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This 1942 patriotic advertisement from the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette newspaper in Greenfield, Massachusetts, boasts of the Greenfield Tap & Die Corporation's (GTD) pledge to America to supply it with the tools it "so badly needs in its great war effort." At the height of World War II (WWII), almost four thousand people were employed at GTD, the largest maker of gages, taps, and dies in the world, in a War Department-financed million dollar state-of-the-art plant in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Three shifts worked around the clock, seven days a week, producing these measuring devices that insured an accurate fit for all parts produced anywhere in the country. The small town of Greenfield had a surprisingly large concentration of industries vital to the war effort, and was important enough to be protected by an anti-aircraft battery, able to shoot down German bombers.