But the choice of Girdler wound up being a bad one. The president of Republic was an outspoken critic of Big Labor and had told the press he would quit to grow potatoes and apples before he accepted collective bargaining. He had blasted the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, as “an irresponsible, racketeering, violent, communistic body.” John L. Lewis thundered back that Girdler was “a monomaniac with murderous intentions.” The murder charge hung on the Memorial Day massacre in Chicago in 1937, when Chicago police fired on marching Republic Steel strikers, killing ten and wounding thirty.4
Since 1940 was a presidential election year, President Roosevelt even devoted his last major campaign speech to a full-blast attack on the Republic Steel executive. “There are certain forces within our national community … who would destroy America. They are the forces of dictatorship in our own land—on one hand the Communists, and on the other the Girdlers.”5
That was the end of any chance of a steel venture for Henry Kaiser.
He also faced another problem. His frenetic ways had raised the ire of the twin gatekeepers in the new high-stakes game of winning federal defense contracts, Jesse Jones and Bill Knudsen.
Jones viewed the smooth-talking, irresistibly affable Kaiser with deep suspicion. It got to the point where he forbade his people from ever meeting with the master salesman alone. “After seeing him they come back to me,” Jones used to complain, “and say, ‘Mr. Kaiser convinced me to give him my watch. Isn’t it wonderful?’ ”6 As for Bill Knudsen, he and Kaiser took an immediate dislike to each other. This came as no surprise to anyone who knew them. Both men were blunt and outspoken; both shared a strong conviction that their way was best until proven otherwise. Underneath the frenetic charm of Henry Kaiser ran the hard starch of his German immigrant forebears. Knudsen, the immigrant who had boxed his way to fame in the Bronx shipyards, had drunk the same starch.
He also believed in the value of experience, and that was what turned him off about Kaiser. Describing those early days at NDAC later, he talked about being barraged by would-be defense contractors whose attitude was, “I’ve never done it before but I can do it again.” It was a clear reference to Kaiser.7
That summer and fall as Britain’s fate hung in the balance, every effort Kaiser made to gain a Washington foothold failed. A lesser man would have packed his bags, checked out of the Shoreham, and headed back to California. But not Henry Kaiser. “So what?” he scribbled on the margin of a letter from his lawyer Calhoun describing Knudsen’s skepticism about Kaiser.8 He figured eventually his luck would turn. So it did, thanks, ironically enough, to his biggest skeptic.
It was October, and outside his office Knudsen could see the leaves on Constitution Avenue starting to turn. Far away in England, the Blitz had begun, as German bombers switched to nighttime raids on London. Japan had formally joined the German-Italian axis, and then occupied French Indochina.9
Knudsen knew that the course of war would not wait for more planes, and neither could the Army and Navy. The Navy had already called up almost 28,000 reservists to man ships that were still under construction in yards in Philadelphia and Newport News. It had leased bases in Brazil and Chile in order to supply them. Registration for the draft under the Selective Service Act, passed in the teeth of fierce congressional opposition, would begin in a few days. Knudsen had also had a sobering meeting with the head of the Air Corps, General Hap Arnold. Unless America began making more planes, Arnold told him, Britain was finished.10
His success with Chrysler and Packard gave him an idea. Why not turn the whole auto industry loose on the war production problem?
Car companies were already making aircraft engines. In addition to Packard, Knudsen had enticed Ford back into the game by getting him to agree to manufacture nine thousand Pratt and Whitney engines—for American planes this time, not British ones. GM’s Allison plant was putting together engines for the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk.11 While Chrysler was making tanks for the Army, Knudsen and Harold Vance had gotten them involved in manufacturing 40mm antiaircraft guns for the Navy—while Pontiac was getting ready to do the same with the 20mm Oerlikon.
Then on September 15, Knudsen had brought to Washington production men and engineers from Saginaw Steering Gear, AC Spark Plugs, Brown-Lipe-Chapin, and Frigidaire—four companies owned but not operated by GM.
