by A. J. Baime
Dow Chemical had invented a plastic sheeting substance with which to wrap and seal munitions headed for overseas, coating tanks, airplanes, and machine guns to protect them from moisture and salt from the sea. This new substance would be called Saran Wrap.
For some, the defining production story of the war would be that of Henry Kaiser, the upstate New York–born industrialist whose company had played a major role in building the Hoover Dam and was now churning out Liberty ships from his shipyards with miraculous speed.
Even the US pharmaceutical industry was playing a critical role—pumping out rivers of a new wonder drug called penicillin.
Economists had long postulated what a full-on war economy could do for the Great Depression. The year before the war began, unemployment in the United States hit 17.2 percent. In the spring of 1943, the rate fell to 4.7 percent. “The war has finally accomplished most of what the New Deal set out to do,” Washington Post columnist Raymond Clapper wrote in 1943. (Clapper would be killed a year after penning these words, while reporting on the war in Europe.) “The war has given every workman a job at high wages, and removed him from dependence on charity.”
Perhaps the best news of all on the home front: Detroit was finally showing its muscle. In 1943 Secretary of War Henry Stimson put a military plane at William Knudsen’s disposal to tour the nation for a full report on war production. The former General Motors president was now a lieutenant general in the US Army—the first and only civilian to this day to receive such a commission. He visited 1,200 factories, flying a quarter of a million miles. When he delivered his report to Stimson, it told a story in which Detroit’s auto industry played the starring role in the Battle of Production.
The state of Michigan received 10 percent of the billions of dollars’ worth of war production contracts, more than any state except New York, which had more than double the population of Michigan. And the great majority of those contracts in Michigan were being executed in one city, Detroit, and its suburbs.
Chrysler’s Detroit Tank Arsenal—a factory that didn’t exist three years earlier—had now succeeded in building roughly as many tanks as all the factories in Nazi Germany combined. On the first floor of an abandoned department store at 1525 Woodward Avenue in Detroit, the motor company had set up a makeshift laboratory for its “X-100” program. With the FBI working as security, Chrysler engineers were developing diffusers for a government project so secret that none of those engineers had any idea what the diffusers were for. Only after the war would they find out: they were helping to build the atomic bomb.
All ninety-four of General Motors’ plants stateside were throbbing with efficiency. GM was building Allison aircraft engines and Avenger and Wildcat fighter planes. American soldiers were motoring into battle in GM tank destroyers, amphibious “DUCK” trucks, and two-and-a-half-ton troop transporters, and they were firing GM-built submachine guns, bullets, and mortar shells at the enemy.
The city of Detroit had grown so rapidly in the past two years that its population was threatening to surpass Philadelphia’s to make it the third-largest city in America. General Motors of Detroit had become the number one military contractor in the United States, ahead of the aviation powerhouse Curtiss-Wright in second place and Ford Motor Company in third. According to a public poll in 1943, however, Americans believed that no single Detroit industrialist was contributing more to the war effort than Henry Ford.
In July 1943, Roosevelt made a short getaway to the property he liked to call Shangri-La, the woody presidential retreat seventy miles northwest of the White House, now known as Camp David. He was preparing a talk with his speechwriters. The day before the speech, he held his regular press conference. Winged by reporters, he smiled with his cigarette holder dangling from his mouth. There had been some rioting recently in the United States, and the papers had criticized the President for his handling of the home front. A reporter asked what his upcoming speech was going to be about.
“It’s going to be about the war,” Roosevelt said straight-faced.
“Abroad or at home, sir?”
“You know,” Roosevelt said, a little miffed, “I hoped you would ask that question just that way. There are too many people in this country . . . who are not mature enough to realize that you can’t take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of it and put the war abroad on one side and put the home front on the other, because after all it all ties in together.
