These two volumes chiefly explore vehicular and winged weaponry in 1940s Detroit. Charles Hyde provides one facet of the narrative and illustrations for President Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chat of 29 December 1940, during which he exhorted an isolationist and uninvolved America to serve as the world's "arsenal of democracy." The United States, still neutral, would provide the guns and ammunition, tanks, planes, ships, and collateral equipment necessary for Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union to continue their fierce battles against the Axis powers on land and sea and in the air. In the event, "Lend-Lease" shipments accounted for roughly one-third of American defense production during the war.

Hyde divides the photo volume into nine chapters paralleling those of the earlier book: "Preparing for War before Pearl Harbor," "Planning Defense Production after Pearl Harbor," "Aircraft Engines and Propellers," "Aircraft Components and Complete Aircraft," "Tanks and Other Armored Vehicles," "Jeeps, Trucks, and Amphibious Vehicles," "Guns, Shells and Other War Goods," "The New Workers," and "Celebrating the Production Achievements." He has selected photographs from the Automobile Manufacturers Association's donations to the National Automotive History Collection, now in the Detroit Public Library. Archivists at Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, the Walter Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, and the US Army assisted him. His past research taught him where to look for information from now defunct or merged companies like Nash and REO.

The visual record provided in Images from the Arsenal of Democracy is remarkable. We see the last 1942 Plymouths rolling off the line before the War Production Board shut down most civilian car production; machines (some as much as 175 feet long) modified for military motors, vehicle bodies and parts; generals inspecting plants (every manufacturing facility had at least one military "resident representative" or "permanent watchdog"); huge new factories (the Dodge-Chicago Division, for example, air-conditioned "only" twenty-two acres of the plant) building the B-29 Superfortress's 2,200 hp engines (18,413 completed). We see FDR visiting the Willow Run Ford plant with his wife Eleanor (September 1942) and Henry Ford squished between these "two people he despised" (97). Another sequence shows the building of B-24 Liberators.[7] One gigantic Ingersoll machine completed forty-two machining operations on the central portion of the wings, which weighed 2.25 tons before workers attached the landing gear, engines, engine mounts, gas tanks, and other equipment. Some nicknamed the Liberator the "Flying Coffin,"[8] because it was difficult to fly, hard to ditch safely (with its high Davis wing), vulnerable to attack (because of the placement of its fuel tanks), and hard to exit through its single door in the rear. Willow Run produced 46 percent of these most manufactured of all US bombers—nearly one per hour in April 1944. Photographs of dive-bombing Avengers (Grumman), helicopters (Nash-Kelvinator), and gliders (Ford; 70,000 parts each) end the chapter.

Automakers produced 49,000 of 88,000 light and heavy tanks. Some were judged effective (M4 General Shermans) or not (M3 General Grants) based on their turret's ability to turn 360 degrees. Six different engines from various manufacturers were allocated to power the Shermans. One Chrysler Tank Arsenal photo shows five parallel assembly lines in action. Since the Shermans were, however, "no match" for the Germans' 1943 Tiger and Panther heavy tanks, US engineers later designed the 46-ton M26 General Pershing, but few of the 2,400 built saw combat, since the army deployed them only in 1945.

Bantam Cars was the first company (July 1939) to build quarter-ton Jeeps; Willys-Overland and Ford got into the game later. FDR appears in one in Casablanca (January 1943). Trucks ranging from half-ton to 2.5-ton carried troops and supplies, food for men and gas for vehicles, and ferried the wounded and dead back from the front. Hundreds of 6x6 trucks (that is, six wheels, all connected to drive shafts) appear in one photo, described as a single day's (!) production (171); General Motors built 78 percent of them. The Quartermaster Corps broke down many of them to be shipped in pieces and reassembled on site in China, New Guinea, France, and elsewhere. One photo shows a DUKW crossing the Danube in April 1945. We see stateside trials and actual combat photographs of the rarer Army Ordnance commissioned "Seeps" (Sea Jeeps) and Weasels, vehicles that could move over ice, across rivers, and up steep embankments. The Army and Navy replicated Swedish Bofors antiaircraft guns and the Navy ordered copies of Swiss Oerlikons. Some antiaircraft cannon could hit planes at thirty-five thousand feet. Three Packard V-12, 1,500 hp engines propelled the Navy's nearly eight hundred PT boats.

One picture (235) shows American workers of Chinese descent at the Hudson Motor Car plant assembling wings for the Helldiver. Hyde states that, before the war, no plant would have hired them. Another photo shows "little people," men who could work in confined spaces, another an entirely African American female assembly line packaging .45 caliber munitions under the eye of a white male supervisor. There are photos of women wiring aircraft (249),[9] riveting fuselages, sewing seat-cushions, and inspecting pistons, gyroscope rotors, and finished engines. Identically dressed women assemble parts for Ranco binoculars in Columbus, Ohio—just the kind of delicate, precise work deemed appropriate for women. But a few photos show women operating cranes, lathes, and metal presses, assembling wing-flaps, and serving as security police for Studebaker's aircraft engine plant in South Bend, Indiana.[10] Female Parts-Department clerks donned roller-skates to rapidly deliver needed parts (276). Both of Hyde's volumes concentrate on Washington's financing and the Detroit-centered production of flying machines, ship engines, land vehicles, and the armor and weapons they were equipped with, but the author delivers hardly any photographs of these instruments of destruction in action.

Journalist A.J. Baime, in another, still more recent book entitled The Arsenal of Democracy,[11] focuses on leading personalities, especially Henry Ford and his only son Edsel. Henry, a friend of Charles Lindbergh—"America Firster," pacifist, and recipient of Hitler's "Grand Cross of the German Eagle" decoration—did not want his company to join the war effort, but the government eventually persuaded Edsel to turn out "a Bomber an Hour" at Ford's sprawling Willow Run plant. Hyde immerses his readers in cold statistics, while Baime introduces his to flammable personalities. Neither offers much about how workers lived and felt. Walter Reuther has no index entry in Hyde's volumes, while Baime vividly describes the "Battle of the Overpass" (45–49) in May 1937, when Ford's company goons slammed the union leader into concrete. Baime includes fewer photographs (twenty-one in all), but one shows strikers marching in April 1941 with a placard asking "Why did FORD get a NAZI medal?" Otherwise, this was Detroit's finest hour.

Though they may be read separately, Hyde's two books belong together. The dry, statistics-studded prose of the text volume becomes more digestible when leavened by visual images. Hyde provides students of history with a narrative of the daunting problems and striking successes of retooling for war, not profiles of dashing pilots and their flying machines, or, like Baime, scandalous tales of wealthy industrialists and their German business connections. In the end, Roosevelt's propagandistic vision of an "Arsenal of Democracy" rings somewhat hollow, indeed ironic, however desirable the defeat of the totalitarian Axis countries. Very few of the Allied nations and their colonial dependencies were democratic or thought of themselves as such during the Second World War. Recall the governing entities of China, India, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, or indeed the plight of America's racial minorities. Hyde's well-researched volume will enlighten serious students of the war, but his laborious prose will deter any more general readership.