During World War II, tank designer G. MacLeod Ross spent time in the United States in his role as British technical liaison officer with the Detroit Arsenal. He wrote a despairing summary on his own country’s inability to mass-produce tanks: “We still pursued our love affair with ‘craftsmanship’, which may be defined as, ‘the ability to fit together two things which do not fit’. There was no place for craftsmanship in an American production plant, even the presence of a vice or a bench in such factories was regarded as a sign of incompetence. Accuracy was invariably the enemy of craftsmanship.”
The U.K. did learn how to mass-produce war machinery, although never on the American scale. But the old-fashioned techniques he had criticized persisted for much longer in the more obscure…
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Road & Track (Digital) - 1 Issue, December/January 2025