by A. J. Baime
American strategy was to bomb precision targets by day—military installations, oil refineries, boat works, and airplane factories. Anything to cripple the Nazi war machine. Even if the bombers missed their targets and hit civilian homes (which they invariably would with great frequency), the cause seemed morally dignified. And the Air Corps bombers were built to attack by daylight. The downside to precision bombing: to hit a target, even with the latest bombsight and radar equipment, a pilot had to attack in broad daylight and in the direct path of anti-aircraft gunners. Which meant higher casualty rates among bomber crews and more destruction of airplanes.
The debate grew fierce. Unlike the Americans, the British civilian population had been brutally attacked by the Luftwaffe, with innumerable casualties among women and children. Churchill and “Butch” Harris had a different sense of high moral ground than their counterparts across the Atlantic. At Casablanca, the two parties came to an agreement. The Americans would bomb strategically by day, while the British would commence area bombing by night. These officials named their top-secret plan “The Combined Bomber Offensive.”
On January 24, Roosevelt sat down in the Casablanca compound in front of nearly forty members of the British and American press who had been flown in on government airplanes. The President sat comfortably in a tan suit, with Churchill to his left in a black suit and bow tie, bowler hat in his lap. Those reporters got the scoop of a lifetime: the Allied leaders had gathered in the heart of the African war zone. The message was clear.
The turning point of the war had come.
“I think it can be said that the studies during the past week or ten days are unprecedented in history,” Roosevelt began. “Some of you Britishers know the old story. We had a General called U. S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant but in my and the Prime Minister’s early days, he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan. That means a reasonable assurance of future world peace. It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.
“This meeting,” the President concluded, “is called the ‘unconditional surrender’ meeting.”
Before the Allied leaders headed for home, the American military commanders conceived a plan for the US Army Air Corps’ most critical onslaught within Nazi-occupied Europe. They would hit Ploesti, the Romanian city with its sprawling ring of oil refineries, which were within the long range of the B-24 Liberators. In an engineer’s war, which pit highly mechanized military forces against one another, this one strike could destroy the source of one-third of Hitler’s oil production. Ploesti was “the taproot of German might,” as Churchill put it. The American Joint Statistical Survey, a think tank of military minds, had called Ploesti “by far the most decisive objective of the war.” A precision strike could stagger the enemy, plug the flow of oil to the Nazis, and stop Hitler’s motorized forces in their tracks.
Ploesti was also the most heavily armed oil installation on earth, surrounded by radar warning systems and innumerable batteries of Germany’s now-famous 88 anti-aircraft cannons, which were developed by the German powerhouse Krupp. The plan would require a long-distance strike by a massive fleet of bombers that would take off from Benghazi in the Libyan desert, flying a round trip of some 2,400 miles.
Only the B-24 had the range and firepower to accomplish such a mission. It would require many dozens of them, the largest American air armada ever assembled up to that time, like a city of planes in the sky moving at well over 200 miles per hour. Military brass eventually named the mission Operation Tidal Wave and scheduled the strike for August.
“The Billion Dollar Watchdog,” Harry S. Truman, arrived at Willow Run with the Truman Committee—officially known as the Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program—less than three weeks after the Casablanca Conference, on the morning of February 19, 1943. Truman wore a dark double-breasted suit, a fedora, and a no-nonsense stare that made him look like he was peering off a postage stamp. Edsel Ford greeted the committee’s seven senators (five Democrats, two Republicans, most of them freshmen). Gaunt and weary, he led Truman and his entourage into the bomber plant.
Fifty-eight-year-old Senator Truman of Missouri was one of the most intimidating figures in America. Not that he was a bully. He was on a personal crusade to protect the American taxpayer during the transformation from peacetime to a war economy. He had come a long way since the war began. Three years earlier, Truman couldn’t get the President’s secretaries to return his calls. He was considered a front for the real power out of Missouri and called “an errand runner for Kansas City politicos”—namely, “Boss Tom” Pendergast, head of Missouri’s Democratic Party, who had recently been convicted of tax evasion and sent to Leavenworth.
Not long before Pearl Harbor, Truman had offered his services to fight waste and corruption in the national defense effort. Only after he promised not to criticize the President—after he swore he was “100 percent behind the administration”—did Roosevelt establish the Truman Committee on March 1, 1941, authorizing the senator to make a full investigation of “the operation of the program for procurement and construction of supplies, materials, vehicles, aircraft, vessels, plants, camps, and other articles and facilities in connection with the national defense.”
With his team of handpicked Washington operatives, Truman went on a rampage. He drove 10,000 miles in his own car to visit military bases and other government construction sites, exposing contractors who were wasting time and money, seeking out morally ambiguous profiteers, and saving millions of government dollars. Truman’s hearings in Room 449 in the Senate Building and the meetings in his private office sitting room known as “the Dog House” had become a major story of the war effort. His work was deemed so vital that the senator who couldn’t get the President’s secretary to return his calls a year earlier landed on the cover of Time magazine. He was so ambitious, it was as if this Missouri politician had his sights on the Oval Office.
