by A. J. Baime
One couple, Mr. and Mrs. John Castle, closed up their beauty parlor in central Michigan and drove their five-year-old car and trailer to Willow Run in the early days of the war. “Arrived here about eight o’clock this morning in the rain!” Mrs. Castle wrote in her diary. “Drove miles, it seemed, to find a park. Every place had more trailers than the law allows, and every private yard either had its quota or else ‘didn’t want any.’”
The couple found a vacancy at a government-owned trailer park. At the bomber plant, Mr. Castle signed on as a parts inspector and his wife as a file clerk. “It was still dark when we left the trailer,” she said of their first day. “What a sight the Bomber Plant was all lighted up! It is such a huge place! And the never-ending traffic pouring through its gates!”
It was all very “romantic,” in her words. But life in the trailer park quickly grew sour. There were two washing machines for sixty families, often with OUT OF ORDER signs on them. The trailer park’s undersized sewer lines clogged and froze. “This means all our waste water will have to run out on the ground,” Mrs. Castle recalled. “Our line is not the only one that’s frozen.” The faucet where sixty families got their drinking water froze too. “I inquired at the office where to get our drinking water and was told to get it in the laundry room. There has been a sign in the laundry room over the faucet reading, ‘This water is not safe for drinking purposes.’ But tonight, the word not was crossed out!”
Others recorded similar concerns. A Mrs. Sam Gordon arrived at a Willow Run trailer park with a baby recovering from kidney surgery. She found the place filthy—garments on clotheslines freezing even in April, little kids roaming free and covered in ringworm. Cold medicines and aspirin were as rare and valuable as blocks of gold. “If there were any better place to go we’d certainly pull out,” she wrote in her diary, “but I don’t think you can find anything much different within driving distance of the plant.”
Edsel realized that the housing crisis could throw a wrench into the bomber production process. If workers could not find an adequate place to live, or if they could not get to work, the bombers wouldn’t roll. He reached out to his contacts in Washington, pleading for help. His pleadings quickly reached the White House.
The President imagined a government-financed “Bomber City” alongside Willow Run, an entire city freshly built with government money. It would be “a city of homes well planned and designed,” Roosevelt described it, “and owned by defense workers, as a symbol of the America we are defending and the America we are rebuilding for the future.”
However, where would the materials come from? And with what man-hours would such a city be built? All that aluminum and steel and labor was needed to build the Arsenal of Democracy, the tanks and airplanes and guns. And how long would Bomber City take to construct? As one war worker put it: “Detroit isn’t worrying about tomorrow, mister. The boys in the Pacific are yelling for help today. Detroit’s worries are right now.”
Roosevelt delegated the Bomber City job to his uncle, Frederic Delano, chairman of the National Resources Planning Board. “I have been asked by the President,” Delano wrote Edsel, “to do all I can to expedite the provision of adequate housing, transportation and other facilities for the workers who will be employed at the Willow Run Bomber Plant.”
Delano’s agency picked a piece of property near the plant for Roosevelt’s $35 million Bomber City. Henry Ford protested. He wrote the President directly. The agency had “picked a site for this purpose which includes land owned by me,” Henry wrote Roosevelt, “which I have been using as an agricultural training school for young men. May I solicit your assistance in stopping this project until a more suitable site is selected.” Besides, Henry argued, a Bomber City would “concentrate people where they might be bombed.”
Henry’s real concern: what would happen to Bomber City when the war was over? It would become a rusted-out eyesore on his land. When the President’s Federal Public Housing Authority set up stakes in fields to build Bomber City, Harry Bennett sent his men to tear them out.
Edsel could never have foreseen the rationing rules, including the rule that people would be forbidden from commuting between Willow Run and Detroit. He realized for the first time that his choice for the bomber plant location had been a massive, irrevocable mistake. He had a health crisis brewing, and there seemed no way to stop it.
17
Will It Run?
