The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

by A. J. Baime

  Edsel appeared tired that morning. Not long before, he had checked himself into Henry Ford Hospital with crippling stomach pain; doctors had run uncomfortable tests, making him imbibe barium solutions and forcing tubes down his throat. They were unable to diagnose anything. “I was concerned about Edsel,” Sorensen later remembered. “The doctors were keeping tabs on him. . . . When he showed signs of indigestion, from which he suffered a great deal, his father would be impatient about that. He would criticize Edsel unmercifully.”

  In Washington, Edsel and Sorensen negotiated a contract for 9,000 Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engines. Six thousand would go to the British, and the other 3,000 to the US military. The government would pay Ford a provisional price of $16,000 per engine (about $10 per horsepower). Edsel kept his father abreast of negotiations by phone, carefully explaining the situation so as not to upset him. To Edsel’s amazement, he was able to convince his father that the family should take on the project. As Sorensen later wrote in his diary: “I am surprised . . . Henry Ford had stated that he would not make any war supplies for any foreign nation. . . . No one could have been more careful in keeping him fully informed than Edsel and I had been.”

  When Edsel and Sorensen left Washington, news of the agreement made headlines all over Europe and North America. In Britain’s House of Commons, the announcement raised roars from crowds of politicians, who believed that Ford magic from the United States would be a huge boon to their campaign against the Nazis. Churchill’s top aircraft production man, Lord Beaverbrook, made his own announcement that Ford of Dearborn would make engines for the Royal Air Force. The news brought relief to all of Britain, where morale had sunk to an all-time low. In the newspapers that same week were pictures of Hitler’s triumphant march into Paris. Time was running out; with France conquered, the Nazis were just twenty-six miles from England.

  Two days after the Fords agreed to produce the Rolls-Royce Merlin, Henry changed his mind. He called Edsel and Sorensen into his office. Edsel appeared with a smile on his face, unaware of the pitfall he had just stepped into. His father explained the situation: in a fit of paranoia, he was now refusing to make the engines, claiming that Roosevelt was trying to lead the country into the fray. “They want war!” Henry said. He would build the motors for American defense, but not for Britain. Sorensen had never heard Henry shout louder in forty years of employ.

  This was Edsel’s deal. He had negotiated the contract. News of it had been reported all over the world. “We wouldn’t have made these commitments if you hadn’t expressed yourself in favor,” Edsel said, in the strongest tone he could speak with his father.

  “I don’t care,” Henry responded. “Call up Knudsen and tell him we’ve changed our mind.”

  Edsel was crestfallen. He headed to his office and picked up the phone. It was one of the most difficult calls he ever made.

  “Bill,” Edsel said, “we can’t make those motors for the British.”

  “Why?”

  “Father won’t do it.”

  Knudsen was incredulous. “But you are the president of the company.”

  “I know, but father won’t do it, and you know how he is.”

  Knudsen phoned some military powerbrokers and secured himself an airplane to fly directly to Detroit. He hurried to the Rouge. In Edsel’s office, he shook Henry’s hand.

  “Mr. Ford,” Knudsen burst out, “this is terrible about those motors.”

  “You are mixed up with some bad people in Washington,” Henry said. “I won’t make motors for the British government. For the American government, yes; for the British government, no.”

  “But, Mr. Ford,” Knudsen said, “we have your word that you would make them. I told the President your decisions, and he was very happy about it.”

  The mention of Henry’s nemesis, Roosevelt, was a mistake. “We won’t build the engine at all,” Ford said. “Withdraw the whole order.”

  Knudsen’s face grew purple with rage. He stormed out of the Rouge. His phone call to Henry Morgenthau’s office in Washington was humiliating.

  “Edsel said that his father said that if he sold engines to the British government that that would rush the United States into the war,” Knudsen told Morgenthau. “We argued back and forth for an hour and a half,” he continued. “I don’t understand their attitude. They have been selling trucks to the French.” Edsel had personally given his word, Knudsen reiterated. “You know, the old man and him—they sort of cross wires once in a while.”

