by A. J. Baime
With the climactic battle between Bennett and the unions at hand, the little man locked down in an office with his boss. “Mr. Ford wanted to fight the thing out,” Bennett later recalled. “He told me to arm everyone we had in the plant, and use tear gas if necessary.”
Edsel was in Florida on a brief trip, trying to regain his health. He got word of the strike by phone and jumped on the first plane he could, bound for Detroit.
As the sun went down, the 2,500 strikebreakers locked inside the Rouge began to grow hungry and terrified for their lives. Union men were hurling stones through windows. Bennett and Henry monitored the situation from afar. An executive named Mead Bricker showed up in a panic. People were brawling outside the Rouge gates, he panted. It was black against white, and entirely out of control.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Henry said. “It isn’t rotten enough yet. It will straighten itself out when it gets rotten enough.”
In the White House, Roosevelt was busy handling some of the most careful political negotiations of his career. He was pushing the Lend-Lease bill through Congress, which would allow him to send munitions to the British military without violating Washington’s Neutrality Acts. The controversial bill, critics pointed out, would enable the President to legally come as close to war against Hitler as he could without sending a man into battle. At the same time, his administration was posturing with the Japanese, who were moving troops deep into Indochina. Soon the President would order the seizure of all Japanese assets in the United States and, more importantly, an embargo of high-octane aviation fuel, knowing that military aggression from the Japanese was likely to come in the form of guns and horsepower mounted on wings.
Unbeknownst to Roosevelt, the Japanese already had a spy on the ground in Hawaii, scoping out the bombers and boats at Pearl Harbor.
When Harry Bennett’s wire arrived, Roosevelt considered it coldly. Bennett was asking the President to send in troops. The idea of laborers walking off the job when critical defense work was under way infuriated everyone in the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt received word from civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune, who had inside information. The Ford Company, she said, was using black workers as “the backbone of the Ford anti-union force.” Bethune worried that this strike was about to turn into “one of the bloodiest race riots in the history of the country,” a riot that “would set race relations back a quarter of a century.”
Roosevelt feared that if he sent in troops he would throw fuel on the flames. Instead, he sent in Walter White, head of the NAACP, and Thomas Dewey, a lawyer and future governor of New York (who would face Roosevelt as the Republican presidential candidate three years later).
As ambulances in Dearborn hauled off dozens more injured on days two and three, news came that Hitler had invaded Greece. His troops took Athens in a matter of hours. Republicans saw an opportunity to attack the Democratic president for not forcing an end to the Rouge strike with National Guard troops.
“With the help of the President of the US, Hitler has closed the Ford plant,” snapped Michigan congressman George Dondero.
Democratic leaders were “assuring us that you were going to do something,” Congressman Clinton Anderson of New Mexico wrote Roosevelt on day three of the strike. “Instead of that we get news that the Ford plant is compelled to close, to the tremendous joy, I am sure, of Mr. Hitler.”
When Edsel arrived in Dearborn, he found his father, Bennett, and Sorensen holed up in an office. Edsel was “extremely alarmed when he learned of our plans,” as Bennett remembered, “and he insisted that we give up any such ideas” of fighting it out. Edsel demanded that Ford do as the other motor companies had done: sign a contract with the unions, as federal law dictated. The Supreme Court had ruled that Ford had no choice.
“I’m not going to sign this contract!” Henry screamed. “I don’t want any more of this business. Close the plant down if necessary.”
Edsel begged his father to listen to reason. If Ford didn’t sign with the union, the government could come in and take over.
“Well, if that happens, they will be in the motorcar business, and we won’t.”
By day four, the strike had left all thirty-four Ford assembly plants in the forty-eight states on lockdown, for fear of further violence. Some 130,000 workers were left idle. In Dearborn, Bennett ordered the ship Henry Ford II up the river to the Rouge, where it unloaded sandwiches and liquor to the men locked inside, who were now driving Jeeps all over the factory and looting the place. Around the Rouge gates, government sound trucks attempted to diffuse the standoff: “The patriotic thing to do is to keep the wheels of our defense factories humming.”
The NAACP’s Walter White brought in his own sound trucks to try to get the men out of the Rouge. “I walked in the picket line around the plant and attempted to talk to a Negro inside, who brandished a frightening weapon several feet in length,” said White. “Across the main entrance of the River Rouge plant stood an apparently impregnable wall of human flesh.”
A few miles away, on the quiet veranda of Henry Ford’s Fair Lane mansion, Henry sat reading the latest news of the strike in the paper when he saw Bennett’s automobile round into the driveway. Out stepped Bennett and Michigan governor Murray Van Wagoner, an emissary of the President.
“Well, you’ve got a plant,” Henry said to the Governor. “What are you going to do with it?”
The Governor appeared overwhelmed. “Van Wagoner became very agitated,” according to Bennett, “and seemed incapable of coherent speech.”
For ten full days the strike wore on, until the Governor brokered a settlement. Henry agreed to discussions with the United Auto Workers—to come to the negotiating table and nothing more. “We’ll bargain until hell freezes over,” said Bennett. “But they won’t get anything.”
