Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

  Because the bugs showed no sign of letting up. On April 15 the very first B-29 rolled off the assembly line at Wichita, but no one dared to take it up in the air. Instead, on May 23 Jake Harmon took up the original prototype once again, only to discover that during a maintenance check someone had inadvertently reversed the aileron control cables, so raising the flaps up actually dropped them down, and vice versa. Harmon had to make an emergency landing after nearly crashing the plane.2

  Yet Harmon was still adamant in his faith in the B-29. “A hell of a good plane,” he kept telling people, even after stepping away from his near-fatal crash, “just a tremendous plane.” And it was Harmon who finally figured out how to pull the B-29 program back from oblivion.3

  He and General Wolfe sat down together and worked it out. Hap Arnold would be put in personal charge of every aspect of the B-29, from the assembly line to modification centers to the recruitment and training of crews and mechanics. The entire operation would be branded a War Department Special Project, meaning no funding or other changes could be made without prior approval of the Joint Chiefs and the secretary. The industry’s Liaison Committee could then address all engineering and production problems without outside interference, while the planes themselves would be organized as a separate independent bombardment wing. Each would have four combat groups of fifty bombers each. A fifth wing would serve as an operational training unit to funnel replacements to the other groups overseas.

  Every overhanging branch of standard chain of command, every piece of government agency and military red tape, would be cut away. From now on, everyone riveting or engineering a B-29, fixing a B-29, or flying a B-29 would be working for the head of the Air Force himself.

  Harmon and Wolfe typed up their plan as a memo. At the bottom they left room for a signature, and typed under it: “H. H. Arnold, Commanding, U.S. Air Forces.”

  They went down the hall and gave it to Arnold. The general read it. He said without expression, “Why doesn’t someone else do something for me once in a while?” Wolfe handed him a pen, Arnold signed the memo, and the B-29 Special Project was born.4

  Hap Arnold also lifted the veil of secrecy that had been draped over the project since its inception. This meant the bomber had to have a name. Boeing wanted “Superfortress”—a salute to its most famous venture. Others pushed for “Annihilator.” Arnold didn’t particularly care; he had other things to worry about besides the B-29 naming contest, like what bomber groups to send to Europe, and how to keep Kenney and his Fifth Air Force supplied in the Southwest Pacific. He decided Boeing’s name would do.5

  That still left the issue of how to get enough B-29s produced to make a difference in the war—and keep Arnold’s promise to have them in China by next year. That’s when Arnold called on Bill Knudsen.

  He had always had his doubts about Knudsen. Although Arnold speaks highly of Knudsen in his memoirs, in the scramble before the war he saw him only as an oversold production man, someone who was full of great speeches but knew nothing about airplanes.6 The big Dane didn’t even know what an engine nacelle was.* But if anyone could understand the complex problems facing the manufacturing end of the B-29 program, it would be Knudsen. He had flown out to Seattle soon after Allen’s death. He had met with Egtvedt and Wells and seen their glum faces and sensed the loss of confidence although not conviction at Boeing. “The Boeing Company never did lose faith in their baby,” Knudsen wrote later, but they “almost gave up hope following that crash.” Some five months later, there still wasn’t a combat B-29 available, “and the bugs had not begun to be ironed out of the ships that were flyable.”7

  That would be Knudsen’s job: to get the bugs out, and the planes in the air and into action. So in the late autumn of 1943, Knudsen stepped in to win what would be remembered forever in Air Force circles as the Battle of Kansas.

  As the name suggests, the main battleground was the B-29 plant in Wichita. When Knudsen paid his first visit, it was hard at first glance to see what the problem was. Some 26,000 people were now working in the Boeing facilities, which included 86 million cubic square feet of plant space, offices, warehouses, and hangars, and covered 185 acres—almost half the size of the National Mall.8 Schools, daycare centers, theaters, shopping malls, and some six thousand brand-new homes—most of them paid for by the Federal Housing Administration—surrounded the site, with fifty-four buses moving workers into work every day. Mobile cafeterias rolled through the plant to minimize time off for lunch.

