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

by A. J. Baime

  “What was your overall impression of the mission?” the officer asked.

  Phillips was so exhausted that he could barely move his jaw. “We . . . were . . . dragged through the mouth . . . of hell.”

  To this day, Operation Tidal Wave is the most highly decorated mission in US military history. In the official tallies of Operation Tidal Wave, 446 American airmen were killed or missing. Of the 178 bombers that had taken part, 88 returned to Benghazi, and few of those were undamaged. The casualty rate was so high that military leaders began to call August 1 “Black Sunday.” For this effort, the mission had knocked out less than half of the refinery operations. Soon they would be running at nearly 100 percent again, pumping out fuel for Hitler’s tanks and airplanes.

  Days after Black Sunday, President Roosevelt spoke to Congress about Operation Tidal Wave. Like so many things in the war so far, this mission had confronted unforeseen obstacles. The casualty rate was unacceptable, he admitted, “but I am certain that the German or Japanese High Commands would cheerfully sacrifice tens of thousands of men to do the same amount of damage to us, if they could.”

  Already in Washington, plans had begun to germinate. The Allies would go back to Ploesti with more Liberators, a more deadly force, and a more strategic attacking plan. Next time they would hit it harder.

  26

  The Detroit Race Riot of 1943

  Summer 1943

  23 Dead in Detroit Rioting; Federal Troops Enter City on the Orders of Roosevelt.

  —NEW YORK TIMES, front page, June 22, 1943

  THE DAY AFTER Edsel Ford’s funeral, Henry Ford II and his “Uncle” Ernie Kanzler opened the private safe in the basement of Ford’s Administration Building. Together they looked through a pile of dusty official documents hunting for anything that could be used in a court of law to wrestle the empire away from Harry Bennett, who now stood as the most likely candidate to become the next president of Ford Motor Company after Henry Ford.

  They found nothing.

  Young Henry was almost twenty-six. He had his grandmother’s chubby body, a nervous high-pitched voice, and no business experience to speak of. He had grown up in this empire; it was not just his birthright, but his identity too. Outside of his brief stint in the military, it was all he’d ever known. But he had never fought in the trenches of office warfare, certainly not against foes like Harry Bennett, in a business as hotly competitive as the auto game, at a company with some 230,000 domestic employees who did not know him as their boss.

  Even as a schoolchild, Henry II’s name had defined him. “The whole school—boys as well as teachers—was always, somehow, in awe of him,” as one childhood friend put it. “People might pretend otherwise, for the best of reasons, and they might try to treat him normally. But no one could ever quite forget that he was Henry Ford II.”

  Growing up, he had an idealistic relationship with his grandfather. Henry Ford had a special affection for young children; they seemed to strip him of his dark side and bring out the affectionate paternalism of his younger years. When his grandkids were young, Henry built a working farm on his land for them so they could learn to grow crops. He built a winter Christmas cottage for them, filled with toys, surrounded by real reindeer. Among Henry II’s earliest memories, he could recall playing in the inner sanctums of the Rouge with Henry Ford. “We . . . were allowed the run of the whole damn company,” Henry II remembered. “We could run railroads. We could get up in the engines and run them around the Rouge.” Henry II could remember learning to drive as a twelve-year-old on the streets of Detroit, grinding through gears as his famous grandfather sat beside him in the passenger seat, both smiling ear to ear.

  Now Henry II was a man, fatherless in a world where his father had been all but crucified, in the midst of a world war so out of control it seemed like the spinning globe was set ablaze. Henry II had no particular job at Ford Motor Company, no title or formal duties. His first day, he went to the Design Department to find Bob Gregorie, as Edsel had suggested.

  “Father told me to start here,” Henry II said.

  “That’s amazing,” recalled Gregorie, “when you think about it. Here Edsel was on his deathbed, and one of the things he wanted to impress upon his son was the importance of the Design Department to the future of the company.”

  Gregorie had known Henry II since he was a little boy. However, soon after Henry II’s return to Dearborn, Bob Gregorie was fired. “The whole place was a nuthouse,” he said of Ford Motor Company at the end of 1943.

