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

by A. J. Baime

  Of course, the happier the Nazis were with Ford of France, the safer its assets. Dollfus was quite clear that cooperating was the only way Ford of France could survive. As correspondence continued, Edsel found himself in the awkward position of thanking Dollfus for his careful work in protecting company property—in effect, for cooperating with the Nazi warlords.

  “I am quite sure that this has been done under the utmost of difficulties and with much hard work,” Edsel wrote Dollfus. “We are very proud of the record that you and your associates have made in building the company up to its first great position under such circumstances.”

  In the spring of 1942, Dollfus communicated more information through Lesto. Ford’s manufacturing plant in Poissy had been hit by the British, he reported. The Royal Air Force had dropped twenty-three bombs on the Poissy plant, eight of them hitting their target. One worker was wounded, and the factory had suffered damage—broken cranes, a smashed cafeteria, plenty of shattered glass. Edsel communicated back that he had seen the images of the bombed-out factory in the newspapers and was pleased that the papers did not mention the fact that the factory shown in the pictures was a Ford factory. Citizens of the United States might be quite miffed to find out that Ford factories in Germany and France were helping to build the arsenal of the enemy.

  Soon Dollfus was writing again to deliver news of more bombings. The Poissy factory had been hit four times by the British, but Dollfus was still doing everything he could to make trucks. Edsel dictated his last letter to the Frenchman on July 17, 1942. He was pleased that Dollfus was in “good health” and “carrying on the best way possible under the circumstances.”

  “I have shown your [last] letter to my father and Mr. Sorensen,” Edsel wrote, “and they both join me in sending best wishes for you and your staff, and hope that you will continue to carry on the good work that you are doing.”

  For Edsel, this was an innocent remark, meant as a thank-you to a longtime friend whose life was at risk. The remark would come back to haunt him in ways he couldn’t possibly imagine.

  The safety of European assets was a terrible source of anxiety for Edsel. Tax law deemed that any property held in an enemy nation “is treated as becoming worthless on the date war with such country was declared by the United States.” The outcome of the war would have serious consequences for the Ford family that went beyond any sense of justice or patriotism. Edsel and Sorensen had cultivated European operations so carefully, for so many years. Now that military strategy held factories as prime targets, would any of it survive? Would Ford employees be added to the list of the war’s casualties?

  That spring Edsel suffered another attack of abdominal pain. Laid up at Gaukler Pointe, he struggled to regain his strength, with his wife by his side. They had grown more alone through the years. They had many acquaintances, but how many true friends? (“It was generally understood,” Ford executive Roscoe Smith once said, “that it was too dangerous to get too close to Edsel.”) Now their children were gone—the two older children married and in the military, the two younger at boarding school.

  Despite the Edsel Fords’ immeasurable wealth, there was something spiritually desolate about their lives. Like Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, their money and the circumstances that came with it had isolated them. And now Edsel faced his own humanity in a new way. “There is no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well,” Fitzgerald had written.

  At forty-eight years old, Edsel was gaunt, his appearance that of a man many years beyond his age. Suffering acute pain and exhaustion, he checked into Henry Ford Hospital, careful to keep the news quiet so that no reporters would show up. His doctors decided that it was time to open him up and take a look. The day of the operation, Edsel’s wife was a wreck. Sorensen waited through the hours with Henry, unable to work.

  “This was the worst kind of news,” Sorensen later wrote, “to find Edsel so ill. He took it all very bravely. We were doing nothing but war work now, and were fully controlled by the government. Slight of build, [Edsel] was thin and worried. . . . Henry Ford was worried. I spent most of the day [of Edsel’s operation] with him. He sure had something to worry about.”

  When Edsel’s doctors peered into his stomach, they saw for the first time the culprit, what was causing the man so much agony. Ulcers, they learned, were not Edsel’s problem. His disease was in fact far more dangerous.

  16

  “Detroit’s Worries Are Right Now”

  Spring to Summer 1942

  Throughout the land a mighty revolution is in progress. American industry is beating the ploughshares of peacetime—the autos, the electric refrigerators, the toasters and the washing machines—into the swords of total war: planes, tanks and high explosive bombs. It is a revolution to which there can be but one end: The doom of Nazidom.

  —NEW YORK TIMES, July 12, 1942

  EDSEL FORD AWOKE FROM surgery with half a stomach, in a world he could barely recognize.

  His doctors informed him that they had found tumors inside him, removed what they could, and taken half of the organ as well. They did not know if the tumors would grow back. Edsel was severely ill, the doctors explained, and carrying on work could kill him. The medical field knew little about stomach tumors or what caused them. For Edsel, the diagnosis was not only depressing but painful.

  Still, how could one feel sorry for oneself lying in a hospital bed when so many young men were overseas fighting the Nazis and Japanese, dying in the trenches?

  When Sorensen visited Henry Ford Hospital, he found Edsel “better than I expected.” Edsel reached out his hand, and Sorensen took it with his huge calloused fingers. The white-haired production wizard was surprised by the affection that had grown in him for Edsel over the years. It was an almost paternal sensation. Sitting by the hospital bed, he thought of all that Edsel had endured at the hands of Henry Ford and Harry Bennett. How could anyone ever be mean to him? he thought to himself.