Before arriving at Willow Run to conduct his investigation into the delays, “Give ’em Hell Harry” promised reporters: “We will get all the facts.”
Edsel sat down over doughnuts and coffee with the senators that morning and made his appeal. He had a keen political mind and saw Truman’s visit not as an attack but as an opportunity to plead for Washington’s help. Thus far, twenty-three months after construction crews broke ground at Willow Run, the company had yet to fly off its one-hundredth airplane—a far cry from a-bomber-an-hour production. Edsel methodically explained the problems that were causing delays.
For starters, he was having trouble getting people to show up for work. He begged the senators “to exert influence on the War Manpower Commission to improve the labor situation at Willow Run.” The bomber plant had the highest absentee rate of any war plant in the country. Edsel broke out a chart and showed it to the committee. The month before alone, 2,060 workers had left Willow Run. As of that very week, Willow Run training programs had taken in 20,177 trainees, and 11,094 of them had quit before the program was over—more than half. The reasons varied.
Drafted into the military: 1,737
Enlistments: 1,472
Found another job: 843
No place to live: 314
Needed at home: 334
Next Edsel led the senators into a conference room where a stack of blueprints three feet high sat on a table. The blueprints showed changes that the army wanted made to the bomber. The Liberator had been designed by Consolidated Aircraft in 1938, the first prototype was in flight a year later, and the bomber was then put into production. It had all happened so fast. Now wanting to improve the design, the army was sending over dozens of changes every week.
Nothing threw a wrench into the mass-production process like changes to the product
that the manufacturer was trying to produce. Ford Motor Company was using hard-steel dies at Willow Run, according to automaking methods—a controversial move, aviation experts were quick to point out early on. Steel dies could not be altered. If the airplane part changed, the steel die that crafted that part became garbage and needed replacing. A new one had to be created from scratch.
The army’s latest request was for a new machine gun turret built into the nose of the Liberator below the cockpit. Bomber crews flying the Liberators overseas had asked for this change, to help defend against attacking enemy fighters coming at them straight on. When Edsel ventured to Washington to beg General Arnold to stop the requests for changes to the airplane, the General replied: “I’d feel as if I had blood on my hands if I ignored those boys’ suggestions.”
So now Edsel’s men had three months to begin delivering bombers with this new nose turret—a huge job.
Edsel introduced the Truman Committee to Willow Run’s new daily superintendent, an engineer named Mead Bricker who’d practically grown up in the Rouge. “Now, look,” said Bricker, and he began to explain what happened when the government asked for a change to the bomber. “We’ll show what it means in delay, what it means in equipment, what it means in jigs and fixtures and the whole conglomeration of things that goes into that kind of engineering process.” Bricker then led the senators onto the Willow Run assembly line, where the deafening noise made them cringe in their suits. Bricker pointed to a specific machine that made a piece of an airplane wing. And if that airplane piece was altered?
“You affect this whole line of procedure,” he screamed over the assembly-line roar. He went through all the steps that were needed to make the part and detailed how it all had to change. “That has all got to be designed and blueprinted and put in operation.”
“Now you may not be familiar with all these things,” Bricker continued, “but this is what happens every time we get a new bale of changes that have to do with this plane. Until you find out, gentlemen, what kind of plane you’re going to build, and until you perfect the design, we can’t guarantee to meet any schedule.”
“Well,” Truman spoke up, “I certainly can see how changes jimmy up your fellow’s program.”
At lunch in a conference room, the committee hurled questions at Ford engineers as Truman walked slowly around looking at pictures of airplanes on the walls. The senators were concerned about this expensive machine that made center wings. Why did this one center-wing machine cost taxpayers $250,000? They wanted to know about the hard dies that Ford was using, according to automobile manufacturing methods. Why did Ford use hard dies when the aviation firms used soft ones that were more flexible in the production process?
Before the committee left, the senators posed for a ceremonial photo out on the airfield with a B-24 bomber towering over them, like a beast standing over its prey. Truman stood in the center holding his hat, and with the camera aimed, he finally allowed himself a smile. When the committee released its report, neither Edsel nor Sorensen could do the same.
Ford “had not produced at Willow Run a plane which was capable of use at the front,” the Truman Committee found. One line in the report cut Sorensen’s and Edsel’s souls as if with a jagged knife. “The production line was set up similar to an automobile assembly line,” it read. “This was probably a mistake.”
22
Taking Flight
Spring 1943
Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
THE SPRING OF 1943 was Edsel Ford’s last season on earth. He spent it under relentless duress. Chasing the bomber-an-hour goal, he summoned all his strength, hoping his last lungful could breathe life into Willow Run.
In March, he stood next to Colonel Thomas Drake on a stage in front of a crowd gathered outside the Rouge. At that moment, the R-2800 Double Wasp aircraft engines built at the Rouge were throttling airmen into battle all over the globe, in the B-26 Marauder medium bomber, the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter, the F6F Hellcat aircraft carrier fighter (which would destroy 5,163 enemy airplanes during the war, at a cost of 270 of their own), and the Curtiss C-46 Commando troop transporter (otherwise known as “the Whale”). On behalf of the Rouge workers, Edsel accepted the Army-Navy “E” Award for Excellence, a ceremonial nod from Washington. The Colonel passed Edsel a red-white-and-blue flag with a large white “E” stitched across it as a crowd applauded and whistled.
