We love looking into the industrial history of our country, especially during the time period in and around WWII. We have showed you videos of all different stuff being built from tanks to trucks. This is a film called Assembly Lines Of Defense and it details and documents the process Chrysler we through to ditch making cars and start making battle tanks in Michigan, including building a massive factory that was open and producing tanks right through the M1 Abrams era! The narrator’s script is great and this is a really patriotic look back at en era where private industry literally went all out and produced wartime supplies in volumes that they had never been produced in before.

Apparently Chrysler went from a cornfield to an active tank plant in less than two years and closer to a year after actually being awarded the contract by the government. The machines you will see being produced and tested here are the medium duty M3 Lee tanks. These were about 30 tons of raw killing power back in the 1940s and while some sort of military analyst claims that these tanks are the best in the world, that claim may have been mildly exaggerated at the time. The German Panzers were (and are still) recognized as being the cream of the crop but they were expensive, complicated, and not easily replaced. The Lee tanks got spit out of the factory like loaves of bread at an industrial bakery.

From the scenes of the massive riveter hanging from the girders to the people hand machining parts and pieces, it is a window into a world that seems so foreign right now that it is scary. Chrysler technically doesn’t exist anymore, now known as FCA and controlled by the Italians. The red tape that would need to be slashed for this type of turnaround on something as advanced as a tank in these times would be immense and in the end would probably fail due to a turtle migration path or something.

Enough of that, let’s take a look at the Greatest Generation’s hard work and skill on display. This is Assembly Lines of Defense!

PRESS PLAY BELOW TO SEE “ASSEMBLY LINES OF DEFENSE” –