When the black strikebreakers left the Rouge under police protection, federal investigators headed in to survey the damage. The next morning Edsel awoke and heard on the radio that his father had caved to the UAW. Bennett had signed the contract, agreeing to all the union’s demands. It was over.
Edsel was dumbfounded. He rushed to the Willow Run construction site to find Sorensen. “What in the world happened?” he asked.
“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” Sorensen responded.
They sought answers from Henry, who explained that he had told his wife that he was going to close down the Rouge. Clara Ford had been in conference with Edsel. If Edsel couldn’t convince his father to sign with the union, at least he could convince his mother that it was the right thing to do. “Mrs. Ford was horrified,” Henry told Edsel the morning after the strike ended. If Henry and Bennett continued to fight the union, “there would be riots and bloodshed,” Henry said, “and she had seen enough of that.” He paused.
“Don’t ever discredit the power of a woman.”
In the struggle with Harry Bennett, the union contract was Edsel’s greatest victory to date. Henry Ford was crestfallen. “It was perhaps the greatest disappointment he had in all his business experience,” Sorensen said.
“Mr. Ford gave in to Edsel’s wishes,” said Bennett. The union would never have won “if it hadn’t been for Edsel’s attitude.”
In Edsel’s office in the fall of 1941, he spent innumerable late-night hours in conference with military figures in Washington, who heaped more defense jobs on his desk. Soon Ford Motor Company would be generating more military material than the entirety of Mussolini’s Italy.
At Highland Park, where the Model T was born, Edsel and Sorensen were tooling up to assemble M7 anti-aircraft guns. Inside the Rouge, they were overseeing the construction of the largest magnesium foundry in the world. Because magnesium was unquenchable if it caught fire (burning at 3,300 degrees), the foundry in the Rouge required extraordinary amounts of safety precautions.
Just a year earlier, at the Lincoln plant in downtown Detroit, Edsel had rolled out the first production Lincoln Continental—a Euro-styled chariot destined to ra
nk high on “most beautiful cars of all time” lists forever. Now the Lincoln factory was tooling up to build aircraft superchargers. Like super-lungs, they enabled military planes to breathe harder so they could travel faster, especially at high altitude where oxygen was thin.
It seemed so incongruous, this newfangled science, wild ideas matched with industrial prowess, all of it destined to play a key role in the ultimate battle between good and evil. Under all that pressure, Edsel’s health continued to decline, and sixty-one-year-old Sorensen fainted twice—once while walking with his wife (his head hit a curb and he needed stitches), then again in the Rouge. Edsel himself was so on edge that he nearly came to blows on one occasion with Bennett. While in a meeting with his father and Sorensen, Bennett entered and announced that he had heard rumors of a kidnap plot aimed at Edsel’s kids. Bennett wanted to send Service Men to protect them. Worn thin, Edsel uncharacteristically exploded.
“Stop this talk!” he shouted. “Leave the boys alone! I don’t want protection for myself or my sons!”
Bennett tore off his coat and charged. Sorensen pushed Edsel out the door before Bennett’s blows could land.
The situation was spinning out of control. “Never was any business run like the Ford empire,” Sorensen wrote in his memoirs. “If a story was written as a fairy tale the public would reject it as too fantastic to believe.”
Then one morning the bombs came.
14
Air Raid!
December 7, 1941
We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way.
—FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, December 9, 1941
AIR CORPS AND NAVAL personnel were still clearing the sleep crust out of their eyes when the telltale roar of engines turned their eyes to the east. The scene: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941, 7:55 AM. On the horizon, a vast storm cloud of airplanes appeared, a pack of Japanese combat planes, many of them streaking low over the ocean, which sparkled in the morning sun.
Earlier that morning, radar had picked up some mysterious signals, which were mistaken to be American planes flying from California to Hawaii. Now a fleet of Japanese attack planes was moving in—forty-nine high-altitude bombers, fifty-one dive-bombers, forty torpedo bombers, and forty-three single-engine fighters. They were headed for Battleship Row, where American ships were tied in port.
The US navy warships were on “Condition Three” alert. Peacetime, no anti-aircraft guns manned. The soldiers and sailors who happened to be near their anti-aircraft guns at that moment found their ammunition boxes locked. They did not have the keys. Aboard the ships, loudspeakers crackled out the alarm.
“Air raid! This is no shit!”
The first ship hit was the Arizona. An armor-piercing bomb exploded on the ship’s forward deck, setting off over a million pounds of gunpowder inside. A sailor would report seeing the Arizona “jump at least 15 to 20 feet upward in the water and sort of break in two.” The ship sank in nine minutes, with nearly 1,200 sailors aboard.
Meanwhile, more Japanese pilots were sweeping low above the mastheads and releasing their payload. “Their accuracy was uncanny,” said one American officer.
