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World War 2 and farm equipment

N

NY 986

Well-known Member
I am expanding on a topic going on the John Deere board. The discussion pertains to materials shortages and limitations along with production limits for a given model tractor or implement. I recalled through a book that I had read that Ford had proposed to the production board governing farm machinery that they build all the tractor units to be sold for one model year as N series tractors. They tried to argue that quite an amount of material could be saved to be used for the military versus building larger row crop tractors. I also remember the Massey Harris harvest brigade which promoted their new self-propelled combine.

To make it personal I recall dad saying that grandpa had to take delivery of his Farmall M in early 1942 as the dealer could not be assured when more M's would come in. Apparently dealers would get preferential treatment in the grain belts of the MidWest and the cotton areas in the South for new tractors.
 
From what I'd read,each manufacturer was allowed to built two models. As I recall from the book Plow Peddler,AC built the WD and the G of all things. Seems to me that each year they were allowed to build a certain percentage of the number built pre war,but that it varied each year.
 
To add to the M story was that it was said grandpa had to order this tractor back in late 1941 and probably after Pearl Harbor. I always wondered why the pressure was there in 1942 to get the tractor when the commitment was already made. The only thing that I can figure is the dealer either refused to take full payment in 1941 because he did not know he was going to get that tractor or IH was going to allocate that M elsewhere regardless of the local dealer having a standing order. I know that grandpa was going to use the money from selling red kidney beans to pay for it so maybe he was up against the clock to get the bean money to pay for the M.
 
I would say it was a forced evolution to use mechanical equipment because of the manpower shortage as well as material shortage.
 
i have my neighbors 1942 farmall m that he bought new. he said back then there was a lottery to get new machinery. he had his name in for a new tractor. he got drafted in the army and was overseas in europe. another man got selected to buy the tractor but couldnt, so they pulled another name and he got it. his family wired him overseas to see if he still wanted it, he said yes. i restored the tractor for him about 18 years ago. after he passed, i bought the tractor. the family even gave me the original bill of sale.
 
Could not have been as both the WD and the G was first built in 1948 two years after the war was over.
 
OK,been a while since I'd read that. I don't even remember if it was in Plow Peddler,or some other article somewhere.
 
I remember Dad telling that there were price controls on used stuff. He said at an auction,they'd sell a bale of hay and a tractor went with it because there were no controls on the price of hay.
 
Dad told me that during WW2 and for several years afterwards, farmers were cash rich but new cars and farm equipment were in very short supply as production could not keep up with demand. Price controls were still in effect too. The black market was strong back then. Returning veterans were given high priority, but even for those veterans most farm equipment sales were completed with a second under the table payment. Towards 1948 production started to meet demand, price controls were lifted and manufacturers started introducing new products after that.
 
Not only that but tractor models were limited to a certain quantity to ensure lesser profitable planting, combines, and corn pickers got built to ensure crops got planted and harvested. Things such as tillage equipment and manure spreaders were scarce until after the war.
 
WD didn't start till 48
but the WC was built 33 to 48
and the WF was built 38 to 51
the only other one Allis built was the U 29 till 52
every thing else was ended by 42 or started after 47
my info comes from tractor data dot com so may or not be 100% correct
 
I don't know what was available during the war, but dad said he first piece of equipment he bought after he came back from ww2 was a new JD spreader. We wore it out in about 1970.
 
When I was a kid I saw the invoice for our M. The tractor and plow was around 1150 dollars all together. I have not seen that invoice in decades and fear it is lost.
 
I have a 42 A, 43 H and a 43 M. I understand there were hardly any 43 A's made. I suspect it was due to material availability. I knew the farmer that originally bought the 43 H. He said it came into the dealer with steel wheels and he told him he wouldn't take it unless they changed it to rubber. Dealer found the rubber somewhere. Maybe off another tractor.
 
