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

by A. J. Baime

  Would an operation create fumes or smoke? Special ventilation would be needed.

  Would a specific job require dangerous materials such as cyanide or acid? Tanks to hold these substances would have to be situated and reinforced safely under the floor.

  The Fords enlisted Major Jimmy Doolittle to help begin planning for the airfield that would border the bomber factory. Edsel aimed to build the most modern, technologically advanced airport in the world, from which his bombers would make their maiden flights.

  On May 5, Roosevelt called upon the nation’s industrial force for “a substantial increase” in airplane production once again, particularly the heavy bomber. “The effective defense of this country and the vital defenses of other democratic nations requires that there be a substantial increase in heavy bomber production,” the President said in a letter that was published in hundreds of newspapers. “I know of no single item of our defense today that is more important than large four engine bomber capacity.”

  With every passing day, the pressure on Edsel Ford and Charlie Sorensen mounted. From Berlin, Hitler promised to torpedo American ships delivering munitions to Britain. Roosevelt declared an “Unlimited National Emergency.” The war was moving closer to home.

  11

  Willow Run

  Spring to Fall 1941

  The Industrial Revolution has now been fully applied to killing.

  —THE ECONOMIST, soon after the outbreak of World War II

  ON A COOL MARCH day in 1941, under an iron-gray sky, a train of Ford cars pulled to a stop in a vast empty field outside a village called Ypsilanti, twenty-seven miles due west of Detroit. Doors were wrenched open, and out stepped Henry Ford, Edsel, Sorensen, Harry Bennett, and Henry’s physician Dr. McClure. A chilly wind swirled the hair on their heads. The brown fields were still shaking off the last of winter’s frost, the grass crunching under their feet. Sorensen spread his long arms like wings and pronounced, “We’ll put up a mile plant right across here!”

  The plot of land—1,450 acres, 240 of it an orchard that would require clearing—belonged to Henry. He farmed soybeans and apples here. Ironically, the property where Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy” was about to grow its deepest roots was a veritable shrine to pacifism. Henry had built something called Camp Willow Run here years earlier, a place for boys whose fathers had been killed or disabled in World War I. The camp, which still drew disadvantaged boys to live in tents and farm the land in summer, was named for the gurgling creek that snaked through the fields. The boys could study their Bible lessons in a little white wooden chapel that stood by an apple tree in the sun.

  At the time, the location seemed perfect. The only problem: convincing Henry Ford to let go of the land. None of the men standing there that morning could know that they were about to make their first mistake in the Willow Run adventure—and it would be a grave one.

  Staring out at his fields, Henry spoke bitterly of the project. Why would the Fords build the largest airplane factory in the world—a war factory—here in this quiet farm country outside Detroit, thousands of miles from violence he believed would never touch them? He couldn’t make sense of it.

  That night Edsel visited Henry at Fair Lane. He was careful (Dr. McClure’s orders) not to get his father too upset. He tried to explain to Henry that this was not a matter of whether or not to build a new Ford model or design a new braking system. It was a matter of good and evil. When Edsel left Fair Lane, he called Sorensen and gave him good news: he had convinced his father to let go of the land. The next day Sorensen ordered a secretary to secure the title, and then he notified army officials.

  “There was nothing to stop us from now on,” he said.

  Two weeks later, Edsel and his father stood watching as loggers began to clear the apple trees and Michigan sugar maples. By now the Fords were calling the bomber factory after the creek that ran through these fields: Willow Run. Henry had demanded that the creek not be disturbed; it would run beneath the factory. In days to come, laborers would see birds that had formerly lived in the trees around this creek nesting in the bomber plant’s steel girders. Henry wanted the timber cleared with his antique saws. The steam-powered circular saws—six feet in diameter—sheared through the timber, the metal blades turning red-hot.

  “It took me 29 years to plant, cultivate, and make that fine orchard,” Henry said. “It took those tractors and bulldozers just 29 minutes to tear it all down.”

  In an office in Detroit, architects from the firm of Albert Kahn were laying out a map of the factory, planned big enough for 100,000 laborers. Instead of a straight assembly line, as it had appeared in Sorensen’s original sketch, the architects designed the plant in an L shape so that it would not spill out of Wayne County—which was Republican and anti-FDR. The county had gone to Hoover in the 1932 election, Landon in 1936, and Willkie in 1940. Henry’s tax dollars would stay in Republican Wayne County, not Democratic Washtenaw County, which had voted for Roosevelt.

  Before a stake tore into the dirt, the first news articles about the bomber-an-hour plan hit the dailies across the country. An artist made a first rendering of “Ford’s Warbird Hatchery.” Edsel called his plan “a revolution in aircraft production methods.” The news came as a boost to Americans. As historian Douglas Brinkley later put it: “It was the first concrete news of mobilization that the average American could understand. . . . To Americans, that rate of production seemed enough to vanquish any enemy, anywhere.”

  The first sign that things were about to go drastically wrong came in early June. Roosevelt’s Office of Production Management contacted Edsel. The OPM was sending a man up from Washington to see the bomber plant site.

