When France fell to Germany in the summer of 1940, the United States lacked the factories, shipyards, and industrial facilities needed to fight a global war. Built for War examines how the US created the industrial foundation required not just to fight but to win a global war. Beginning with the crisis sparked by the German victories of 1940, author David Rigby traces how President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a network of government agencies moved to expand the nation's productive capacity long before Pearl Harbor. Federal agencies oversaw the construction of aircraft factories, ordnance works, synthetic rubber facilities, aluminum smelters, and giant shipyards on a scale never seen in the US. These facilities produced the equipment, munitions, ships, and aircraft that sustained Allied operations in Europe and the Pacific. Rigby describes aircraft factories with mile-long assembly lines, Liberty Ships and tankers being launched in rapid succession from new government-owned shipyards on all three coasts, and sprawling munitions complexes.

At the center of the wartime construction effort were talented government bureaucrats who determined where taxpayer-financed factories would be built and which companies would operate them. Drawing on government records, wartime studies, and contemporary accounts, Rigby proves that many industrial facilities most closely associated with the Arsenal of Democracy were financed and owned by the federal government. The wartime factory building program reshaped communities across the country. Farmers lost land through eminent domain proceedings, isolated rural areas became centers of military production almost overnight, and millions of workers migrated to new defense hubs in search of jobs. The industrial expansion that supplied the war effort transformed the American landscape and economy for decades after the fighting ended.