by A. J. Baime
It was true, Edsel confirmed. He had gotten word that Missouri senator Harry Truman was arranging a trip to Willow Run for a full congressional investigation into the plant’s failure. Senator Truman would be arriving in a matter of weeks. The Truman Committee had grown very powerful in the first year of the war. The press was bound to be horrible.
“You’d better be prepared,” Lindbergh said, “and see if you can’t do something about it.”
Grimacing, Edsel argued to bring on more workers at once. They needed more bodies! The original projections had called for more than 65,000 more workers than were on the payroll at Willow Run at that time.
But new workers had to be trained, Lindbergh reminded everyone. “We have more than 30,000 employees at Willow Run now,” he said, “and less than 400 of them had experience in aircraft manufacture before they came here.”
Sorensen stepped out of character and admitted guilt. “We knew it was a tough problem, but we didn’t know it was quite so tough,” he said.
Edsel fired back with exasperation: “But a lot of people told us it was.” The company “had made all kinds of production promises for months and listened to none of the warnings,” he said.
Henry spoke up: “What are we going to do about this place?”
No one had yet come up with the answer.
In Washington, on July 11, 1942, a strange letter appeared on the desk of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, arriving via airmail from the office of Felix Cole, the American consul general in Algiers, Algeria. The memo’s title: “A New Ford Motor Company for Africa.” The letter explained that Ford’s French division—which was then building trucks for the Nazis—had established a new company in Algiers, that at least one person involved in the new arrangement was said to be “unscrupulous” and “100 percent pro-German,” and that the local commercial circles were “pointing an accusing finger” at the new African Ford company, questioning where its loyalties lay—with America or with Germany.
The news of the new company, Ford-Afrique, made it to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau’s office. Morgenthau was an upstate New York Jewish gentleman farmer turned diplomat who mistrusted major corporations and their executives, whose judgment was easily clouded, the Treasury secretary believed, by a lust for profit. He had been quietly crusading to expose corruption and war profiteering over the past year. During the war, his office, along with others in Washington, would conduct either formal or informal investigations into major American powerhouses with financial ties to Nazi Germany, such as Standard Oil and Chase National Bank.
Henry Ford was already on Morgenthau’s radar—ever since Henry refused in 1941 to build Merlin aircraft engines for the British. Now there was this suspicious new Ford company incorporating in northern Africa. Soon Morgenthau’s agents were looking deeper into the situation. Could this company in Africa be used to support Hitler’s war effort? What did Ford executives in Dearborn know about it?
On December 7, 1942, Edsel Ford was in his office when he got the shock of a lifetime. An investigator named J. John Lawler showed up with a warrant to search the premises. The warrant was on a US Treasury Department letterhead, signed by Mr. Lawler and one J. W. Pehle, an assistant to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. “You are hereby instructed and required,” the warrant began, “pursuant to the provisions of Section 5(b) of the Trading with the Enemy Act . . . to produce upon presentation of this instruction . . . any and all books of account, contracts, letters, notes.”
Edsel was baffled and frightened. Why would the Treasury Department want to search his papers? The investigator, Lawler, found Edsel and his assistant, R. I. Roberge, “extremely curious as to the reason for this investigation.” They were “not at all certain of what the Treasury’s interest was.”
For an hour and a half, Edsel answered questions, which centered on his correspondence with Ford’s top man in France, Maurice Dollfus, who was known to be serving the Nazi warlords. Apparently, Dollfus had started this new Ford company in Algiers. The African Ford company had come up in Dollfus’s correspondence with Edsel, so Edsel had some rudimentary knowledge of it. But he knew almost nothing of the details.
When the Treasury investigator left Dearborn for Washington, he carried with him piles of Ford Motor Company contracts and letters, which Edsel shared freely, including his correspondence with the eloquent if not mysterious Dollfus. What, Edsel wondered, could he have done to violate the Trading with the Enemy Act? Was this all some kind of mistake?
