The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

by A. J. Baime

  In March 1943, the first part of Bomber City opened its doors. Called Willow Lodge, it was an entire neighborhood built in open fields, completed four months after groundbreaking. The first of thousands of men, women, and children arrived with their old cars and worn-out rationed tires, their suitcases, and their hopes for an easier life. Bomber City appeared as Roosevelt had originally imagined it: “a city of homes well planned and designed . . . a symbol of the America we are defending and the America we are rebuilding for the future.”

  That didn’t mean it was an easy place to live.

  Willow Lodge was a sprawling, campuslike community bordering Michigan Avenue, the main local road that traveled straight into the heart of Detroit twenty-seven miles away. The homes were one- or two-bedroom, dormitory-style apartments made of semipermanent materials, attached in fifteen long rows (some two-story, some one-story), with flat roofs and hastily constructed windows. Willow Village—the rest of Bomber City—would soon follow nearby, with homes for 2,500 families and a shopping center.

  Bomber City was characterized by a clash of cultures, with blacks and whites, Northerners and Southerners, day-shift and night-shift laborers—all migrants—living in tight quarters. If America was a melting pot, this was its perfect microcosm. The quarter-inch-thick walls were far from soundproof. People got to know each other quickly, even if they never shared any interpersonal communication.

  James Edson Stermer, the thirty-nine-year-old Detroit Institute of Technology professor who had come to work as a riveter at the bomber plant, moved into Willow Lodge’s B Dormitory soon after it opened. He paid $5 per week for a single room at Willow Lodge, his lease signed with the US government. “I wander upstairs through overheated halls to No. 160,” he recalled of the day he moved in, “a clean, bare cubicle in brown beaverboard, approximately eight by ten [feet], equipped with an open clothes-nook without hangers, a four-drawer bureau, a wall mirror, one chair, one single bed, one wastebasket, and an outside view through the lone window of the bare ‘campus.’”

  With babies crying and night-shift workers coming and going, sleep came in fits and starts. “Practically every night I have been awakened two or three times by other roomers,” Stermer remembered, “men coming in noisy-drunk, men shouting to their friends along the length of the corridor, alarm clocks going off in nearby rooms. If a man doesn’t impair his hearing in the deafening clamor of the rivet guns on the job, he stands a good chance of wearing his nerves down trying to sleep under a barrage of hillbilly sociability in the Lodge between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.!”

  A haze hung above Bomber City, thickening in the cold months. The homes were heated with soft coal, which was dispensed one ton at a time in wooden bins along the streets. The temperature in the dorms was kept above 80 degrees.

  For entertainment, which the government considered important for morale, Willow Lodge featured a bowling alley and a movie theater that showed films three nights a week. There were dances and communal picnic tables. There was also plenty of vice, for anyone looking for it. “Professional gamblers and fast women quickly moved in for a cleanup,” a Detroit News reporter wrote of Willow Lodge. Once Federal Housing Commission officials got word of illicit activity, they sent the police in with instructions to clear out suspicious characters.

  Each morning Stermer took the “Cattle Car”—a crowded Greyhound bus—to the bomber plant, and every evening he came home to Willow Lodge the same way. The bus came about every eight minutes, and the trip was one mile long. With seats for forty, the Cattle Car often fit more than double that number, the aisles filled with standing passengers. On each ride, Stermer saw the blank faces and bloodshot eyes of the tired, the sometimes sick, and the sometimes injured from their long hours amid the booming machinery. By one historian’s estimate, compared to soldiers overseas, twenty times more workers died or were injured in war-related industries on the home front in 1942 and 1943.

  They were a grim army of foot soldiers, fighting the Battle of Production. But at least now the men and women at Willow Run could show up for work and collect a check with regularity, with a pillow a reasonable distance away.

  While far from luxury living, Bomber City, now that it had begun to open, finally started to solve the absentee problem that had plagued Edsel and Sorensen for months. In the executive offices of Ford Motor Company in the spring of 1943, Edsel began to see a shift in morale, even as he himself grew weaker and closer to death. Banner headlines told the stories of battles won overseas. The tide was turning, and the rising production figures at Willow Run seemed to mirror the overall war effort.