“When we send an expedition to Sicily,” Roosevelt continued, speaking of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily that began July 9, “where does it begin? Well it begins at two places practically. It begins on the farms of this country, and in the mines of this country. And then the next step in getting that army into Sicily is the processing of the food, and the processing of the raw material into steel, then the munitions plants that turn the steel into tanks and planes. . . . Then it’s put on ships that are made in this country.”
The invasion of Sicily, the President pointed out, was a perfect example of his arsenal concept. It required 14,000 Jeeps and trucks, 600 tanks, and any number of airplanes—equipment that was built on assembly lines by civilians, who were pouring out more trucks and tanks and airplanes with each passing day. The plan was working. As the President famously said in 1943: “Yes, the Nazis and Fascists have asked for it. And they are going to get it.”
Edsel Ford was at his desk one day when he received a shocking letter. The missive was addressed to Edsel’s secretary Lepine, and it was signed by a lower-level Ford executive.
“Last night at five o’clock I took a call from a person who refused to give his name,” the letter read, “who said that defense material valued at $8,000 to $12,000 was being taken out of the Rouge Plant in trucks every day, the material being sold on the outside by a ring of men. He accused Mr. Harry Bennett as leader.”
Edsel had long suspected that Bennett’s tentacles were woven deep into the underworld, and that this underworld thrived right under the Ford family’s noses, here in Dearborn. For months there’d been rumors of thefts in the plants. Others had accused Bennett before—but they learned their lesson quickly. “If anybody made a complaint about any stealing around the plant,” said Ford production engineer Mead Bricker, “usually Bennett had them beaten up.”
Was Bennett running an inside job? For a man who didn’t get paid piles of money, he lived a high life, with properties and boats and horses. “I don’t have any idea how much he pilfered,” Edsel’s son Henry II later said of Bennett, “but I’m positive—although I don’t have any proof—that he could not have lived the way he did on the salary he had. . . . He stole the place blind either through the dealers or some other fashion. I don’t know how the hell he did it, but he did it.”
Edsel was determined to solve this case. If he could prove Bennett’s guilt, he could get rid of him once and for all. Edsel had an ace up his sleeve—his dear friend in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. The pair dined together in the nation’s capital regularly. Edsel gave Hoover a call. Soon the FBI’s Detroit bureau chief, John Bugas, arrived in Dearborn. The thirty-five-year-old lawyer and G-man from tiny Wamsutter, Wyoming, had a lanky basketball player’s body, a curiously canine face, and the cowboy mentality he had honed during his years working as a national park ranger.
Bugas spent the better part of a Saturday with Edsel, talking over the security of Ford’s war plants and the accusations of theft on company and government property. They toured Willow Run and the Rouge, examining locations where trucks could move government property out the doors under the cover of night. Neither Bugas nor Edsel knew at the time of their first meeting that it would be one of the most important of both of their lives.
It turned out that Bugas knew Harry Bennett well. Through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Bennett was probably the FBI’s most valuable informant in the Detroit area. “On numerous occasions when serious crimes occurred in Detroit and elsewhere in the state,” Bugas wrote in an FBI report d
ated March 30, 1939, “[Bennett] has personally entered activities of the investigation and been of considerable assistance.” Bugas called Bennett “a very valuable friend of this office.”
Still, Bennett’s service to the Bureau did not warrant immunity. He may have been above the law within Henry Ford’s empire. But he was not above the law in the eyes of J. Edgar Hoover.
John Bugas first joined the nation’s most elite police force in 1935, the year its name changed from the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was a fearless, inventive investigator, adept at the art of fisticuffs while wearing a suit. As a special agent in Alaska and Alabama, Bugas rose quickly through the ranks. “Guns, tough situations and ornery men were . . . second nature to him,” as his daughter would later say. Hoover assigned Bugas to head up the Detroit bureau in 1938, more than doubling his pay to $6,500 a year.
