by A. J. Baime
Roosevelt’s first stop: Detroit.
Thus far, in the Oval Office, the story of the war’s first eight months had unfolded like a montage of crushing news—“the winter of disaster,” as the President’s top speechwriter put it. “The awful realization was slowly coming over the country,” said War Production Board chief Donald Nelson, “that America was losing a war, the greatest in history, one upon which our national existence depended.”
Cables and phone calls had crisscrossed the Atlantic between the President and Prime Minister Churchill, in a morbid game of discursive ping-pong. “The news is going to get worse and worse before it begins to get better,” Roosevelt told Churchill.
On the home front, production numbers were falling far behind quotas. The most serious issue was the failure of industry to launch airpower. Through Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, the United States was scheduled to deliver 1,709 planes to the Soviet Union, 3,305 to Britain, and 340 to other Allied nations. Many of those airplanes could not be delivered because they had not yet been built. The planes that foreign governments wanted most were the hardest to build: four-engine bombers. The need for bombers had become an obsession.
“I have been deeply concerned at the slow expansion of the production of heavy and medium bombers,” Churchill had said. “Other long-term projects must give way to the overriding need for more bomber aircraft.” On another occasion: “We must aim at nothing less than having an Air Force twice as strong as the German Air Force by the end of 1942. It is the very least that can be contemplated, since no other way of winning the war has yet been proposed.”
On August 8, 1942, Roosevelt had received a memo from White House statistician Isador Lubin. “The airplane production situation appears to be getting progressively worse,” Lubin wrote. “Not only have we failed to meet your directive as announced in January [a schedule of 60,000 planes for 1942], but we have failed even to realize the schedules that had been laid out before we entered the war.”
Infuriated, Roosevelt fired off a memo that landed on half the desks in Washington. “I am concerned by the figures on production of combat planes,” he wrote. “The bomber deficit in July seems to be the most serious. . . . I think you should hold a clinic on this patient. Then you can let me know what disease he is suffering from and how he can be cured!”
Of all the wartime production centers, Detroit had become the most important—and thus far, the most disappointing. Crowded, hot, teeming with exhausted laborers who were far from their homes and suit-and-tie engineers working themselves to exhaustion, the city had become a seething hotbed of potential violence. With the constant flow of poor Southern African Americans into the city, it was only a matter of time before it erupted in full-blown race riots, according to local authorities. The age-old murderous Southern race conflict was being transplanted into an overheated, overcrowded industrial megalopolis.
Morale had shifted significantly in three months. One confidential government report circulating around the nation’s capital, called “All’s Not Well in Detroit,” detailed how the auto industry was 60 percent behind military production quotas. In an issue of Life that hit newsstands just days before the President’s train screeched north from Washington to see the auto industry’s progress, the magazine summed up the situation with a cover story called “Detroit Is Dynamite.”
“The news from Detroit is bad this summer,” the story began. “Few people across the country realize how bad it is. Wildcat strikes and sit-downs, material shortages and poor planning at the top have cut into Detroit’s production of war weapons. The result is a morale situation which is perhaps the worst in the US. Detroit can either blow up Hitler or blow up the US.”
On September 18, the President’s train roared into Detroit. That afternoon, Edsel Ford, his father, Charlie Sorensen, and Harry Bennett stood fidgeting at the northwest corner of Willow Run, where the rail tracks swept against the concrete siding. Secret Service, State Police, and US troops surrounded them. Lindbergh made sure not to show up for work on this day, wanting nothing to do with his archenemy, President Roosevelt. At 3:40 PM, the President’s special train pulled up to the bomber factory, right on schedule.
When the door to Roosevelt’s train car opened, a special ramp with railings flopped down on the siding. With no use of his legs, Roosevelt grabbed ahold of the railings to support himself as he made his way down the ramp on his own power, his face showing the strain as the muscles in his arms flexed. Photographers were gentlemen back then. None would consider snapping the President in a moment of weakness.
