Still, this was not enough to fight a war. After the Japanese attack, Roosevelt increased his demands on American industry. He called for sixty thousand warplanes, forty-five thousand tanks and twenty-thousand anti-aircraft guns. And he wanted all these within one year.

A month after the Pearl Harbor raid, Roosevelt organized a special committee to direct military production. He created another group to help companies find men and women for defense work. And he established a new office where the nation's best scientists and engineers could work together to design new weapons.

These new government organizations faced several problems. Sometimes factories produced too much of one product and not enough of another. Sometimes tools broke. And some business owners refused to accept government orders.

But the weapons were produced, and American troops soon had the guns and supplies they needed.

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The federal government had to quickly expand its own workforce to meet war needs. Federal spending increased from six billion dollars in nineteen forty to eighty-nine billion in nineteen forty-four. That was fifteen times as much spending in just five years.

Roosevelt had to take strong steps to get the money for all this spending. He put limits on wages. He increased income taxes to as much as ninety-four percent on portions of incomes over two hundred thousand dollars. And he asked the American people to lend money to the federal government. The people answered by purchasing almost one hundred billion dollars in war bonds.