Spring to Fall 1942
I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
—CHARLES LINDBERGH
AT 12:30 PM ON March 24, 1942, a train screeched into Michigan Central Station in Detroit, bound from Boston. From a Pullman car, Charles Lindbergh stepped onto the siding with a suitcase in his hand. The platform appeared crowded. All over the country, urban train stations were symbolic microcosms of America in wartime—everyone in a hurry to get somewhere, teeming crowds, a great migration, most notably fresh-faced boy-men in military uniform. Increasingly, there would be more Americans on crutches in train stations, in wheelchairs, or in coffins making their final journey home.
A phone call from Harry Bennett had summoned Lindbergh to Detroit. The aviator had found himself in a position that bordered on the bizarre. With a critical shortage in labor across the country, in a nation desperate for airpower and trained pilots, the world’s most famous aviator was unemployed and seemingly unemployable.
Lindbergh couldn’t find a job.
Edsel was laid up ill at the time. Henry, Bennett, and Sorensen welcomed Lindbergh in Dearborn. Over lunch, Lindbergh shared pieces of his story. As Henry Ford knew, of course, the aviator had done everything he could to keep America out of the war, resigning from the Air Corps Reserves and deeply alienating the President in the process. “Now that we are at war,” he said, “I want to contribute as best I can to my country’s war effort. . . . I must take some part in it, whatever that may be.”
He had asked officials in Washington to be reinstated in the Air Corps so he could fight overseas. As the ardent antiwar activist would later learn, he was strangely non-averse to killing in military engagement, as long as he was sure he was shooting at enemy soldiers and not civilians. But for now, the military didn’t want him. The Roosevelt administration wanted nothing to do with him.
“He is a ruthless and conscious fascist,” Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes told the President, “motivated by a hatred for you personally and a contempt for democracy.” Ickes went on to say that it would be “a tragic disservice to American democracy” to allow “this loyal friend of Hitler’s . . . a chance to gain a military record.”
“What you say about Lindbergh,” Roosevelt had responded, “and the potential danger of the man, I agree with wholeheartedly.”
When Lindbergh went seeking a way to participate in the war effort on the home front, he was blackballed. The only man unafraid to hire him was Henry Ford. Thus the aviator’s arrival in Dearborn.
Had any public figure ever been more misunderstood? Lindbergh was no Nazi, nor was he a pacifist. His politics were esoteric and even dangerous, but he considered himself an American patriot. Now he believed that his phones were being tapped by the FBI, and he was being called a traitor.
After lunch, Henry, Lindbergh, Sorensen, and Bennett headed down the road to Willow Run. Inside, the clattering of the machines assaulted the eardrums. To Lindbergh, it seemed a cacophony without parallel. They moved slowly so Henry Ford could keep up, the old man’s eyes vacant, as if he were lost. “The plant has progressed greatly since I was last there,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal that night. “Runways all in, most of the building finished, much of the machinery installed.” Like anyone else who visited Willow Run, Lucky Lindy was awed by the sheer ambition of it. He saw “acres upon acres of machinery and jigs and tarred wood floors and busy workmen . . . a sort of Grand Canyon of a mechanized world.”
Almost exactly a year had passed since Henry and Edsel stood on this plot of
land watching the giant saws clear the sugar maples and apple trees. And now? “The Ford schedule calls for the first bomber to be produced in May,” Lindbergh wrote in his diary. “From the appearance of the factory it seems to me it will be very difficult to meet this program. It will be little short of a miracle if the actual production of four-engine bombers is under way in April.”
While in Washington attempting to get his Air Corps commission back, Lindbergh had heard firsthand how desperate the army was for four-engine bombers. And how the hubris of Ford’s bomber-an-hour plan had offended the aviation industry’s top figures. No one believed the Fords could pull it off. As Lindbergh remembered Assistant Secretary of War Robert Lovett saying: “The rest of the industry was very much opposed to the Ford company entering aviation, and hoped the production program would not be met.” Lindbergh had personally argued with officials over the subject.
“There is no question of the Ford Motor Company’s ability to place the large bomber on mass production,” he told officials in Washington, “provided that sufficient raw material, government furnished equipment, and outside purchased parts are available under reasonably normal conditions.”
Now in Dearborn, Lindbergh could see for himself how far off track the job seemed to be.