  In April, Edsel permitted a rare one-on-one interview with a reporter, something he loathed doing. Agnes Meyer of the Washington Post met with him in his office. Pictures of his kids and of B-24s in flight adorned the walls. The reporter found Edsel “very old and very young, very sure of himself and very diffident, a man of brilliant mind who has preserved his integrity, elasticity and independence against heavy odds.” As for the bomber plant? “In terms of engineering,” Meyer wrote, “Willow Run is considered by those who know most about such things to be the supreme achievement of American Industry.”

  So, she wanted to know, what took so long for Willow Run to begin to realize its promise?

  Edsel went through the whole program, reliving the last harrowing two years of his life. When the bomber-an-hour plan was first hatched in San Diego, he explained, “the automobile was still in general use. There was no restriction on gas and rubber. We therefore expected no housing problem, nor a transportation problem.” The employment of women on the assembly lines required unexpected new responsibilities, he explained. Nearly one-third of the workers at Willow Run were now female.

  The changes in the industry were all a part of a new America being born, Edsel said. Soon, he predicted, “there will be so many new developments in the mechanical field, television, airplanes, streamlined transportation and other things that will make new kinds of employment. The new era that lies before us is largely a question of planning, but the planning must come from people who have had the time and have given the thought to fitting the pieces together.” With the important contributions of major industrialists, a postwar future was bright, explained the man who knew he would not live to see it. “We businessmen,” Edsel said, “will have enough to do.”

  Forty-one thousand feet up over Willow Run, deep into the stratosphere, the airfield’s mile-long runways appeared no larger than pencils that one could snap in the fingers. Charles Lindbergh sat strapped in the single-seat cockpit of a Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bomber—nicknamed “Jug” for juggernaut. Motoring through the ether at speed, he was about 12,000 feet higher than the summit of Mount Everest. Lindbergh was eight miles high.

  Only a handful of pilots had ever flown at such altitudes. Under one wing, he could see the city of Detroit with its tight collection of buildings perched on the river, peaceful under a gauze of vapor cloud. Under the other wing was Toledo, Ohio, in the distance. Lindbergh set the trim tabs and adjusted the engine’s turbocharger for the oxygen-deprived air, enabling the engine to breathe. Though he wore his oxygen mask, he panted for air. He engaged his radio, sucking in a gasp before each word:

  “Willow . . . Run . . . tower . . . from . . . army . . . six . . . zero . . . three . . . eight . . . over.”

  A reply came from the airfield control room, but Lindbergh couldn’t make out the words. He was flying too high; the radio couldn’t function.

  Suddenly, he felt a jolt of dizziness—a sensation he had experienced before. He was about to faint from lack of oxygen, and he was alone in the cockpit with the engine roaring. His senses opened up, grasping for consciousness. Was something wrong with the oxygen mask? He knew from experience in an altitude chamber that he had about fifteen seconds to solve the problem, or he would likely lose consciousness and control of the airplane. If he descended rapidly, he could level off in air with more oxygen, at an altitude where he could breathe. So he shoved the yoke for
ward. The Thunderbolt plunged into a howling dive.

  Thirty-five thousand feet.

  Thirty-four thousand.

  Thirty-three thousand.

  Lindbergh’s eyes struggled to read the dials on the instrument panel. Then everything went black. He lost his eyesight. He could still hear the roar of the engine, but he had gone blind. He shoved the yoke harder, fighting the machine for his life.

  Thirty-three thousand feet.

  Thirty-two thousand.

  The instrument panel came back into focus, his eyesight returning. Instinctively, he pulled back on the stick and leveled off. He had made it.

  When he landed the Thunderbolt, he stepped onto the concrete runway in his army-issue flight suit: drab green head to toe, heavy leather boots, helmet and goggles, parachute strapped to his back. His senses tingled with alertness. After a consultation with a mechanic, he learned that his oxygen gauge was slightly off. Though the gauge said he had more oxygen, he had run out. His life had nearly been extinguished by a quarter-inch error of a tiny instrument needle.