Edsel had always wanted to turn his family empire into a modern aviation powerhouse. Now this boyhood dream had come true, under the oddest of circumstances. Holding the Army-Navy Excellence flag, he began a bittersweet speech.
“The presentation of this flag does not indicate that we have reached the top of our stride,” Edsel said. “The engine we worked on this morning will be carrying American airmen over some distant theater of war a few weeks from now. Let us make it a good engine for the safety of our airmen and let us produce it promptly that it may reach them in time and in ever increasing numbers.”
On the stage, Edsel appeared exhausted, as if each word he muttered taxed him. Nearby his father stood watching him with concern.
At Willow Run, bombers were filling the two hangars at the airfield and circling the skies in ever-increasing numbers. Each of the problems that Edsel had detailed for the Truman Committee, he and Sorensen were now tackling one by one.
Edsel had the idea of subcontracting bomber parts to other plants to quicken production. The Rouge was now producing stabilizers, radio operator doors, and side gunner doors. Edsel’s Lincoln plant was making engine cowlings and air ducts. The Gibson Refrigerator Company of Belding, Michigan, signed on to produce center-wing flaps. The Metal Molding Company of Detroit agreed to make bomb racks.
All through the winter, recruiters had swept through the rural South, signing on workers to stem Willow Run’s labor shortage. By March 1, 1943, the bomber plant employed 6,491 from Kentucky, 1,971 from Tennessee, 714 from Texas, 450 from West Virginia, 397 from Arkansas, and 314 from Missouri. There were also men and women from Egypt, Iceland, New Zealand, Panama, Turkey, Chile, and Cuba. In his war factories, Edsel employed 4,390 blind or deaf laborers, 111 deaf-mutes, 3 armless men, and 10 legless men. Willow Run had, about that time, reached peak employment: 42,331 workers, a number equivalent to the population of a small city.
Workers in the bomber plant began noticing men and women watching them with stopwatches in hand. Edsel had created what he called the Time Study Department—an attempt to perfectly integrate man and machine on the assembly line, to bridge that gap that separated the imagineer’s big-picture perspective from the worker with the rivet gun in his hand. The team of statisticians consisted of forty-one men and twenty-two women. If the factory was meant to be as finely integrated and tuned as a watch, their job was to make it run on time. They whittled the bomber job down to as many singular tasks as possible, then studied the length of time it took for each. They factored in “unavoidable delays” for each worker (thirty minutes every nine-hour shift for bathroom visits, for example, including the trip back and forth). Then they swarmed the bomber plant timing spray-painters and oilers and jig operators with their stopwatches.
The Time Study Department created a chart for each foreman. At the end of a shift, production figures could be measured against this chart. If the two did not match up, the foreman had to answer to Charlie Sorensen. In all, executives estimated that the Time Study Department was saving the company $100,000 with every ship delivered to the army.
By now, requests from the Air Corps for changes to the airplane had begun to fall off. The engineers at Willow Run could focus on building bombers, rather than altering their assembly line to accommodate changes to the bomber. The B-24 was no longer a moving target. Daily, Willow Run grew more precise, fluid, and intelligent, and faster in its every task.
In April, Edsel had a chart sent off to the White House, a page splattered with numbers, the most important of which showed production fig
ures at the bomber plant. The chart looked like it was plotting an airplane in takeoff, building in altitude. Willow Run produced 75 planes in February 1943, 104 in March, and 150 in April. One of the President’s secretaries, Marvin McIntyre, placed the production card on the Oval Office desk with a note that read, “You will probably understand this. I don’t but I am going to have somebody explain it to me.” (The President wrote back: “You don’t have to understand it. FDR.”)
And still Edsel was continuing to sign new defense contracts: amphibious vehicles, armored cars, jettison gas tanks, and squad tents. The Rouge assembly lines were spitting out not one but two different kinds of tanks (the M-4 and the M-10). From its lumber mill in Kingsford, north of Detroit, Ford Motor Company had begun to construct Waco CG-4A gliders—engineless aircraft that were towed up into the sky and then released, so they could fly quietly behind enemy lines. Painted army green, the wooden glider measured 83.6 feet by wingspan and 48 feet in length. It could carry fourteen soldiers plus a pilot, and it could also carry a Jeep and a Howitzer into battle. The glider was a novel contribution to American airpower. “Never before in history had any nation produced aviators whose duty it was to deliberately crash land,” one army general later said of these gliders.
That spring, Edsel wrote William Knudsen in Washington. “Our war jobs are coming along fine,” he noted, “and we will be making a lot of stuff by August. All told, our employment will total 220,000 people, against 120,000 [during peacetime] on automobiles.” The numbers were astounding. The war had forced the company to build incredibly complex machinery that it had never built before—at a volume and speed considerably greater than it had ever achieved churning out automobiles. Since the war had started, Ford Motor Company had stopped making cars and had grown considerably.
