What Each Car Brand Built in WW2

TL;DR

Every major car brand converted to wartime production, making WW2 as much a manufacturing battle as a military one.

Key Points

• 1.General Motors was the single largest weapons producer of the war, building 500,000+ military trucks, M1 Carbines, plane engines/fuselages, and amphibious vehicles — and even owned Opel, the Nazi army's biggest truck supplier.
• 2.Ford built 8,685 B-24 Liberator bombers at a rate of one per hour at the Willow Run plant, the largest factory in the world at the time, while Ford UK produced 360,000 military vehicles.
• 3.Chrysler manufactured 22,000 tanks at the Detroit Arsenal — more armored vehicles than all Axis powers combined — using car assembly line techniques, and also contributed to the Manhattan Project (atomic bomb).
• 4.Mitsubishi was Japan's largest aircraft manufacturer, producing 17,000+ planes including the A6M Zero that bombed Pearl Harbor, while also building the Musashi, the heaviest battleship ever constructed.
• 5.Rolls-Royce built over 168,000 Merlin V12 engines powering 40+ aircraft including the Spitfire, Hurricane, P-51 Mustang, and Lancaster bomber — making it the engine hero of the Allied air war.
• 6.Mercedes, BMW, and Volkswagen used tens of thousands of forced laborers, POWs, and concentration camp prisoners in their factories, with BMW also secretly building aircraft engines for the Nazis years before the war started.