by A. J. Baime
“Pounding away at Germany from the air,” Roosevelt had said, would crack “the morale of the German people. . . . When I write to foreign countries I must have something to back up my words. Had we had this summer [in 1938] 5,000 airplanes and the capacity to produce 10,000 per year . . . Hitler would not have dared to take the stand that he did.”
The President, his military chiefs, and his cabinet had all come to agreement: not only would airpower play the most critical role in the future of military aggression, but the four-engine bomber would be the most critical weapon of all. As Air Corps chief Hap Arnold said in 1940: “The United States must build, as quickly as possible, an Air Force capable of waging a decisive air offensive against the Axis powers in Europe, and this Air Force must consist predominantly of Heavy Bombers.”
And yet, mired in economic priorities, Washington had failed to build any semblance of airpower. Some progress had been made: aviation firms had produced prototypes of new military planes. Boeing had developed the B-17 four-engine bomber. The first B-17 had a short and ominous history: three months after its first shakedown flight, it had crashed, killing its two test pilots, but it had since progressed in design. The Army Air Corps had ordered a fleet of 360-mile-per-hour Curtiss-Wright P-40 Warhawk single-engine fighters after seeing the first prototype in 1938. And Consolidated Aircraft Corporation out of San Diego had unveiled the prototype for the B-24 four-engine bomber in 1939—the Liberator, the biggest and most powerful of them all.
None of these airplanes, however, existed in any numbers. Most of the progress in American aviation during the 1930s was aimed at civilian travel. Still, in 1940, if a person wanted to fly from New York to Los Angeles, he would spend twenty-four hours in a DC-3, flying at low altitude (cabins were not pressurized) at a mere 155 miles per hour, at his own peril (no radar), stopping three times to refuel. And only if weather permitted.
By the time the President announced his 50,000-airplane plan, America’s European allies were clamoring for flying machines from the United States. They needed weapons that could stand up to the Nazi Luftwaffe. If the British couldn’t get American warplanes soon, “You’d have the Germans eating breakfast with us,” said the Air Ministry’s Patrick Hennessy. France’s premier, Paul Reynaud, cried for “clouds of airplanes” from the United States—planes that could not be offered to the French because they did not exist and there was no US company capable of building them in time.
Now the air war was on in Europe, democratic nations were crumbling under the onslaught of Hitler’s warplanes, and America had no airpower.
The day after Roosevelt’s 50,000-airplane speech, his critics attacked. Congress had already approved $7 billion in military expenditures, Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri said. “We hear now that the Army has only 58 airplanes that are not obsolete.” Clark wanted to know how the rest of that money “was squandered.” The man emerging as Roosevelt’s loudest critic, the aviator Charles Lindbergh, called the 50,000-airplane plan “hysterical chatter.” In Germany, Hermann Goering burst out laughing when he heard Roosevelt’s plan.
“What is America,” commented Adolf Hitler, “but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records, and Hollywood?”
Ultimately, the President’s strategy would be a test of the democratic system itself. If this war would be fought not just with soldiers but with assembly lines, the United States would seem to have a terrific advantage. America’s foundries, refineries, and factories turned out more steel, aluminum, and cars than all the other major powers combined, and the nation had larger reserves of oil than any other country. The question became: how could Roosevelt convince American industry to put its free-enterprise interests aside and build the weapons that could arm the Allies, when most of America still believed the war in Europe would never touch them?
The President needed the nation’s titans of industry in his corner. Throughout his years in the White House, however, his politics had made enemies of these powerful industrialists. The New Deal had inserted government into big business as never before. “They are unanimous in their hate for me,” he said of Wall Street and industrial tycoons in a campaign speech for his second term in 1936. “And I welcome their hatred.” Now those titans of industry were the figures that Washington needed most.
Roosevelt needed a man on the inside, a liaison who understood mass production and who could oil the hinge that joined big industry and its assembly lines to the nation’s capital. He invited the Wall Street legend Bernard Baruch to the White House. Baruch had played this kind of role under Woodrow Wilson during World War I. The financier had three suggestions.
“First, Knudsen. Second, Knudsen. Third, Knudsen.”
When the phone rang in the office of the president of General Motors in downtown Detroit, Knudsen was expecting the call.
“Mr. Knudsen,” an operator said, “the President of the United States wants to talk to you. Here he is.”
“Knudsen?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“I want to see you in Washington. I want you to work on some production matters. When can you come down here?”
That night Knudsen went home to his family and explained that he was leaving his $300,000-plus salary behind. His flabbergasted twenty-year-old daughter asked why. “This country has been good to me,” Knudsen said. “And I want to pay it back.” He had arrived from Denmark via Ellis Island forty years earlier with $30 in his pocket; left to find his way alone, he had fought with his fists on the docks in New York just to get by. Now he was a rich sixty-one-year-old man being appointed to the most important production job in the world.
On his way south, Knudsen stopped in New York to see his boss, General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan, who detested Roosevelt and his New Deal politics. “They’ll make a monkey out of you down there in Washington,” Sloan warned. Sloan told Knudsen that if he was going to work for Roosevelt, he need not come back. His days at GM were through. When Knudsen arrived at La Guardia Field to fly to Washington, reporters were waiting for him.