  “The Great Boeing Kitchen” dispensed hot food, along with soup, coffee or tea, and buns, all for only twenty-eight cents. “This beats any meal I ever had anywhere,” one young man said. A foreman said the rolling cafeteria meant “my men don’t gripe about their wives as they used to”—and kept their minds focused on their jobs.9

  Knudsen found at Wichita a workforce that was entirely new to manufacturing work and trained entirely by Boeing—and made up of almost 40 percent women. It was a workforce as skilled and dedicated as any in the country. They literally worked longer than the day is long: three shifts of ten hours each, with every other weekend off and time and a half for every hour beyond forty hours a week.

  Still, absenteeism was low, worker morale high, and the production numbers were impressive. The planes were apparently getting built, but somehow they weren’t getting to the Air Force. Knudsen thought this was odd, because when he arrived he had noticed rows of B-29s on the airfield. Why weren’t they on their way? he asked. The manager had to point out that because of the rubber shortage, all the planes had wooden tail wheels and couldn’t be flown.

  When Knudsen walked closer to one row of sixteen B-29s, he noticed something even odder.

  None of them had engines.

  Slowly the truth came out. In order to make their production quotas, managers were counting planes as complete even when all their parts hadn’t been installed, whether it was tail wheels or even engines. A manager shamefacedly explained that from time to time an engine would be taken off the assembly line and put into one of the “gliders” on the field. Otherwise, the planes were useless.

  Knudsen shook his head. There was going to be a new rule, he said. No more B-29s could be turned out of the shop without engines. In fact, “we ruled that an airplane wasn’t really an airplane,” Knudsen said later, “until it was flown and accepted by the Air Force.”10

  The Battle of Kansas had begun.

  From Wichita, Knudsen headed for Marietta. No facility was more of a sore point to the Army than the Bell plant there. Army generals all but accused Bell executives of deliberate sabotage. If Wichita was at least making airplanes, however incomplete, at the cost of $44 million Marietta was making none.

  Knudsen saw at once what the problem was. The Bell executives, headquartered two thousand miles away in Buffalo, had gotten in over their heads. They had wildly underestimated how long it would take to get a four-million-square-foot plant built out in the middle of Cobb County in rural Georgia, and how long it would take to train a workforce of 40,000 rural Southerners to work on a complex assembly line like the B-29’s—when Cobb County’s entire population was only 35,000. People who were being trained to press aluminum sheets into wings and ailerons first had to be shown what aluminum looked like.11

  Bell nonetheless had promised to have the plant producing planes by September 1942. But by the end of June that year, the building was still only 3 percent complete. My March 1943 the building was nearly finished, but only three thousand men were at work—most of them engineers brought down from Buffalo—making tools for plants elsewhere. Worker morale was low and pay worse. In June 1943, five hundred workers simply walked out and never came back.

  When, in July, the air-conditioning finally came on in the enormous Plant No. 6—it looked “like something from another and larger planet,” one Atlanta reporter said—Marietta had yet to make a complete plane.12

  Knudsen decided a change was needed at the top. He brought in Colonel Carl Cover, a former vice presi
dent for Douglas, to be in charge.13 As time went on and the facilities were finished, it turned out Bell’s training program was one of the best in the industry. Schoolteachers, salesmen, clerks, hairdressers, bank tellers, and housewives became skilled aviation workers, learning to cut aluminum sheets, lay out electric cable, or buck and rivet for ten hours at a stretch.

  One of those wielding a riveting gun when Knudsen visited was a widow who lived in a tiny trailer outside Atlanta. She had been at the gates of the Marietta factory the day it opened, and remained there working the 8 A.M.-to-4:45 P.M. shift every day until the war ended.