  After the phone call, Morgenthau called one of his colleagues. “Edsel definitely gave his word to Mr. Knudsen,” the Treasury secretary said.

  “I guess Edsel isn’t old enough yet to have a view of his own,” came the answer. “I guess when he grows up and gets about twenty-one his father will back him more.”

  “Well, I don’t know how,” Morgenthau said. “I guess he’ll have to wait until he hasn’t got a father.”

  Morgenthau grew suspicious of the whole affair. Henry Ford was an accused Nazi sympathizer, who had received the Grand Cross from Hitler himself, who had financial concerns inside Nazi-occupied territory. Now he was refusing to build engines that would be used to attack Germany. Was he prioritizing his family empire above his patriotism? Or was he really just a pacifist?

  When Edsel returned home to Gaukler Pointe that night, his driver motoring through the estate’s security gates, he faced the painful task of explaining to his wife that his name was about to be brutally maligned all over the world in the newspapers. The Roosevelt administration put out a devastating statement, faulting Edsel. The Canadian government attacked, calling the Fords “a menace to democracy.” In Britain—where the Nazi invasion seemed closer with every hour—the news stirred fury.

  In Germany, however, Dr. Albert was most pleased. The Nazis couldn’t be happier if the Fords refused to build aviation engines for their enemies. In fact, Henry Ford’s refusal to build the Merlins, along with his anti-Semitism and his Nazi medal (the Grand Cross of the German Eagle), was perceived by many as further evidence of Nazi sympathies. “The ‘Dementi’ of Mr. Henry Ford concerning war orders for Great Britain has greatly helped us,” Dr. Albert wrote Edsel.

  The international embarrassment weighed heavily on Edsel—having his patriotism compromised on the world stage. He was suffering through the indignity of World War I all over again. Of all the feuds that he had suffered through with his father, this one hurt the most.

  One month after Henry Ford’s aircraft engine debacle, the Battle of Britain began—the first battle ever fought entirely by air forces. The Luftwaffe had gone relatively unchallenged in the air by the rest of Europe. The British were the first to take the Nazis on. Churchill’s Royal Air Force brawled with Goering’s “birds of hell” in slug matches at astounding speeds, fulfilling the Wellsian prophecy of all-out war in the air between national superpowers.* “Mankind is Frankenstein,” wrote one British journalist. “Science, especially the science of aviation, is his monster.” Churchill’s Air Ministry was estimating some 2.5 million casualties on the ground in Britain, including women and children.

  The Luftwaffe’s numbers proved astounding. Hundreds of Messerschmitts attacked in packs—350-mile-per-hour single-engine fighters. Following them were Heinkel bombers powered by sophisticated twin Daimler-Benz engines. The Stuka dive-bombers nosed toward the ground at such speeds that the Nazi pilots often fainted while dropping their explosives; the plane could then pull itself out of the dive automatically as the pilot regained consciousness.

  “We could feel the shock of the bombs a mile away,” said a Ford factory worker at Dagenham, twelve miles outside London. “The noise was terrific. Gunfire commenced at dusk and ended at dawn.”

  On August 13, 1940, Goering ordered Adlertag—“Eagle Day.” The Luftwaffe swarmed in even greater numbers. Churchill and his chief military assistant, Lord Ismay, stood in the operations room of Britain’s Fighter Command over a map showing the positions of Nazi flying machines.

&nb
sp; “There had been fighting throughout the afternoon,” Lord Ismay recalled, “and at one moment every single squadron in the Group was engaged. There was nothing in reserve, and the map table showed new waves of attackers crossing the coast.” All of England braced for the blow. Said Lord Ismay: “I felt sick with fear.”

  Without a single ally in military support, Churchill promised to battle to the end. No one believed the British had even a remote chance against the Nazi war machine. As George Orwell put it: “We saw our soldiers fighting their way desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane against three, with rifles against tanks, with bayonets against tommy-guns.” Privately, Churchill turned to the United States and quite literally begged Roosevelt for help.

