World War II was, in some ways, like no other event in American history. It involved sending more people and resources to more places around the world than any endeavor the United States had ever organized before. Still, those who managed and fought the war could draw upon the experience of World War I (Chapter 23). In that war, Americans raised an army, produced war materials in huge quantities, and transported them to Europe. On the battlefields they confronted such modern weapons as tanks, submarines, and airplanes. During the 1920s, as Chapter 24 explains, American industry improved products such as the automobile as well as techniques for manufacturing them. Despite the Great Depression, Americans had the most productive industrial plant in the world at the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the New Deal had created a variety of agencies that helped prepare the government to face the huge task of organizing the war's truly global crusade. The combination of fighting a depression and a war made the government much more a part of every level of Americans' lives, as the following chapters will show.