He was less impressed by the plane itself. He did an hour test flight with one of the B-24Cs Consolidated had sent out and “found the controls to be the stiffest and heaviest I have ever handled.” He much preferred flying the B-17, and thought crews would, too. “I would certainly hate to be in a bomber of this type” if a couple of Messerschmitts caught up with it—which they would soon be doing, once the Willow Run B-24s made their way out to Europe.16
As for Charlie Sorensen, Lindbergh found him “a man of exceptionally strong character but with a number of weaknesses that often accompany strong character and obvious success.” One was vanity. Another was a belief in his own ideas no matter how ill conceived, and a corresponding disbelief in what others, no matter how experienced, might say about it.
One of Sorensen’s new obsessions, for example, was the idea of building a cargo plane with a one-thousand-foot wingspan. Air Force officials were appalled, and said so. Undeterred, Sorensen unveiled his plans to Lindbergh on the phone. Equally stunned, Lindbergh suggested starting with a five-hundred-foot wing instead. “You fellas are always blocking me, blocking me,” Sorensen burst out, and hung up.17
Lindbergh also noted Sorensen’s bullying ways. As they walked together through the plant, Lindbergh watched workers’ eyes drop to their work, avoiding meeting Sorensen’s terrifying stare. “No man wishes to cross him,” he remarked sadly, “and no man can cross him and hold his job.” It was no way to get at the truth of potential problems, or of how to correct them. The famed aviator summed it up this way: “His heart is so filled with the love of the machine that it has somewhat crowded out his love of the men who must run it.”18
Still, Lindbergh could not deny the Ford man’s ability: “He is certainly one of the men who has built this nation into what it is today.” He also believed Sorensen’s belief in Willow Run was correct. Once production was fully under way, “the output will be tremendous.”19
When that would come about was, of course, the crucial question. That May the Ford team had to admit to Lindbergh they were at least a month behind schedule. Sorensen and Harry Bennett were at each other’s throats, and Roscoe Smith found himself caught in the middle.
Bennett had his own ideas about where machines and men should be placed to speed things up, and began ordering certain equipment to be installed, which Smith ordered removed. There was an unholy row, and both Sorensen and Bennett stormed into Smith’s office. Voices were raised, chairs were pushed back.
Suddenly Bennett lunged at Sorensen, who backed away, fists raised. Smith tried to step between the two men, and caught Bennett’s punch on the jaw, sending him to the floor. When Smith tried to get up, Bennett knocked him down again.
Sorensen watched, then simply said, “Harry, I’m surprised at you,” and walked out. Bennett called the old man to tell him his version of what happened. Henry Ford said, “Well, Harry, I think you hit the wrong fellow.” When the story of the fistfight whirled around the Ford offices, everyone knew whom he meant.20
Roscoe Smith never set foot in Willow Run again.
Mead Bricker now took over the plant. No one envied him. A new battle developed, over tools and dies. The aircraft industry all made their molds, or dies, for parts from rubber and various soft metal alloys. Sorensen and the Ford people scoffed at this. It made exact measurements extremely difficult, especially since the dies were used over and over and lost their original firmness. Ford was going to use steel for their dies. After all, these would be mass-producing thousands of parts, and the expense involved, Sorensen’s team felt, would be more than worth it.
Then they discovered that the steel dies damaged the delicate aluminum surfaces, forcing them to remake more and more parts. Now it was Consolidated’s turn to gloat. Maybe you know about mass production, they warned, but we know about quality production. What was supposed to be a corporate partnership was becoming a bitter antagonism. “If the Consolidated men were carrying a chip on one shoulder,” Lindbergh noted, the Ford men arrived with a chip on both.21
That was nothing, however, compared to the other problem with the steel dies. Two years after it had first flown, the B-24’s design was constantly evolving. Changes demanded by Air Force command based on battlefield conditions, or new discoveries by Mac Laddon and his team on how to improve performance, forced modifications in how the plane was made, down to the tiniest subsection. Ford was learning that they barely had time to install their new expensive steel dies before they had to be junked. That meant not only new dies but changing the machine tools to fit them, and often a different jig to handle the altered part. That first year, the Air Force ordered 575 master changes alone—and all the while everyone was wondering where Ford’s B-24s were.
