by A. J. Baime
Across the Motor City and its suburbs the morning after Pearl Harbor, paranoia reigned. With all the war work in Detroit, it was obvious that the city could prove a key strategic target, that it had a bull’s-eye on it. Six truckloads of soldiers swarmed the streets, taking positions at bridges and tunnels. Police patrolled defense plants, with orders to guard with “special vigilance.” “Detroit found itself on a war footing today,” read the Detroit News front page, “with Federal, State, and City law enforcement agencies taking extraordinary precautions to prevent acts of sabotage against vital services and defense industries.”
In his office in Dearborn, Edsel scrambled that morning to get word from Washington. A cable arrived from General George C. Kenney.
“The Under Secretary of War has directed that all necessary steps be taken immediately to increase munitions manufacture to the highest possible level STOP. To effect this end production must be placed at once on a twenty four hour day seven day a week basis STOP.”
Another cable came through from Robert Lovett, the assistant secretary of war for air. “We are going to raise our sights all along the line,” he cabled Edsel, pointing out “the vital part which we are counting on the Ford Motor Company to play. [Willow Run] is the keystone in the arch of the big government plants, and for that reason we are most anxious for it to get into operation at the earliest possible date.”
Edsel cabled Washington a response: “We fully realize gravity of situation and importance of earliest completion and operation of our aircraft motor and bomber plants. Entire staff bending every effort to cooperate. Plant progress at present well ahead of machinery schedule.”
Next, Edsel contacted Bennett, who ran the company’s personnel office, and told him to start hiring more men. They needed the plants to run around the clock. “The war won’t wait,” Edsel said. “We have no time to waste.”
When Henry Ford heard the news of Pearl Harbor, he told Edsel: “We might as well stop making cars now.” So grave was the morale and so deeply rooted the purpose that Henry dictated a cable to his archenemy, President Roosevelt, wishing him “the strength and wisdom necessary for the task you have received. Our organization in all its departments is in fullest cooperation with the government’s purpose. Henry Ford.”
Edsel had read letters from his executives in England telling him about the bombs dropping on their factories, about how they had painted the huge rooftop of the great Dagenham plant black in an attempt to hide from the Nazi bomber pilots at night. Now he had to plan for air raids himself, and quickly. He sent a memo to Bennett, putting him in charge of “the general plan for protecting employees and property in case of air raids.” If Bennett was good at one thing, it was fighting. Edsel would make use of his talents.
All communication with German Ford executives was now cut off. The last communiqué between Ford’s German plant and Dearborn’s high echelon of executives came a few days before Pearl Harbor.
“Please tell me is Cologne and other associated plants operating are you all well [sic],” cabled Sorensen. “All plants operating and all managers and executives are well,” came the reply.
When Edsel drove out to the Ypsilanti site to gauge progress at Willow Run, he saw its red brick shell standing stark against the blue sky. The building, the airfield, the hangar—all of it was almost complete, a sprawling marvel of industrial ambition. Willow Run was shaping up to be not just the world’s largest airplane factory, but also the world’s largest factory of any kind under one roof. To train workers on how to build these airplanes, Edsel had started construction on a $500,000 school on the Willow Run grounds, with a capacity for 8,000 students.* The last of the runways was drying. To form the runways the company had poured enough concrete to construct a 20-foot-wide highway 115 miles long.
Thousands of men now worked in the bomber plant; the first piece of a B-24 would be completed two days after Pearl Harbor. But the cavernous factory still appeared vastly empty. Edsel had promised that the bombers would take flight in May, just five months away.
Critics in the aviation industry were still arguing that mass production of four-engine bombers was impossible, that the entire production strategy of Willow Run was off the mark. Edsel had banked the reputation of his family empire on the proposition that it was not.
Days after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt gathered Washington’s power elite in the White House to discuss war production. The Nazi juggernaut seemed impregnable, and the air in the President’s office was thick with anxiety. As Roosevelt’s chief speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, put it: World War II was “the first war in American history in which the general disillusionment preceded the firing of the first shot.”