“I was astonished to find him so helpless,” Sorensen remembered. “He was in agony.”
Roosevelt’s bulletproof Lincoln phaeton limousine was ready—top down, ample chrome sparkling in the Michigan sun. It was a beautiful car, born on the assembly line at Edsel’s Lincoln factory in Detroit. Roosevelt wore a light gray suit with a black tie and his usual wire-rim spectacles. At the car door, a large muscular guard lifted him into the air as if he were a child and placed him in a seat in back.
Standing by, Henry Ford scowled in the presence of his nemesis. How awkward it was to have Roosevelt here on his property. But then Henry had to be reminded: this was not his property. Willow Run was government property.
Edsel, meanwhile, smiled nervously at his friend Roosevelt. Edsel felt as many Americans did: boundless respect for this man who had overcome so much to contribute as much as he had. And yet, on this occasion, as Edsel shook the President’s hand, he could not hide from the facts: his aviation venture had cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions, and his promise of a bomber an hour had gone woefully unfulfilled.
Ford Motor Company had thus far rolled out but a single Liberator—Bomber Ship 01. They were four months and counting behind schedule.
Secret Service men placed Henry in the back of the Lincoln phaeton between the President and his wife. Edsel and Sorensen sat in front next to the driver. With military and bureaucrats in tow, the car pulled toward the bomber plant’s gaping doors. Willow Run swallowed them up.
Bennett had organized the proceedings. The route the phaeton was to travel was marked with flags, guiding the driver through the factory. The President and First Lady were all smiles, chatting amiably. As the limousine moved into the manufacturing area, Edsel explained the machinery to Mrs. Roosevelt while Sorensen did the same with the President. In the backseat, sandwiched between Roosevelt and his wife, seventy-nine-year-old Henry sat in silence, staring off with glazed-over eyes.
“It was evident to me that he was not enjoying the company,” Sorensen remembered. “The President and Mrs. Roosevelt were indifferent to him.”
Roosevelt had never been inside an airplane factory. Edsel had the place pasted with American flags. Secret Service men eyed the laborers suspiciously. Any worker who had a lunch pail was told to set it on the ground a few feet away, for fear that it could be concealing a weapon. The 35,000 working at Willow Run at the time knew a visitor was on the way, but the visitor in question was but a rumor until he arrived. All around the President, workers stopped and applauded.
“We’re with you, Frank!” yelled one.
“How do you like it, Mr. President?” yelled another.
The President waved and smiled, feeding off the enthusiasm. In the front seat, Edsel studied him with glances over his shoulder. Roosevelt’s face had a way of expressing amazement and confusion simultaneously, revealing everything and nothing at the same time. His political skills were uncanny, this ability to keep everyone on their toes, always guessing as to what he was thinking.
“Charlie, what is that?” Roosevelt asked Sorensen, pointing to a machine that cut a piece of a wing and then bent it into shape. Sorensen couldn’t help but sound like a PR man as he explained how the company had set up the factory to build bombers according to automobile manufacturing methods, something that had never been done.
The First Lady raised one of her favorite causes, women workers. She was pleased to see so many fema
les with sleeves rolled up—terrific fodder for her next newspaper column. Even before Pearl Harbor, she had championed the cause of women workers for the Arsenal of Democracy. Edsel explained that Willow Run was now employing thousands of women and the number was rising by the week.
“Franklin, look over here,” Eleanor Roosevelt said.
The President turned and blinked his eyes to make sure he knew what he was seeing: dwarfs toiling inside a hole in a bomber. Edsel explained. The dwarfs had been hired to climb inside a section of the center wing, where normal-sized people could not fit. They worked in there firing rivet guns—more proof of the almost Rube Goldbergesque ambition of this operation. Roosevelt swung the door to the phaeton open, and two dwarfs approached. They shook hands and talked with the President while official photographers captured the moment for the newspapers.