  For Lindbergh, it was just another day on the job.

  As he drove from the airfield to his office inside Willow Run, he struggled with philosophical questions. Returning from the border of death always makes one more aware of life, he thought to himself. And so he gazed on the bomber plant with new eyes. As a young man, Lindbergh had found in the science of aviation an epistemology, a science he believed would open the universe to humanity and bring nations together. This was what it had now become: a ruthless weapon.

  “Now, it seemed a terrible giant’s womb,” he wrote of this moment, staring at Willow Run.

  Growling, clanging, giving birth to robots which were killing people by the thousands each day as they destroyed the culture of Europe. Inside, crawling over jigs and wings like ants, were thousands of men and women, sacrificing sunlit hours, home and family, shop and farm, to serve this hellish monster. This was the temple of the god of science at which we moderns worshipped. . . . Here I watched a steel door lift and an airplane roll outside; while, in reality, the walls of a cathedral fell and children died.

  With hundreds of bombers rolling out of Willow Run each month now, Lindbergh had found himself quite busy. The airfield would see over 7,000 Liberator takeoffs in 1943 alone. Each bomber required a two-and-a-half-hour shakedown flight and a pass on hundreds of checkoffs before it could be delivered to the army. Lindbergh spent hours each day in-flight and in the airfield hangars, mixing with other test pilots in the instrument laboratory, the engine shop, the parachute loft, and the exercise rooms.

  At the request of the army, Lindbergh began a series of high-altitude flying experiments, motoring higher and higher into the stratosphere over Willow Run, using his own body as a test dummy. Army intelligence had received word that the Nazis were conducting their own altitude experiments. If a bomber could drop its payload from 40,000 feet up, it could do so at little risk of anti-aircraft gunfire. The Nazis could employ this kind of bombing as a terrorist tactic, dropping TNT indiscriminately on London or even New York. (Hitler had a deep desire to tear down Manhattan’s world-famous skyline. After the war, the Allies would uncover a secret Nazi map of New York with German writing and a bull’s-eye on Midtown.)

  In Germany, Heinrich Himmler—head of the SS and co-architect of the “Final Solution,” the holocaust that was at that time unfolding—had arranged to move a compression chamber to the Dachau concentration camp, where a research doctor named Rascher used 200 prisoners, mostly Jews, to conduct experiments. The prisoners were thrust into the chamber and exposed to high-altitude conditions. Nearly half died from lack of oxygen, perishing in a panic under the watchful eye of Dr. Rascher. The rest were executed afterward so that news of these experiments could be kept secret. Still, Allied intelligence got word of them. Churchill told his advisers that “the enemy will very likely start high-altitude bombing.”

  At Willow Run, Lindbergh conducted experiments in a new $125,000 altitude chamber built by Ford engineer Emil Zoerlein. The chamber was the most cutting-edge of its kind. It resembled a chunk of an airplane fuselage, big enough for fourteen men, with five circular windows cut into the side. The apparatus was so large that the chamber was built on one floor at Willow Run while the machinery that controlled it was installed on the floor directly below. A control panel stood next to the chamber so that the man running it could see inside.

  Unlike other chambers, which could only simulate altitude (like the one at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where Lindbergh also conducted tests), Willow Run’s could affect altitude and temperature conditions, taking a man up to 60,000 feet and 70 degrees below zero. Freezing temperatures at such altitudes could damage equipment, and so such testing was deemed critical. The chamber was also built to test the ability of humans to endure high-altitude conditions and to handle emergencies that could arise in such situations.

  Lindbergh made his maiden voyage in the altitude chamber in 1943. He wore a special thick leather suit, which made him sweat uncontrollably upon entry. An attending physician attached an oximeter to the lobes of the aviator’s ears to observe the oxygen levels in his blood. The airlock door was closed, and Lindbergh gave the thumbs-up. A 500-horsepower gasoline car engine pumped up the pressure, and slowly Lindbergh ascended into a phantom stratosphere.

