The US at the start of WW2 was primarily an inefficient agrarian economy.
The war machine is what changed that - that and not being reachable by enemy bombers, and hence not bombed to bits.
Germany started middling and ended destroyed.
The war machine is what changed that - that and not being reachable by enemy bombers, and hence not bombed to bits.
Germany started middling and ended destroyed.
Germany required like 10 percentage points more of its labor force in agriculture in 1939 than the US did, and that still wasn't enough to make Germany self-sufficient in food; the US was of course one of the major food exporters in the world (in neither case were agriculture workers more than a third of the population, I should note). US agriculture also had largely mechanized in the 1910s, albeit many farms did switch back to draft animals during the 1920s and 1930s due to the collapse in agricultural prices, making animal feed grown on your own farm cheaper than buying fuel for the tractor. Europe agriculture largely didn't mechanize until the 1950s, after WW2.
Let's try this another way, during WWII the US built warship tonnage equivalent to all the rest of the world's navies combined...in just 1943. Then the US did that again in 1944. At one point, the US hit a Japanese fleet with 17 fleet carriers at once. Keep in mind the Japanese only built 9 fleet carriers total and that was considered the most powerful fleet in the world at the beginning of the war.