  “We shall need the greatest production of aircraft which the United States . . . are capable of sending us,” Churchill wrote. “May I invite you then, Mr. President, to give earnest consideration to an immediate order on joint account for a further 2,000 combat aircraft a month? Of these . . . the highest possible proportion should be heavy bombers, the weapon on which above all others we depend to shatter the foundations of German military power.”

  “Mr. President,” Churchill wrote in another letter, “with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”

  With haste, Knudsen put his plan into action—to make the Motor City ground zero for war preparedness.

  On October 15, 1940, five hundred of Detroit’s most powerful auto men gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, where Knudsen was scheduled to deliver a keynote speech following the New York Auto Show. The auto business in America was the centerpiece of the nation’s industrial prowess. Either directly or indirectly, over 1,000 auto plants contributed in the United States, in forty-four states, to an industry that was worth over $3 billion and employed one of every nineteen people nationwide. These men in suits mingling at the Waldorf—among them Edsel Ford, General Motors’ Alfred Sloan, Chrysler’s K. T. Keller, and Packard’s Alvan Macauley—were the ones driving this machine.

  Standing with a carnation and a US flag pinned to the lapel of his suit coat, Knudsen stumbled through his opening. “As a report on the state of the nation,” said one person present, “his speech outranked in importance many a presidential message to congress.” Starting this current month, Knudsen said, Washington was going to push through defense contracts at a rate of $600 million a week. Yes, it seemed like the war was far away, across a mighty ocean. But it was coming, Knudsen argued. His words drew gasps from the crowds. It was all simply unbelievable.

  “Fifty thousand airplanes,” Knudsen said, “130,000 engines, 17,000 heavy guns, 25,000 light guns, 13,000 trench mortars, 33 million shells, 9,200 tanks, 300,000 machine guns and ammunition, 400,000 automatic rifles and ammunition, 1.3 million regular rifles and ammunition, 380 Navy ships, 200 mercantile ships, 210 camps and cantonments, 40 government factories, clothing and other equipment for 1.2 million men . . .”

  To fill these orders, Knudsen said, would require 18 billion man-hours. The nation, indeed all those who opposed the Nazis, could count on Detroit, Knudsen said. It would be nothing short of “the greatest production problem of any country in modern times. . . . Give us speed and more speed. Talk to your men—make them feel that it is their responsibility as well as yours. Ask them what they think of a civilization that drives women and children to live in cold and wet holes in the ground.”

  What America needed most was heavy bombers. “We need more bombers—more big bombers—than we can hope to get,” Knudsen pleaded. “Even the British now agree with General Arnold that they cannot win the war with fighter planes. It had been a bitter, bloody experience for them, this realization. Bombers, big bombers, are needed sooner than we dare hope to get them under present circumstances. We must build them at once! You’ve got to help!”

  The President had recently signed a conscription act, the first peacetime draft in history. Millions of young men were registering to do their part. American boys had little to fight with, few tools of war.

  “The first half of 1941 is crucial,” Knudsen concluded. “Gentlemen, we must outbuild Hitler.”

  10

  The Liberator

  Fall 1940 to Spring 1941

  I think it well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through.

  —BRITISH POLITICIAN STANLEY BALDWIN, 1932

  KNUDSEN AIMED TO FIND out just what Detroit was made of. One of his first calls was to K.T. Keller, the head of Chrysler, which had pulled ahead of Ford during the Depression as the number two automaker in the United States.

  “K.T., this is Knudsen. I need your help.”

  “Sure, Bill,” said Keller. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to make tanks.”

  The next day Keller arrived in Knudsen’s Detroit office to look over blueprints of the M2A1 tank. Keller was a bowling ball of a man with a vicelike handshake and hair that looked like it was slicked with motor oil. His engineering talents were legendary, and he had been handpicked to take over Chrysler following the retirement and death of Walter Chrysler himself. Keller looked at the tank blueprints and paced around Knudsen’s office. Then he turned and said, “I don’t know, Bill. I’ve never seen one of these things.”