“Can you make guns—a lot of guns—in a hurry?” Knudsen asked. Next to him was his small-arms man, Bill “Powder” Johnson.
A crate was hastily brought in and uniformed men pulled off the cover. Inside, carefully wrapped, were machine guns of various types and two principal calibers, .30 and .50. They came from different plants and arsenals, but all bore the expert mark of their designer, the Browning Company, which had engineered all the basic designs soon after the First World War. They had lain around largely unused and forgotten, until now.
The men gathered around, going over the weapons with their eyes and hands, probing and assessing. “Beautiful workmanship,” one of them murmured.
Then: “Do you want them as beautifully finished as these handmade products?”
No, they were told, the Army just wanted lots of guns.
“How many—and when?”
“A hundred a day—two years from today, if possible.”
Then they were shown the machine tools used to make these battlefield predators. They were belt-driven contraptions, between twenty and seventy years old, which had been packed in grease and stored in various Army arsenals.
The automobile men were appalled. “We would have junked these a long time ago,” one of them explained, shaking his head.12
Nonetheless, Saginaw Steering Gear and AC agreed to give shelter to the relics and attempt to make guns out of them, while Frigidaire and Brown-Lipe-Chapin would watch and study the results. America’s machine gun production was about to jump ninefold.13
Machine guns, tanks, antiaircraft guns: so why not fighters and bombers and artillery of all sizes? What if instead of issuing emergency contracts here and there, the car companies’ 1,050 factories and $3 billion worth of manufacturing facilities were put to work systematically on the defense effort? The possibilities might be endless.
The auto industry was the country’s biggest single employer, with one out of every twenty Americans employed directly or indirectly by its 850 companies.14 It had the biggest pool of mechanical and engineering talent—engineers who knew how to make rapid modifications in production and design, including machine tools. It was also an industry of associations, with closely knit ties binding its members together, from the Automobile Manufacturers Association to the National Automotive Parts Association, the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association, the Society of Automobile Engineers, and many others—some with members who had less than four employees. Here was a network that could mobilize talent, information, and resources from iron and steel to plate glass, copper, lead, leather, and motor oil, for the defense effort.
Knudsen also sensed that the auto industry was poised to be a model for the future of the American economy. Everywhere Knudsen looked, he saw an American industrial base woefully unprepared for the scale of demands that would be placed on it. He stunned one audience of politicians and businessmen at the Carleton Hotel by stating that the war effort was going to require a complete retooling of nearly every American factory over the next eighteen months.
America’s production plant had become obsolete, run down by depression and a government committed to taxing business and giving more power to labor unions. What Knudsen saw in the defense buildup was more than just rearmament in a time of international danger. He saw a way to revitalize American business and industry.
“If we all work hard enough and keep our noses pointed in that one direction, we can do it,” he told his Carleton Hotel audience.15 But it would never happen until the auto industry itself converted to wartime production.
The biggest priority was to break the burgeoning bottleneck in airplane production. In September, Knu
dsen went over the figures with Stimson before the secretary of war’s meeting with the president on the sixteenth. Of 4,247 planes ordered as part of the Congress’s first supplemental appropriation for the Army, 4,151 were now under contract. Of the 14,395 ordered in the second the previous week, 2,681 were under contract—nearly one-fifth the total. Given where they had started, it looked impressive. Roosevelt, however, was disappointed. His 50,000 planes a year still looked very far off.16
Knudsen also did a tour with General Hap Arnold of every aircraft plant in the country with whom the government had a contract, from Dayton and Wichita to the West Coast, as well as the leading airplane engine factories.17 Their production numbers looked woefully small and their physical plants distressingly primitive.
It was time, Knudsen decided, to get things into high gear.
He took the train to New York. October 15, 1940, for the opening of the annual Automobile Show at Madison Square Garden. The Automobile Manufacturers Association was hosting a dinner in honor of Knudsen, and presented him with a signed edition of Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln. Knudsen, an avid book collector, was touched. As the dinner ended he stood up and asked the attendees to bear with him, as he had a request to make.