It drove Sorensen to near fury. “We would agree on freezing a design, then be ready to go ahead,” he remembered later. “Back from the fighting fronts would come complaints or suggestions regarding certain features, and the plane designers came through with alterations in design with no consideration for the production program.”22
Of course, the Air Force’s attitude was that learning from battlefield experience was what warplanes are all about. A change could make the difference between being shot down and coming home alive, or a safe versus a disastrous landing. When Sorensen complained, Hap Arnold said simply, “I’d feel as if I had blood in my hands if I ignored these boys’ complaints.” But for the people at Willow Run, it added to the feeling that they were trapped in a Sisyphean enterprise, with no way out.
And by the spring of 1942, the public was noticing. Where were the mass-produced B-24s Ford had been promising for almost a year? Watching from the sidelines at North American’s plant in Inglewood, Dutch Kindelberger scoffed, “You cannot expect a blacksmith to learn to make a watch overnight.” He told the New York Times that in his opinion, far from speeding up the production of airplanes, getting the auto industry involved was slowing it down, especially (as at Willow Run) in the making of airframes. Pratt and Whitney’s founder, Fred Rentschler, worried that the government had created “a Frankenstein’s monster” by getting Ford and the car companies involved, which would end up hurting the aviation industry.23
The Office of War Information had to issue a statement reassuring the public over the delay. Investigators from the Truman Committee began sniffing around, wondering where all the government money was going when no planes were being made. Willow Run was becoming a public relations disaster for Ford, and a national joke. Wits in the newspapers changed the name from Willow Run to “Will It Run?”
On Monday, July 27, Lindbergh drove back out to Willow Run to meet Henry Ford, to see what he could do to help straighten out the growing mess. They drove together to the airfield where an Air Force bomber had landed to unload a passenger, an Air Force general. Lindbergh caught sight of him talking to Sorensen and Bennett and Edsel Ford in the development engineering department.
He was a tall man wearing an Air Force uniform, an older man with wide shoulders and a white mustache who spoke English with a Danish accent.
It was Bill Knudsen, now Lieutenant General Knudsen.24 He was there in his new job as the War Department’s head of production, and as Undersecretary Robert Patterson’s troubleshooter to get Willow Run production off the ground. Indeed, Knudsen already had the answer.
The answer was field modification.
At first Knudsen had had trouble adjusting to his new Air Force uniform, and his new smaller office on the second floor of the Munitions Building. He had no formal staff or organization; the War Department’s Materiel Command and its various Production Boards forged ahead without him. He learned he was there as a facilitator, as Stimson and Patterson’s personal representative in charge of getting unstuck what the public and official Washington said was stuck: namely, wartime production at the factory level.
“You’ll have no set schedule,” Stimson told him. “Bottlenecks in production appear to be everywhere, so use your own judgment which ones to break first.”25 Knudsen would hav
e a plane, and could go anywhere he wanted and see any data or reports he wished. On February 1, just three days after his appointment, he was off to the West Coast. He was starting a series of inspection trips that would last three years. The former GM boss logged a quarter of a million miles, visiting twelve hundred factories as well as the jungles of New Guinea and the battle plains of Europe.26
The lieutenant general rank and the uniform were supposed to give him authority, especially with lieutenant colonels and brigadiers used to a more formal chain of command. But in the factories around the country, Bill Knudsen needed no title. He was Knudsen (he usually answered the phone that way, “This is Knudsen”), a living manufacturing legend, and his appearance on the factory floor was always a sensation.