  “Apparently the Plant Site Board have had some reservations in their mind regarding the Willow Run site,” Edsel told Sorensen on June 4, 1941. “This man is out to get information regarding the matter and report back to the board.”

  Muscular bulldozers had already cleared the land. Railroad tracks were being laid, a spur that connected the site to the nearby New York Central line so that raw materials could roar in day and night. When Edsel looked at these cleared fields, he saw everything moving along as planned—what would be, someday soon, the crowning achievement of his family empire and his career.

  Edsel wondered: what could be wrong with this location? It was too late to turn back now.

  Harry Bennett arrived at his office one morning during the early days of the Nazi pounding of London to find Charles Lindbergh waiting for him. In the basement of the Rouge, the aviator—who was now thirty-eight years old—stood as tall and slim as ever. Thus his nickname, Slim. His blond hair had begun to recede, but his pale, chiseled face still looked younger than his years. Lindbergh was ten minutes early for a scheduled meeting with Henry Ford. Promptly at 9:00 AM, Henry arrived. The men exchanged good mornings and then moved into Bennett’s office, where Lindbergh made Henry a proposition.

  The aviator had become the most prominent voice of an emerging political force called America First—the largest, most powerful anti-interventionist group in the nation. Since Henry Ford’s stance on war was well known, Lindbergh was hoping Henry would join the cause.

  Henry had befriended Lindbergh in the years since the aviator took both father and son Ford on their first flights in his Spirit of St. Louis in 1927. The aviator had visited the Rouge often in 1940, touring the factory with Henry and Edsel. They had spoken for hours about aviation, the various planes being used in the war, and the strengths and weaknesses of each airpower.

  “I have great admiration for this man,” Lindbergh said of Henry. “He has genius, understanding, fearlessness. . . . He is, and will always remain, one of the greatest men this country has produced.”

  Henry and Lindbergh never lacked for conversation. They were both born in Detroit. Both had become icons of modernity’s defining ambition, to harness power. Unlike Edsel, Lindbergh could talk with Henry for hours about what became known at the time as “the Jewish Question.” Both
Henry and Lindbergh had controversial views on the Jews, and both stood accused of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies. Both had received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler, and both had endured extreme public censure when they refused to give the medal back. Most importantly, they shared a disdain for the President.

  “I wish I trusted him more,” Lindbergh said of Roosevelt. “What has happened to America? To the character of the pioneer? To the courage of the Revolutionary Army? To the American destiny we once had?”

  Henry had reservations about joining America First. Later that day, however, Bennett phoned Lindbergh and said that Henry was willing to join. A half hour later, Henry phoned Lindbergh himself. “He asked if a donation would be in order,” recalled Lindbergh. “I told him that accepting membership was the most important aid he could give.”

  “Your stand against entry into the war has already had great influence,” Lindbergh said. “And if we are able to keep out of it, I believe it will be largely due to the courage and support you have given us.”

  Thus, Henry Ford joined the most controversial anti-FDR group in the country, just as Edsel was building the highest-profile war production factory in the President’s Arsenal of Democracy.

  Three months after his meeting with Henry Ford, on January 23, 1941, Lindbergh sat down at a small table at 9:55 AM in the new House Office Building in Washington, surrounded by politicians and reporters, jammed elbow to elbow in a sweaty conference room. The aviator was set to deliver testimony before a congressional committee. It would be one of the most shocking pieces of testimony anyone in that room had ever heard.

  Lindbergh was the only man in the country who could speak about the Luftwaffe with intimate knowledge. He had personally examined Germany’s air force as late as 1938. He was the only American Goering allowed to fly the Luftwaffe’s machines and inspect its facilities. Probably no other foreigner from any nation had seen the Luftwaffe’s buildup with such immediacy, and no other figure had reported more facts back to the US government. “Nobody gave us much useful information about Hitler’s air force until Lindbergh came home in 1939,” said Air Corps chief Hap Arnold.

  Now in Washington, as Lindbergh leaned over a table to speak into the microphone, spotlights captured a look of bitter determination on his face. The United States, Lindbergh said, should seek a “negotiated peace” in Europe, even though Hitler had invaded peaceful nations from Poland to France to Norway, committing atrocities along the way. Many took the aviator’s message of appeasement as confirmation of his Nazi sympathies. Lindbergh’s reasoning was even more surprising to the American public: the United States should stay out of the war because the nation was not capable of creating an air force in time that could beat the Luftwaffe. Against Hitler, America and Britain simply could not win.

  “Our own air forces are in deplorable condition,” Lindbergh said as cameras clicked and rolled. “Regardless of how much assistance we send [to Britain], it will not be possible for American and British aviation, concentrated in the small area of the British isles, to equal the strength of German aviation.” He warned that if America joined the war, it “would be the greatest disaster the country has ever had.”

  It was no secret that Lindbergh was a suspected Nazi sympathizer. His testimony did not help his cause. When asked point-blank during his testimony “which side would it be to our interest to win [the war]?” he answered: “I would prefer to see neither side win.”

  Throughout 1941, Lindbergh toured the nation making speeches—at Chicago’s Soldier Field, the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, New York’s Madison Square Garden. By this time, America First had swelled to 800,000 members, including future president Gerald Ford, the film producer Walt Disney, the poet E. E. Cummings, and the novelist Sinclair Lewis. Still, Henry Ford was the group’s highest-profile member. And Lindbergh’s politics could not have been more controversial.

