High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Office of War Mobilization (OWM) was an independent agency of the United States government headed by Former Supreme Court Justice James F. Byrnes that coordinated all government agencies involved in the war effort during World War II. This office took over from the earlier War Production Board to shift the country from a peacetime to a wartime economy, sometimes loaning smaller factories the money needed to convert to war production. Soon outproducing the Axis powers, U.S. manufacturers soon split their time between making consumer goods and war supplies. Unemployment, the scourge of ten years earlier, had all but vanished, as Americans went to work to fuel the war machine.