  She wasn’t just any widow. Helen Dortch Longstreet was the widow of Confederate general James Longstreet, whom she had married when she was thirty-four and he was seventy-six. She was eighty when she started work at Bell. Every day she drove in to work in her Nash coupe in her black sweater and slacks and black visored cap, a cigarette dangling from her lips. The noise and vicious kick of the riveting gun bothered her not at all. “I was head of the class in riveting school,” she liked to tell people. “In fact, I was the only one in it.” Her foreman could tell Knudsen Mrs. Longstreet was never late and never missed a day of work.14

  Over time, Mrs. Longstreet and Colonel Cover almost made Marietta the most efficient B-29 plant of them all. In November the first plane came out the factory doors. General Wolfe confessed to the Bell people, “I didn’t think you could do it.”

  By the fall of 1944, its 28,000 workers had made producing B-29s so routine that Bell was able to renegotiate its contract at a lower cost-per-plane basis, and even Cover’s tragic death in a plane crash did nothing to break the factory’s stride.15 By the time the war ended, the Bell-Marietta airplane factory, once a symbol of government inefficiency and corporate waste, had become a symbol of the New South. Its new general manager became so popular he was nominated for governor in 1946, and the plant remained a pillar of the Sun Belt industrial resurgence down to the 1990s.†

  At Omaha, Knudsen found the situation a little better. Martin Aircraft had broken ground there in the spring of 1941, with a line of bulldozers and Euclid tractors, each with a Stars and Stripes flying from its rearview mirror. The plant had been built to supply the Army with B-26 Marauders, but production was phased out in July 1943 to shift to the B-29. When Knudsen first visited, the new jigs and dies were still showing up—at a cost to the Army of some $90 million.16

  But Knudsen liked the two Martin managers, Hartson and Willey, the latter a shrewd, thickset Englishman who had transferred from Martin’s Baltimore plant to oversee the new operations. In the end, however, the Omaha plant—like Boeing’s at Renton—would become a final assembly center for B-29 parts made elsewhere, a rendezvous point for so many of the companies and corporations that had made the arsenal of democracy.17

  From Chrysler came nose sections, nacelles, leading edges, and center wing flaps, shipping by rail from Detroit. From Goodyear in Akron came the all-important bomb-bay fuselage sections, sections so large that they took up the full height of the factory building in Akron. To make room, the massive concrete foundations that Goodyear engineers used to neutralize vibrations for jigs used for making wings for Martin B-26s had to be broken up with a one-ton wrecking ball and dragged away.18

  Meanwhile, Hudson Motors—which had designed one of the first weapons whose program Knudsen had overseen, the 20mm Oerlikon antiaircraft gun—supplied fuselage waste sections and tail gun turrets. J. I. Case, the tractor company, made outer wing panels, wing tips, and ailerons, and Bendix Corporation supplied the dorsal and belly turrets.19

  That still left the problem of the engines—and here even Knudsen found himself facing near-certain defeat.

  The country’s second-biggest aircraft engine firm, Curtiss-Wright, had designed the R-3350 as far back as 1935 as the ultimate piston engine. On the drawing board, its eighteen cylinders could deliver no less than two thousand horsepower with less than half the weight of other engines. As Wright engineers liked to put it, it was as powerful as the average train locomotive but weighed as much as the average locomotive wheel.20 But there had been a host of problems. Its eighteen cylinders sat in radial fashion like spokes on a wheel, or rather two wheels of nine each, packed close to each other. Preventing overheating, including inside the exhaust system, proved almost impossible—as Eddie Allen had found at the cost of his life. Overheating problems in the reduction gears and exhaust system seemed destined to keep the engine from ever reaching production—that is, until Pearl Harbor.

