Today we see "defense" spending that puts this sort of historical situation at a nearly reasonable level, complete with $400 hammers. I long for the good old days with reasonably-limited budgets. Today's defense is more offensive, with rarely an actual defensive act against an outside aggressor...I wouldn't have thought that the Allied forces could have been stalled by a lack of wrenches and hammers—just as I wouldn't have expected that American soldiers in Iraq would have to make their own Humvee armor. But in both America and Britain, during WWII, basic hand tool shortages regularly slowed down troops.
Luke sent along a excerpt from Walter J. Boyne's Boeing B-52: A Documentary History, explaining the impact of this shortage on American troops:
There were curious anomalies in the system as it grew. When hand tools were in such short supply, crew chiefs shared them, one set between each two B-47s. It was crazy to have two $3,000,000 aircraft sitting side by side with a $400 tool kit between them, and two master sergeants arguing over whose turn it was to use a ratchet wrench, but that's the way it was. Tools came out of one pocket, and aircraft out of another. [...]
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