He would spend an hour or two looking over blueprints and production schedules, with the nervous manager at his side, before heading for the factory floor. His black-ribbon pince-nez looked out of place with the khaki uniform, gold-bedecked cap, and three silver stars on each shoulder board. But behind those glasses were eyes that noticed every detail as he walked down every aisle, stopping at every machine and speaking to the men and women working them—sometimes taking over the controls to show them how to handle a tool more easily or safely.
Then he’d walk back to the manager and, pointing down the aisle, say, “Why don’t you reverse the arrangement of the center of these three lines, so that the work will go down the first line, up the second, and down the third, instead of having to be carried back twice?” The manager would stare dumbfounded and tell an assistant to make a note.27
Then they would head for the parking lot. Knudsen would walk down the rows of employees’ cars, pausing to point out a worn tire or a broken headlight, sometimes crawling under the car to trace an oil leak. “Get those fixed,” he would tell the manager. “Defense workers always get priority on new tires or retreads. You don’t want a blowout or a breakdown keeping an employee away from work.” Knudsen never expected every car problem to get fixed. But he was sending a message to the higher-ups: Make sure all your workers get to work. Absenteeism could be as much a threat to the production schedule as a materials shortage or a labor strike.28
So it went, starting at eight o’clock, every day. Sometimes he visited 11 plants a day—350 those first six months—fixing labor shortages, material shortages, and bottlenecks large and small—“We’re short on everything except bottlenecks,” he quipped to his new friend and Forrestal aide Admiral Lewis Strauss.29† It was a demanding schedule for a man sixty-four years old with one kidney (the other had been taken out in an operation in 1938) and chronic high blood pressure. But Knudsen knew these were the final necessary steps to getting the weapons and munitions out of the factories and into battle.
All the while he never forgot his higher responsibilities. This was “the price that was being paid by families,” he said, “who waited the return of their sons, their brothers, their fathers—yes, and their sisters.”30 To Knudsen they represented “the eternal forces of freedom”—what Hitler and the Axis were seeking to destroy. Every production delay took them one step further away from that moment of reunion—and further away from victory.
Including at Willow Run. During his days at OPM, Knudsen had followed the efforts of his old rival Charlie Sorensen with pain and misgiving. It seemed to undercut his whole working premise, that the auto industry could revolutionize aircraft production if done the right way—and seemed to prove that Sorensen’s insistence on building planes, not parts, was the wrong way. Now in July he set out to Ypsilanti to see if he could unblock what was becoming a bottleneck of personalities, as well as production. In fact the answer was in his pocket.
He had mentioned it to Robert Patterson more than a year earlier, after the undersecretary had been grumbling about the failure of Glenn Martin’s company to get its B-26 Marauder off the ground. What was the matter over there? Patterson wanted to know.
“Nothing’s the matter,” Knudsen said. “If your office, or the War Department, would quit making last-minute changes and leave the Martin people alone, they will make you planes that will fly.”
Patterson was startled and barked, “What do you mean?”
“I think we should freeze the designs for a while so we can get some airplanes,” Knudsen said. Trying to stay up to the minute on specifications at the factory end only meant being late on every plane and design. “What I think we should do to keep abreast of things is build the airplanes first and add whatever improvements are necessary at some place especially equipped to do that.”31
Patterson thought about it, and agreed. It marked the start of the Air Force’s field modification program. In January 1942 the Materiel Division set up ten modification centers, the first of which was in Cheyenne, Wyoming. At first everyone thought the aircraft companies themselves would do the modifying at the centers, but Douglas, North American, and the rest already had their hands full. Airplane production was poised to more than double in 1942—from 19,000 to 47,000—and no one had people or materials to spare, even to modify their own planes.32
So the nation’s airlines stepped up to fill the gap. American, Northwest, United, Southern, and Mid-Continental—all volunteered their personnel and materials to run the new modification centers. One of the very first was Mid-Continental Airlines, based in Minneapolis, which did the modifications that got Jimmy Doolittle’s squadron of B-25s ready for their carrier flight on the way to bomb Tokyo in April 1942. By the time Knudsen came out to Ypsilanti in July, twelve centers were going, while the Army Air Forces’ own Air Service Command was modifying five hundred planes a month to get them ready for overseas duty.33
Here clearly was the answer to Sorensen and the Air Force’s problems. Let Willow Run build the bombers as is, ready to fly to modification centers where the field changes the generals wanted could be done bomber by bomber, instead of interrupting the flow of assembly-line production. And that meant complete bombers, not subassemblies or unfinished knockdowns. Knudsen noticed something else. The way Willow Run had been contracted and constructed was for building both finished planes and subassemblies such as wings and tail sections, which then had to be shipped someplace else. These two operations were running at cross-purposes, Knudsen realized, and needed to be brought together for a single purpose: making flyable B-24s from nose to tail.34 That would also relieve Ford of some of the labor pressure, by letting them subcontract out subassemblies for delivery to Willow Run instead of the other way around.