Moving along, Edsel showed the President the giant seventy-five-foot-long super-truck that Ford Motor Company was using to move “knockdown” assemblies (bombers without engines, in pieces) from Willow Run down to Douglas Aviation’s plant in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for assembly. The huge eighteen-wheelers were powered by two Ford V8 engines and drove with US Army escort trucks protecting them. They were the biggest trucks ever to hurtle down an American road. Roosevelt asked if these were the trucks that motorists were complaining about, causing traffic problems. Before Edsel could answer, the phaeton moved to the ell in the factory, the spot where Willow Run cornered abruptly at the Washtenaw County line.
“And so this is the city line!” Roosevelt exclaimed loud enough for all to hear. Yes, the Democratic president had heard about the plant layout, how Henry Ford had demanded that Willow Run be built L-shaped so that it stayed within the confines of a Republican county that voted against Roosevelt in three straight elections. Sitting between the President and First Lady, Henry Ford squirmed.
The group moved to the most impressive machine inside Willow Run: the center-wing mechanism. Here was the $250,000 apparatus that cut days of work into a six-hour job creating the Liberator’s fifty-foot-long center-wing section. Sorensen and Edsel explained in detail how every center wing that this machine spat out was exactly like the one before.
At the end of the assembly line, the group could see a row of partially built B-24s slowly taking shape, in various forms of undress. By the time the party drove out of the plant onto the airfield apron, the afternoon sun had ducked toward the western horizon. On the runway lay the finale. The Air Corps had organized a gathering of American military airplanes all in a row, to showcase the rise of the nation’s airpower. Here stood the B-24 Liberator, its sister plane the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, several Martin B-26 Marauders (medium bombers powered by 2,000-horsepower R-2800 Double Wasp engines built by Ford at the Rouge), the famed Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter (also powered by a Ford engine), the North American B-25 bomber, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a Bell P-39 Airacobra, a bunch of Curtiss P-40 Warhawks, and some training Vultees and Cessnas.
Next to those, Edsel had organized a showcase of his war work, all the military equipment that the Rouge, Highland Park, and Lincoln factories were producing. The Ford medium tank, the Ford V8 tank engine, the T-17 armored car, the T-22 light armored car, the one-and-a-half-ton army truck, the amphibious reconnaissance car, the 75-millimeter cannon mount, the Jeep, two kinds of anti-aircraft gun directors, and the Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp aviation engine—which the Rouge was now pumping out at a rate of more than 600 a month, the equivalent of 720,000 horsepower every thirty days.
From his limousine, the President sat quietly admiring all that machinery, a rare moment of silence for this loquacious man. He completed his visit with a twenty-minute conference alone with Henry and Edsel. What they discussed will remain forever between them. But it was clear that Willow Run was behind schedule. And that it had better get up to speed. When the party left, Roosevelt held a small model of a Ford-built B-24 Liberator in his hand—a gift from Edsel.
Two weeks later, the President arrived back at the White House. The nation he had seen was still in the early part of a long journey. And yet, every part of life was affected by the war, for everyone. He was astonished by what he had seen. This was a country that had rolled up its sleeves. Nearly 3.5 million Americans had left their homes, their schools, and their jobs to serve in the military in 1941 and 1942. Innumerable businesses that didn’t serve the war effort had vanished. In the first two months of the war alone, about 300,000 retailers had closed their doors in what BusinessWeek called “the most severe contraction in the business population that we have ever experienced.”
Because of rationing, a cup of coffee was a luxury. Canned beer was hard to come by because tin was needed for munitions. Harder still to find was whiskey—alcohol was needed for torpedo fuel and for medicinal purposes. Finding a steak was like winning the lottery—unless you got it from “Mr. Black” (the thriving black market). Americans were now buying horse meat and even muskrat meat for their tables. Housewives were ordered to retain cooking fats in their kitchens and return them to butcher shops. One pound of cooked animal fat contained enough glycerin, they were told, to produce gunpowder for fifty .30 caliber bullets.
