it was a wow to see the price of the MA-DUCE and 1919a4... I bet that price does not include the mounts and extras for those beasties.,

 

[jjadurbin]

Thanks for the link ...fascinating information. My great uncle was a Corsair pilot with VMF-124, and after learning what the enemy did to captured Americans, traded a bottle of whiskey with a mud Marine on MogMog island for a U.S.M1A1 Carbine, which he then carried along with his 1911 .45ACP. If he went out in a blaze, he wanted the extra fire power. According to this site, his carbine (Winchester) cost taxpayers about $45, his 1911 .45ACP about $15 plus the shoulder harness, and they list the Corsair at being valued today at about 3.5 million.

He kept two out of the three, no Corsair in my drive.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/military-vehicle-news/corsair.html

 

[Slamfire]

Very interesting! The cost for the Lugers really surprised me. I thought they were more.

It would be interesting to know if the German data has to be adjusted for the slave labor they were using. The Germans used their Jewish population for slave labor (essentially) before shipping them to the "East". I have noticed the Nazi's had a twisted sense of humor. The concentration camp gates had signs "Work shall set you Free!". (the inmates were worked to death). And in Auschwitz, the walkway to the gas chambers was "Ascension Avenue". And then, the Germans used POW's, French, Belgians, basically anyone they could get their hands on, in their Armament factories.

As an aside, I read a book by a USAF Air Force Ace who was shot down over Germany. He had been told to escape and if caught, act as a foreign worker. He was given some cover story in his training. This turned out to be bad advice as the Allies had no idea how evilly the Nazi's treated their slave laborer's. The pilot narrowly missed being shot with real escapee foreign workers. If a foreign slave worker ran away from his job, and was picked up by the authorities, the Nazi's shot them for being too much trouble to deal with!

I don't know how much wage control was going on in the US. Given all the other rationing going on, I suspect factory wages were being held down. The major problem in the US, was not enough workers. Women were brought in, unlike Germany which kept the women home, but there were not enough Rose the Riveter's for all jobs (agricultural for example) to go around.

Something to understand, in the 1930's the US had an enormous amount of idled industrial capacity. The production capacity, idled though it was, was more than the Axis powers combined. So when the US got in the war, it took time, but all the factories were humming.

The US was a manufacturing behemoth 80 years ago. It ain't anymore. When we need masks, we wait till the Chinese spin up their factories, and wait in line like everyone else.

 

[Hooda Thunkit]

The Germans weren't the only ones to use POWs for labor.
The US did too.

Both of my parents grew up in a town that had a WW2 POW camp nearby. They both remember POWs manning garbage trucks, and doing manual labor around the county.

The difference being, the POWs in the US camps that were doing labor were volunteers, and usually a 'trustee' type prisoner.

Also, as to the wartime wages, they were indeed artificially controlled. That is how it came to be common for US workers to have health insurance paid by the employer.

The employers were all crying for workers, but couldn't poach from other jobs by offering higher pay, that was forbidden. So, employers offered perks, the biggest being health insurance.
Some of the perks would be housing (in very short supply in the factory towns), transportation to and from the job, meals, etc. Any or some combination of these would be offered in lieu of money.

 

[boom boom]

We actually used quite a few POW's in agriculture as laborers in WWII. My grandfather was a farm manager at the time and had a few German POW's as laborers.

 

[lysanderxiii]

What blew me away, was the cost of the 1918 BAR put that in todays dollars that about 4500..

That's about the price of an M249 . . .

And, as Slamfire noted German figures are questionable. 1) how to figure the "exchange rate" between a 1944 DM and a US $? 2) how do you calculate the labor cost if the labor id forced?

The correct way to do it would be to compare the man-hour requirements for manufacture of each weapon, and even that will be skewed as forced labor will will not work as efficiently as a motivated and paid work force.

 

[MikeInOr]

Very interesting website... but when ever I see figures thrown around like that without any references to where the figures came from it really brings out the cynic in me!

 

[mjsdwash]

people always forget inflation, but people also forget that inflation does not generally adjust to the 2 person household income of the 1970's onward. So most inflation indexes you can double and have an accurate reference for actual cost of living. My 64 Buick cost $3300 or so in 1963 new, but people made about $6500. Modern equivalent costs about $34,000 but household income is around $62,000 so its not far off. But the big difference is in 1963 it was one job, vs. 2020, where its two. The average person in county makes about $40,000/year, so are approximately 2/3 of cost of living from that era, not including housing of course, which is closer to 1/8.