He checked into the Dearborn Inn, taking a room on the second floor ($10.50 a night). He agreed to a salary of $666.66 per month (the equivalent of what he would have earned if he were in the Air Corps). Sorensen offered Lindbergh more, but the aviator refused. On his first day, like all other new employees, he walked through Willow Run’s front doors into the Personnel Building, where his identification was checked. He was fingerprinted not once but twice.
And so Lindbergh and Henry Ford—the nation’s two highest-profile anti-interventionist activists, both of them enemies of the President, both accused Nazi sympathizers and accused anti-Semites, both decorated with swastika-emblazoned medals by Hitler himself—joined hands in the campaign to build the most destructive weapon in the Arsenal of Democracy.
Lindbergh wasn’t the only celebrity working at Ford Motor Company during the war. Gray-haired Jim Thorpe, the 1912 Olympic gold medalist and pro football hero, took a job at the offices of the Rouge. So did Jesse Owens, described by Ford’s in-house publication as “the man who first put the blitz on Berlin” by winning Olympic golds in 1936 before the enraged blue eyes of Hitler himself. Unlike those men, however, Lindbergh was a lightning rod.
Some workers at the Rouge protested against the controversial aviator’s appointment. Newspapers ran editorials denouncing Lindbergh as a troublemaker, moving Ford’s chief legal counsel, I. A. Capizzi, to fire off threatening letters. Bags of mail arrived in Dearborn from concerned citizens who thought Lindbergh was a Nazi. “I am so anti-Hun and anti-Jap,” read one, “the damn dirty rats, that I don’t want to see anyone take any chances with such a type of a man as Lindbergh.”
Henry and Edsel paid these attacks no mind. Aviation engineers were “as scarce as hen’s teeth,” in the words of General Oliver Echols of the Air Corps. Finally, at the most ambitious venture in aviation history, someone had arrived who knew all there was to know about airplanes.
Bennett set Lindbergh up in an office on the side of Willow Run farthest from the airfield. He gave him a 1942 Mercury with a radio transmitter in it so that Lindbergh could stay connected to the executives at all times within ten miles of the bomber plant. Lindbergh quickly became fascinated with the inner workings of this Machiavellian empire.
“These relationships between the officers of the Ford Company are becoming of great interest to me,” he wrote in his journal. “Every one of these men has a strong character, and loyalties and conflicts weave in and out through every move they make.”
“Sorensen has the reputation of being the best production engineer in the United States,” Lindbergh wrote, “of imposing and ‘bulling through’ sweeping ideas quickly formed, of being ruthless in his dealings with men. . . . ‘Cast Iron Charlie,’ they call him; men’s eyes drop to their work as he passes along the aisles of the shops; no man wishes to cross him, and no man can cross him and hold his job. . . . His heart is so filled with his love of the machine that it has somewhat crowded out his love of the man who must run it. He is certainly one of the men who has built this nation into whatever it is today.”
As for Edsel, there were rumors. Soon after Lindbergh started work at Willow Run, he got a phone call from Bennett, who said in confidence that Edsel had cancer of the stomach and that doctors were giving him a year or two to live. These rumors were incredible. Edsel’s two older sons were in the military. His father was now seventy-nine years old, the sharp edges of Henry Ford’s brilliant imagination blown dull by the years. Who would lead the great Ford empire if Edsel perished?
Lindbergh wanted to get to work, to serve his country, but he found the inner workings of this empire so strange that he advised the company’s executives that he was having trouble fitting in. “I came here in hope that I might offer suggestions and advice,” he told Sorensen. “I find, however, that the company’s policies and methods are so different from the others I have followed in the past that, until I learn to understand them better, I must consider myself more a student than an advisor.”
As March yielded to April, with Edsel’s promises to deliver bombers to the military in May, Lindbergh began to hear more grumblings from his contacts in Washington. The news from overseas was getting grimmer by the day. It had now been five months since the United States had entered the war. Not one yard of enemy territory had been taken. Not one successful campaign had been launched. Hitler’s U-boats, the rattlesnakes of the sea, were wreaking havoc in the Battle of the Atlantic, sinking ship after Allied ship. In the Pacific, the Japanese had taken Java, parts of the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines. Burma, a critical strategic outpost, was about to fall. General Joseph Stilwell reported from the Far East: the Allies needed airplanes! The Japanese were attacking with waves of fighters. “We couldn’t retaliate,” General Stilwell reported, “because we didn’t even have an anti-aircraft gun.”
