General Motors film entitled: "It's up to US," explains how to maintain private cars during World War 2, when all manufacturers switched to production of war materiel. Bugler, in U.S. Army uniform, blows reveille. Montage of American scenes, including homes and gardens; mountains; forests and lumberjacks felling a tree; an oil well gusher spewing crude oil; open pit mining operations; Niagara falls; flock of sheep grazing; workers picking cotton and it being delivered to a processing plant by horse-drawn wagon; a large timber log being cut into boards in a lumber mill; steel being manufactured for the war effort; a woman housewife or homemaker saving foods in a refrigerator in a vintage 1940s kitchen; a man cutting his lawn; a woman vacuuming her carpet; a woman taking clothes from a washing machine; a farmer plowing with a tractor; automobiles on American road and in parking lot of a defense plant. A driver with worn and dented 1938 Chevrolet Coupe car parked in front of a home is assisted by another who drives up behind him in a 1941 Oldsmobile and gives him a push. Sign at a Chevrolet service garage reading: "Official O.P.A. Tire Inspection Station." A 1942 Chevrolet 2-door fastback car drives into the garage. Mechanic greets driver and begins routine service, including: adding distilled water to battery; draining oil from car up on hydraulic lift. Scene shifts to a mechanic lubricates fittings on a 1937 Chevy on a lift at a gas station. Scene reverts to the earlier garage where mechanic drains cooling system, and refills it. The mechanic removes the carburetor and services it on a bench. He checks distributor rotor and makes compression checks. He cleans and re-gaps spark plugs, and checks tires and brakes. Cars driving on a town street. Mechanic aligning wheels on 1941 Chevrolet. Animated illustrations of tire wear from alignment problems. Servicing air in tire of 1942 2-door Chevy. More animated illustrations of tire problems. Illustrated explanation of rotation for bias tires.
Various uses of trucks. Trucks used for transportation save substantial haulage cost. Lumbering activities amidst forest. Men cut trees and load them on trucks. Truck transports them on rough roads and drop them in water. Trucks lined outside a bread mill. They move for daily delivery of bread.
Point of view shot out the front of a steam locomotive railroad train as it speeds along a track in western United States. Men stacking wood lumber for boat shipment beside a canal in the early 1900s. The mill and stacks of lumber seen across the canal. Miners at a coal mine ride an open car full of coal as it emerges from a mine in West Virginia, as seen from camera riding on same coal car. Glimpse, from a passing train, of a steel mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Immigrants to the United States, from various European countries, at work in industrial production jobs. Men in factories; working at a power forge in a steel mill; Lumber operations: Men cutting down large trees with hand axes and sawing logs for timber in a forest, using large 2-man saws; Butchers moving sides of beef in a meat packing company. Women working in a metal parts factory (appears to be a sink faucet manufacturing company); women working in a textile spinning mill operation and stacking moving machine shelves with spools. A hose set up from a fire hydrant spraying water in a city street and children in bathing suits running underneath to play and cool off in hot summer weather. Montage of various still and moving images: Immigrant children in classrooms and in school yards. A woman instructing new adult immigrants in an English language instruction class. Immigrant workers engaged in skyscraper construction, high in the air without safety equipment. An iron worker perched atop a vertical steel beam with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. A woman posing on a horizontal bar. Men and women posing in the surf at a beach. People at beach watching as a group of men create a human pyramid on the sand. A little girl with her feet in the surf. Boys in a classroom, with two of them dirty from work and another boy sleeping with his head on his desk. Mothers and fathers at home asking about what the children learned in school. A young girl leading a group of school children in reciting the pledge of allegiance (pre-1950s version of the Pledge of Allegiance is heard recited by a group of children, without the "Under God" wording that was added in 1954). Still image of a young girl employed in a fabric mill (child labor).
Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry in Savannah, Georgia. Experts in a bamboo forest. One of them digs ground using a shovel. He pulls out a root from the ground. He cuts it into two equal parts from center. The experts drive away in car to the headquarters of U.S. Department of Agriculture, Biological Survey. The name plate consists of portrait of Migratory Waterfowl Refugee bird. At the headquarters a man puts the root into a clipper for processing.
Forty thousand United States soldiers and National Guardsman of the third Army in military combined arms training maneuvers at Camp Shelby,and Desoto National Forest, Wiggins, Mississippi. U.S. Army Air Corps BT-9 Yale aircraft flying over tents and seen flying overhead. U.S. Army written on the wings of the planes. Troops moving in trucks and running across a field. Teams of horses pulling field artillery. Horses cooling off in canal water after the exercise. U.S. Army M2 Light tanks in maneuvers. Gun crews firing machine guns and field artillery pieces.
A-4 a German surface to surface missile also known as V-2 is test fired from Peenemunde in north east Germany . The missile moves upwards but changes course and explodes in mid air. Missile drops down in a forest region and causes fire and smoke. Firemen spray water with pipes in the area to extinguish fire as wreckage of missile is seen. (World War II period).