Daniel Immerwahr

And so the way he puts it is this.

Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire and I have a length of garden hose.

If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I might help him put out his fire.

And I mean, I'm a historian.

I've seen that line like many, many times.

And it's always about being a good neighbor.

But then when you think about it, you're like, wait a minute.

You don't imagine yourself as Herbert Hoover.

And you just imagine yourself like kind of raising your hand in the back of the room and being like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa.

What if your hose doesn't fit his hydrant?

You've got a serious problem.

And the costs of non-compliant screw threads, it's bad enough during peace.

It's horror during war.

So World War I was fought with horses.

World War II is a much more mechanized war.

In fact, one of the main ways in which the United States participates in World War II is essentially acting as quartermaster to the world, as supplying stuff to

to all of its allies.

It outsources the fighting to other countries and it just sends its factories into overdrive.

The problem that everyone recognizes at the start of the war is that none of the US stuff plays with the foreign stuff.

So there's a Canadian official who just says, look, you have to understand that at the start of the war, there is not a single gun or a single round of ammunition that can be shared among the allies.