The Air Force higher-ups got the message. Starting fall of 1942 Willow Run’s operations finally became one. Everything flowed along four lines simultaneously, which converged to two, and then finally one at the end—2.3 million square feet later—which pointed out the doors to the blue sky and black tarmac beyond. A two-mile-long monorail conveyor carried the pieces of aluminum sheet metal, flashing under the glare of the plant’s fluorescent lighting, to the separate assembly departments and thousands of machine tools and mechanical presses. A huge mechanized chain dragged each bomber through the four 60-foot bays of the assembly process, from the fuselage where the pilot’s floor was set on a great merry-go-round of mechanisms that slowly turned as workers darted back and forth installing and riveting parts in place; through the center wing section with its massive Ingersoll mill which took the 56-foot chunk of aluminum lowered by crane and clamped, milled, drilled, reamed, bored, and then unclamped each section in one seven-cycle operation, before it moved on to the next bay.
There it met the outer wings as the plane now headed for final assembly. Station 1 brought the canopy and riveted it to the center wing. Station 2 brought bulkheads, bomb racks, and side panels of the bomb bay doors—sliding doors, not swinging doors like the Flying Fortress, for quicker opening and shutting. Then came the electric wiring and hydraulic system, plus the afterfuselage and tail sections. Finally workers put in the nose wheels, the B-24’s four engines, and the trailing edges.35
Near the end, the bomber was pulled int
o one last room. When Charlie Sorensen had originally visited San Diego, he had been appalled to see technicians standing on stepladders to apply the spray paint to their planes. Now at Willow Run all spraying was done with miniature elevators raising and lowering painters over every square foot of the plane—even as the din and dust rose up from the work on the plane behind.
The very first completed Ford B-24 emerged into the sunlight on September 10, 1942. A week later President and Mrs. Roosevelt visited Willow Run and marveled at the size of the facilities and immensity of the achievement. Before the end of the month, Sorensen’s team had completed 18. When 1942 ended, they had 56—a far cry from the hundreds they had promised and the public had expected. But a turning point had been reached.
In January 1943, 31 Liberators were completed; in February—even as one senator from Washington was telling the world, “Apparently there has been practically no production to amount to anything”—there were 74. March brought 104.36 Willow Run was still not yet out of the woods. There would be chronic labor problems: For every new worker coming to Ypsilanti there was another who left, either for a better job in Detroit or out of disgust with the still-inadequate housing or (if he was male) because he had been drafted.
As Sorensen had foreseen, the unions also made constant trouble. United Auto Workers Local 50, the “Bomber Local,” spawned a series of wildcat strikes that interrupted production. In July there was a one-day foremen’s strike over who would be allowed to use the plant’s telephone. Navy secretary Frank Knox personally arranged for Naval Reserve lieutenant Henry Ford II to be released from active duty so he could go back home to Ford and save the situation. The Army’s Material Command got so worried at one point in September that it even recommended the government take over the plant.37
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