 

[indy1919a4]

Just one fun comparison the mg-42 & mg-34 cost about 100 to 130 dollars to make, the Lafette tripod that they set on cost about 160 dollars..



But to be fair the Lafette tripod is a work of art .

 

[Mr. Zorg]

It would have been interesting to have included the Walther P38 with the same methodology as the other handguns since it relegated the P08 to a secondary substitute standard issue. Plus the Browning HP with both Canadian Inglis and Belgian P35 cost of production. But the article had to end somewhere.

It's the relative costs, not the absolute values, that really hold my interest.

 

[.455_Hunter]

Not sure I am tracking on the 1911 being more costly than the Luger.

 

[HB]

Don’t forget NASA’s German backbone postwar .

It makes sense that BARs were $4500 etc. Many of those weapons were state of the art back then. Then M1 Garand was one of a kind.

 

[indy1919a4]

Don’t forget NASA’s German backbone postwar .

It makes sense that BARs were $4500 etc. Many of those weapons were state of the art back then. Then M1 Garand was one of a kind.

I really swore I would slam my hand in a door before saying anything bad about the 1918 BAR. By God the BAR & Kirby got the Sarge and squad out of trouble almost every week.. It is one of the most manly of weapons to shoot, hold & handle.. But Sadly.. Lean in please... because I am going to say this softly.

The American version of the BAR going in to WW II was far from state of the art.. really the gun was in need of some changes. (The kind that FN made over in Europe with their Model D). Cleaning an 1918 is really something I would not want to do in the dark and mud. Also holding it while shooting can be a pain.



That all being said, I never typed this, someone hacked my account

 

[fpgt72]

The Germans weren't the only ones to use POWs for labor.
The US did too.

Both of my parents grew up in a town that had a WW2 POW camp nearby. They both remember POWs manning garbage trucks, and doing manual labor around the county.

The difference being, the POWs in the US camps that were doing labor were volunteers, and usually a 'trustee' type prisoner.

Also, as to the wartime wages, they were indeed artificially controlled. That is how it came to be common for US workers to have health insurance paid by the employer.

The employers were all crying for workers, but couldn't poach from other jobs by offering higher pay, that was forbidden. So, employers offered perks, the biggest being health insurance.
Some of the perks would be housing (in very short supply in the factory towns), transportation to and from the job, meals, etc. Any or some combination of these would be offered in lieu of money.

German POW's laid many a road in Texas.

 

[Speedo66]

The POW's in this country weren't brutalized, were fed properly, and weren't worked to death. Quite a difference.

Once Italy surrendered in '43, Italian POW's were permitted to join Italian Service Units in the US, where they were trained and paid to do required jobs, and were no longer confined.

 

[Monac]

Thanks for the link ...fascinating information. My great uncle was a Corsair pilot with VMF-124, and after learning what the enemy did to captured Americans, traded a bottle of whiskey with a mud Marine on MogMog island for a U.S.M1A1 Carbine, which he then carried along with his 1911 .45ACP. If he went out in a blaze, he wanted the extra fire power. According to this site, his carbine (Winchester) cost taxpayers about $45, his 1911 .45ACP about $15 plus the shoulder harness, and they list the Corsair at being valued today at about 3.5 million.

He kept two out of the three, no Corsair in my drive.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/military-vehicle-news/corsair.html

Wow. That speaks volumes about the size of the Corsair. I think Me-109 pilots had to carry a 32 automatic, because a Luger would not fit in the cockpit. Of course, if your uncle had been flying a P-47 Thunderbolt, he could have added a bazooka and half-a-dozen rockets to his airborne arsenal.

 

[jjadurbin]

The POW's in this country weren't brutalized, were fed properly, and weren't worked to death. Quite a difference.

Once Italy surrendered in '43, Italian POW's were permitted to join Italian Service Units in the US, where they were trained and paid to do required jobs, and were no longer confined.

