Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

  Glenn Martin had carried the concept a step further with the JRM-3 Mars, a gigantic flying boat that could carry almost 100,000 pounds of cargo across the Atlantic Ocean—far above the reach of German U-boats. The Mars had its maiden flight on November 5, 1941, and seemed to be the last word on cargo-carrying megaplanes.†

  Hughes, however, intended to outdo them all. He envisioned a plane with not four or even six but eight Pratt and Whitney R-4360 4000-horsepower engines and a wingspan of 320 feet—an entire football field. Taking off from water like a seaplane, the Hercules (as he dubbed it) would carry one hundred tons of cargo, or 750 men or a Sherman tank, over a transoceanic distance at 20,000 feet—nothing less than a flying Liberty ship, in effect.

  To Kaiser, the image was irresistible. There had been some talk at the War Production Board of giving him a contract to build the Martin plane, but he jumped instead at Hughes’s plane. “These ships could land 500,000 fully equipped men in England in a single day,” he enthused to Time. “The next day they could fly over again with 70,000 tons of fresh milk, beefsteaks, sugar and bombs.”33 He learned that General Hap Arnold had turned Hughes’s superplane down flat—but then, Arnold had turned down Kaiser once as well. He heard aviation executives like Donald Douglas and Jack Northrop tell him the idea was insane—but then, traditional shipbuilders had said the same thing when he set out to build Liberty ships.‡

  He declared that he and Hughes could have five thousand megaplanes in the air inside of two years, even though Consolidated’s master of mass production, Harry Woodhead, warned him it couldn’t be done in less than four.34 And so, despite the misgivings of the aviation industry and the Air Force brass, the Defense Plant Corporation gave Kaiser and Hughes an $18 million contract to build three of their cargo planes under Hughes’s direct supervision. There would be no fees; Kaiser and Hughes would be doing the entire thing for free. Kaiser was less than pleased. “Every builder knows,” he protested, “that a non-profit contract is a loss.”35 But such was Kaiser’s enthusiasm that he leaped at the chance to realize his dream of revolutionizing the aviation industry, just as he had almost everything else.36

  Kaiser and his wife, Bess, met his new partner for dinner at the Shoreham Hotel in DC. The thin, taciturn Hughes walked in wearing sneakers and no necktie. He had a slinky blonde on his arm with long hair pulled down over one eye like Veronica Lake.

  “I think Mother Kaiser almost died,” Kaiser’s longtime secretary Edna Knuth remembered. “But that didn’t bother Mr. Kaiser. He was talking business with Hughes and it was a big night for him. He didn’t care about the blonde.”37

  Then reality began to intrude. Because aluminum and magnesium were in critical supply in 1942, the government had deemed that all new airplane prototypes be made from plywood. Hughes’s first problem was finding enough wood for his massive project, and for the massive building in which to house it. In the end he settled on birch laminates, but the press preferred to think it was spruce so it could brand his plane the “Spruce Goose” (a name Hughes hated). But as Kaiser followed the plane’s progress by phone calls and telegrams, he became more and more alarmed.38

  Kaiser was obsessed with meeting deadlines. Hughes, on the other hand, was a perfectionist who considered deadlines imposed by others an intrusion into his own private vision. He was also prone to be inaccessible at critical times—a foretaste of the mysterious recluse of later years. Kaiser would show up at the plant in Culver City and learn that Hughes was missing. Then he would pace and fume while Hughes’s aides hunted for their boss.39

  By summer he was not only running out of patience but running out of time. He had to account to the War Production Board for the Spruce Goose delays, but Hughes was giving him almost no information. On August 27, 1943, the project’s general manager called Donald Nelson out of his office. “We have a terribly chaotic situation out here,” he warned. “It’s going to blow right up in your face.”40

  Kaiser and Nelson were never mutual fans. Many felt Nelson had set the megaplane project up to fail: As journalist Eliot Janeway put it, he had told “Kaiser that, so to speak, he can have a ham sandwich if he can bake the bread, borrow the butter, and somehow steal the ham.”41 But for once they had a common foe, Hughes’s unaccountable delays, and a common objective: to find out what the hell was going on.

