Chapter 12: Back with a Vengeance
One of the most notorious appointments of McSweeney's during the war was the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Henry Ford. Already famous as the pioneer of the assembly line and a renowned entrepreneur and businessman with one of the largest auto companies in the world bearing his name, his resourcefulness and efforts in keeping the economy in Detroit alive through its car-manufacturing sector gave him even more fame.
Ford had also been supportive of the National Patriotic Party of America from its inception, as his extremely racist and anti-Communist views were more than compatible with those of the Patriots. He began actively promoting the Party, and effectively made the Ford Motor Company part of its financial arm. Profits from sales and investments would go towards sponsoring McSweeney's campaigning, and in response Ford himself was guaranteed a position if and when the demagogue became President.
True to his word, Ford did gain an appointment in the new government. Under him, he was able to create an even larger company by implicating his company's rival General Motors as an organization dedicated to destroying America by supporting Jews (despite a lot of evidence proving the contrary), before shutting down the company and absorbing it into Ford. This effectively created a monopoly dominated by Ford in the United States auto market, and was an instrumental part of the plan to rearm the United States.
Like in Germany, new factories that were created throughout the country were built not only to create cars, but also tractors and heavy machinery to further mechanize the United States economy and make it less dependent on less efficient, traditional methods. However, these factories were also used to disguise the acquisition of new tanks, which had been prohibited by the arms limitations treaties inflicted on the U.S after the Great War. Similarly, factories that were ostensibly for innocent-seeming purposes were in fact underground arms factories, as the United States began gearing for another war.
Additionally, the United States, after the development of the airplane by the Wright Brothers in 1904, was a major player in the young and fledgling aviation industry, and had been a pioneer in the development of the airplane as a weapon of war. However, after the end of the war and the marked fall of the U.S economy, there was a general sense of discouragement for the pursuit of aviation as her Entente enemies prohibited the country from conducting airplane manufacturing and development. To further rub salt in the wound, the United States had been working on an aircraft carrier, the USS Remembrance, when the war abruptly ended in defeat, and it was forced to halt construction and turn it over to the Royal Navy.
McSweeney essentially reversed this by recruiting the pioneering aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, another renowned supporter of the NPPA, who was more than happy to provide his expertise on airplanes during his tenure as an airmail pilot and as the man who had flown solo across the Atlantic from New York to Paris in 1928. Acting as the administration's military liaison to the "Big Three" airplane companies of Boeing, Curtiss and Wright, he oversaw the development of many new innovative designs for aircraft, including the first prototypes for jet aircraft, and the expansion of the civilian airline services to allow American aviation to take off once more. He also became part of the German-American weapons sharing program and visited Germany on a consistent basis in the 1930s, meeting with Reichsmarshall Hermann Goring on many occasions, and proving instrumental in allowing the American Big Three to cooperate with the German companies of Junkers, Messerschmitt and Heinkel.
As for arms themselves, although McSweeney had taken an interest in his German counterpart's designs for the assault rifle and submachine gun, the two nations were unable to formulate a plausible deal that wouldn't arouse the interests of the Entente and allow the United States Army to be fully equipped with those weapons. As a result, instead of the United States Army being able to acquire fantastical weapons like the Wehrmacht had for all of its soldiers, the mainstay of the U.S Army for the last thirty or so years, starting from 1937, the M1903 Springfield bolt-action rifle, was gradually phased out over a five-year period to be replaced by the M1936 Dickens self-loading rifle. Named after Springfield Armory weapons engineer Marcus Dickens, it was the culmination of the visions of many gunsmiths in the 1920s and 30s, surpassing the capabilities of all standard-issue military rifles at the time, including the German Karabiner 98 (the successor to the antiquated Gewehr 98 used by the German Empire and Weimar Republic until 1935), the Confederate Tredegar and the British Lee-Enfield. Unlike most service rifles, which featured five round fixed magazines, the Dickens featured ten round detachable magazines, and a notably higher rate of fire of thirty five to forty rounds per minute. It thereby gave the Army and Marines a weapon that would allow it to, in the words of the Butcher, "cut down our enemies instantaneously in a way not seen since Hiram Maxim's invention annihilated the limeys and Canucks at the Teton." The Dickens, would, therefore, remain unmatched until the introduction of the self-loading Garand rifle into the British, Canadian and Confederate militaries.
In spite of this, like Germany, the Navy remained somewhat neglected. Although McSweeney had believed in the correctness of President Alfred Mahan's theories that a nation's power depended on its ability to project naval force around the world, he also believed that the United States needed to first win the land war before concerning itself with subjugating the rest of the world. In addition, hiding the reconstruction of the Navy would be an even bigger challenge. As a result, the United States Navy grew to a lesser degree than its other branches, though through diplomatic maneuvering which led to an easing of these limitations by UK Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, it did manage to circumvent some of the limitations the Entente had placed, and was able to commission two full-sized aircraft carriers, in addition to half a dozen smaller "babytop" escort carriers and four new battleships. Submarines were not as heavily prioritized, however, though Germany would sell seven U-boats to the United States in exchange for two escort carriers.
These developments all allowed the United States to once more rearm itself, albeit covertly, and allowed it to regain its position as the dominant military power in North America, although it would not be until the Mormon Pacification, the Spanish and Mexican Civil Wars, and finally the outbreak of the Second Great War that it would be able to be properly put to the test.