Knudsen dumped a load of papers on the table. Sitting at the head table, Edsel Ford could see they were blueprints. Airplane blueprints.
“We must build big bombers,” he blurted out. “The British cannot win the war with fighters.” It was not just Britain who would suffer, he said, but America’s own defense preparations. “We need more bombers than we can hope to get,” he said. “We need them sooner than we dare to get them under present circumstances. You’ve got to help!”18
The response from the automotive executives was enthusiastic: Tell us where to go and what to do. You’re the boss, Bill.
The men gathered again on October 29 in Detroit. The same day, Henry Stimson donned a blindfold and reached into an enormous glass bowl to pull out the first draft registration number. The 250,000-strong U.S. Army was about to expand to over a million. America was getting ready for war.
In Detroit, Knudsen’s meeting was at the New Center Building, a former gourmet food market and grocery. None of the attendees from Buick and Chrysler and Fisher Body and the other auto companies had told their secretaries or colleagues where they were going, or why. It was top secret.19
Once inside, they met a panel Knudsen had assembled, composed of Air Corps officers and aviation executives, to talk about their problems and issues. For the rest of the day, they explained the challenges of making airplanes using prefabricated parts and castings, the problems with using flexible soft dies for parts instead of the hard-cast dies car men were used to, and the issues involved in an industry where a Navy Aeronautics Board or Army Ordnance request could change faster than a retail customer’s could, and could hold up the entire production line while engineers and mechanics stood and thought of ways to meet the new specifications.
The Air Corps men were led by a short, soft-spoken, dark-eyed major who had been a former staff officer under Billy Mitchell. One or two of the General Motors men who had visited their Allison plant had met him. He had been the Air Corps’s point man there. On this day he was an aide to Knudsen, nothing more. But in less than a year and a half, he would be a hero to every American household for his daring raid in revenge for Pearl Harbor—a raid that would change the course of the war. His name was Jimmy Doolittle.
Doolittle laid out a series of engine and equipment parts. There were also complete displays of bomber subassemblies in the nearby Graham-Paige auto plant for the executives to examine. The major stressed that the Army Air Corps needed bombers as well as fighters, and needed them now. “Here are the parts we need,” Doolittle said in closing. “Pick out the ones you can build.”
First on his feet was William Brown of Briggs Manufacturing, the nation’s biggest independent car body maker. Owner Edwin Briggs had quit work as a seventy-five-cents-a-day railway worker to stuff car upholstery for Henry Ford and wound up one of the richest men in Detroit, as well as owner of the Detroit Tigers. Now Brown explained how Briggs engineers were working with Vought-Sikorsky to use their car-body-panel presses to make airplane surfaces. Then others began to chime in with ideas, and finally offers.
Briggs, GM’s Fisher Body, and the Murray Corporation agreed to make parts for the B-17 Flying Fortress, an agreement that would require close collaboration between the three body-making rivals. Chrysler and Hudson Motor Car said they would help to make frames for Martin’s B-26 Marauder, Fisher Body would help with the North American B-25, and Charlie Sorensen from Ford agreed to pitch in with Consolidated’s B-24.20
That day the executives also agreed to found the Automotive Committee for Air Defense, with Clarence Carleton of Motor Wheel, a parts manufacturer, as chairman. Its members would all help with manufacturing parts of aircraft as subcontractors for Douglas, Boeing, and the rest. At the same time, they agreed, also at Knudsen’s request, to suspend all annual model changes for automobiles, thus freeing up time usually spent retooling to concentrate on plane production. In pure marketing terms, it seemed a suicidal move, particularly with less than one-quarter of Americans thinking the United States should be involved in the war in Europe. But it was a major step in getting American business into wartime production—and all more than a year before Pearl Harbor.21
That concession persuaded the aviation people to sign on to Knudsen’s plan, as well.22 In the end it would pay off handsomely. Although Michigan held only 4 percent of the country’s population, it would ultimately supply 10 percent of all major war contracts. By D-day almost one out of every five Michigan residents was involved in war work, and 70 percent of that work was confined to the four counties around metro Detroit, the heart of the auto industry. General Motors alone would make 10 percent of everything America produced during World War II, including thousands of aircraft engines, hundreds of different parts for Boeing, Martin, and North American, and entire airplanes for Grumman.23
Knudsen coined a phrase to describe the auto industry’s commitment to war production: “the arsenal of democracy.” It would change the entire nature of the military buildup and spill over into every sector of the American economy that converted to wartime production.
