Henry Stimson.

Henry Stimson was 73 years old when President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated him for his second stint as secretary of war in 1940. There were critics that said a man of his age wasn't up for the task as war raged in Europe and threatened to come to U.S. shores, but Stimson managed to take a poorly equipped and under-manned military and rapidly transform it by quickly ramping up the defense industrial base. Stimson wrote the article, "America is Ready: Our New Army is Trained and Equipped for Modern Combat," for the March-April 1943 issue of Army Ordnance.

Drobably the most fundamental weapon of all modern warfare is powder, and when I came here in July 1940, we didn't have enough powder in the whole United States to last the men that we now have overseas for anything like a day's fighting. And, what was worse, we didn't have any powder plants or facilities to make it; they had all been destroyed after the last war. The criticism which had then arisen against "merchants of death," as the commentators called powder manufacturers, had resulted in such unpopularity that the greater part of the powder makers had gone out of business. Some of them, I know, had spent a great deal of money destroying their plants.

I remember that the first few weeks I was here I went around like Israel Putnam was said to have done in the beginning of the Revolution crying, "Powder, powder, for God's sake give me powder!" because it takes about two years to construct and get a large-sized powder plant into full operation. The same thing was practically true of our facilities for the manufacture of weapons: We had no facilities for manufacturing weapons except our six little government arsenals whose capacity is only five percent of the facilities we have today....

In the next place, we had no legal power to increase and train an army of the...