Long before I was born, the "factory farm" down the road from my family's farm had six German U-boat crewmen who had been captured off Morehead City N.C. In 1966 I had an elementary class with the daughter of one of these men, who I later met. He had returned to Germany after the war, only to find his homeland destroyed, "...everything I knew was now gone." Miles Ducan, who owned the farm where he had worked, sponsored his application for citizenship. When I reached my early teens I served in the Wildlife Conservation Corps with two sons who had U-boat fathers who'd escaped to America to rebuild their lives. Those stories stuck with me through the years.

 

[Texas10mm]

people always forget inflation, but people also forget that inflation does not generally adjust to the 2 person household income of the 1970's onward. So most inflation indexes you can double and have an accurate reference for actual cost of living. My 64 Buick cost $3300 or so in 1963 new, but people made about $6500. Modern equivalent costs about $34,000 but household income is around $62,000 so its not far off. But the big difference is in 1963 it was one job, vs. 2020, where its two. The average person in county makes about $40,000/year, so are approximately 2/3 of cost of living from that era, not including housing of course, which is closer to 1/8.

Average wage is meaningless.

If I'm in the room with a NFL player the AVERAGE wage in the room could be in the millions of dollars. What really matters is the MEAN or MEDIAN wage. Which is lower than the average. https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/central.html

 

[jjadurbin]

Wow. That speaks volumes about the size of the Corsair. I think Me-109 pilots had to carry a 32 automatic, because a Luger would not fit in the cockpit. Of course, if your uncle had been flying a P-47 Thunderbolt, he could have added a bazooka and half-a-dozen rockets to his airborne arsenal.

...very true, and I had a chance to study the cockpit of a Corsair during a show at Luke, the seat has a space between the frame and wall where a machinist fashioned a M1A1 "snap rack" for many a Marine pilot. Compared to the Hellcat and Kitty the Corsair was monster huge. One of his friends was a P-47 pilot, Quentin Aanenson, both from the same home town. As kids we used to listen to them discuss techniques, tactics and missions ...they are both featured in that PBS series a while back. In later years they both preferred shotguns and duck hunting.

https://quentinaanenson.com/

 

[illinoisburt]

The cost perspective is interesting. What it really does is reinforce the strange pricing of surplus. After the war the obsolete and oversupply equipment was scrapped and sold off. This included a big ol' pile of guns. Since the government interest is reducing maintenance and storage rather than recovering costs, the prices when plentiful to the public end up being really low (essentially not much more than value of base components). It seems most of the public placed about the same value on them at the time, too. Now that the guns are less commonly found and niche markets have developed for them, the prices have come up to close to or over actual cost of making a new one.

As an aside, my paternal grandfather was an MP at Camp Alva in Oklahoma guarding Nazi POWs captured in North Africa. He was not a big fan of guns after the war, however I recall him talking more than a few times about how happy he was to ditch the 1911 pistol for a wire stocked M1 carbine. Said it shot a lot better and was better respected by the Nazi officers who still wore their uniforms and commanded the other prisoners inside the compound. The old 'you cannot shoot us all' argument has been around a long time.

 

[Toml]

This POW knowledge would make an interesting thread in its own right. My dad was a USDA forester in middle Georgia. It is my understanding that German prisoners worked under his supervision, sourcing timber for the military.

 

[Palescarab]

My Grandpa who was a WW2 vet use to tell me stories about his dad and the German POWs that were brought out to work at his blacksmith shop in Gering, Nebraska. I remember him talking about how they were perfectly fine with being in the USA cause they were generally being treated well, were eating regular meals, had a place to sleep, weren’t being shot at, and had plenty of eye candy in the local girls who’s boyfriends had gone off to fight the war. I think back to those stories when I think of my grandpa cause that last part about the girls always got a good laugh out of him when he talked about it. He also said most of the guys that were brought out to work in the shop were generally really nice guys and they never had any problem with them. I use to go out there as a kid and for hours would listen to grandpas vet buddies tell stories about the war. Crazy how much I miss those years.

 

[Slamfire]

We actually used quite a few POW's in agriculture as laborers in WWII. My grandfather was a farm manager at the time and had a few German POW's as laborers.

After reading the Camp Lordsburg historical marker, and being led to some of the remaining WW2 artifacts, I became interested in the Japanese internment during WW2.







Almost a quarter million Japanese Americans were put in concentration camps. And used as forced labor. They too were in agriculture, building roads, infer structure, etc. A shooting bud, his Dad was in the Dakota's. Some of Dad's agricultural buildings are still around. When the war ended, businesses and states did not want to give back their American slaves, and it took a court case to release all of them! Slaves are so profitable to the owner!