  In September the Navy’s top aeronautics expert, George Spangenberg, was sent out to California with the head of the Civilian Aviation Board, Dr. Ed Warner, who had been Jimmy Doolittle’s teacher at MIT. On the flight out, Spangenberg and Warner did hours of calculations of the plane’s planned weight, fuel, and payload range—which became more sobering the longer they checked the figures.

  Spangenberg had to admit he was “tremendously impressed” with the setup at Culver City. Hughes had figured out how to build everything from wood, including his factory—with the cap strips for the Spruce Goose’s wing beams requiring no fewer than sixty-four laminations.42 But he was furious that Hughes’s engineers hadn’t told their boss the aeronautical truth: while the plane’s lift went up as the square of its linear dimensions, its weight went up as a cube of those dimensions. The “square-cube” law had doomed the project from the start, plywood or no plywood. The Spruce Goose might get off the ground but it would never fly—let alone across the Atlantic.

  Spangenberg and Warner returned to Washington to write out their sixty-page grim report, and on February 11, 1944, Nelson canceled the Kaiser-Hughes contract.43 After the war Kaiser put the blame squarely on his old nemesis Jesse Jones. Jones had said, he told a Senate committee investigating the Spruce Goose’s cost overruns in 1947, that “there was no more able and reliable man” than Hughes and “if you go along with Hughes I want it understood that Hughes has the responsibility and you do not interfere with him.”44 Now Kaiser saw that had been a mistake. Jones’s own view on being saddled with the Hughes debacle was never recorded.

  On the Spruce Goose, Kaiser had learned his lesson and moved on. Hughes, however, refused to give up. He sank more than $11 million of his money into the plane’s completion. It would fly a single maiden flight after the war, in November 1947, with Hughes himself at the wheel. Then it returned to its climate-controlled hangar, where it would remain until Hughes’s death in 1976. Right to the end, Hughes kept on payroll a fifty-man team to fix and maintain his wonder plane in case the federal government, or Henry Kaiser, changed their minds.

  Kaiser never did. But he was not done with airplanes by a long shot.

  His opportunity to redeem himself came with Brewster Aviation. The Long Island company had a $275 million contract to make dive-bombers and one of the Navy’s finest fighters, the Vought F4U Corsair. In February 1943 it produced exactly eight planes. Not one was a Corsair.

  The problem was partly poor materials control, which created bottlenecks and slowed production. But the heart of the matter was management’s battles with labor and the plant’s UAW boss, Tom Di Lorenzo. Di Lorenzo was a hard-nosed union man who had fiercely opposed the no-strike pledge taken at the beginning of the war. “Our policy is not to win the war at any cost,” he told the Washington Post, but “to win the war without sacrificing too many of [our] rights,” including the right to strike. The latest strike, a bruising one, had come in August 1943—the same month Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting in Quebec to plan Operation Overlord. When the strike was over, Brewster president Fred Riebel decided it was time to quit. He was Brewster’s fifth president in sixteen months.45

  The Truman Committee felt it had to weigh in on this unacceptable interruption of production in a vital defense plant. It knew that Kaiser was on the board, so it presented him with a choice. Resign from the board, or take Brewster over. Kaiser was less than thrilled. “It’s not an alluring prospect to take over what is reputed to be the worst situation in the country,” he grumbled. But Undersecretary James Forrestal also intervened, asking Kaiser to take over as a personal favor. The Navy, he said, had to have those planes. So Kaiser agreed and hande
d the plant over to his younger son, Henry Jr. “Brewster will be back on schedule this month,” he said.46

  More than seven thousand Brewster workers and managers were on hand on Sunday, November 7, 1943, when Kaiser landed at La Guardia Airport. They wanted to hear how he was going to heal the labor wounds and turn their plant around. He wanted to fill them with the same enthusiasm and optimism about the war effort he was feeling, despite Howard Hughes. He strode to the microphone.

  “I feel so cheerful I could sing to you,” he announced. Then to the vast astonishment of his audience, he did.

  “Oh, what a beautiful morning,

  Oh, what a beautiful day,

  I’ve got a beautiful feeling,

  Everything’s going my way.”