  “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration,” he said in front of a crowd of 8,000 in Des Moines, Iowa. America was “on the verge of war,” but it was “not yet too late to stay out.”

  Roosevelt went on the attack. “If I should die tomorrow,” the President told Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau over lunch, “I want you to know this. I am convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” At a campaign rally for Roosevelt at Madison Square Garden, the name Henry Ford drew boos so loud that the voices shook the building’s girders. The Roosevelt administration’s loudest attack dog was Harold “Old Curmudgeon” Ickes, secretary of the interior, who called Lindbergh “the No. 1 United States Nazi fellow traveler.”

  “No one has ever heard Lindbergh utter a word of horror at, or even aversion to, the bloody career the Nazis are following,” Ickes said in a statement, “nor a word of pity for the innocent men, women, and children who have been deliberately murdered by the Nazis in practically every country in Europe.” Mocking the aviator for his Nazi medal, Ickes called him a “Knight of the German Eagle.”

  Under public attack from Washington, Lindbergh resigned from the Air Corps Reserves—a move he would soon regret. Ickes made another statement: “Mr. Lindbergh returned his commission with suspicious alacrity. But he still hangs on to the Nazi medal!”

  Given the publicity, Henry Ford quietly removed his name from the roster of America First. But his loyalty to Lindbergh remained. Together they would soon find themselves fighting a far greater battle.

  12

  Awakening

  Spring to Fall 1941

  When we are talking about America’s war production job we are discussing the biggest job in all history.

  —WAR PRODUCTION BOARD CHIEF DONALD NELSON

  IN THE SPRING OF 1941, American industry awoke from the long, cold slumber of the Great Depression. In rural towns, silent factories full of rusted-out machinery and cobwebs sprang to life, the sleepy roads around them alive again with traffic. In the Rust Belt, smokestacks spit streams of telltale smoke. At shipyards along the coasts and on lakes and rivers far inland, cranes swung against the sky while the steel hulls of new ships crashed into the water. At aviation companies in Seattle, Baltimore, Buffalo, and Bethpage, New York, men who’d been unemployed for years lined up to grab their pick of positions. Few ever dreamed they’d get to create a piece of a machine that could fly.

  In Radford, Virginia, and Sandusky, Ohio, construction crews were quickly erecting new gunpowder factories. In Milwaukee, the Allis-Chalmers agricultural equipment factory began tooling up to make turbines for navy vessels, while the Cluett, Peabody, & Co. shirt and pajama company across town started on the biggest job of its history—weaving thousands of military uniforms.

  “America is like a giant boiler,” British foreign secretary Lord Grey once said. “Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.”

  Nowhere was that fire set to blaze like it would in Detroit and its suburbs. The Big Three auto companies were still pumping out shiny chrome-bumper cars. At the same time, the auto industry was signing the lion’s share of government contracts. At hulking factories specializing in car bodies—GM’s Fisher Body, the Murray Corporation, and Briggs (owned by Edwin Briggs, who also owned the Detroit Tigers)—executives were hiring men to build parts for the four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress. At the Hudson Motor Car Company, engineers were figuring out how to make frames for the B-26 “Widowmaker” Marauder, a twin-engine medium bomber designed by the Baltimore-based aviation pioneer Glenn Martin. On the assembly lines where glamorous Cadillacs were built, GM executives would soon be rolling out 16.5-ton M5 light tanks, each with a pair of V8 engines and two transmissions.

  Car companies were taking on jobs that they had no experience doing, and hiring workers who had never fabricated a bicycle pedal, let alone a piece of a tank or a machine gun shell.

  In the suburb of Warren, the steel skeleton of Chrysler’s $20 million Detroit Tank Arsenal was in place, a factory that would so
on swell to 1.25 million square feet. The company’s imperturbable workaholic boss, K. T. Keller, had bulldozed some of the land himself. Even before the walls were up, production men began building twenty-eight-ton M3 Sherman tanks destined to roll over the borders of Nazi-occupied territory. Keller brought in a steam locomotive on the plant’s railroad siding just to heat the place. The plan: to build more tanks in this one factory than Hitler was producing in all of Nazi Germany.

  “It is the biggest thing we have ever undertaken,” Keller said, referring not to tanks but to Detroit’s overall war production plan. “It is so big that we cannot measure it and it gets bigger every day. We are ready to make a million of anything if they will let us know what they want.”

  In the vast fields outside of the city, where Henry Ford’s orchard and his boys’ camp had long thrived, the Willow Run bomber plant began to rise out of the ground. Workers laid the first concrete pilings on April 20, 1941. The spur from the New York Central Railroad reached the site on May 3. The first structural steel framework went up May 13. Construction workers began pouring the concrete floor on June 25. Albert Kahn’s architects had designed floor space not just for the machine shop, stockrooms, and assembly line, but also for a fully equipped hospital, metallurgical and X-ray laboratories, toilets, and cafeterias capable of feeding tens of thousands of laborers at a time.