Ya,I don't dispute that. I thought I heard that or read it somewhere when they were talking about the Gs. That they made so many of them that dealers were finally forced to take one G for every 3 WDs to get them out of inventory and out to the dealers. Might have been total BS. Seems to me somebody had found a few Gs still in crates,never assembled and that was his story. Said there were still more new in the crate to be assembled.
Sounds kinda like the WW2 Harleys that could be bought from Army surplus for $10 each back in the 60s.
 
I don't know if this was just a story or not but I was told that the limitation orders did help certain small farm equipment companies such as New Idea. Apparently the production board was not supposed to close any one company out of its normal business during the war. So the end result was to let New Idea build closer to it's normal production quantity to reach its raw material allotment. Further, the large companies did not have much room in their allotment to build things such as rakes and manure spreaders so companies such as New Idea partially filled the gap. I remember one old timer saying back then if he really wanted to push the local new Idea dealer he could have gotten a manure spreader but apparently this farmer did not care for NI. I also remember another old timer saying it was New Idea or nothing on certain pieces back then.
 
Kind of like the story of the traveling salesman and the farmers daughter.....Had something to do with lodging.
 
A lot of farm equipment manufacturers also built artillery pieces and shells, restrictiing their capacity to make farm machinery. Massey Harris ,for example, built various tank parts. And let's not forget JD attempt at building an armored tractor......Ben
 
Dads favorite thing to say when he did not like the wait or price at the dealer when I was a boy ,"Hey Mister The WAR is Over" don't be giving me thlose hi prices and bs saying you cant get it . not sure about the 2 models ,, , I know case built limited amounts of DC and SC every year throughout WW2,and actually overbuilt too many SC's..i cannot say for sure whether the big L or the little VAC was built continuously throughout the war..tires also were a premium price...the fix it up and make it do method of living of the 30s depression yrs . was good training for those that had to make do or improvise , or do without during WW2..those people went thru a lot , and had to learn a lot ,many were introduced and mastered electric and hydraulics that had coal oil lamps and ropepulleys and mule power at home . my mother worked building c-46-and 47 airplanes while the factory was being built around them and over them .my Dad was in mechanized infantry Tank division.. Dads b-I-l joined the army air corp and asked for immediate combat,, he was sent to guam , and helped figure out which part of the jap zero was most vulnerable ..
 
Which would explain why the government did not want the manufacturers to sacrifice harvesting machinery production in favor of more profitable tractors. Especially critical with small grains as quite a bit was done by threshing crews even though the combine had been out for a while. The man power was not there for threshing crews during the war.
 
I recall shortly after the War surplus aluminum was available and some manufacturers used aluminum rather than steel. Allis Chalmers combines had some aluminum sheet parts. I had a CA with the belt pulley made of pressed sheet aluminum, I saw one WC with a pressed steel axel housing and another friend had an Oliver 70 with cast bronze brake pedals.
 

I have a 1942 Case S tractor that Daddy bought after WW2. It originally had steel wheels which were cut off and had a rubber tire rim welded on the cut off spokes. During the war a neighbor got a Ford N of some description with steel wheels. He didn't keep it long, got a yellow standard IH the size of an H Farmall.

KEH
 
I was told that for IH while nothing was close to plentiful that H's were a bit easier to come by than M's. Probably why I don't see very many WW2 era M's around besides ours.
 
I own a 1944 LA Case. It was originally painted in military paint, but is a farm tractor.

The rest of this is totally hearsay, I have no evidence one way or the other. Supposedly, it was realised that a batch of tractors would not be needed by the military, but were desperately needed by farmers here in Australia. Case was already a well established brand here.

Two shiploads were dispatched to Australia. One was torpedoed (so there is a shipload of Case tractors somewhere out there in the Pacific), the other got here and the tractors were balloted out to farmers. The tractor I have is supposedly one of the surviving shipload. I bought it at a farm auction about 20 years ago.

I do know (from personal memory) that farm machinery, building material etc were very scarce here at the end of WW2 and remained so into the early 1950s.
 