  “I can’t sing,” he told the newspapers afterward, “but … and seeing all those people there and the planes they helped to make, well, it gives you a feeling of confidence. That’s why I couldn’t help but to do my best in trying to sing.”47

  Kaiser decided the best way to get Brewster Aviation productive again was to work out a deal with its labor leaders. “You don’t cure a patient by whipping him,” he said. But some in Congress, like Representative Melvin J. Maas of Minnesota, thought he was going too far.

  MAAS: Of course if you give [labor] all the candy he wants, he is for you, isn’t he?

  KAISER: That’s not what I said. You are making a statement that I am giving them the candy: I am not…. I hope I am building morale. I build men. I hope I take those men that exist and build better men of them.

  MAAS: That is a very nice platitude.

  KAISER: They are not platitudes. Thank God they are not platitudes…. Do you know how many men I am employing under me? Three hundred thousand.

  MAAS: I merely wanted to know….

  KAISER: Do you think I employ that many people by platitudes?

  MAAS: I have just one or two questions and then I’m through, Mr. Kaiser.

  KAISER: Thank God.48

  Platitudes or not, Kaiser did get Brewster going again. The labor problems vanished and plane production rose. The youngest Kaiser got 60 planes out the door in January 1944, 74 in February, and 101 in March. When production reached 120 planes in April, the standard the Navy had demanded, Kaiser asked to hand over the factory to others.

  For their seven months of work at Brewster, he, Henry Jr., and their operating team had worked for free, with no fee or remuneration.49 He was ready to move on to his next big project, producing magnesium for the U.S. Air Forces.§

  The war was moving on, as well. That February, Marines stormed Kwajalein Island in the Pacific, and then Eniwetok. American bombers clobbered the Marianas, only thirteen hundred miles from Tokyo, while others, including Willow Run B-24s, hit targets across Germany. Daylight bomber raids on Berlin were now normal, even as women made up 42 percent of the workforce building those bombers in West Coast aircraft plants.

  As 1944 began, 70 percent of America’s manufacturing was focused on wartime production. American factories were building a plane every five minutes, and producing 150 tons of steel every minute. Shipyards were launching eight aircraft carriers a month, including Kaiser’s baby flattops, and fifty merchant ships a day.

  Day and night, endless freight trains loaded with raw materials and finished war goods moved east and west to outfit a 12-million-strong American military and provide its British, Australian, Russian, and other allies almost $1 billion worth of aid a month—the equivalent of $50 billion in today’s dollars. The effort required more than 142 million carloads—the most massive cargo lift in human history.‖ Yet, amazingly, while all this prodigious production was happening, more than half of America’s businesses were still cranking out goods and services for the civilian sector, from shoes and lightbulbs to paint and restaurant supplies and newsprint for the funny papers—including some, like GE and DuPont, who were the biggest war contractors.

  What war had revealed was not the power of American industry, but the inexhaustible resources of the world’s biggest free-market economy.

  Yet while the planes flew and the soldiers fought, and weapons poured out from America’s plants, the man who had set it all in motion, Bill Knudsen, was dealing with his most difficult challenge yet.

  * * *

  * Given its inhabitants, it was a tough place. Daily and nightly brawls earned the hostel another name: Hoodlum House.

  † Two of them are still flying today.

  ‡ At one meeting an Air Force officer warned Kaiser that Hughes’s idea was untenable with existing technology. “You’re talking as far ahead of the times as Leonardo da Vinci.” Kaiser was puzzled. As he left with Calhoun, he asked his lawyer, “Have we talked to this da Vinci yet?”

  § See Chapter 18.

  ‖ It was made possible by a logistical plan worked out for Knudsen by railroad executive Ralph Budd back in 1940, which prevented the kind of infrastructure collapse the same effort triggered during World War I.

  A visibly strained Lieutenant General Bill Knudsen (left) and Secretary of War Robert Patterson meet Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea, August 1943. Courtesy of the National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library

  There is in America a spirit that drives people to want to do different; they are just ornery enough that they will not stay where the rule was laid down. In that I believe you will find the greatest hope for America’s future.

