by A. J. Baime
Daily Willow Run reached wider and higher into the sky—three stories up, farther from one end to the other than the eye could see. At night, construction workers toiled under Hollywood-style klieg lights. The world had come a long way in the forty years since Henry Ford worked in Detroit’s Edison electric plant, powering the city’s first dull streetlamps.
Adjacent to the Willow Run site, graders leveled the airfield. It took them 94 days to flatten the earth, moving 650,000 cubic yards of dirt. Engineers spent 107 days laying 16 miles of sewer and 58 miles of drain tile underground—critical to keeping the airfield dry, lest the runways crack and buckle when the earth froze in winter. The field naturally drained toward the northeast, and yet there was no outlet there, so the engineers used a complex network of drainpipes to move rainwater into the little Willow Run Creek on the other side. In the end the sewer gangs could brag that they had put in a drainage system under the airfield big enough for a thriving small city.
Before Willow Run’s brick walls were complete, before the place even had a roof, Ford Motor Company began hiring workers. The first employees were put on the payroll in early November 1941, and the first production man-hours were logged on November 15. The little roads leading to the factory parking lot clogged in the early mornings with men seeking work, many having traveled hundreds of miles to get there.
The 420 acres of land bordering the construction site were home to 94 houses and 331 people. It was a rural enclave just outside the teeming Detroit metropolis. The local tavern, built in 1829, had the “atmosphere of an antique shop,” according to one frequenter. The first new arrivals drew consternation from the locals—who were unaware that an estimated 100,000 workers were soon expected to be punching time cards at this bomber factory.
All the while, the conflagration overseas continued to spread. As Willow Run’s concrete floors were being laid, Hitler shocked the world by attacking the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa sent over 3 million German troops and 600,000 motor vehicles over the border. The Soviet forces crumpled under the treads of the Panzer tanks. Hitler had proven what machines could do in the hands of a madman. Under the onslaught of Nazi troops and pilots, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin turned to the United States. He too needed tanks, trucks, and airplanes—equipment that would have to be built on the assembly lines of America.
When Washington inquired, Edsel Ford promised: the company’s Liberator bombers would take flight in the spring of 1942, ahead of schedule.
“These are terrific stakes,” a Fortune reporter wrote of Willow Run in 1941. “No piece of armament that we are forging is more important [than the heavy bomber]. . . . The Allied nations have desperate need for a breakthrough weapon. The heavy bomber has the range and striking power that global war demands. . . . It may save our honor, our hopes—and our necks.”
One night over dinner at a fine Washington seafood restaurant in 1941, Edsel and Sorensen sat talking about the old days, when Edsel was a kid riding his bike around the Mack Avenue plant and Sorensen was a $3-a-day pattern-maker. With all these trips together, the two had cemented a deep bond. They had known each other since Edsel was old enough to take his first steps on wobbly legs. Now they were a team running an empire—Edsel making the decisions in his corner office, Sorensen in the factories, making things happen. They shared the purpose of the war between them, a chance to make a difference in a way neither ever imagined among all their lofty ambitions.
“I was devoted to him, and he knew it,” Sorensen said of Edsel. “When he became President of Ford Motor Company, he never did treat me like [he was] a boss; but I always worked for him as though he was my boss. He was gentle, considerate of others, unsparing of himself—and he was a man.”
After dinner that night, Edsel suddenly doubled over in pain. Alarmed, Sorensen helped him back to his hotel room and called for a doctor. The physician gave Edsel pain medication, and Sorensen sat by his bedside until sunrise.
“I was afraid it was his end,” Sorensen later said. “It scared me to see the agony he was in at times.”
What was causing this agony inside Edsel? The attacks were getting worse. For months, Edsel’s doctors had been trying to get him to come in for examinations. But he was tired of the enemas and pills and probes. “There would be no indication for any tube swallowing this time,” Dr. John Mateer wrote him, urging him to come in for more tests. “I realize how very busy you are at the present time.”