A never was built with steel and none were made in 43. Some tractors were built during war and from 44 on production increased as Henry Ford advised Roosevelt that even though the was was winning if by some factor lasted longer farmers were streched with old tractors and to insure food supply lets build some tractors to insure food supply and other things farm related could keep increased production.
 
Farm equipment manufactures were allowed to stay at 80% of pre war production of farm equipment.

Both Ford and Massey tried to capitalize on the war effort as far as equipment was concerned because of the products they made, the N and the Massey combine.

There really wasn't a shortage of much except rubber. Even gas and oil were plentiful. But buy rationing gas they could force the savings of rubber which was in demand. The one thing we had to import was rubber and that was a 2 month sea voyage to get it here and supply was limited because much of where rubber was grown was under Japanese control. Manufacturing was also in demand for products like trucks, tanks and artillery. That's why they stopped the production of cars for the most part. They needed those specialized assembly lines for war materials. The scrap metal drives were aimed at making the civilian population feel like they were doing their part for the war effort.

US manufacturing never exceeded 50% toward the war effort. Germany, Japan, Russia and England were at 100% for the war effort.

Rick
 
Every fall when I go to the Makoti North Dakota threshing show, I see an unusual M Moline model U high crop. The little sign board attached to it says that the owner needed a tractor during WW2 and the high crop was all that was avalible. This is prairie wheat country where a high crop is not needed, but to the owner, this was better than no tractor at all.
 
Saw a new 43 Chevrolet, when I was a kid but, rather than having a Chevrolet emblem on the side of hood it had an emblem that spelled out General Motors co. It was painted Olive Drab. Of course they technically did not make cars in 43,
 
There was a large synthetic rubber plant built on the Ohio River in Beaver County Pa for the war effort. Parts of the original steam power operation I believe is still running for other purposes.
 
I remember WWII (The Big One) from start to finish. Ford made minor changes to their 9N and called it the 2N in 1942 so as to be able to raise the price based on the idea that it was a "new model". Got around price controls that way. Didn't even change the serial # designator. Remained as 9N throughout the run even though they were 2Ns. A substantial amount of equipment to in include tractors was made during the war years. A few production numbers of tractors illustrate this.
Ford:
1942-6365 2Ns plus 9159 9Ns total of 15524
1943-27528
1944-43443
1945-28749
Farmall M:
1942-9023
1943-7413
1944-20661
1945-17479
Farmall H:
1942-28854
1943-28160
1944-35872 1945-28679
John Deere GM:
1942-418
1943-330
1944- None
1945-2032
John Deere A:
1942-9006
1943-5645
1944-19574
1945-30039
John Deere B:
1942-17075
1943-9442
1944-20317
1945-10494
John Deere H:
1942-3760
1943-6801
1944-596
1945-8160
 
I remember when the Allis G came out. I was 12 years old and sat on one at the AC dealer for quite a while trying to come up with a good reason to buy one but in spite of being 12 years old with a fertile imagination, I couldn't think of one thing we could use a little tractor like that for. Then we heard that Allis was coming out with a replacement for the WC. Someone got a rumor started that this tractor would also have a rear mounted engine but be much larger than the G. When the replacement arrived we went in to see it and it looked just like the WC except for the add ons like hydraulics and a little more power. Things the WC probably would have had earlier had it not been for the war.
 
Your Farmall H and M data confirms what I was told in that M's were scarce for a lot of the war. I heard a few stories of guys wanting M's but took H's when the chance was there. A fair amount of H's were traded off after the war when M's got to be plentiful again. Not to beat this to death but it was said that the government wanted a certain tonnage of raw material made into planting and harvesting equipment for those companies that were already building such products.
 