Camp Lordsburg was unusual in that it had Japanese American's, Germans and Italians in one Camp.

I am reading this book. Nazi Prisoners of War in America

There were slightly less than a half million German/Italian POW's in the US. The US scrupulously followed the Geneva Conventions which required the POW's be treated no more, no less than US servicemen. So the Camps, food, etc, were equivalent. And in many cases, better than what the Germans had in service. They loved the food!

The Geneva conventions allowed POW work in "Non Military" industries. That got defined as, more or less, if they touched tank parts, but not the tank, that was non military. Unlike in Germany where slaves built artillery, firearms, tanks, etc. Unhappy workers do not make good product. This is why German mid war weapons, to include P-38's have a well deserved post war reputation for breaking!

Thinking about shooting your WW2 P.38?


The greatest use of German POW's was in agriculture and forestry. This was hard work, especially in the Southern states. Incidentally, a German got about 80 cents a day in script which allowed them to buy things from the PX and if they were bad, they got docked pay and bread and water. If they saved their money, they got to take US cash to Germany and that was important as the German economy had collapsed. It worked. Shootings were rare, no mutinies. I think more Germans were murdered by ardent camp Nazi's for being defeatists than by Camp Guards.

In spite of vocal Americans who demonized and then wanted to punish and hurt German POW's, German POW's were very well treated, and acted very well. The farmers did not want to give them up, (Slaves are so profitable to the owner! ) and for many Germans, the best years of their lives were in fact, as a POW in the US. It paid off later in good relations with Germany.

No one wanted to be a POW in Russia!

German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union

Even the British were reluctant to give up their German POW's. They used them as forced labor until 1948, (three years after the end of the war!) primarily because businesses have a hard time giving up their slave labor. Slaves are so profitable to the owner!

German prisoners of war in the United Kingdom

 

[fpgt72]

Perhaps we need to define "concentration camp".

You also can not look at the past with the eyes of today.....it just does not work.

I do not define the "camps" that Japanese Americans got shoved into "concentration camps", I define what the british did to the Boers as concentration camps, german to jews, romani, and other ethnic groups fit into there, what the soviets did to their own people as well fall into concentration camps.

What the US did was not cool in any way, however I do not see it raising to that level.

 

[WestKentucky]

POW workers were common in the US. Where I grew up there were large piles of rocks around farms, and the story from the old timers was that the size of rocks could determine who stacked them. Large rocks were stacked by workers in the “New Deal” programs where government paid workers improved farmland in the area and made it more easily tillable. These people would have had better access to mules and would be willing to do more to get heavy stones out of the fields. Smaller stones were likely piled up by POWs who were under armed guard and had considerably less access to draft animals, machinery, or tools which could be used for escape. My grandpa worked alongside some Germans as a young man in other jobs trying to get by.

They are long gone now, but that same grandpa helped to build part of the buildings used as barracks at Camp Campbell (before it was Fort Campbell) and I recall as a kid seeing them being torn down while on a field trip visiting the army post to get our early life dose of military life glorification which planted a seed for a lot of kids to have a desire to fly around in helicopters, drive big awesome trucks, and play with big guns.

Where I live now, there is a community nearby where the barracks are still standing which housed POWs and supposedly held some Japanese-American civilians when the Japanese were held. The buildings have supposedly been used for a few purposes over the years but they are in bad shape now and will likely be gone soon.

This article does a decent job of describing the situations in Tennessee, so if there was this much activity here, there was likely as much or more in every other state in the continental US.
https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/pow-camps-in-world-war-ii/

sorry for thread drift...

What is interesting to me is the multiple types of manufacturing which cannot be done anymore without totally rebuilding a dead technology. The skilled labor and specialized machinery needed for certain things is simply nonexistent today. Some of that is driven by environmental laws, as some practices were atrocious environmentally. It’s also interesting knowing that in a lot of areas coal fired steam power was cheap and plentiful, and some areas were still using water powered machinery, but production costs with very little energy overhead still were unbelievably high, even with suppressed wages. It makes me wonder how much of the cost was what is now considered “cost of poor quality” where parts got rejected due to flaws and were either reworked at further expense or scrapped along with all of the labor dollars already put into them.