“I have been thinking about the munitions which this country must produce in order to lick the Germans and the Japs as quickly as possible,” Roosevelt said with his trusted confidants around him. “And by my usual rule-of-thumb method I have arrived at the following figures. I am going to make a speech before Congress in a few days and tell them what I expect the country to produce. I am going to state these figures publicly.”
One of Roosevelt’s advisers interrupted him. “Mr. President, I doubt that we ought to mention those figures to the public. Won’t they give out too much information to the enemy?”
“These figures are high because they represent what we simply have to produce,” Roosevelt said. “I have absolute confidence that the country can do the job, and because I believe these figures will tell our enemies what they are up against, I want to make the figures public.”
He told his staff not to fall out of their chairs. Then he listed the numbers that he expected American industry to meet: 60,000 flying machines, 45,000 tanks, with ships, guns, and bullets in proportion—all in the year 1942, which would begin in roughly three weeks.
Washington’s power brokers all agreed that the four-engine bomber, a new weapon that could strike devastating blows at the enemy—the Consolidated B-24 Liberator and its cousin, the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress—would play a critical role in the war. The first B-17s had arrived in Manila three months before Pearl Harbor. Secretary of War Henry Stimson said in a cabinet meeting that the heavy bomber had let “American power back into the islands in a way which it has not been able to do for twenty years.” He told Roosevelt that the four-engine bomber had brought about a “reversal of the strategy of the world.”
The President agreed. He was, in the words of his closest aide Harry Hopkins, “a believer in bombing as the only means of gaining a victory.”
In a sense, the war was shaping up to be a race to gain mastery of the skies by mass-producing airplanes and innovating more speed, range, efficiency, and reliability. Competition was the impetus for innovation, especially with survival hanging in the balance. The Allies and Axis were locked in a competition to build airpower. In a speech that had been recently published in the American press, the Luftwaffe’s chief, Hermann Goering, had said: “If hitherto we produced hundreds of airplanes daily, we will produce many more hereafter. . . . We must produce planes in numbers and of a quality that seems unthinkable, but which is possible in Adolf Hitler’s Reich.”
The President could not hide from the numbers. Intelligence sources inside Nazi Germany painted a terrifying picture. Since the war started in Europe in 1939, the Nazis had continued to exponentially increase their productive capacities. Under the genius engineer Fritz Todt and, later, Professor Albert Speer, new factories in Germany, worth some 12 billion reichsmarks, were rising out of the earth and spitting out armaments on their assembly lines for Hitler’s war machine. Three new factories—each of them bigger than Hitler’s Volkswagen plant—had been completed in eight months’ time, all of them to build the Luftwaffe’s Junkers Ju 88, a versatile two-engine bomber that could near 300 miles per hour and carry over 4,000 pounds of TNT.
Speer’s industrial organization had no fewer than 10,000 assistants, an army of its own devoted to organizing the war machine’s factories, which were all working according to the American methods o
f Henry Ford. From Germany’s many boat works, seventeen new U-boats were motoring into the Atlantic every month. From car factories all over Europe, rugged trucks added more horsepower to the firepower. As Speer himself would recall after the war: “Hitler’s point of view was: The more I demand, the more I receive. And to my astonishment programs which industrial experts considered impossible to carry out were in the end actually surpassed.”
Owing to labor shortages, the Nazis had begun to employ slave labor. As Hitler put it as early as November 9, 1941: “The area working directly for us embraces more than 250 million people. Let no one doubt that we will succeed in involving every one of these millions in the labor process.”
In Washington, meanwhile, Roosevelt wanted to know: where were America’s bombers?
“Preliminary figures have just come through on four-engine bombers,” White House official Isador Lubin said. “They do not look so hot.” By now, the federal government had signed four companies to build B-24 bombers: Consolidated (the original designer), Douglas, North American, and Ford Motor Company (the only one of the bunch that was not in fact an aviation company). Thus far, only Consolidated was actually rolling out bombers. And yet its production figures were dismal. Consolidated “fell down badly,” according to Lubin. The company produced just twelve B-24 Liberators over the previous month, and production speed was actually declining.