One cold morning that winter Edsel awoke at Gaukler Pointe with a severe fever and a flare of agony in his gut. With his wife Eleanor’s help, he got himself in a car, and a driver motored him to Henry Ford Hospital. Eleanor Ford asked the doctors to summon the best abdominal specialist in the world. Soon Dr. Roscoe Graham was en route from Toronto to perform surgery. He opened Edsel up and found tumors that had taken root so deep in the stomach that there was no way to get them out. After the surgery, the physician approached Edsel’s wife gravely.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can do nothing to help Mr. Ford.”
Edsel was dying.
He stayed in the hospital for another week until his fever retreated. Then he headed home to Gaukler Pointe. The mansion’s vast sitting rooms and warrens were devastatingly quiet. Mail poured in from friends who had heard of his hospital stay.
“I do hope you are not suffering from any serious illness and that you will soon be back on the job,” wrote J. Edgar Hoover.
“Dear Edgar,” Edsel wrote back, “I am sorry to say that I was laid up for a couple of weeks. I seem to have the thing under control at the present,” he lied.
Eleven days after his surgery, Edsel was back at Willow Run. “Looks bad,” Sorensen wrote in his diary. “Something wrong with him. . . . Stress and strain is the worst thing for that ailment.” In retrospect, Sorensen looked back on these days bitterly, believing that Edsel’s life could still have been saved. “If Edsel could have dropped out of sight for a while at this time and gone in for a cure, he would have recovered.” Another Ford executive put it this way: “What he should have done . . . is to have taken his dough out of the company and quit.”
Eleanor begged her husband to leave the job behind, but Edsel refused. What was his life but a struggle for integrity and meaning? To prove he was no prodigal son, to fill the roomy shoes of his famous father? Why give up now when his greatest battle could still be won? Why surrender?
Unaware of the severity of the illness, Henry had no sympathy, blaming his son’s condition on his taste for a drink and a smoke. “If there is anything the matter with Edsel’s health,” he told Sorensen, “he can correct it himself.”
Edsel’s children were unaware that the illness was terminal, but they knew something was terribly wrong. Benson, Edsel’s second-oldest, was driving with Sorensen one day on military leave. He unleashed his rage at Henry Ford.
“Grandfather is responsible for Father’s sickness,” he shouted, “and I’m through with him!” Sorensen tried to calm Benson down, but it was impossible. The young man was hysterical over the condition of his father.
The cruel Detroit winter set in, and Edsel soldiered on—battling production problems and nervously awaiting word from Washington about the Treasury Department’s strange investigation of his files. “I had no idea,” said his secretary A. J. Lepine, “seeing him almost every day at the office that he was seriously ill.”
Edsel tried to find pleasure in his children. His daughter Josephine moved her wedding date up so that he could attend, though she perhaps did not entirely understand why. The proud father of the bride-to-be received a letter from Mr. Condé Nast asking if Josephine would pose for a photograph for Vogue magazine. (Edsel approved, but the photograph was never taken.) When Edsel walked his daughter down the aisle on January 2, 1943—less than a month after the Treasury investigator had raided his office—he looked dapper and sophisticated as always, though the wedding guests whispered that something appea
red wrong about him.
Josephine married Walter Buhl Ford (no relation), and Edsel took delight in calling the newlywed couple the Ford-Fords. He hosted the reception at Gaukler Pointe, where family and friends clinked champagne glasses inside the beautiful mansion, with its gaping Gothic fireplace and dramatic chandeliers.
As for Edsel’s oldest son, Henry II was still stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Base outside Chicago. Edsel realized that this internecine drama was about to fall right in Henry II’s lap. Young Henry would need all his strength and nerve in the coming months ahead. In Chicago, Henry II and his wife Anne gave birth to their second daughter that January of 1943. Edsel and Eleanor took a train to the Windy City and checked into its finest hotel, the Drake. Edsel stood by his son as the grandchild was baptized in a nearby church.