Rationing changed the way people dressed and bathed. Wartime forced the issue of racial and gender integration as never before. Because labor was in such demand, jobs that blacks could never attain before were now open to them. As one African American woman famously put it: “Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen.”
The President was happy with what he saw—this new America slowly coming into its own. In his post-trip press conference, surrounded by the White House press corps, he had little to say about Willow Run, except this: like the war itself, Ford’s bomber experiment was not going exactly as planned. Willow Run was “not yet in production.”
20
A Dying Man
Fall 1942 to Winter 1943
This hour I rode the sky like a god, but after it was over, how glad I would be to go back to earth and live among men, to feel the soil under my feet and to be smaller than the mountains and trees.
—CHARLES LINDBERGH
CIRCLING THE SKIES OVER Willow Run in the flight deck of a B-24, Charles Lindbergh worked through a series of maneuvers with a copilot beside him. He had probably piloted a wider array of flying machines than any American. But he’d never flown an airplane as uncomfortable—nor any that required as much pure arm strength—as a B-24 Liberator. It was like flying “a 1930s Mack truck,” as one aviation historian put it.
The wheel in the cockpit connected to a system of cables mounted on pulleys within the body of the airplane that activated the flight controls (ailerons, rudders, and elevators). It was all operated marionette-like by the pilot’s arms and feet. The wheel (or the “yoke”) controlled the ailerons on the wings; turn left for a left turn, right for a right turn. Two foot pedals could also turn the plane left and right, while the wheel also controlled the vertical stabilizers; push the wheel forward to aim the nose into a descent, or pull back to raise the nose further into the sky.
After an hour or two, the muscles in Lindbergh’s arms ached from exhaustion. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew tested out their equipment. Bombardiers opened and closed the bomb bay doors, then dropped dummy bombs into Lake St. Clair, while radiomen and engineers worked over their gauges and electronics.
Up at 20,000 feet, with no pressurized cabin, the temperature could sink below −40 degrees Fahrenheit, the icy wind blowing right through the cockpit. Having worked up a sweat on takeoff, the pilot’s face could freeze onto the rubber oxygen mask. There were no windshield wipers. If it was raining, the pilot had to stick his head out the window to see the runway upon landing. There was also no real bathroom—not a big deal during a two-and-a-half-hour shakedown flight. But on a ten-hour bombing mission, all an airman aboard a Liberator had access to was a tube for urination (which often froze and clogged) and a bag for defecation.
As Lindbergh began his descent, the bo
mber rattled and banged. Gas fumes filled the cockpit. When the rubber wheels touched down, his hands were cramped and shaky. He headed for the showers. Later, he arrived in a conference room for a debriefing with Henry Ford, Edsel, Bennett, Sorensen, and several other engineers.
The date was October 26, 1942. By this time—a month after the President’s visit to Willow Run—bombers had begun to trickle out of the factory, and Lindbergh’s job was to size them up. He found the airplane “unnecessarily awkward” and the instruments “more complicated than the keyboard of a pipe organ.”
“I found the controls to be the stiffest and heaviest I have ever handled,” he said. The closer he looked at these airplanes, the more he was alarmed. The Ford-built B-24 was “the worst piece of metal aircraft construction I have ever seen,” Lindbergh concluded. He added:
Rivets missing, rivets badly put in, rivet holes started and forgotten, whole lines of rivets left entirely out, wrong-sized rivets, lopsided rivets, badly formed skin, corner cuts improperly made, cracks already started, soft metal used where hard metal is essential, control holes left out, pilot’s escape hatch incredibly badly constructed.
The army was now taking possession of Willow Run’s first bombers, and the company was getting a reputation for turning out poor-quality workmanship. The arrogance of Ford’s bomber-an-hour plan had infuriated the other airplane manufacturers. Aviation men were hoping that Ford would fail, and so far it had. Lindbergh was hearing more grumblings from Washington. The government was ready to come in and take over Willow Run.
