by A. J. Baime
The influx of new black labor heightened racial tension in the factory and caused more wildcat strikes. As one laborer put it: “I’d rather see Hitler or Hirohito win the war than work beside a nigger on an assembly line.”
For many Americans, no sight symbolized the nation’s effort on the home front more than women working in war factories. As early as 1941, the federal government had campaigned to place women on assembly lines. The War Department asked Edsel to hire 15,000 female workers at Willow Run. He was happy to oblige. The first woman employed at the bomber plant was Agnes Menzies—a nurse in the First Aid Department. Another woman named Rose Monroe started at Willow Run soon after Pearl Harbor. An attractive tomboy-type brunette, Rose had driven in an old Ford from Kentucky with two young girls in tow. She worked jackhammers and rivet guns at Willow Run.
One day Rose Monroe caught the eye of a government man who had come looking for the right woman to serve as a promotional figure, an example that could get more women out of the home and into the factories. Here was Rose Monroe—attractive, tough, determined. Rose Monroe became “Rosie the Riveter,” a symbol of American strength and teamwork, promoted in government newsreels and posters, painted by Norman Rockwell, mythologized in a big band tune.*
All the day long,
Whether rain or shine
She’s part of the assembly line.
She’s making history,
Working for victory
Rosie the Riveter.
As at other war factories, women were hired at salaries slightly less than what men made. (At Willow Run, unskilled male laborers started at 85 cents an hour, for nine-hour shifts, five days a week.) Management put up signs inside the bomber plant: GENTLEMEN WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE. THERE ARE WOMEN PRESENT. Within weeks, foremen put up their own signs: WOMEN WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE. THERE ARE GENTLEMEN AROUND HERE. (“Some of these women had words I never even heard of,” remembered one foreman.) Edsel’s wife, fearing that children would be left alone to fend for themselves without their mothers, arranged to have posters put up in the female bathrooms urging women workers to utilize government-operated day care facilities.
All the while, the housing debacle outside Willow Run worsened. By this time, over 30,000 people had moved into this rural backwater on the outskirts of Detroit. Nearly 2,000 were living in makeshift tarpaper shacks and chicken coops. In one instance, a nun entered a shack and found a newborn baby inside with her mother. The baby was wrapped in newspapers to keep her warm. In another, health authorities tested local wells by dropping purple dye into some local toilets. They later pumped purple water out of nearby wells that were being used by families for drinking water. Officials feared what a typhoid epidemic in Detroit could do to the war effort. Photographs of kids living in squalor around Willow Run appeared in newspapers across the country. It looked like a scene out of the Third World, but it was right there in Ypsilanti outside Detroit, where a year earlier the biggest local news might have been a cat stuck in a tree.
In Washington, Senator Harry Truman and his Truman Committee investigating defense production organized a hearing to discuss the Bomber City that Roosevelt wanted built beside Willow Run. The city would cost $125 million in materials that the government didn’t have, and $125,000 in labor that the government didn’t have either. And where would the construction workers live while Bomber City was being built? What about police and fire departments? Schools and a hospital? Edsel was estimating a peak employment of 60,000 at Willow Run, down from the original estimate of 100,000. That still required thousands of dwellings and all manner of infrastructure.
The government pushed ahead on Bomber City, the construction set to start in the fall of 1942—promising more traffic jams and shortages of just about everything. Bomber City was projected to open early in 1943. Judging from the news from abroad, the war could be lost by that point.
Meanwhile, there sat Edsel Ford in his corner office, living on painkillers, the weight of it all on his shoulders, wondering when the first Ford B-24 Liberator would take flight. Wondering, perhaps, if he would live to see it happen at all.
18
Bomber Ship 01
May 1942
Over all, we feel the intangible dominating presence of rules, rules, policies, social controls, all holding thousands of divergent personalities firmly in the intermeshing action patterns of giant mass production.
—WILLOW RUN ASSEMBLY-LINE WORKER
ONE DAY A THIRTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD man named James Edson Stermer arrived at Willow Run’s personnel office for his first day of work. He was not much different from the other thousands who came to work at the bomber plant that day—a Detroit Institute of Technology professor who was taking on a job to contribute to the war effort. But his story illustrates what it was like to walk through those factory gates in the middle of World War II.
Stermer was pointed to the Plant Hospital for his physical. Height: 5′10″. Weight: 189 pounds. Blood pressure: 144. Two nurses X-rayed his chest to rule out tuberculosis, handling him “as impersonally as freight-handlers on the Michigan Central,” he remembered. He moved to a private cubicle and was told to strip off his clothes.
“Operations?” a nurse asked.
“Yes—appendix out.”
“Hold out your hands. . . . Turn them over. . . . Up! . . . Out! . . . Touch the floor! . . . Stoop! . . . Okay, wait as you are for the doctor.”
After a quick consultation with a physician, Stermer was sent back to the personnel office, where he was fingerprinted three times (once for company records, once for the Michigan State Police, and once for the FBI). He had his picture snapped for his ID badge, was given a locker for his personal things, then was sent inside the factory, where, after a stint as a stock handler at 85 cents an hour, he enrolled in riveting school.