Columns of steel-gray smoke and fire blistered the sky as the great iron hulls moaned and rolled over, capsizing into the muddy ocean. More waves of attack planes appeared—among them the Zeros, the Mitsubishi-powered 300-mile-per-hour fighters that would soon become legendary. The attacking planes moved in low over Pearl Harbor’s airfields, Hickam and Wheeler. The American warplanes were grouped together for protection against sabotage. It was hard for the Japanese pilots to miss. Only a few American aircraft managed to scramble up into the sky before the surprise assault on Pearl Harbor was over.
Nearly 2,500 American sailors were dead, and many more wounded. The surprise attack proved the worst naval disaster in American history. It was also devastating to American airpower. Roughly three hundred planes—nearly all of the fighters and bombers stationed in the Pacific—were destroyed.
Roosevelt was sitting in his White House study with his closest aide and friend, Harry Hopkins, when his phone rang shortly after 1:30 PM Washington time.
“Mr. President,” said Frank Knox, secretary of the navy, “it looks as if the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”
“No!”
Roosevelt hung up the phone. It must be a mistake, said Hopkins. The President disagreed. It was no mistake. Moments later, Admiral Harold Stark phoned confirming the news.
The President wheeled quickly in his chair to the Oval Office. “His chin stuck out about two feet in front of his knees and he was the maddest Dutchman . . . anybody . . . ever saw,” according to a White House Secret Service agent. Soon the phone rang again. Hawaii governor Joseph Poindexter delivered more news from Honolulu.
“My God,” Roosevelt spit, “there’s another wave of Jap planes over Hawaii right this minute!”
Once again, the airplane had successfully delivered a surprise and destructive attack. If anyone needed proof of the importance of airpower in the new global playing field, Pearl Harbor was it.
In the hours to come, across America, the most shocking news since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln made its way over radio broadcasts. Crowds gathered in front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, cheering on the President, not knowing what else to do. Inside in the Oval Office, congressional leaders and cabinet members horseshoed around Roosevelt’s desk. He briefed them on the latest news, stopping to check the cables that were being handed to him.
“How did it happen that our warships were caught like tame ducks at Pearl Harbor?” shouted Senator Tom Connally of Texas. “How did they catch us with our pants down?”
“I don’t know, Tom,” Roosevelt said with his head bowed. “I just don’t know. . . . The fact is that a shooting war is going on today in the Pacific. We are in it.”
When Churchill called the White House from England, he said with shock, “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?”
“It’s quite true,” Roosevelt said. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We’re all in the same boat now.”
A few minutes after 5:00 PM the day of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt called his secretary, Grace Tully, to his study. The President sat with his desk covered in piles of notes.
“Sit down, Grace,” Roosevelt said. “I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.”
He spoke in a steady tone, more slowly than he usually dictated. “Yesterday comma December 7th comma 1941 dash a day which will live in world history. . . .”
The next day Roosevelt delivered his famous “Day of Infamy” speech.
“Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together to make war upon the whole human race,” he said. “Their challenge has now been flung at the United States. We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history.”
The United States declared war on Japan on December 8. Due to the Tripartite Pact—which tied the Axis powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan, together as one military force—Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the United States. The United States declared war on the Axis powers on December 11. In the next few days, Bulgaria and Romania declared war on the United States. Britain declared war on Bulgaria. Holland declared war on Italy. Belgium declared war on Japan.
National superpowers had chosen sides. All that was left was a fight to the death.
PART III
THE BIG ONE
I was the flight engineer on the Wyatt crew [under pilot Second Lieutenant Bert Wyatt], who perished on their sixth mission while returning from a giant raid on Berlin on April 29, 1944. I survived because I was disabled on an earlier mission and was being X-rayed at the hospital when the fatal mission was flown. Our B-24 Liberator, named El Lobo, was hit over the target, lost two engines, but made it halfway home to England. At which point it was shot down by a German fighter plane near the villa
ge of Dinklage in northern Germany. In 2006 I traveled to Dinklage and participated in a small ceremony with local dignitaries and newspapers in attendance. They presented me with several fragments of the plane, which they located with metal detectors. The Germans treated me like a celebrity instead of a guy who helped bomb them to smithereens.
—JACK R. GOETZ, Penn Valley, CA
15
The Grim Race
Winter 1941 to Summer 1942
Orators, columnists, professors, preachers, and propagandists performed magnificently with the theme that World War II was a war between two ideologies. But whatever inflamed people’s minds in warring countries, victory was on the side of the heaviest-armed battalions. The conflict became one of two systems of production.
—“CAST IRON” CHARLIE SORENSEN
ON THE MORNING OF December 8, 1941, America awoke as a nation paralyzed with fear. The skies were pregnant with hellfire, citizens across the country were told by their most trusted officials.
“This is war,” one army lieutenant general announced. “Death and destruction may come from the skies at any moment.” “The war will come right to our cities and residential districts,” New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia said in a speech. He had recently put on order over 100,000 gas masks in expectation of chemical warfare in New York City. “At the present time, under the present relative position of the enemy, we may not expect long-continued sustained attacks such as the cities of Great Britain have suffered, but we will be attacked—never underestimate the strength, the cruelty of the enemy.”