The President wanted to know: where were the Liberators?
“They don’t give me anything to eat,” Edsel confided in a friend that spring. He was living on a diet of painkillers. “They just feed me pills!”
“You can’t go far on pills.”
“No,” Edsel said. “I get hungry once in a while.”
In his corner office, Edsel felt like he was trapped in a bad dream. The bomber-an-hour project was spinning out of control, and his every minute was a frenzy of problem-solving. All the social and production pitfalls sparked by the new wartime economy had come to fester at Willow Run as if in a petri dish—only a petri dish the size of the largest factory under one roof that had ever been built.
Bomb threats caused work stoppages almost daily. “Caution and paranoia were part of the daily routine at Willow Run,” remembered Wally Pipp, who worked in plant security. (Pipp was a former first baseman for the New York Yankees, replaced in 1925 by Lou Gehrig.) “It was quite an experience. We had to check everything—look in the garbage cans and everywhere.”
Engineers at Willow Run were complaining that deliveries of raw materials were failing to show up. Edsel had to fly to Washington to beg for rubber, copper, and especially aluminum. With all the industrial production in the United States—ships and tanks and guns and airplanes—there weren’t nearly enough raw materials to go around. Ford Motor Company was given top priority by the Roosevelt administration: “A-1-A.” However, as the ambitious shipbuilder Henry Kaiser put it: “A priority is something which gives you an option to ask for something which you know you’re not going to get anyhow.”
Wildcat strikes occurred with regularity, owing to constant intimidation by Bennett’s Service Department. Army inspectors came to Willow Run and were bewildered by Bennett’s labor policy. As Lindbergh put it: “Bennett is certainly a colorful character. . . . But I sometimes wonder whether Bennett does n
ot try to handle the Ford workmen with a little too much of the mailed fist.”
Soldiers headed for hellholes were outraged by the idea of labor strikes in war factories. (“I’d just as soon shoot down one of those strikers as shoot down Japs,” said one Air Corps pilot. “They’re doing just as much to lose the war for us.”) But this was America, land of the free. Citizens could not be forced to work—the way they were in Hitler’s Germany.
Bennett wouldn’t back down. At one point, he got in an argument with Willow Run’s day-to-day superintendent, Roscoe Smith, over the placement of soda machines. In an office with Sorensen present, Bennett slugged Smith with a sharp right hook, sending him tumbling to the ground. Smith got up and felt a wound bulging on his head. He walked off and never returned to Willow Run.
“You were trying to do a job for your country and for the company and trying to do a job for yourself,” he later said. “I was really relieved to get out.”
Every day Edsel and Sorensen were given updates on how many laborers punched in the day before. The numbers didn’t add up; people were simply not showing up for work. So Edsel commissioned a study to find out why. For starters, the military was draining the labor force. As soon as a man was trained to build an airplane part, at great expense, he might be called to duty—here today, gone tomorrow. And it was only getting worse. The armed forces were going to drain several million men from the ranks of factory workers by the end of 1942. Other workers left their jobs at Willow Run because tire and gas rationing prevented them from getting to work, or they couldn’t stand the living conditions around the factory. Or they simply found a better job elsewhere.
Desperate for able bodies, Bennett dispatched recruiters to sweep through the southern states passing out flyers to strangers: “Willow Run, the Largest Bomber Plant in the World, Located in Detroit Area, NEEDS: MEN AND WOMEN.” Mobs of new faces gathered in the bomber plant’s Personnel Building. A good portion of them were rural Southern blacks who had never traveled out of the farmland where they were raised, who had come by bus hundreds of miles with tickets provided by Ford Motor Company. They wore rags and spoke strange backwoods dialects. One man showed up without shoes. “They didn’t know whether to send him into the plant or not without shoes, but they finally did,” remembered Ford engineer Anthony Harff. “The fellow said he never wore shoes in his life.”