The Motor City was no stroll in the park. It was a tangled nexus of opposing forces: labor versus management, black versus white, rich versus poor. During Prohibition, given its close proximity to Canada, it became the home of a thriving underground economy that continued to bubble up after the “Noble Experiment” ended and the bars restocked their liquor shelves. As the Detroit News stated in 1939: “In no city was there such an unholy alliance among hired gunmen, high-level executives, government officials, and police agents as openly existed in Detroit.”
Since the start of the war, Detroit had morphed from a hard city into what Time magazine called “the biggest wartime boomtown of all,” with a surging population full of out-of-towners. Bugas was the man in charge of policing its underworld.
After Pearl Harbor, frightened citizens turned up at his offices at all hours to report “suspicious Japs” and suspected Nazi spies. The phones rang off the hook. Within two days after the United States entered the war, Bugas had taken into custodial detention forty “dangerous aliens”—thirty-eight Germans and two Italians, including an economics professor at the University of Detroit. Sleepless and overworked, Bugas drank paranoia from his coffee cup. He’d spent enough time snooping around certain German restaurants downtown to see men furtively handing each other Nazi propaganda, whispering to each other with German accents.
There were Nazis in America, right in Detroit. The question was: how dangerous were they?
Even before the United States entered the war, Bugas had already made several high-profile busts of spies and potential foreign terrorists. In 1940 he uncovered a plot to blow up the Dodge factory downtown, taking into evidence a tin containing forty dynamite caps and a mysterious note: “This is all I can get. I’ll have the other soon by the time you are ready for it. Watch Mike. Don’t let him know too much. I must see you on the weekend. Things is shakey.”
In another foiled plot, the G-man used an apartment with one-way mirrors to gather information on an attractive German countess and Nazi spy named Grace Buchanan-Dineen. It was “a bizarre plot,” in his words. “It will sound like a storybook reading, it is so fantastic.” She led him to five other Nazi operatives working in the Detroit area, feeding facts on American aviation production back to the German government.
These agents were not working alone. The Nazis’ thirst for knowledge about America’s bomber program was insatiable. Bugas’s Detroit detective work had uncovered spying equipment as well as Nazi flags, rifles, and handguns. With his help, the FBI had cracked the largest espionage case in US history days before Pearl Harbor. A double agent named William Sebold brought down the Duquesne Spy Ring; thirty-three suspected Nazi spies were taken into custody, one of them in Detroit.
Bugas was also surveiling certain auto executives, under suspicion for Nazi sympathies. Among them: Ernest Liebold, Henry Ford’s longtime secretary, who had power of attorney over Henry’s bank accounts. Liebold had close ties to one of the Nazi spies busted in the Duquesne Spy Ring; Bugas had caught them communicating on various occasions in 1940 and 1941, recording the encounters on 16-millimeter film. According to informants, Liebold had proclaimed the night the Nazis attacked Poland that Germany would “blow the hell out of London in three weeks and teach the damn Jew bankers a lesson.” Informants also told the FBI that Liebold called President Roosevelt “a Jew” and that the Ford secretary’s wife had once remarked, “When Hitler comes here you will be glad you knew us.” Liebold had even allegedly bragged that he had access to the blueprints of the Willow Run bomber plant.
Bugas’s investigation ultimately found Liebold to be harmless. It is highly likely that Harry Bennett had something to do with these findings.
Like everyone who spent time with Edsel Ford, Bugas found him eminently respectable. After their first meeting, Bugas sent in his operatives to question various members of Bennett’s Service Department. Did they know anything about these reported thefts? What was the status of Ford security? Bennett was reputed to know everything that went on within the Ford empire. But he claimed no knowledge of thievery.
Bennett grew tired of the FBI’s questions. In an office, he had it out with Edsel. He was “sick and tired of having my men called in by Bugas.”
“We’ve got to do something,” Edsel responded. The allegations claimed that crooks were walking off with thousands of dollars’ worth of government property every day. “They’re carrying the goddamn plant away!”