Dutifully, Edsel tried to get along with his father. “The baby is a beauty and didn’t make a murmur during the ceremony,” he wrote Henry from Chicago. It seemed like such a short time ago that Edsel was trotting along beside Henry through the long aisles of Highland Park, looking up at his father like he was a god. Henry and Edsel had clashed on many occasions through the years, but Edsel had always looked up to his father. Being a loyal son was an intrinsic part of his definition of success. “I think Edsel Ford was infinitely more than a loyal son,” one high-level Ford man, A. M. Wibel, said of his boss. “I just think he adored his dad and what he stood for.”
In the end, if Edsel was going to be remembered, his legacy would be Willow Run. And so he put all his strength into it. “I spent all day yesterday at Willow Run,” he wrote his father in the winter of 1943, not long after being diagnosed as terminal. “Talking manpower, work incentives, trying to make plans to reduce absenteeism, now over 10% per day.”
The plant was getting close, Edsel knew, to realizing its ambition. He could feel it. The bomber-an-hour goal was not out of reach. The war was slipping away, and so was his own personal battle, a fight for integrity he had waged his entire adult life. It was not too late to turn everything around—but Edsel was running out of time.
PART IV
THE RISE OF AMERICAN AIRPOWER
It was this feeling of the unknown. What were we going to face? What was a mission going to be like? We were very green, not really prepared for it. There were ten of us: pilot, copilot, navigator, bombardier, engineer, radio man, second radio man, second engineer, and two gunners. I was a rear gunner. Our first mission was over Aschersleben—I’ll never forget it—in the heart of Germany. It was an airfield. I was a nineteen-year-old kid. I remember planes flying, and I remember the cold. At 30,000 feet, to see so many planes and fighter planes and bombers, it was just awesome. Let me put it like that: awesome. It was just surreal.
—BENJAMIN NAPOLITANO, Stamford, CT
21
Unconditional Surrender
Winter 1943
We will make Germany a desert. Yes, a desert.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
AT MIDNIGHT ON JANUARY 11, 1943, a pair of Pan American clippers sat ready to taxi on an airfield runway in Miami, surrounded by the most crack security team anywhere on earth. Aboard one of the planes, the President of the United States sat with his seat belt on, feeling the rumble of the engines in his bones. He had taken a private train south from Washington along with a group of the most exalted minds in the US military, some two dozen in total. With the party strapped into the belly of the two planes, the pilots squeezed the throttles. They lifted off, bound across the Atlantic Ocean for Africa.
No American president had ever flown overseas—a testament to the infancy of aviation. (Only one had ever flown at all: Roosevelt’s cousin Theodore enjoyed a four-minute jaunt aboard a plane built by the Wright Brothers in 1910.) Roosevelt was also about to become the first American president since Abraham Lincoln to travel into an active theater of war. At that same moment, Winston Churchill sat aboard an airplane with his team of top military and political thinkers, headed from the United Kingdom to the same destination—Casablanca. For his private aircraft, Churchill had chosen an American-made B-24 Liberator with passenger seating built in place of the bomb racks.
Because of heavy winds, the President’s clipper flew low over the Atlantic, not much more than 1,000 feet over the water, cruising at a speed of 105 miles per hour. Locked in steel boxes with detonators attached (in case of emergency) were the secret papers that were the focus of what would soon be known as “the Casablanca Conference.” These papers held the answer to the question of how the war would be won, if it would be won.
Roosevelt had plenty to think about over the long haul. Though his war plans were top-secret, his overall strategy was far from it. Anyone who’d read a newspaper in recent months knew that in order to win the war, the Allies were desperate for mastery of the skies.
