A Confederate battle flag distinct from the flag of the Confederacy, the "Stars and Bars," was created following the first major battle of the Civil War, at Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia, in July 1861, because in the heat of battle soldiers and commanders confused the Stars and Bars with the Union army's "Stars and Stripes."

After General Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard, commander of the Confederate forces at Manassas, demanded a change, the Virginia army's high command, meeting in the Fairfax Court House in September, agreed to a design that earlier had been proposed for the flag of the Confederacy, but rejected in favor of the Stars and Bars. The new battle flag, a perfect square of red with a diagonal St. Andrew's cross of blue punctuated with white or gold stars, was produced by women in Richmond and first issued to soldiers by the end of October. The number of stars, representing the number of seceding states, increased to 13 after Missouri was admitted into the Confederacy on November 28, 1861 and a Kentucky secessionist provisional government that had formed on November 18 was voted into the Confederacy on December 10.

Despite the fact that a pro-Union government replaced the secessionists in Missouri and the Kentucky government voted to end their status of neutrality and stay in the Union, the 13 stars remained on most Confederate battle flags throughout the war, although flags with 12 stars also were produced. Beauregard attempted to standardize the battle flag throughout the Confederacy, but individual units resisted, insisting on retaining their own distinct designs.

Your friend may have been thinking of William Hoffman (1807–1884), who was Colonel of the 3rd U.S. Regular Infantry, and, as Commissary General of Prisoners, reported directly to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton during the Civil War.

On October 13, 1863, Brigadier General Gilman Marston (1811–1890), the Commander of the military district where the war prison at Point Lookout, Maryland, was located, wrote to Hoffman, asking for money to build barracks for the thousands of Confederate prisoners there, who had to sleep in a large stockade compound crowded into flimsy tents, summer and winter. Hoffman denied General Marston's request. Marston also asked to be supplied with better rations for the prisoners, but Hoffman also refused that request, saying that the prisoners were already "bountifully supplied with provisions" sent to them from their families and friends, which was clearly not true.

The Union officer then acting as the Provost-Marshall in charge of the camp, Captain Joab Nelson Patterson (1835–1923), was relatively well-regarded by the prisoners, despite the terrible conditions there. One of the prisoners wrote of Patterson that he was "as kind as he was allowed to be."

General Marston was reassigned, as was Captain Patterson. Replacing Marston was Brigadier General James Barnes (1801–1869), who had performed extremely poorly at the Battle of Gettysburg. He was a kindly man, thought the prisoners, but he had almost no contact at all with them. His Provost-General at Point Lookout became Major Allen G. Brady, 20th Regiment, Veteran Reserve Corps (1822–1905), a cruel, brutal, and arrogant man who assumed his post at the prison in June 1864 and proceeded immediately to increase enormously the sufferings of the prisoners and to appropriate for himself vast amounts of provisions meant for them. He remained in command of Point Lookout until the end of the war. His tenure there was the worst time for the prisoners.

Brigadier General Barnes received a brevet promotion to Major General just before the end of the war. Major Brady was never promoted anywhere near as rapidly as he believed he merited, but months after the war ended, he was promoted to Brevet Colonel before he was discharged.

Colonel Hoffman appears to have handled the management of Point Lookout no differently than he did the other Union prisons, which is to say badly, allowing terrible conditions of privation and abuse to grow unchecked. Secretary Stanton certainly did nothing to intervene and may even have encouraged this as one way to punish the South for its rebellion. Stanton did not wish to exchange prisoners with the South because he believed the North could better afford to prosecute the war without the return of its men than the South could, and because he believed that negotiating with the South on this issue might provide some precedent that could be construed as a Union recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign power.

Many prison camps on both sides during the war were miserable places where many tens of thousands of prisoners from either side died. Prisoners returning from Point Lookout, however, pointed out that whereas some of the privations of Union prisoners in Confederate camps might be attributed to the general deterioration of conditions in the South as the war progressed, the privations of Southern prisoners in Union camps had no such contributing cause, and, in fact, were fostered by a commonly-practiced policy of retribution.

At the end of the war, Colonel Hoffman, having stifled some camp commanders and aid groups who had wished to help Confederate prisoners during the war, was actually able to return to the U.S. Treasury almost $2 million that had been originally allocated to feed Confederate prisoners. He was brevetted Brigadier General on October 7, 1864, for "faithful services," and then brevetted Major General on March 13, 1865, for "faithful, meritorious and distinguished services as Commissary General of Prisoners during war."

Yes, it halted completely. No cars, commercial trucks, or auto parts were made from February 1942 to October 1945.

On January 1, 1942, all sales of cars, as well as the delivery of cars to customers who had previously contracted for them, were frozen by the government’s Office of Production Management. As a temporary measure, local rationing boards could issue permits allowing persons who had contracted for cars before January 1st to secure delivery.

President Roosevelt established the War Production Board on January 16, 1942. It superseded the Office of Production Management. The WPB regulated the industrial production and allocation of war materiel and fuel. That included coordinating heavy manufacturing, and the rationing of vital materials, such as metals, rubber, and oil. It also established wage and price controls.

All manufacturers ended their production of automobiles on February 22, 1942. The January 1942 production quota had been a little over 100,000 automobiles and light trucks. The units manufactured at the beginning of February would bring up the total number of vehicles in a newly established car stockpile to 520,000. These would be available during the duration of the war for rationed sales by auto dealers to purchasers deemed “essential drivers.”

Representatives from the auto industry formed the Automotive Council for War Production in April 1942, to facilitate the sharing of resources, expertise, and manpower in defense production contracting.

The auto industry retooled to manufacture tanks, trucks, jeeps, airplanes, bombs, torpedoes, steel helmets, and ammunition under massive contracts issued by the government. Beginning immediately after the production of automobiles ceased, entire factories were upended almost overnight. Huge manufacturing machines were jack hammered out of their foundations and new ones brought in to replace them. Conveyors were stripped away and rebuilt, electrical wires were bundled together and stored in the vast factory ceilings, half-finished parts were sent to steel mills to be re-melted, and even many of the dies that had been used in the fabrication of auto parts were sent to salvage.

The government’s Office of Price Administration imposed rationing of gasoline and tires and set a national speed limit of 35 mph.

By April 1944, only 30,000 new cars out of the initial stockpile were left. Almost all were 1942 models and customers required a permit to make the purchase. The Office of Price Administration set the price. The government contemplated rationing used car sales as well, but that was finally deemed unnecessary. The government estimated that about a million cars had been taken off the road by their owners, to reserve for their own use after the war.

In the autumn of 1944, looking then toward the end of the war, Ford, Chrysler, Nash, and Fisher Body of General Motors received authorization from the War Production Board to do preliminary work on experimental models of civilian passenger cars, on condition that it not interfere with war work and that employees so used be limited to planning engineers and technicians. Limits were also set on the amount of labor and materials the companies could divert to this.

During the war, the automobile and oil companies continued to advertise heavily to insure that the public did not forget their brand names. Companies also were proud to proclaim their patriotic role in war production, and their advertisements displayed the trucks, aircraft, and munitions that they were making to do their part in combat.

In addition, auto advertisements encouraged the public to patronize local auto dealers’ service departments so that car repairs could help extend the lives of the cars their customers had bought before the war. In the last couple of years of the war, the auto companies also used their advertisements to heighten public anticipation of the end of the war and the resumption of car and truck manufacturing, with advertising copy such as Ford’s “There’s a Ford in Your Future.”