  Edsel wanted all the news. So Sorensen gave it to him.

  Willow Run was continuing apace. The factory was all but completed, and thus far employment had hit nearly 10,000 workers. The first B-24 center wing was nearly finished. The new school on the Willow Run grounds to train bomber workers and Liberator mechanics was built, and the first students had enrolled.

  But there was bigger news. The war work in Detroit, and at Willow Run specifically, had captured the imagination of millions in America and in Britain. It seemed to happen overnight. The President was making numerous speeches, including his State of the Union, about how this war would be fought and won: not just in military theaters but at home on assembly lines, where men like Edsel and Sorensen were demigods. The famous American motor companies were being called “self-contained ‘Arsenals of Democracy.’” It was as if the production man was a new kind of military general, fighting an engineer’s war. And now the press had swarmed Detroit, after the biggest home-front news story so far.

  The Washington Post: “What may not be generally known is the amazing story of how Detroit is rapidly being transformed from a center of peacetime production into the greatest war production area to be found anywhere on the globe.”

  Fortune: “A terrible burden has fallen upon the city, for Detroit must now become the main plant in the Arsenal of Democracy.”

  Look magazine: “The scale of Detroit’s war boom stuns the imagination.”

  Of all the figures in the Motor City, the press zeroed in on Henry Ford as the main character in this narrative. Of course, Edsel understood the irony. Henry had had little to do with Ford Motor Company’s war work; he was, in fact, a virulent pacifist who had to be convinced ad nauseam of the importance of military preparedness. And he was getting lauded as the industrialist making the greatest contribution. Such were the whims of iconography.

  Henry made the cover of Time with an inscription that read, “Mass Producer: Out of Enormous Rooms, Armies Will Roll and Fleets Will Fly.” “Even
the American people do not appreciate the miracle [of Detroit’s war production], because it is too big for the eye to see,” the magazine stated. “There is no better sample than Henry Ford. If Armageddon is to be decided in Detroit, Armageddon is won.” Life magazine pronounced that “Henry Ford is still the greatest man in Detroit.” Also weighing in was the New York Times: “Once old Henry Ford gets his teeth into the Germans it will be all over but the signing of the armistice.”

  Willow Run had taken center stage. The length of its assembly lines was “more than three times the height of the Empire State Building,” noted the Christian Science Monitor, “and four times that of the Eiffel Tower.” According to a Washington Post report, Willow Run was “the greatest single manufacturing plant the world had ever seen.” “All 16 major league baseball teams could play eight simultaneous games before crowds of 30,000 each [inside Willow Run],” the Post reported. “And there would still be room enough left over for a full-sized football game before an additional 30,000 spectators.” The Wall Street Journal called the bomber plant “the production miracle of the war.”

  “It is a promise of revenge for Pearl Harbor,” the Detroit Free Press gushed. “You know when you see Willow Run that in the end we will give it to them good.”

  When Britain’s Royal Air Force flew over German cities dropping thousands of propaganda leaflets, Ford’s Liberator factory was offered to the enemy as a symbol of American might. “In one American factory alone,” the leaflet read, “the new Ford plant at Willow Run, Detroit, they are already turning out one four-engined bomber able to carry four tons of bombs to any part of the Reich every two hours.”

  Lying in bed recuperating from surgery, Edsel found all this publicity unnerving. Roosevelt and Churchill were clamoring for airplanes now. Willow Run had yet to produce a single one.

  When Edsel returned to his Dearborn office in Ford’s Administration Building, he appeared unsteady on his feet. The first thing he did was seek out his father and kiss him on the cheek. Edsel’s secretary A. J. Lepine had everything perfectly organized for him. Get-well letters filed into Dearborn by the bushel, including one from President Roosevelt’s appointments secretary, Marvin McIntyre, who added on a thank-you for the Ford car with a hand-operated throttle that Edsel had delivered to the President for his use at his country estate in Hyde Park, New York.

  “I guess the pressure got too high at Dearborn,” Edsel wrote back in longhand, addressing the President’s secretary as “Mac.” “I had to go into the hospital. I am feeling fine again and anxious to get back on the job.”

  More than ever, Edsel needed his sons by his side. “He wanted them near him,” Sorensen recalled. “We talked about it every time we had a few moments together.” Edsel wanted to be assured that if anything happened to him, his son Henry II was ready—to take on Bennett, to become president of Ford Motor Company, to help realize the dream of Willow Run. But Henry II insisted on staying in the military. Edsel kept the severity of his condition a secret from his children. Meanwhile, he could sense the anxiety in his son’s letters.

  “This man’s navy is plenty tough,” Henry II wrote his father from Chicago’s Great Lakes Naval Station. “This afternoon they gave us drill for over an hour and I was in charge of one of the battalions. Of course I don’t know how to lead this sort of thing, so I made plenty of mistakes and the thing turned out to be one terrible mess.”