Edsel was working grueling hours—sometimes sixteen hours a day—and enduring increasing pain in his gut due to a health condition that had doctors confounded. He appeared to have gastric ulcers, but doctors had no idea how to treat them. Perhaps ulcers were not Edsel’s problem. Perhaps his suffering was caused by something more biologically sinister.
At Gaukler Pointe, his wife Eleanor begged him to slow down. “I can’t spare the time,” he said. A moment of respite was rare indeed. He was a busy man, and perhaps in some ways he hid behind his business, his many important obligations. He was like many people defined by those obligations, so how could he say no? Not only was he suffering the weight of war work, but he was president of the Detroit Institute of the Arts and the Ford Foundation, a trustee of the National Foundation on Matters of Business Policy and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, a member of the National Advisory Committee of the American Red Cross, vice president of Henry Ford Hospital, and chairman of the board of the Detroit University School.
Meanwhile, Knudsen called Edsel again, this time asking if Ford Motor Company could mass-produce another aircraft engine critical to the defense effort. It was a big job and would require major resources and serious expertise. With Sorensen, Edsel flew to the Pratt & Whitney plant outside Hartford, Connecticut, to inspect the R-2800 Double Wasp—a relatively new, air-cooled, 18-cylinder radial engine, introduced in 1939. General Hap Arnold, who was spearheading Washington’s effort to build American airpower, met them there. He gave Edsel and Sorensen a blow-by-blow.
The Double Wasp was rugged, versatile, and easy to maintain, its 18 cylinders joined at the center like pieces in a pie. The engine put out 2,400 horsepower, and weighed 2,350 pounds—more than a horsepower per pound, an impressive achievement.
“Just think,” Sorensen said, “one cylinder is bigger than a [Lincoln] Zephyr engine.”
Auto men like Edsel and Sorensen were accustomed to speaking loudly, so they could be heard over the groan of engines. But on the test bed, this Double Wasp’s song was deafening.
“You have seen the modern industrial miracle,” Sorensen said, gazing at this engine that could throttle a human over 300 miles per hour through the sky. Sorensen begged Edsel for the job. “Give me the Rouge,” he pleaded.
Edsel smiled—it was a deal. The pair moved on to the War Department in Washington to make the agreement formal on 4,000 engines and a new factory that would be built onto the Rouge. Edsel signed a letter of intent on a contract that would soon make Ford one of the world’s biggest heavy-rated aircraft engine producers—on top of the bomber-an-hour job. The Fords agreed to front the $14 million to get the factory built—a “blackout building” with no windows so it could function in total darkness in case of air raids.
“It will be completely guarded by men and by barbed wire,” Edsel told reporters. “Since it will have no windows, the newest type of indirect lighting and of air conditioning will be employed for maximum efficiency.”
Before the official contract was signed, Edsel broke ground on the new aviation engine plant at the Rouge. He ran the construction hoe with his own hands, wearing his usual fine tailored suit and pocket square. The factory was completed in miraculous time, mere months. By the time Edsel’s first Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp landed on the test bed at the Rouge, Sorensen had designed an ingenious dynamometer system. When the aircraft engines were tested, the system harvested their energy output, which was then used to power machines building new Double Wasps. In essence, the factory could partially power itself.
&nb
sp; Edsel had another reason he could not leave his job behind: he had two important new employees working for him—his boys Henry II and Benson. As the war preparedness fever heightened the pressure at every level in the company, Edsel’s sons began their careers. Henry II had known his whole life that his destiny was the Rouge. Now he was inside working full-time—but not on cars. Sorensen assigned him to the Rouge’s dynamometer lab, running Double Wasp aircraft engines on the test bed. It was hard work, in the loudest room in the factory.
The sight of young Henry at the Rouge was an antidote for Edsel’s stress. He had long imagined and wondered where Henry II would excel, what his favorite part of the business would be. The design department, where Edsel felt most at home? Business, the part of the company that most needed new blood? Henry II had his grandmother’s well-girthed body and his mother’s eyes. Edsel knew his oldest son had a hard road ahead of him, and he worried over his ability to handle it all. The young man couldn’t hide his nerves; the anxiety was all over his face, from the weight of the expectations.
