Luther Gulick was instrumental in mobilizing industry to fight World War II, so it’s no surprise the IPA Collection includes a good sampling of vintage war posters from 1944. Collectors prize these originals.

But we were particularly struck by this one calling on patriotic Americans to “Back the Attack” by investing in War Bonds — Uncle Sam needed the loans to pay for the war.

The captions, interestingly, put a pricetag on the particular military equipment the money would buy. An Army jeep cost $1,165 in 1944 dollars — that would be the equivalent of about $15,942 today. A walkie-talkie? $200 — $2,737 today. A flamethrower? $950  — $13,000 today. All the way up to a medium tank, $57,570 ($787,835 today); a motor torpedo boat, $500,000 ($6.8 million today); and an LST, or landing ship tank, $2 million ($27.3 million today).

But those price conversions seriously misrepresent the skyrocketing costs of military equipment since. That’s largely a function of the increasing sophistication of modern weaponry. But it’s also attributable to what the D-Day hero and postwar President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned was the appetite of the military-industrial complex.

So an armored Humvee (a grown-up jeep) will today cost as much as $600,000. An Abrams M1 tank, $8.5 million (still perhaps a bargain compared to the top-of-the line French AMX-56 at $12.6 million.) A Seawolf class nuclear submarine will run you $3.5 billion (again, the French have a pricier version in their Triomphant class sub at more than $4 billion each). And the latest American aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is coming in at more than $13 billion. With two sister carriers, the trio will set American taxpayers back at least $42 billion.

Whew!

Well, war (and peace) is expensive. World War II (apart from the horrific loss of life) cost more than $4 trillion in today’s dollars, as we noted in a previous post. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/09/the-cost-of-war 

But not all war equipment is costlier today. Cell phones are cheaper than walkie-talkies. And you can buy yourself a flamethrower these days for under $1,800.

https://throwflame.com/products/flamethrower/

How quaint it all seems back then!