During 1939, as the world burned, America reduced her army from 156,000 to 49,000 men.

Twenty years after “the war to end all wars,” the United States fielded only the thirteenth largest army in the world.

It was larger than that of Portugal but smaller than the fighting force of Bulgaria. Meanwhile, the Japanese Imperial Army could boast of 6,000,000 men under arms in partnership with a navy larger than the combined strength of the United States and Britain. In Europe, Germany had invested six times as much as the United States on arms between 1935 and-1940.

But, the United States had the capacity to produce soldiers and equipment in a hurry.

Barely a year after Pearl Harbor we were fighting in North Africa and busily preparing for the invasion of Europe and the battle that would take the fight all the way to Berlin.

It’s important to note that early in the war our planes were not as maneuverable or as fast as the Japanese Zero. And that the Germans had better planes, tanks and heavy guns throughout the entire duration of hostilities.

Even as late as the invasion of Normandy in the summer of 1944 seasoned German soldiers wrote letters home describing the poor fighting quality of the American and British soldiers, most of whom had never seen battle before D-Day.

Our lack of preparation was more dangerous than it seems on the surface—during the war, Germany developed jet aircraft and medium range ballistic missiles; two technologies the allies only perfected after capturing German technology at war’s end. Had German technology proceeded at a faster clip, we would surely have lost the world to the forces of evil.

Victory came through a combination of high productivity on one side and attrition on the other. The attrition could not have happened without the great increase in productivity. We compensated for our lack of technological prowess by the sheer force of numbers.

We beat both the Germans and Japanese back home on the farm.

We turned automotive factories to the production of tanks and warplanes, ramping the output of war material from near zero in 1940 to 50 percent of total American factory output by mid-1942. The United States went from the weakling on the beach to a hoard of 12 million men and women in uniform by 1945.

Our factories produced over seventy thousand naval vessels and nearly 73,000 aircraft during the conflict. And we changed the world forever when we broke tradition by sending our young women into the factories and munitions plants. It is important to note that these amazing feats were paralleled in the Soviet Union, but we’ll get to that later.

The allies, Great Britain, Russia, the United States (and France) united to beat the axis powers with often inferior equipment and after suffering unimaginable losses at the outset of conflict.

Allied forces, a collection of inexperienced citizen-soldiers, destroyed battle-hardened armies.

Many American troops were farmers who had never traveled a hundred miles from home before being shipped off to fight on another continent. The Allies waged war by tsunami. They simply overwhelmed the enemy with superior numbers on every front.

Sons of the great depression learned to march, with broomsticks for rifles. Automotive factories became arsenals of war. Hope grew proportionately.

Describing his feelings upon learning that the Americans had been dragged into the conflict, Winston Churchill wrote, “…now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!” He said that in 1941, four years prior to the last shot fired. Churchill, perhaps better than any other, understood the power of overwhelming numbers even in the face of a technically superior foe…

So what does all this war talk have to do with church multiplication…?

(This is an excerpt from the first chapter of “How To Multiply Your Church”)