“Can you build those fifty thousand planes?” they asked.
“I can’t,” said Knudsen. “But America can.”
Knudsen moved into a Washington apartment and took an office in the Federal Reserve Building on Constitution Avenue across from the Army and Navy Departments. Roosevelt placed him in full command of defense manufacturing—“tanks, airplanes, engines, uniforms, and the multifarious items needed in the program after the first processing stage,” the official announcement read. For this Knudsen would receive a salary of $1. He was the first of World War II’s so-called dollar-a-year men.
His square head and blue eyes made the cover of Life magazine the following week. A reporter from The New Yorker trailed him for a series of three profiles. Knudsen’s appointment signified a historic moment in American history: the attempt to turn a democratic government, free enterprise, and the military into one giant fighting machine.
The President was very clear on what would be Knudsen’s most important task. “The effective defense of this country and the vital defense of other democratic nations requires that there be a substantial increase in heavy bomber production,” Roosevelt wrote on May 4, 1941. “I am fully aware of the fact that increasing the number of heavy bombers will mean a great strain upon our production effort. It will mean a large expansion of plant facilities and the utilization of existing factories not now engaged in making munitions. But command of the air by the democracies must and can be achieved. We must see to it that the process is hastened and that the democratic superiority in the air be made absolute.”
When Knudsen met George Marshall, the army chief of staff, the General said to him, “Your responsibility and my responsibility are much alike. Your responsibility is to produce; my responsibility is to use. Our greatest need is time.”
Knudsen promised “speed, speed, and more speed.”
At the first meeting of what was now called the National Defense Advisory Commission, headed by Knudsen a
nd US Steel chief Edward Stettinius, Knudsen boldly took the floor.
“Our immediate problem is to make 50,000 airplanes a year,” he said. “We haven’t got a lot of airplane factories. And we haven’t got time to wait for them to be built. As I see it, an airplane is pretty big. A bomber weighs from 20,000 to 40,000 pounds. Standing in a field, it looks pretty big. And it is big. But when an airplane is taken apart, it is nothing but a lot of little pieces. With that in mind, I figure the automobile business can make parts for airplanes, and sections for planes that we can glue together. In the automobile industry they understand mass production.”
Knudsen and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau came up with a plan. Who had both aviation experience and mass production know-how? Why not call the family who pioneered aviation through the 1920s, the family who invented the idea of fully integrated mass production on a grand scale in the first place?
When it came to the Ford family, as one government official put it, “nothing was ever impossible.”
8
“Gentlemen, We Must Outbuild Hitler”
Spring to Fall 1940
England’s battles, it used to be said, were won on the playing fields of Eton. This plan is put forward in the belief that America’s can be won on the assembly lines of Detroit.
—WALTER REUTHER, 1940
AT THE ROUNDTABLE LUNCHEON in Dearborn, with Henry Ford sitting between Edsel and Sorensen and waiters in white coats hovering, the conversation turned to the war in Europe.
The situation overseas sent Henry into fits of rage, which he unleashed at the Roundtable. He was “obsessed with the European situation,” according to Sorensen. “It was on his mind night and day. Anything pertaining to Europe would upset him. The likelihood of [America’s] involvement upset him almost to incoherence.” Now seventy-seven, Henry had suffered a minor stroke. He was so waifish, he looked like his skeleton was trying to crawl out of him. His eyes appeared as if someone had “dimmed the power behind them,” according to Harry Bennett. Henry had begun to show serious signs of senility. He was often confused, mentally volatile, and paranoid. All through the 1930s, he had clashed publicly with the Roosevelt administration. Now all his paranoia was fixated on the President.
“The people are looking for a leader,” Henry said. “And they’ve got a leader who is putting something over on them, and they deserve it.” Henry was sure the President had his own agenda and lives would be lost as a result. “They don’t dare have a war,” Henry said of the Roosevelt administration. “And they know it.”
But the war in Europe had already begun; the political situation was completely out of control. France had already been conquered, and Britain was left to fight the Nazis alone. It had fallen to Edsel and Sorensen to protect the family’s assets overseas, however possible. Ford Motor Company was straddling nations at war. In fact, the company was at war with itself, in more ways than one.
Ford plants in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark were now in Nazi-occupied territory. Ford of Britain, on the other hand (the Ford empire’s greatest power abroad), was serving Churchill’s campaign against the Nazis. A new factory outside Manchester was tooling up to churn out complex Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engines for Britain’s marvelous Spitfire fighter planes, while Dagenham outside London was making military trucks and ambulances.
Edsel couldn’t discuss these issues frankly at the Roundtable—his father was too volatile. Henry’s physician, Dr. McClure, had cautioned Edsel not to bring the stress of the war upon his father. Back in his corner office, Edsel wrote careful letters to his executives abroad, hoping to obtain information. Were the factories in Nazi-occupied territory damaged? Were they running at all?