A relieved Knudsen returned to Washington. His plane just had time to touch down before the first serious wave of criticism began to hit.
It started with the War Department. Stimson was delighted with Knudsen’s $500 million agreement with the carmakers. “He’s going to have dies made and stamped out piece by piece in mass production,” Stimson noted in his diary, “large portions of the planes which are now made by hand.” It was, he wrote, “the first real stroke of light we’ve had around here” regarding plane production.24 The news that Detroit was halting annual model changes pleased him even more.
But union leaders were furious about Knudsen’s secret meeting in Detroit. The auto industry had only recently begun to be unionized. Organizers like Walter Reuther and his CIO boss, Philip Murray, feared this agreement to move car companies into war production would be used to wring concessions from workers. Big Labor was used to having its way in New Deal Washington. The presence of Knudsen and his fellow businessmen made them nervous. If someone has to make concessions to get industry moving again, let companies make the sacrifice in terms of profits, they insisted. Don’t expect us to give up our gains for the sake of any defense effort.
Instead, United Auto Workers’ president Walter Reuther presented his own plan. His workers could easily produce five hundred planes a day, he told government officials. Reuther declared that almost half of the plant capacity at Ford, GM, Chrysler, and the others was underutilized (the automakers themselves said it was far less). By pooling machine tools, the labor leader said, they could convert that space to produce the wings and fuselages for fighters, and convert auto engine plants to make aircraft engines by the thousands. Meanwhile, a national aviation produ
ction board would give labor, government, and business equal say in how to do it.25
When Reuther unveiled his plan in early December, the press and public were agog. Convert the auto industry to aircraft production! Why hadn’t anyone thought of that before? The Reuther Plan, with its picture of P-40s coming down the assembly line at the speed of Chevy convertibles, found many champions in the media, and Congress. If Washington stuck to the pace Knudsen and his fellow businessmen were setting, wrote columnist I. F. Stone, America wouldn’t be ready for war until 1947.26
Knudsen was less impressed. He was quietly amused that Reuther was getting credit for proposing using car companies to build airplanes, when Knudsen had worked out the actual details more than a month before. He also noted that Reuther’s plan focused on building fighters, when what both the Air Corps and Britain needed were bombers.27 He also had serious doubts about the idea of mass-producing entire planes. Knudsen’s Detroit deal was about making airplane parts, including engines, and left actual assembly to those who knew the business, the aviation companies themselves.
The auto union leader didn’t seem to realize that whereas the average automobile consisted of perhaps 15,000 separate parts, a twin-engined bomber like the B-25 Mitchell demanded 165,000 parts—plus 150,000 rivets. No existing auto plant, no matter how carefully retooled, was ready to produce so complex a piece of machinery, let alone five hundred a day of varying sizes and weights.
Still, Roosevelt was impressed by the Reuther Plan and wanted Knudsen to meet him. Knudsen said yes. Reuther brought with him three men he described as tool designers, “capable of doing whatever was necessary.”
Knudsen went over to a drawer and pulled out a set of drawings for the Pratt and Whitney 1830 aircraft engine—the predecessor of the R-2800 Twin Wasp Ford had agreed to build. He put them on the desk and told Reuther, “Here are some drawings. You specify the plant, or plants, that will make five hundred of these motors a day, and I will give you a contract to make them.”
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