  The aviator had flown 43,000 feet up in a P-47 Thunderbolt. “Forty-three thousand feet is obviously close to the maximum altitude where one can remain for long without a pressure mask,” he wrote in his diary. And yet, soon after, he made a “flight” of 49,000 feet without a pressure mask in the altitude chamber in Willow Run. Only three men had ever flown higher in actual airplanes.

  Lindbergh wondered: Just how high could a person go before vapor formed in the bloodstream, before he touched the ceiling of human endurance and consciousness? Could he fly higher than any man ever had, while keeping his feet on the ground inside Willow Run? He was, in his own words, “anxious to find out.”

  23

  “The Arsenal of Democracy Is Making Good”

  Winter to Summer 1943

  The criminal, corrupt Fascist regime in Italy is going to pieces. The pirate philosophy of the Fascists and Nazis cannot stand adversity.

  —FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, 1943

  DURING HIS State of the Union Address in January 1943, the President stood at his podium engulfed by microphones. Behind him, Vice President Henry Wallace and House Speaker Sam Rayburn were as still as statues. Spread out around the House chamber, the nation’s elected officials awaited the message, divided as usual in policy but all behind the President in his campaign to protect the nation and win the war.

  Now ten years in office—longer than any other president—Roosevelt was a veteran of these speeches. This one—which would be translated into twenty-six languages—would be remembered for what the Washington Post called its “glorious goals.” The United States would “bomb [the Japanese] constantly from the air,” Roosevelt declared. As for the Nazis, “we are going to strike, and strike hard.” In the end, however, the speech’s main focus would be not just on the war abroad, but also on the Battle of Production at home.

  “In 1942, we produced 56,000 combat vehicles, such as tanks and self-propelled artillery,” the President said. “We produced 21,000 anti-tank guns, six times greater than our 1941 production. We produced ten and a quarter billion rounds of small arms ammunition, five times greater than our 1941 production and three times greater than our total production in the first World War. . . . Few Americans realize the amazing growth of our air strength.”

  Roosevelt concluded, “I think the Arsenal of Democracy is making good.”

  Since he had first delivered his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech on December 29, 1940, the President’s message had never veered. In speech after speech, he had continued to define and redefine this term. The phrase had been uttered by others before, but now it was attributed to Roosevelt, who had come to define it in a new way. The arsenal concept
’s underlying goal was to inspire American men and women, whether they worked in a factory or on a farm or in a laboratory studying the fragility of a uranium-235 atom. Every worker of every shade made a difference. Every time an alarm went off and an American got out of bed to go to work, that made a difference.

  Only now, early in 1943, did many Americans begin to fully grasp the arsenal concept’s meaning and its genius. As historian Jorg Friedrich put it: “Military strength was no longer based on the military abilities and skills of officers and rank and file but on the capacity of industry to supply the front with more and better weapons. The war of the future would be decided not at the theater of war but far behind the lines, in the factories and dwellings of the workers.”

  Now, in the spring of 1943, Roosevelt spent hours sitting alone in the Oval Office with his mountain of memos and confidential war progress reports. It was in these top-secret reports, to a large degree, that he consumed the overall narrative of the war. It was in these reports that the President could see his arsenal coming into its own. The war progress reports brimmed with heroic stories of battles not just overseas but in office buildings and factories in America.

  General Electric, the nation’s largest electrical equipment outfit and its fourth-largest corporation, was on its way to producing $3.3 billion worth of war equipment, most notably 30,000-horsepower naval turbines.

  Westinghouse Electric of Jersey City, New Jersey, was building bombsights, radar equipment, and other machinery worth nearly $1.5 billion.

  The Kleenex Tissue Company was building .50 caliber machine gun mounts.

  An orange-squeezer maker was producing bullet molds, a casket builder was producing airplane parts, and a pinball-machine maker was turning out deadly armor-piercing shells.