Dr. Albert had cabled Edsel from Germany to say that Ford-Werke in Cologne would do its best “to safeguard your interests in plants in occupied territory.” The plants in Europe were up and running, he reported. “You realize, of course,” Dr. Albert wrote Edsel, “that as soon as a victorious army occupies foreign territory, according to international law (convention of the Haag), the occupying forces have the right to use all plants for manufacturing war matériel.”
“We are producing normal trucks only” in Germany, Dr. Albert promised—an obvious lie. (As Cologne’s former chief engineer Tallberg put it: “Of course those trucks were going to the military.”) Further information, Dr. Albert wrote, could not be disclosed “under the restrictions imposed on communicating with foreign countries.”
Meanwhile, the family had received word that their Antwerp assembly plant had been bombed by the British. Given the lack of communication from abroad, the information came from Washington. Secretary of State Cordell Hull had cabled Edsel to inform him that “four Belgian employees were wounded” and that “damage to the plant was principally broken glass.”
A key source of information for Edsel was Maurice Dollfus, the head of Ford of France, a chain smoker with a bad heart and a “pyrotechnic eloquence,” as one auto man described him. A loyal, longtime friend of the Ford family, Dollfus wrote Edsel a series of long letters after the start of the war. He could reveal facts, but “very often not all the truth,” owing to the Nazi censors who would surely be reading the letters before delivery.
With Paris conquered, Dollfus was forced to continue running the Ford facilities in France as part of the Nazi arsenal, delivering trucks to the Wehrmacht. Hitler had an insatiable thirst for machinery and horsepower; the Nazis were taking all the trucks Ford of France could build, and paying for them.
“Our trucks are in very large demand by the German authorities,” Dollfus wrote Edsel in August 1940, “and I believe that as long as the war goes on and at least for some period of time all that we shall produce will be taken by the German authorities.”
“In order to safeguard our interests,” Dollfus wrote Edsel, “and I am here talking in a very broad way—I have been to Berlin and have seen General von Schell himself.” General Adolf von Schell was the Nazis’ plenipotentiary for automotive affairs, in charge of taking over the continent’s car factories for military purposes. “My interview with him has been by all means satisfactory,” Dollfus wrote. In the margin of his letter, he scribbled in longhand: “I was the first Frenchman to go to Berlin.”
On July 30, 1940, Edsel cabled a simple note to Dollfus: “Glad you are safe also plants looking forward to fuller reports regards.” Two months later, he wrote Dollfus again, thanking him for his hard work. “I also appreciate your great effort to keep the organizations intact and desire to produce something. . . . You are doing a fine job in cooperating with the other companies in the allocation of raw materials for the various Ford companies.”
The idea of allegiance had become a complex entanglement. Dollfus was doing everything he could to please the Nazis; otherwise, they would kick him out and take control. It was a matter of survival. Privately, Edsel grappled with the idea that his company was willfully serving the Nazi war machine. His factories were building the arsenals that were destroying each other. As Dollfus wrote Edsel: “The history of our company during this war seems like a novel.” Only the evil they faced was all too real.
Edsel ventured south to Washington in late May 1940 to attend meetings about airplane production. This was “Washington Wonderland,” the cherry-blossomed asylum, tangled in rivaling ambitions and red tape and dotted with its famous edifices—the Capitol Building, the White House, the Supreme Court Building. The roads crisscrossed with motorcar traffic—every car made in America. Edsel arrived at Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s office at 8:30 AM on May 31.
The news from Europe that morning was profoundly disturbing. Ships were evacuating 200,000 stranded British and another 140,000 French and Belgian soldiers from the shores of Dunkirk, beaten back in France by the Nazi juggernaut. At any moment, the British expected an invasion. No foreign power had successfully invaded the Isles since the Norman French in 1066. So sure were British leaders of the impending Nazi invasion that they had removed stree
t signs from cities and towns along the coastline, hoping the Nazis would get lost upon arrival.
Unlike his father, Edsel was a friend and ally of President Roosevelt and his administration. Conversation was informal in Morgenthau’s mahogany-paneled office. The airplane situation was grave, Morgenthau explained. The President had promised thousands of aircraft engines to the British. Somebody had to build them—and fast! The President was receiving desperate missives from Winston Churchill. (“The enemy have a marked preponderance in the air,” Churchill had written. “The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood. . . . I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness.”)
Morgenthau wanted to know: Could Edsel Ford build aircraft engines on his assembly lines? What would it entail, and how long would it take?
“Sure, we can do it,” said Edsel. “We will make all the studies we can in a preliminary way and see what can be done.” As Morgenthau later recalled, Edsel said he would take on the job “for patriotic reasons.”
Four days later, just before midnight, an armored car pulled up to Gate 4 of the Rouge. Two soldiers unloaded top-secret blueprints for the Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, the British-designed power plant that was the jewel of the Royal Air Force. Following the blueprints, the Fords received the aircraft engine itself. Knudsen arrived in Dearborn from Washington to help study the project.
On June 13, Edsel returned to Washington with Sorensen to finalize the deal. They arrived at 8:30 AM and headed to the Mayflower Hotel for breakfast. Knudsen met them there. All talk was of aviation engines—the scintillating technical challenge of producing them en masse, according to automobile manufacturing principles.
