When President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the project to build Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams, he was thinking about jobs. He had no idea those jobs would, a decade or so later, actually win World War II.

Originally, the plan was to build just one dam on the Columbia River. The government settled on Grand Coulee, in Washington state. But the Oregon delegation in Washington, D.C., got very upset about this and begged Roosevelt to change his mind and favor the Bonneville site in Oregon.

Figuring two dams would create more jobs than one, Roosevelt gave the green light to both projects.

By the end of the 1930s, the dams were in service, churning out electric power that was basically free. (A side effect of this was the construction of thousands of homes in Oregon and Washington equipped with notoriously inefficient but easy-to-install electric ceiling heat - maybe you even live in one of them!)

But the two dams generated far, far more power than the U.S. could use in the 1930s. Especially the sparsely populated Northwest corner thereof. Transmission lines were built, but they could only take the power so far. And electricity can't be stored - not in anything like an efficient manner. It has to be used the instant it's created.

It looked like the main benefit of the dams was the thousands of jobs they'd created during the Depression. Two dams weren't doing anything that one dam couldn't have done, and one dam wouldn't have done much more than a grid connection from Hoover Dam might have accomplished for a lot less money.

That is, until Dec. 7, 1941.

As you likely know, as the war wore on America's output of war equipment - especially airplanes - got bigger each year until the hapless Axis powers were completely overwhelmed with hostile (to them) tanks, planes and artillery. By 1945 the output was staggering, and it was topped off with a pair of war-ending nuclear bombings in Japan. All of these things can be largely attributed to the two Columbia River dams.

The seemingly unlimited electric power was just what America's young aluminum industry needed. Airplanes and their armor were made from aluminum refined in plants very close to the dam; aluminum requires huge amounts of electricity to extract it from bauxite ore. And it's no coincidence that Hanford, where the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were built, is situated on the Columbia River near the dams - nuclear weapons research and production requires enormous amounts of electricity.

Perhaps these needs would have been sated without the two "job-creation projects" on the Columbia. Perhaps then Boeing and Douglas would have gotten their start somewhere in the Midwest, where airplane culture was so much more developed.

But also, perhaps - just perhaps - our production abilities would have fallen short of the challenge that was before us, and we would have lost the war. The Germans weren't too far away from developing a working nuclear bomb when they were forced to surrender in 1945. Without all those aluminum airplanes flying over Germany and dropping bombs on factories, they might very well have beaten the Allies to it.

Did Roosevelt's "make-work" project in Oregon save the world? We'll never know.

(Sources: Gulick, Bill. "Roadside History of Oregon." Missoula: Mountain Press, 1991; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Publication EP870-1-42)

Finn John, a former Corvallis Gazette-Times copy editor. He lives near Albany.