Allis Chalmers made the model B starting in 38 and going to about 57. My grandpa bought a B in 1938 and drove it 50 mile home. I never did ask him why he drove it that far. I sure would have thought there would have been a closer dealer. Maybe price or availability.
DWF
 
I heard a lot of tractors were sold/shipped on steel during the war and the 1st 2Ns were on steel and didn't have lights or a starter or an electrical system to save resources. That didn't last too long. One of my dad's cousins in laws still have the Farmall H they bought during the war and the steel wheels it came on. I aw a display at a store in Ames Iowa last summer it had a John Deere model M in it. They claim that John Deere built a plant in Ames and made war material (bombs I think) after the war they converted it to make tractors producing the M and MTs there. I've seen fire arms made by International Harvester during the war. Companies made many different things and after the war many plants were re-purposed. The Louisville Farmall plant was built to make war material and converted to tractors after the war. The Willow Run plant that GM had was originally built by Ford and they made B-24 bombers there. The politics after the war dictated some of these plants were sold off by the government to selected buyers as they didn't want big companies that built war plants to use them to push smaller competitors out of business. Willow Run was allocated to Kaiser and they Built Kaiser cars there when Kaiser stopped building cars GM bought it.
 
I well remember in 1949 going by Allen Tractor Co. in Ithaca NY and they had at least 12 or more Allis G's lined up on an angle by the road. We wondered what in the heck any one would want something that funny for. ...Jack
 
I read that same thing about Ford in a IH book. I don't what the other manufactures response was but IH pointed out that the N series was not a practical tractor in every situation such as the western wheat belt on 1,000+ acre farms were they were barely adequate for a garden tractor. I have a 1942 D but there is nothing special about it feature wise. On a personal note my grandpa was drafted in 1942. My great grandpa tried to take his place because he wanted someone to carry on the farm. But as it turned out grandpa was sent home anyway because he was the only male in the family that could carry on the name. The fact that he farmed probably didn't hurt either. Anyway a few years later he bought his first piece of ground and started farming with a D4 cat.
 
(quoted from post at 19:14:10 04/07/16) I heard a lot of tractors were sold/shipped on steel during the war and the 1st 2Ns were on steel and didn't have lights or a starter or an electrical system to save resources. That didn't last too long. One of my dad's cousins in laws still have the Farmall H they bought during the war and the steel wheels it came on. I aw a display at a store in Ames Iowa last summer it had a John Deere model M in it. They claim that John Deere built a plant in Ames and made war material (bombs I think) after the war they converted it to make tractors producing the M and MTs there. I've seen fire arms made by International Harvester during the war. Companies made many different things and after the war many plants were re-purposed. The Louisville Farmall plant was built to make war material and converted to tractors after the war. The Willow Run plant that GM had was originally built by Ford and they made B-24 bombers there. The politics after the war dictated some of these plants were sold off by the government to selected buyers as they didn't want big companies that built war plants to use them to push smaller competitors out of business. Willow Run was allocated to Kaiser and they Built Kaiser cars there when Kaiser stopped building cars GM bought it.
Click to expand...

Yea Ford pulled a good stunt with the Willow Run plant. Got the government to build it then started building B24's for them with the option for retaining the plant after the war. IIRC Ford sold the land to the government too. But on the other hand they did build a lot of B24's.

Rick
 
Grandpa looked at/ tried other brands before settling on the M. The 9N in 1941 was pitched to him as filling all his needs. But he quickly realized the 9N's strengths were in tillage and mowing but not in pulling heavy manure spreaders, corn pickers through mud, and not having enough power for a pull type combine. In the end he was put off about the 9N because the salesman would not readily address his concerns about it. He looked at a John Deere A but did not like the hand clutch and I don't Deere had the Remote cylinder Power Trol then. I think he also looked at Oliver and Massey Harris but thought the Farmall M was more ergonomic. They probably lacked remote hydraulics as well at the time. Even though he was unhappy with the Ford salesman he might have bought a 9N or 2N to do light chores due to the hydraulic 3 point hitch but then other things came along.
 
In 1957 when I was in basic Training at Ft. Jackson, S.C. the first M-1 they issued me was made by International Harvester in 1944. I could barel hit the target with it. The instructor didn't do much better. He had me carry it to the ordnance tent at the rifle range and they confiscated it because the rifling in the barrel was pretty well worn out. They issued me a relativity new one then and I did better on the firing range. Firing an M-1 when you are left handed is the pits. All the cartridge hulls sand the clip come up through the center of the rifle and trying to see the target with your left eye is almost impossible after you fire the first round.
 