In numerous polls, Americans had chosen the heavy bomber as their favorite weapon. Fortune magazine: “The people are sold on peace through air power.” The entire American public had gone bomber-crazy. Films like Dive Bomber (1941, with Errol Flynn) and Flying Tigers (1942, John Wayne) thrilled movie audiences. “Our heavy bomber is our greatest weapon,” John Steinbeck wrote in his book Bombs Away (1942), after spending a month flying with a crew. Aviation pioneer Alexander de Seversky’s literary polemic Victory Through Airpower (1942) made #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Still, production of aircraft in the United States had a long way to go to secure victory.
“Despite all the talk about reorganizing the flow of raw materials,” Harry Hopkins told the President, “and despite the fact that the aircraft construction program was the subject of conversation through the entire months of September and October, it appears that not a Goddamn thing was done to overcome production difficulties.”
The head of the Air Corps, General Hap Arnold, also agreed, singling out the failure of one particular company. “There has been some delay in new producers getting started,” according to Arnold, “such as Ford.” Arnold reminded the President of “manpower complications, such as in Detroit.”
As for the overall narrative of the war at this point, finally the Allied leaders could celebrate good news. Two months earlier General Dwight Eisenhower had landed his troops in the North African theater, beating back Nazi general Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps. Operation Torch was the Allies’ first major, successful land, sea, and air campaign against Hitler.
As news of these battles along the northern coast of Africa thrilled Americans at home, the first headlines announcing genocide at the hands of the Nazis also appeared in the American and British press. What many in high levels of government had long suspected was now becoming a matter of revealed truth.
“One is almost stunned into silence by some of the information reaching London,” Edward R. Murrow reported over CBS radio. “Some of it is months old, but it’s eye-witness stuff supported by a wealth of detail and vouched for by responsible governments. What is happening is this: Millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered. When you piece it all together . . . you have a picture of mass murder and moral depravity unequaled in the history of the world.”
In Casablanca, twenty miles from the Atlantic coastline in French Morocco, the President’s plane touched down and taxied to a stop at 6:20 PM local time. All around the airfield, the earth was scarred by fighting that had been staged there just weeks earlier. The President’s motorcade arrived at the Anfa Hotel outside the city at 7:00 PM on January 14, 1943. Roosevelt wheeled his chair inside a villa called Dar Es Saada (Arabic for “House of Happiness”). The decor was so opulent that the President whistled and joked, “Now all we need is the Madame of the house!”
Security was hyper-alert. The American and British politicians and officers were warned not to drink anything but bottled water, for fear of poisoning. Secret Service men burned all trash in the hotel rooms, lest the slightest detail of the conversations in Casablanca reach the wrong ears. Barbed-wire fences sur
rounded the area, and a bomb shelter was built into a swimming pool.
A knock on the President’s door at Dar Es Saada signaled the arrival of Winston Churchill. The two protagonists remained that night in conference until 3:00 AM. The historic Casablanca Conference had begun.
In the compound of villas in Casablanca, elite British and American commanders worked through a series of conferences picking apart every theater of war and outlining the progress of factory production at home. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed: the defeat of Nazi Germany would get priority over the war with the Japanese. Among the many decisions made, they outlined a plan to combine the American and British air forces in an effort to pummel Nazi Germany into submission.
Daring missions in the skies over Germany would require huge fleets of bombers. Massive casualties were expected. When the machines were shot down, more machines would have to appear in the skies behind them. To ensure victory, the assault would have to be brutal and relentless.
There remained one difference of opinion among the British and American leaders: how to utilize the heavy bomber, which was a controversial annihilation device. Churchill was a proponent of bombing cities by night. In darkness, bomber crews were less likely to get hit by anti-aircraft flak. The dapper, Bentley-driving British air marshal, Arthur Harris—nicknamed “Butch” for “Butcher”—had come under attack for his embrace of area bombing, the destruction of cities, which was after all a form of terrorism. The Prime Minister’s science adviser, Lord Cherwell, called this tactic “de-housing the workers,” destroying civilian homes and thus the morale of the men and women working in Axis war factories. This kind of bombing ensured casualties among civilians.
