NDIA AT 100: THE ROLE OF PARTNERSHIPS AND COMMUNICATION.

* This is part five of a six-part series looking at the history of the National Defense Industrial Association as it celebrates its centennial year.

"It is through such organizations as the Army Ordnance Association that the truth of what we are doing can be brought to the attention of the people. ... We are moving in a big way and have to move fast. ... If we are going to preserve for our children the heritage of our fathers, we must prepare and do it without loss of time."

--Lewis Compton, assistant secretary of the Navy, Oct. 1940

On Oct. 8, 1940, more than 1,500 members and guests of the Army Ordnance Association gathered at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for the 21st Annual Meeting of the association. Though the AOA had long focused on its titular Army branch of service, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy Lewis Compton gave a "most timely" address during the meeting's industrial mobilization luncheon, which had to be relocated to a larger room to accommodate 683 attendees.

"Timely" was an understatement, for the New York event was held during the London blitz bombing campaign across the Atlantic. Only three weeks earlier, the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 had instituted the first peacetime draft in U.S. history.

Compton was serving under the newly-appointed Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox--one of the chief architects of the "two-ocean Navy" that envisioned a fleet ready to deploy and engage in the Atlantic and Pacific simultaneously. Knox had assumed the role in July 1940, a week before President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the so-called Two-Ocean Navy Act into law, authorizing a 70 percent increase of the naval fleet, or more than 250 additional ships.

The role of partnership and communication between government and industry was powerfully tested in this ramp-up. Just after the two-ocean legislation was first introduced, "the Navy Department immediately began tentative negotiations with the shipbuilders and others for the ships and equipment required to meet this tremendous task," Compton wrote in the January-February 1940 issue of Army Ordnance. "Through this use of foresight it was possible for the Navy to release letters and dispatches of awards for practically all the combatant tonnage authorized under this act within two hours after the president had signed the bill." The shipbuilding firms had used similar foresight, placing all of their tentative orders with subcontractors such that, immediately upon...