The war demand for iron was incredible. Just Caterpillar alone, 2 war theaters, Alcan Highway/Civil projects. The range of manufacturers for similar industrial equipment is also astounding because they needed more crawlers than Caterpillar could produce, + all the other related equipment, graders, scrapers, cranes, compressors, gensets and so on.

50 some odd thousand D7's many at 33,000 or so lbs of steel, just one of several models all destined for the above efforts. There was restricted access for civilian purchase, then the war ends and there are surpluses. Story below is about retrieval of surplus tractors from the south pacific, by a well accomplished innovator of heavy equipment in conjunction with Caterpillar.
Buster Peterson
 
Speaking of JD As, my neighbor has a 1946 A they bought brand new and they claim it was the first new tractor sold in the county after the War. This one does have Power Trol. They bought a one way disc tiller with a hydraulic lift to go with it. Also, I have been told by a few that were around at the time, demand for self propelled combines was so great that some of the cutters were buying them down south, making the harvest run up north to us in Montana, and selling them to area farmers for more then what they cutter paid for them.
 
Interesting that some of the equipment was recovered as the article in link describes . Much of it was not . A teacher that I had in high school was in military in south Pacific. He said that after war's end, much new equipment on the islands was loaded on barges and taken to sea and dumped in the ocean.
He saw new dozers started , put in gear, driver crawl off of it and the dozers went off the barge.
 
Is the Willow Run plant still standing? I have seen pictures of the inside with B-24's as far as you could see. Wasn't it 3/4 of a mile long? I know it was huge.
 
If you are talking about M1 Garand rifles many were built by IH but not during ww2. I believe they built them in the early 50's.
 
My one grandfather worked for Eastern Aircraft in Trenton building TBM Avenger torpedo bombers. The tool room had hundreds of brand new cast-case B&D power drills in it at the war's end. Government put two people in there with 5 pound sledges to break drills and throw them in the scrap pile. Reasoning was dumping them on the surplus market would hurt B&D and other drill makers too much. A few were 'liberated' and we still have one that works after all these years.
 
Some of those LA's that were sunk supposedly had the Hesselman fuel injected, spark ignited engine. Some call it a diesel which it is not. They were not a great success as they had some engine problems but would be collectable today.
 
My grandfather was on a list to buy his '45 BN. When he finally got it he wanted a planter to go with it. The dealer only had one for an A so that's what he brought home.

Modified a brand new planter. I don't have the book in front of me but I'm pretty sure it was a an A110/A111. Honestly I don't even thing they made that model plater for the BN.

Used that darn thing up until the late 80s. :) I still have it, wouldn't mind trying it at some point.

K
 
Dad said his dad's name got drawn in a lottery for a tractor. The price was set. There was a Massey Harris (don't know which model) and an F20 Farmall. He wanted the Massey, but got the F20. He had that until the mid 60's when he either sold it or gave it to dad's older brother who worked at Firestone in Des Moines and then bought 80 acres south of Des Moines. My uncle had it along with some other F20's and an F30 and a WD45 until he sold all sometime after 2000.I had heard that Deere built tank transmissions during the war, but never heard if they built any other war machines.
Here is a link below to who built M1 Garand's:
www.scott-duff.com/WhoHowManyWhen.htm
 
Dad said his dad's name got drawn in a lottery for a tractor. The price was set. There was a Massey Harris (don't know which model) and an F20 Farmall. He wanted the Massey, but got the F20. He had that until the mid 60's when he either sold it or gave it to dad's older brother who worked at Firestone in Des Moines and then bought 80 acres south of Des Moines. My uncle had it along with some other F20's and an F30 and a WD45 until he sold all sometime after 2000.
I had heard that Deere built tank transmissions during the war, but never heard if they built any other war machines.
 
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