“It is impossible in words to convey the feel and smell and tension of Willow Run under full headway,” Stermer wrote in his journal. “The roar of the machinery; the special din of the rivet guns, absolutely deafening nearby; the throbbing crash of giant metal presses; busy little service trucks rushing down endless aisles under the blue-white fluorescent lights; the strange far-reaching line of half-born skyships growing wings under swarms of workers meeting deadlines.”
The place teemed with workers—black, white, young, old, men, and women. About one-third of the assembly-line workers were female, spanning the social spectrum from the wives of successful businessmen to ex-prostitutes. The sections of the plant were marked with a grid, so Stermer could find his way. Letters ran north and south, and numbers east and west, like the street grid of a city.
The riveting theory teacher—a big, gray-haired fellow named Mr. Farley, who had worked for years at the Rouge—gave Stermer a lecture intended (in the new employee’s words) “to orientate trainees to the airplane industry, to the relation of the airplane industry to the war effort, and to the war effort in relation to the preservation of the American way of life.” Then it was time to start firing rivet guns.
Nothing could seem simpler to the uninitiated. But Stermer was about to find out: riveting was anything but simple. He was assigned a workbench, clamps, a hammer, a punch, goggles, and drills of various sizes. On his first day, his boss told him, “It costs about $250 to train a first class riveter. To understand rivets, one has to know how to measure them. Therefore, you will have to learn how to use a measuring scale.”
Each bomber required 360,000 rivets (all made on the premises), some one-sixteenth of an inch long and weighing 0.00005 pounds, others fifty times that length and weighing 0.05 pounds. Some were nickel-steel, some pure aluminum, some stainless steel, others aluminum-steel alloy, and all were carefully engineered to perform their job not just on the ground but 20,000 feet up, where temperatures dropped to 40 below and the atmospheric pressure plunged. Rivets were kept in iceboxes at negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit until they were used—part of the heat-treating process to make them as strong as possible.
“Riveting is a social operation,” St
ermer remembered. “It involves two persons interacting, one to direct the rivet gun, the other to oppose the hammer at the other end of the rivet with the bucking bar.” At one point, he drove in thirty rivets only to find that he had jammed half of them. His foreman “got red in the face.”
The nine-hour shift moved slowly. In the cafeteria, Stermer paid 38 cents for lunch: a meat sandwich, an apple, a piece of pie, soup in a paper carton, and a pint of milk. The size of the cafeteria itself was overwhelming. Each day cooks served 1,500 pork chops, 550 pounds of trimmed beef, 700 pounds of potatoes, and nearly 10,000 rolls. Rationing limited each worker to consumption of 1.53 “meat points” per day.
After lunch Stermer returned to riveting. He spent a week studying riveting theory before he was handed over to a foreman on the assembly line. The more hours he put in on the job the more overwhelmed he became. “One thing that impressed me again today was the importance of ear plugs,” Stermer wrote in his journal. “The din without them is absolutely deafening. Yet nothing was said about them during orientation or theory school. So many little adjustments in this place could be made so much easier if somebody would just give them a little thought—and pass the results of the thinking along!”
To Stermer, it was clear that the scope of this industrial adventure and the speed at which the factory had been built had caused a rift between the imaginations that had dreamed up Willow Run and the man who held the rivet gun in his hand. It was the imagineer’s job to concoct this giant mechanism and to envision it from its totality down to the rivet. But Willow Run was so vast, and dreamed up and built so quickly, that it was functioning like a timepiece in which all the little parts did not fit together properly.
The first of May arrived, the month when the military chiefs were scheduled to take delivery of the first Ford bomber. But there was no bomber. The war overseas was being lost and the bomber-an-hour goal was not yet remotely in sight. Months earlier, Willow Run was the celebration of the Allied war movement on the home front. Now the plant was becoming an embarrassment in front of the whole nation. One federal official called Ford’s bomber-an-hour experiment “the worst mess in the whole United States.” Others had begun to call Willow Run “Will It Run?”
“The powers that control the plant and its environment are unable to grasp the fact that we are at war,” stated the Detroit News. “And to realize that the great, basic purpose of the plant is to help win—perhaps even decide the issue of the war.”
When it seemed like things couldn’t get worse, Edsel got word of a special visitor who would soon be arriving at Willow Run. The identity of this visitor was top-secret, but Edsel figured it out quickly when Secret Service agents showed up asking to snoop around. The President himself was going to visit the bomber plant, and the clock was ticking. The pressure to get Willow Run fully in production would heighten with every hour until Franklin Roosevelt arrived.
From his dock on Lake St. Clair at Gaukler Pointe, Edsel boarded a Grumman amphibious airplane on the morning of May 15, 1942. He had taken possession of a government-issue plane to commute from Grosse Pointe to Willow Run, flying in a fraction of the time it took him to travel the forty-five miles by car.