On January 6, less than a month after the United States entered the war, Roosevelt’s motorcade pulled up to the Capitol Building, where the President was set to deliver his 1942 State of the Union Address. The radio audience swelled into the millions, across the country and overseas. “In fulfilling my duty to report on the State of the Union,” Roosevelt told Congress, “I am proud to say to you that the spirit of the American people has never been higher.”
The room erupted with applause, but every politician clapping knew the statement was utterly untrue.
Roosevelt laid out his plan, asking American industry to build 60,000 airplanes. The number drew gasps.
“The superiority of the United States in munitions and ships must be overwhelming, so overwhelming that the Axis nations can never hope to catch up with it,” Roosevelt told Congress. “In order to attain this overwhelming superiority, the United States must build planes and tanks and guns and ships to the utmost limit of our national capacity. We have the ability and capacity to produce arms not only for our own armed forces, but also for the armies, navies and air forces fighting on our side. As we get guns to the patriots in those lands, they too will fire shots heard around the world.”
Who was going to build all this war matériel? And where? As one of Roosevelt’s key production organizers, Donald Nelson, later said: “Automotive conversion was the first and biggest item on our agenda. The story of production for war . . . centers around the story of the conversion of our automotive industry—the most colossal aggregation of industrial might in history. We knew that we would have to fight a highly motorized and mechanized war—or a losing war.”
On January 24, 1942, the 750 most powerful manufacturing men in Detroit gathered in a meeting hall downtown to confront the job ahead. Already, the Roosevelt administration had deflected some blame for the nation’s lack of preparedness. Military production had been front-page news all through 1941. Now the war was on, and Detroit was still making shiny chrome-bumpered customer cars.
Representing Washington in Detroit was Ernest Kanzler—Edsel Ford’s best friend, the man whom Henry Ford had unceremoniously fired from Ford Motor Company years earlier. Henry didn’t bother attending the meeting; he loathed Kanzler. “Edsel and Kanzler should be bankers,” Henry said of them—to his mind, the ultimate insult. Kanzler was a Harvard-educated lawyer with brilliant, probing eyes, a bald pate, and not a lick of patience. He had been sent by government officials to deliver a hostile message: the auto industry had better get moving on war production or else.
Suddenly, this aggressive and accusatory Washington emissary was on the opposite side of the table as Edsel Ford. Miffed by Kanzler’s strong-arm attitude, Edsel started calling his best friend “Mr. Kanzler.”
Sitting before the brain trust of Detroit, Kanzler pounded a gavel. “We must have at once,” he said, “in fact we should have had it yesterday, an all-out war economy. We were all agreed upon what we want to do to Hitler and the Japs. I say to you, gentlemen, we have got to develop a new point of view.”
According to government contracts, Roosevelt was depending on the auto industry to produce 75 percent of the military’s new aviation engines, 80 percent of the tanks, one-third of the machine guns, and 100 percent of the cars and trucks. Oldsmobile cannon shells, Packard marine and aviation engines, Buick aviation engines, Dodge gyrocompasses and ambulances, Studebaker troop transporters, Cadillac tanks and Howitzer cannons, Dodge shortwave radar sets, Chrysler field kitchens, A. C. Spark Plug .50 caliber Browning machine guns . . .
Some of this matériel was already being delivered. The great majority had yet to see the light of day. Meanwhile, Detroit was using up raw materials for customer cars still rolling off the assembly lines. The auto industry was consuming 51 percent of the nation’s malleable iron, 75 percent of the plate glass, 68 percent of the upholstery leather, 80 percent of the rubber, and 34 percent of the iron. Every molecule of that material and more was needed for war production.
Now Kanzler wanted to know: why, for example, had Willow Run yet to roll out a bomber?