  The next day Keller traveled to the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois so he could see a tank with his own eyes. Then he called Knudsen back.

  “We can make them,” Keller said.

  “How much will they cost?”

  “Damned if I know. Maybe $20,000, maybe $30,000. They weigh about thirty tons apiece. Where do you want us to make them, and when do you want us to get going?”

  “Make them in Detroit, and get going now. You have to have a plant and a test ground. I figure they will cost you about $30 million.”

  “Okay, whatever it figures,” Keller said. “What about guns?”

  “The Army will furnish them.”

  “Good. Then we won’t have to worry about that. Anything else?”

  “Yes,” Knudsen said. This was government business, he said. For auto men like Knudsen and Keller, a handshake was something you could take to the bank. But in Washington you had to make things official. “Send me a little piece of paper, showing me what you spend,” Knudsen said. “We’ve got to make it formal, K.T.”

  Knudsen contacted Alvan Macauley at Packard Motor Car Company, which had just rolled out the first air-conditioned automobile (the 1940 Packard One Eighty, “cooled by mechanical refrigeration”). McCauley agreed to build Rolls-Royce Merlin liquid-cooled V12 aircraft engines—the technological marvel of the British air fleet (and the same engines that Henry Ford refused to build). Knudsen called Harold Vance, head of Studebaker, the maker of the new “Deluxe-tone” line of automobiles, and other engineering brains at Willys, Nash, and Fisher Body. All agreed to get on the defense bandwagon.

  GM’s chairman Alfred Sloan had publicly attacked Roosevelt’s defense plan. “I believe the greatest danger and the most difficult part of our defense . . . is a protection of the American way of living against attacks from within, not from without”—insinuating clearly that the President and his New Deal politics were graver threats to the US Constitution than the Nazis were. “We haven’t got enough ‘economic royalists’ among us to do this job for national defense,” Sloan said sarcastically in a radio interview.

  Nevertheless, by the end of 1940, GM had undertaken tens of millions in defense orders. The first of these contracts went to Chevrolet, for 75-millimeter high-explosive shells.

  On December 12, 1940, the Fords received word of a potential new venture. Major Jimmy Doolittle—soon to be famous for his “Doolittle Raid” on Tokyo—called asking if Ford Motor Company could help supply machine parts for a four-engine bomber the army was planning on investing heavily in. The British were desperate for them. Consolidated Aircraft out of San Diego had
designed the four-engine B-24 Liberator—the largest and most expensive American aircraft in existence at the time. But Consolidated moved too slowly; the company had no production know-how.

  Edsel went to see his father at Fair Lane. He tried to explain: The family had to get on the defense bandwagon. The other motor companies in Detroit were accepting military contracts. It was their patriotic duty. Besides, if the Fords didn’t work with Washington, the President could try to take over the Rouge. There were rumors. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had said as much in a recent speech at Yale. “The President could take over Mr. Ford tomorrow,” she’d said, “if an emergency existed.”

  The situation called for action, Edsel pleaded. Already, the Nazis had bombed Ford’s Dagenham plant outside London. Ford workers had been wounded there, and surely there’d be more bombs. The time for action was now.

  “Those planes will never be used for fighting,” Henry argued. “Before you can build them, the war will be over.”

  Edsel sent Sorensen to try to talk sense into Henry. “I was over the barrel,” Sorensen later remembered. “On one side a mightily determined old man racked by hallucinations. On the other hand, a Franklin Roosevelt Administration, able, even eager, should occasion arise, to take over Ford Motor Company.”

  Finally Henry relented. He agreed to take on an aviation job—not for war and not for any foreign nation, but “for the defense of the United States only,” he said.

  From that moment on, Edsel hurled his family empire headlong into the defense effort. As Sorensen put it: “Our organization moved fast—and dangerously.”

  On December 29, 1940, President Roosevelt delivered his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech from the White House. The following week, Edsel, Sorensen, and a small team of Ford production men flew aboard a US Army aircraft to the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation factory in San Diego to see the four-engine B-24 Liberator for the first time.