  In 1942 the Army suddenly set huge hopes on the R-3350, especially for its new Boeing superbomber. Millions of dollars poured into Wright Aeronautical to expand its plant in Woodridge, New Jersey, and Chrysler’s Dodge division agreed to mass-produce the engine at a completely new plant on South Cicero Street on Chicago’s West Side. It quickly eclipsed Willow Run as the largest manufacturing plant in the world, with some four million square feet. It was so huge that when Bill Knudsen paid a visit in late 1943, he almost forwent his usual personal walk-through. “I had quite a time trying to visualize that acreage filled with machine tools and people.”21

  Because the plant was still largely empty. The Wright engineers were having so many problems with the motors they were building that the Dodge people saw no point in opening up full production. The problems weren’t just engineering ones. The R-3350 required more than nine thousand separate machine cutting tools to make. It was the most complex piece of machinery ever mass-produced in the United States, but it had to be made by one of the country’s most inexperienced workforces.22 Most of the three thousand employees at Woodridge had never worked in a factory before. They were completely unprepared for the scale and complexity of the R-3350, as were their supervisors. And when Wright instituted an intensive training program on the engine, some employees learned enough to quit and get higher-paying jobs at aircraft plants elsewhere. No wonder three of the inspection supervisors in the Woodridge crankcase and housing departments wound up leaving for psychiatric treatment.23

  For Knudsen, too, it was a depressing experience. “It was rather tough for me,” he confessed later, “a production man, to face these manufacturers at a time when all the engines they would have in their plants would be for that day’s production,” with no other inventory on hand “and no shipping data for the next supply.” As he paced the vast half-empty bays of the Chicago facility and saw workers sullenly standing, sleeping, and shooting craps in the dark corners of the Woodridge plant, he must have wondered if finally, with the R-3350, he had chosen an assignment too tough even for him.24

  Still, Knudsen crossed his fingers and stayed hopeful. He knew there were powerful companies behind the engine project—he had arranged for GM’s Fisher Body to start building the B-29’s enormous engine nacelles—and that the key to making the operation more efficient was not just better handling of employees, but better use of subcontractors. Starting in September 1943, Wright-Woodridge and Dodge-Chicago began exchanging those parts each was producing more efficiently, in order to speed up output. A bevy of new subcontractors were found. They included Studebaker; American Radiator in Elyria, Ohio; U.S. Radiator of Geneva, New York; Bohn Aluminum; and Dow Chemical. Chrysler assigned workers from plants in Detroit and Kokomo to make R-3350 parts, while Wright turned to its satellite plants in Ohio and New Jersey to do the same.25

  All in all, the B-29 engine program turned Curtiss-Wright into the second-biggest prime military contractor in the country, right after General Motors.‡ Morale at Woodridge gradually improved, as the Air Force and Knudsen insisted on raising workers’ pay, especially those working in the hot and dangerous foundry section, and tying pay bonuses to production quotas. Workers came alive to the fact that the machines they were building were going to have a massive impact on the future of the war.

  One twenty-year-old woman from Georgia told a reporter how her Air Force boyfriend had been killed in action, and how working at Woodridge made her feel she was helping to make sure other boys d
idn’t die the same way. “We’ve got to stick to our jobs to get these engines out,” one Bronx woman declared, “so we can get those B-29s across the water where they can knock hell out of the Japs”26

  Knudsen agreed, and was ready for the next stage. In December—just as Dwight Eisenhower was named Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe and after the Marines suffered three thousand killed and wounded taking the island of Tarawa—General Wolfe flew off to China to build the first airfields for the B-29, and Knudsen took over the entire program.27

  Meanwhile, Hap Arnold had had a visitor.

  It was General Leslie Groves from the Army Corps of Engineers, who had spent the last year working with a team of the country’s most distinguished scientists and engineers from DuPont, Union Carbide, Allis-Chalmers, Tennessee Eastman, and other corporations, on what he could only describe to Arnold as a superweapon—one that could win the war.§ To deliver it, they were going to need a superplane, he said, a plane big and fast enough to carry it into action.

  “In calling on him at this time,” Grove remembered after the war, “I was of course assuming that our work would be successful”—since they still had not extracted an ounce of enriched uranium, and the first test of a bomb was more than six months away.28 Still, the chief worry was whether Arnold’s superbomber would be ready in time. Neither Boeing’s B-17 nor Consolidated’s B-24 would be up to the job. Groves warned they might have to consider using a British plane, the Avro Lancaster, instead.