  —William S. Knudsen

  ON AUGUST 17, 1943, a U.S. Army Air Force plane was making its way from Brisbane, Australia, to Port Moresby, New Guinea. It was Lieutenant General Bill Knudsen’s longest trip yet as head of the Army war production effort, covering more than 9,000 miles from Washington and Los Angeles, to New Guinea, headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur’s command.

  Knudsen had no windows to catch a glance of the Pacific’s azure waters as they began their descent to Port Moresby, and the incessant roar of the plane’s four engines made conversation with his companion, Assistant War Secretary Bob Patterson, almost impossible. Flying in Air Force bombers had taken some getting used to. It meant lots of noise, no pressurization, and icy cold at cruising altitude even here in the steamy South Pacific. Knudsen had flown in his first when he was on the Defense Advisory Committee and made a field trip out to the airplane factories on the West Coast.1 That was almost three years ago, he realized, when everyone wondered if America could produce a thousand airplanes, let alone fifty thousand. They had left those numbers far behind. Now, at Secretary Patterson’s invitation, he was going to see how those planes and other weapons they were producing at such prodigious rates were being used on the battlefield.

  As they touched down on the tarmac, the tropical jungle heat rose up to embrace them. Knudsen stripped off the coat he had been wearing and tucked it under his arm as General Douglas MacArthur and an array of generals and admirals stepped forward to greet their two distinguished visitors. Under MacArthur, Americans had just scored two significant victories, first at Buna and then in the battle of the Bismarck Sea, securing a foothold in Japanese-occupied New Guinea. The general gestured the way toward Government House, where he intended to explain to Patterson and Knudsen his plan for victory on the island, and then his strategy for the ultimate goal: the liberation of the Philippines.

  In the crowd Knudsen picked out a familiar face. It was a long, rather cynical face that someone might have mistaken for that of film actor Humphrey Bogart, sitting atop a tall lean figure in an Air Force general’s uniform. It was MacArthur’s air chief and commander of the Fifth Air Force, General George Kenney. Knudsen had met him in Washington a year ago when he was still settling into being head of Army production and had to help Kenney get the planes, equipment, and spare parts he would need for his new South Pacific command.

  George Kenney was tough, charismatic, outspoken. When MacArthur’s chief of staff tried to protest how Kenney was handling his airplanes and crews, Kenney had grabbed a piece of paper and drew a pencil dot. “The blank area repr
esents what I know about air matters,” he growled. “The dot represents what you know.”2

  Kenney respected few men in or out of his profession, but one of them was Bill Knudsen. “His expertise in his field was unquestionable,” he remembered after the war, and Kenney was drawn to Knudsen’s simple, straightforward patriotism and wry sense of humor. Once Knudsen came out of a long Munitions Building meeting where no decision had been reached, shaking his head with a weary smile. Suddenly Knudsen said, “George, do you know what a conference is?”

  Kenney said no.

  “A conference is a gathering of guys that singly can do nothing and together decide nothing can be done.” Knudsen also gave him his succinct translation of status quo. “That’s Latin for what a hell of a fix we’re in.”3

  Now Knudsen found himself standing next to Kenney. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly six o’clock. “If you can give me dinner,” Knudsen whispered to Kenney, “I’d like to get away from all the brass hats and talk airplanes.”

  And so they did.

  Their dinner lasted almost until one o’clock in the morning, and would have gone on longer if Kenney hadn’t promised to get Knudsen back to MacArthur in time for a breakfast meeting.4 As Knudsen recalled, “In our talk we practically took planes apart and put them back together”—just the kind of talk he loved.5 They talked about the B-24 Liberator, which Kenney believed was the perfect bomber for long-range operations among the widely scattered islands between New Guinea and the New Hebrides, and North American’s twin-engined B-25 Mitchell, which Kenney’s engineering wizard Irving “Pappy” Gunn and North American field rep Jack Fox were transforming into a low-flying strafing machine—at one point even trying out a 75mm cannon in the nose.6

  Knudsen in turn told him his impressions of the captured Japanese planes he had seen when he stopped in Brisbane, including the much-vaunted Japanese Zero. He had been less than impressed. The planes struck him as “standard construction, but generally lighter than ours”—and the products of a Japanese industrial base that was still stuck, like the German’s, in a handcraft tradition.7