Charlie Sorensen stood and faced down Kanzler, his infamous temper raging. “Blanket charges of this description, indicting a whole industry, are just as absurd as blanket indictments of a whole people,” he said. As for Willow Run, Ford Motor Company had come up with the bomber-an-hour plan on its own accord, and the company had footed the money to build the bomber plant out of its own pockets. Was that not patriotism, flying its most ambitious colors?
“Mr. Edsel Ford and I went west at the request of the Army to look over a bomber with the idea of determining whether we could produce such planes in quantities,” Sorensen said furiously. “Without a dollar of government money, without so much as a telegram telling us to go ahead, we made a start on Willow Run. It cost millions. But we did it. Instead of wasting time we have advanced by months the day on which we will be producing planes in great quantities. If that’s failure to cooperate we don’t know what the word means.”
GM’s new president Charles Wilson (who had replaced William Knudsen, now that Knudsen was a key dollar-a-year man in Washington) put it all in perspective: “When you convert one of our factories, you move everything out and start with a blank space. Out of a long row of intricate machines on the production line, a certain percentage can be used in the manufacture of a war product. But the production line will necessarily consist mainly of new, special purpose machines.”
Where would those machines come from? It would take months alone just to design and build them, Wilson said. And that was the case for every auto plant asked to build a war product it had never built before.
Kanzler laid down the law. The motor companies had to stop making customer cars. (Ford Motor Company would roll out the last wartime civilian automobile on February 20, 1942.) The nation was on the cusp of the most profound economic shift in history, Kanzler said, and Detroit had to take the lead. There in front of the city’s most powerful auto men, he predicted: “You won’t recognize this nation four months from now.”
Each day in the first two months after Pearl Harbor, Edsel arrived at Willow Run to find it bigger and more crowded than it was the day before. By now, the first bomber parts were visible to the eye, though none had been pieced together yet to resemble anything like an airplane. It seemed so odd to witness men fabricating bomber parts while air raid defense and fire teams ran drills through the factory—men in heat-resistant asbestos suits and fluorescent armbands that could be seen in total darkness, running around with stretchers and fire extinguishers.
Edsel had poured all his energy into building this
plant, knowing that it could someday soon be leveled in seconds under the apocalyptic rain of incendiary bombs and their unquenchable, fiery jelly. (“One spark,” according to Willow Run’s air raid training literature, “will eat through your skull or body.”)
But then he knew that his operatives in Europe—men like Maurice Dollfus in France and Dr. Albert in Germany—worked under far more threatening circumstances.
One day in February 1942, Edsel received a strange letter from Maurice Dollfus. The letter itself was forbidden fruit. Once the United States entered the war, communication with executives in Nazi-occupied territory became strictly illegal. With the permission of the US State Department, Edsel had negotiated a line of communication into Europe. He was desperate for information from inside Nazi-occupied territory. Were his long-trusted executives safe? What would happen to the company’s assets there? Ford’s chief executive in France, Dollfus, was allowed to deliver correspondence via an intermediary named George Lesto, who was able to travel to Vichy, France, where he could mail documents to the United States.
“Since the state of war between the USA and Germany I am not able to correspond with you very easily,” Dollfus wrote Edsel on January 28, 1942. “I have asked Lesto to go to Vichy and mail to you the following information.”
According to Dollfus, the Nazis were asking for all the trucks that Ford of France could deliver. The Wehrmacht needed all that horsepower and more to carry troops and equipment. The war had actually benefited the bottom line. “It is a fact,” Dollfus reported, “that [Ford’s] prestige in France has increased considerably and is now greater than it was before the war.” For years Ford of France had been a financial drain. Now, in 1942, profit would hit 58 million francs, all of it funds paid out by the Nazi regime. Dollfus was amazed at the shift in fortunes. He called the profits “brilliant.”
“At this state I would like to outline the importance attached by [German] high officials to respect the desires and maintain the good will of ‘Ford,’” Dollfus wrote Edsel. “And by ‘Ford,’ I mean your father, yourself and the Ford Motor Company, Dearborn. . . . Even in the case of a completely victorious German peace, the rights of the shareholders will be protected.”