The plane motored along the glistening lake and took flight, banking into a turn that revealed through a window an aerial postcard picture of downtown Motor City, its iconic edifices poking through the spring haze. There was the luxurious Book-Cadillac Hotel (the tallest hotel in the world when it was completed in 1924),* General Motors’ magnificent headquarters along the river, and the Guardian Building, which local authorities had turned into a kind of command center for the city’s war production effort.
Minutes later, Edsel stepped off the plane on the runway at Willow Run, in front of the control tower and the airfield’s hangar. He had a spring in his step on this morning. The first Ford-built B-24—Bomber Ship 01—was set to roll off the assembly line. It was an “educational” airplane built with parts fabricated by Ford and others supplied by Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego.
At the door of Willow Run that led onto the airfield, the bomber stood on its huge rubber tires. It was not only a weapon but a symbol of American strength in a new kind of war. “The B-24 has guts,” said the army air force’s pilot instruction manual. “It can take it and dish it out. It can carry a bigger bomb load farther and faster, day in and day out, than any airplane that has passed the flaming test of combat.”
The bomber’s skin was made of aluminum stamped so thin that you could stab through it with a knife. Inside were 4,000 feet of rubber and metal tubing; like arteries and veins, these tubes moved fuel, oil, oxygen, de-icing fluid, and hydraulic fluid throughout the machine. The cockpit, the airplane’s brain center, was a cramped cavern with cast-iron seats for the pilot and copilot, specifically built to protect these men from flak and gunfire coming from below.
Eighteen rubber fuel cells were mounted inside the wings (twelve in the center wing, three more each in the outer wings, for even weight distribution). These tanks held 16,320 pounds of 100-octane gasoline (2,720 gallons), and the bladders were self-sealing. In the event a bullet shot through one, it instantly sealed itself to prevent fire. In the belly of the plane, the bomb bay was constructed to hold 8,000 pounds of payload in three different ways: four 2,000-pound bombs, eight 1,000-pound bombs, or twelve 500-pound and twenty 100-pound bombs.
On the assembly line’s final stage, workers on elevator systems had guided spray-paint guns over every outer inch of the ship. Bomber Ship 01 was a shade of army green dull enough so that the metal did not reflect the sun. Workers had also mounted all the government-issue equipment, such as gauges, life rafts, and the bombsight. And there were those big engines—a quartet of Pratt & Whitney power plants built by other companies, notably the Buick division of General Motors. (Ford’s Pratt & Whitney engines built in the Rouge were used on other planes, not the B-24.)
By the time Bomber Ship 01 made its way out the doors under the beating sun, Edsel, Sorensen, and a sprawling crowd of laborers, engineers, military officials, and representatives from Washington had gathered on the airfield. On a dais in front of the bomber, Edsel stood by an American flag flicking in the wind, enjoying a round of applause, the sweat beading on his brow. Southern Michigan was in the thick of a spring heat wave that afternoon—over 90 degrees.
“The plant itself needs no praise,” Edsel said, his voice loud and tinny through the microphone. “It speaks for itself. It is a fine plant, splendidly equipped, and eloquent of what can be accomplished by cooperation between government and industry, management and labor, army officers and production engineers, civilians and military men. Unfortunately this plant has been the subject of some premature and inaccurate publicity. That, perhaps, was natural. For Willow Run has become a symbol of the United States in the air. . . . Every employee and every manager here pledges all out cooperation until the V of velocity in production, and valor in combat, becomes the V of final victory.”
Although Lindbergh was very likely on hand, Ford’s chief test pilot, Harold Henning, did the honors on this day. Inside the bomber’s cockpit, with a copilot beside him, Henning powered up the Liberator’s radial engines at 3:15 PM. The crowd watched from a distance as the plane taxied to the top of a runway, in awe of the Liberator’s size and its thunderous song. As one pilot who flew a B-24 said upon first seeing it: “It was HUGE. I was completely amazed by its monstrous size, its four mighty engines.”
When Henning had the Liberator’s engines up to temperature, he pointed Bomber Ship 01 down the runway and gunned the throttles. The ship shuddered for a moment, the throbbing engines straining to collect those tens of thousands of pounds and thrust them forward with all the power of a herd of 4,800 thoroughbred horses. Edsel stood amid the crowd as if alone, watching this airplane gather speed and lift itself off the tarmac, climbing in altitude as its exhaust note began to slowly fade.
It had been a bitter battle to get this first ship built, and there was still a long war a
head. But for a moment, watching that flying machine arc into a smooth bend, Edsel allowed himself some quiet satisfaction, as if the plane’s takeoff had lifted an unbearable weight from his shoulders. He could not help but smile.
He was back in the airplane business again.
19
Roosevelt Visits Willow Run
September 1942
My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. . . . Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a country where everything is built on the dollar?
—ADOLF HITLER
SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON September 17, 1942, the President slipped quietly out of Washington with a retinue of officials from the military and the White House. His private train left the nation’s capital under the cover of night. The train had a stocked bar, Secret Service operatives manning all the doors, and a special car configured to carry the President’s limousine, like a garage on steel wheels. He had scheduled a trip across the country and back, over 8,750 miles, to see for himself what the country had become—a full inspection of this new America, of which he was the chief architect.