  When Edsel drove out to Willow Run, the building appeared along the roadway, with a pair of water towers standing tall behind it. He limped slowly through the main entrance. On one side: the Personnel Building, which included the executive offices, the lobby, and Plant Protection headquarters, with its own locker room, gunsmith, and radio dispatcher’s office. On the other side: the Visitors’ Lobby, where all visitors, potential employees, and vendors had to produce identification and proof of citizenship. Along with American flags, government signs caught Edsel’s eye:

  REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR

  AMERICA NEVER LOST A WAR

  GOVERNMENT PROPERTY

  He entered the main plant, with its interior skeleton of steel girders, tiled floor, and no windows or natural light. Ford executives had taken to calling this space “the most enormous room in the history of man.” Some 156,000 40-watt Sylvania fluorescent bulbs gave the scene an eerie glow, especially when workers looked at their watches and saw that it was midnight. This was the largest lighting installation ever created.

  Edsel saw thousands of laborers on the job, but no completed bombers. Not even close. The majority of the plant stood on the ground floor, which was ringed by a second-floor mezzanine of offices. In one corner on the second floor, the Plant Hospital was set up behind large doors with red crosses on them. When Edsel inspected the hospital, he saw the most modern medical facility ever built into a factory, with antiseptic white ceramic-tiled walls, soundproof ceilings, six physicians, forty nurses, a sanitary engineer, a staff of dentists, X-ray machines, separate wards for men and women, and operating rooms. Every new employee received a physical here. Over the next three years this hospital would also see its share of amputations due to injuries inside the plant—ninety-six in total.

  The bomber construction area was divided into two sections: manufacturing and assembly. Raw materials came into manufacturing via the New York Central railroad spur, the entry bays serviced by four 30,000-pound cranes. In the metal shop, welders and blacksmiths would soon be molding up to ten tons of sheet metal into 3,000 different bomber parts each week. Next to the shop stood five parallel rows of iron-gray hydraulic presses, some weighing as much as 700,000 pounds. They stamped out bomber parts—the sound of each stamping as sharp and loud as a car smacking into a tree. The presses were continuously lubricated by 1,500 gallons of oil each day, the tanks located underneath the floor.

  Willow Run was designed to build Liberators in five subassemblies—the center wing, the nose and cockpit, the aft fuselage, the tail, and the outer wing—then bring them together for the final product. The interchangeable parts made their way around the plant on a system of twenty-nine miles of conveyors on the ceiling, like upside-down railroads, some rated to carry five tons, some fifteen. The metallurgical laboratory was situated in the southwest area of manufacturing; here bomber parts were heat-treated, chemical-tested, plated, and painted. Alloys were mixed like ingredients in a bakery. Foundry workers melted aluminum and stirred it with precise amounts of copper, chromium, molybdenum, tungsten, vanadium, and most commonly carbon.

  Technicians used the most powerful X-ray machines on earth—General Electric models operating at 240 kilovolts—to check metal castings that could cause a plane to crash if they failed. Every critical casting would pass through these X-ray machines, keeping them humming around the clock.

  The various parts came together in the assembly area—all of which converged into a single assembly line. Soon this row would stretch with bombers, one after the other, each exactly alike, just like Model Ts. Or so Edsel hoped. He knew the effort to beat the Nazis and the Japanese depended on these bombers. He had to get them off the ground by his deadline.

  May was three months away.

  In the fields outside the bomber factory, Edsel saw a disturbing sight. He could recall standing in these fields with his father and staring at the horizon a year earlier, the view before them like a bucolic painting full of trees, birds, and a broad sky. Now trailer parks stretched out across the fields, a sea of muddy dwellings in the shadow cast by Willow Run. Shantytowns had emerged on the lawns of local farms and on the edges of the trailer parks. It was as if someone had lifted a city the size of Ann Arbor, with its state university, and plopped that population here where there was no infrastructure, no real sewage system, and few sources of potable water. Every day there were more arrivals, and there was nowhere for them to go.

  When Edsel chose this site and convinced his father to give up the land, he had figured that the local towns and the city of Detroit—twenty-seven miles away—could supply the huge l
abor needs. However, once Washington’s Office of Price Administration set up its rationing system and distributed its “War Ration Book Number One” (nicknamed the “Sugar Book”), workers were no longer allowed to drive the twenty-seven miles from Detroit to Willow Run, owing to restrictions on gas and rubber tires. If people wanted a paycheck working at the bomber factory, they had to live in its direct vicinity or they would spend upward of three hours each day trying to get to work and back on buses that were overcrowded, unreliable, and, at forty cents a day, expensive to ride (“an unreasonable burden upon the wage earner,” as one Washington investigator put it).

  The government had started work on a new highway to connect Willow Run to downtown Detroit. (Today this highway, the Edsel Ford Expressway, is part of I-94.) But it would take time to complete, and what good what it do if people were forbidden by law from driving on it?

  All over the country, infrastructure struggled under the weight of the most sudden and profound mass migration the United States had ever experienced. Seventeen million Americans would leave their homes for a job in a war factory between 1940 and 1945. In a nation suffering its twelfth year of depression, a steady paycheck was worth the move. Few urban centers would see a larger in-migration than the four counties in the Detroit-Willow Run area, into which 212,457 would arrive between 1940 and 1944, according to census figures.