Unlike Edsel, his son Henry II could not remember a day when he was not filthy rich. At Yale, where the students called him “T” after his grandfather’s Model T, Henry II failed engineering. “The other guys said sociology was a snap course, so I figured that was for me,” he later said. “I flunked it, too.” He left the university without his diploma after he was caught cheating on a final exam.
At Henry II’s twenty-first birthday party, bandleader Tommy Dorsey regaled guests, along with twenty-three-year-old up-and-comer Frank Sinatra. Soon after, Henry II was married to Anne McDonnell, an attractive Catholic woman from a wealthy New York family. The society papers called it “The Wedding of the Century.” Pope Pius XII sent his personal blessing. Upon the occasion of his wedding, Henry II received 25,000 shares of Ford stock, in recognition that (in his father’s words) he would “join the Ford Motor Company as your future business.”
Now here he was in the Rouge, his fingers raw, his face smeared with grease. Engineer Laurence Sheldrick took Henry II and his brother Benson under his wing.
“I’ll give those boys all the credit in the world,” Sheldrick said. “They certainly didn’t pull any punches about getting their hands dirty.”
Sheldrick had Henry II and Benson reporting directly to a black foreman. When Henry Ford came to see his grandsons, he had Harry Bennett by his side. Bennett saw Edsel’s kids reporting to a black man. He pulled Sheldrick aside and, as the engineer later recalled, “called me everything on the map.” Sheldrick went to see Edsel right away.
“Don’t pay a bit of attention to him,” Edsel said of Bennett. “That’s good for the boys. Keep them right there.”
But Sheldrick didn’t keep them there. He had a more critical assignment for them. He transferred the Ford boys to the Jeep program, where they worked on the assembly of the first “blitz buggy” that Edsel was now building for the military, off the assembly lines at the Rouge. One day Sheldrick asked Edsel if he would come see a shakedown of the first Ford military Jeep.
“I’ll never forget this day,” Sheldrick recalled. “I told Edsel that if he would stop by Rotunda Drive on the way from lunch he could see the Jeep operating.” A whole group of cars came down and parked on the road. Among his men, Edsel stood waiting. Sheldrick gave a signal, and the first Ford-built Jeep came tearing out of the woods, with Henry II and Benson in the cockpit. “This jeep just came out of nowhere up to their father. He got one hell of a kick out of that. That was one time that I saw Edsel when he was thoroughly enjoying himself. He was awfully proud of his boys.”
Then the dreaded day came when Edsel saw Henry II in uniform for the first time. To avoid the uncertainty of his draft placement, Henry II enlisted in the navy. Sorensen offered to file exemption papers for the young man, but neither Henry II nor Edsel would allow it—not after what Edsel had endured during World War I. Benson was just behind his older brother, enlisting in the army.
Edsel was crushed the day Henry II left the Rouge, bound for the Great Lakes Naval Station north of Chicago. It was an emotion that could not be fathomed until experienced. Eleanor Roosevelt had expressed it best, what it felt like to see a child in uniform leave home during wartime. “I had a feeling that I might be saying goodbye for the last time,” she wrote. “It was sort of precursor of what it would be like if your children were killed and never to come back. Life had to go on and you had to do what was required of you, but something inside you quietly died.”
Henry Ford was infuriated by the idea of his grandson in uniform, and he tasked Harry Bennett with getting Henry II out of the military. Bennett began to meddle, making calls to high-level officials, and word got back to Edsel. He wrote his father a letter.
“Now that [Henry II] is in the Navy he is trying to do a good job,” Edsel wrote, “and he can’t do it with all the string-pulling and high-pressure from Bennett. . . . Henry feels his place is in the Navy. . . . We, who are after all his parents, have given the whole matter a lot of thought and believe as Henry does and it is his decision to make and he is making it. You are the only one who can do anything with Bennett and we would appreciate very much if you would call him off.”