Bugas and J. Edgar Hoover together produced a dense twelve-page report for Edsel. It focused on the protection of war plants against sabotage (background checks on all employees and security around specific areas of danger, such as large tanks of gasoline or chlorine gas “of sufficient volume to cause considerable danger in the event it should be suddenly released”). The report also focused on protecting the factories from theft.
Even after this report was filed, however, Bugas continued to show his face around the Rouge and Willow Run. Edsel had put the G-man and Bennett on a crash course.
24
Death in Dearborn
Spring to Summer 1943
I do miss him so terribly that at times it seems impossible to go on, and yet I feel so very close to him that that gives me comfort. I brought down so many pictures so that everywhere I look I can see him.
—MRS. EDSEL FORD, August 1943
EDSEL WAS IN HIS office in early April 1943 when the company’s head of purchasing, A. M. Wibel, came to see him. Harry Bennett had made deals with suppliers for some materials, Wibel said, and these suppliers seemed a little dubious. As head of purchasing, and a longtime respected Ford executive, Wibel had to deal with the Washington accountants. The war plants were government property. Anything fishy and the accountants would invade the place. Now Wibel came to Edsel, raising a red flag.
“There were people that we were asked to put on the payroll for no apparent reason except to pay a debt of some kind,” Wibel said. “They were people that had to be paid for something they never did.”
Fed up, and with nothing to lose, Edsel went looking for Harry Bennett, unleashing his fury. Bennett was stunned. He went to Henry Ford—who by now, nearing eighty years old and suffering significant signs of dementia, was an easy target for a master manipulator.
“You know Edsel is sick,” Bennett said, “and here’s Wibel, making him upset! You make up your mind whether you are going to lose Edsel or get rid of Wibel.”
Soon Wibel was told that his days at Ford—over thirty years—were over. He was sent home for good. Since Edsel was nineteen years old, he had known A. M. Wibel. “Wibel was one of the Ford greats,” Sorensen later said. “From then on,” he remembered sadly, “events moved with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy.”
On April 15, 1943, Edsel arrived at work late and in pain. “Looks like a sick man to me,” Sorensen wrote in his journal. “I am worried about him.” That night, at home, Sorensen’s phone rang. It was Henry Ford. He told Sorensen to meet with Edsel and make him “change his attitude on everything.” Henry went on a rant—about Edsel’s Grosse Pointe friends like Ernie Kanzler (whom Edsel’s kids cal
led “Uncle Kanzler”) and their society cocktail parties, and about Harry Bennett. Sorensen grabbed a pencil and took notes, cataloging Henry’s complaints about Edsel:
Discord over handling labor unions.
Bennett in full accord with Henry Ford. Henry Ford will support Bennett against every obstacle.
Change relations with Bennett.
Kanzler relationship—wants it broken up.
Regain health by cooperating with Henry Ford.
The father-and-son relationship had come to an impasse. The next morning, Sorensen went to Edsel’s corner office and showed him his notes. Edsel fell to pieces.
“I feel I can be helpful,” Sorensen said, “but if you wish, I will go no further. It’s evident where Mr. Ford is getting these ideas. But to me that is not so distressing as would be a break between you and your father.”
In tears, Edsel sat slumped on a couch. “The best thing for me to do is resign,” he said. “My health won’t permit me to go on. Charlie, I want you to know I appreciate very much what you are trying to do. It is a kindly thing to do and I respect your help.”
“If you go,” Sorensen said, “I go too.”
For the next two hours, they discussed their obligations. The President needed them. Their country needed them. Willow Run was almost in full production. The bomber-an-hour goal had yet to be achieved, but it was in their sights. Sorensen asked Edsel to do one thing: it was time for Henry Ford II to leave the military and join his father at Willow Run and the Rouge. Edsel needed his oldest son now. Perhaps it was clear to Sorensen in that moment: for Edsel, there was no tomorrow. Henry II was going to have to take on his father’s battles, and the sooner he got started the better.