As a father, Edsel could see his own past in a new light. He had been forbidden by his father to fight in World War I. Henry Ford had subjected Edsel to humiliation at its apotheosis to keep him out of the trenches—to keep him safe. But the cost was the loss of Edsel’s honor, a wound perhaps deeper than death. Edsel could not inflict that wound on his own son. And yet he feared the consequences. Could Henry II be asked to make the ultimate sacrifice?
13
Strike!
Spring to Winter 1941
Practically all the Ford employees are fearful of Bennett. They speak of him privately as if he were a combination of Dracula, Pearl Bergoff, and J. Edgar Hoover. They are convinced that he has as many spies in his pay as Hirohito of Japan, and they credit him with a malevolent omniscience that would do honor to the devil himself.
—THE AMERICAN MERCURY, May 1940
EARLY ON THE MORNING of April 2, 1941, eight Ford workers who had been fired by Bennett’s Service Men for union activity called for a strike at the Rouge, claiming that the firings had violated federal law. First a few men joined the strike. Then a few more. Then, under the astonished eyes of suit-and-tie management, workers en masse dropped their tools and made for the doors. The pounding noise of machinery in the Rouge gave way to the sound of boots clattering—thousands and then tens of thousands of men walking off the job.
There had never been a strike at the Rouge. The walkoff appeared impromptu, but in fact the United Auto Workers had planned ahead. Thousands of men, most of whom didn’t work for Henry Ford but did support the auto unions, were on their way to Dearborn. Cars with license plates from states all over the Midwest thundered into the Rouge parking lot, carrying bruisers with baseball bats and iron rods.
Harry Bennett was ready for them.
The morning of the strike, union picketers barricaded the three main entrances leading in and out of the plant. Groups also blockaded tunnel-ways and railroad tracks. No one could come in or out. Inside the factory, Bennett organized a group of 2,500 black strikebreakers. They were armed with knives, hand-sharpened metal rods, and badges saying 100% FOR FORD. Bennett had promised them they would be “paid around the clock” if they refused to exit the Rouge. For months he had recruited aggressively among the black community for his Service Department. Two-thirds of the black laborers in Detroit worked for Henry Ford. Bennett sought out the largest men, armed them, and inflamed their rage against “whitey.” Now he was prepared to set them loose like cats among the pigeons.
Bennett was set to play out a daring, all-or-nothing strategy. That first day of the strike—now a fully loaded racial standoff between white union men outside the Rouge and black Service Department loyalists inside—Bennett sent a wire directly to the President of the United States, informing Roosevelt that the Rouge had
been seized by “communist terrorists.”
“Unlawful sit-down strikes, followed by seizure of highway approaches and entrances to the plant in a Communistic demonstration of violence and terrorism have prevented the vast majority of our 85,000 employees from going to work at the Rouge Plant,” Bennett cabled the White House. “Communist leaders are actively directing this lawlessness.”
Within hours the strike turned violent. “Iron bolts and nuts flew through the air in a wholesale barrage from the factory roof,” said one reporter on the scene, “while several hundred Negroes with steel bars and knives charged out of the main gate, No. 4 at the Rouge plant.”
“I went out to the Ford Rouge Plant to see for myself just what is going on,” said a broadcaster on Detroit’s WJR radio at 6:00 PM that first day of the strike. “I found all the streets and highways leading to the gates on Miller Road in Dearborn barricaded with planks, bricks, debris, and various other obstructions. Pickets milled around by the hundreds, in groups, carrying clubs, sticks, and other articles of defense or attack. I saw a number of persons injured by bricks, clubs, and fists.”
Bennett held a press conference. “The unions seized our plant like burglars,” he told reporters, “and if the Fords were to condone such actions it would be like saying ‘come on, take us over.’ Mr. Ford is convinced that his policies are just and right.”
Union officials were working their own angle. “The Ford company is attempting to sabotage the defense program because of its Nazi connections,” one told the New York Times. “It has sought to impede defense by turning down contracts for the British. The Ford company incited violence during the strike and pitted race against race.”