  Henry II spent anxiety-ridden hours wandering the grounds of Willow Run and the Rouge, not knowing what else to do. Rather than address him as “Mr. Ford,” as others did, Bennett called him “the fat young man walking around with a pad in his hand.”

  “I am green,” Henry II told anyone who would listen, “and I am looking for answers.”

  The spotlight was on him. Everywhere he went, people pointed and whispered. That’s the new Henry Ford. He sure doesn’t look like Henry Ford. He failed engineering in school! Can he save the company?

  “All these people, they are determined to compare me to my grandfather,” Henry II told reporters when they came for a scoop. “I am no more like my grandfather than the man in the moon. I am like my mother.”

  Henry II didn’t get any help from Henry I. When the young man visited his grandfather, he got a chilly reception. Henry Ford seemed irritated by the presence of Edsel’s sons. At one point, he asked Sorensen to send Henry II off to California, as he had asked Sorensen to tell Edsel so many years before during the heated battles over the Model T in the mid-1920s. History was repeating itself.

  Young Henry did the best he could to please his grandfather—who, after all, was now president of the company.

  “I hope that somehow and in some way I can be of some value to you,” Henry II told Henry I, “and possibly relieve you of some few things and maybe in some small way do a few things daddy used to do,” he said, referring to his deceased father as he always had done when he was alive, as “Daddy.”

  Eventually, Henry II gathered the courage to move some personal belongings into his father’s corner office. He hung a picture of Edsel on the wall, so that the father was looking over the son’s shoulder. Then he set out to win a war of his own. For weeks he read through his father’s files, trying to understand what he should be doing, looking for answers. One observer found him studying Edsel’s papers “like a cryptographer looking for a clue.”

  Sorensen was thrilled to see young Henry. “Nothing pleased me so much in a long while like Henry II’s decision to come back again,” he wrote in his journal. He advised Henry II to get around the plant, let the workers see him. Sorensen promised that the whole atmosphere would change just by the young man’s presence. Said another Ford engineer, Anthony Harff: “When Mr. Henry Ford II came into the picture, why, we felt our prayers over a great number of years had been answered. We actually prayed for something like this to happen.”

  “Something had to be done to save the company,” Sorensen remembered. “I was hearing rumblings from Washington.” His fears were confirmed when he heard Drew Pearson, the powerful journalist who wrote the syndicated column “Washington Merry Go Round,” talking on the radio about how Henry Ford was too old to run his company and Roosevelt was ready to take the place over at any moment.

  And what of the Treasury investigation? Ford executives who knew about this investigation* understood that whatever the findings regarding Dearborn’s relationship with its French division during the war and the Trading with the Enemy Act, Washington lawyers would be able to twist the evidence enough so that it could be used to pry the company from the family’s hands.

  Under Sorensen’s iron fist, war production had continued to impress Washington. The skies over Willow Run filled with bombers from morning to night. Lindbergh’s test flights saw a constant improvement in the quality of the Liberators, which were being delivered to the army at a quickening pace. Ship number four hundred rolled o
ut of Willow Run on June 17, with another one hundred right behind.

  But what of the future? Without top leadership, Ford Motor Company was left rudderless.

  All signs pointed to disaster. Edsel had left behind a monster of war productivity: tanks, tank engines, bombers, airplane engines, superchargers, trucks, Jeeps, amphibious Jeeps, gliders, generators, gun mounts, a menu of spare airplane and tank parts, and a smelter pumping out 110,000 pounds of dangerously flammable magnesium per month. Racial tensions in the factories were high. All communication with factories in Axis territories had long since been cut off.

  With no job duties per se, Henry II focused on his task ahead—unseating Harry Bennett. As Henry II later said: “Harry Bennett is the dirtiest, lousiest, son-of-a-bitch I ever met in my life.”

  There was only one way to handle a man like that, and that was to look him in the eye, show no fear, and employ the same Machiavellian tactics that Bennett had mastered himself. One day, soon after his discharge from the navy, Henry II went to see Harry Bennett in his office. Bennett controlled the Ford empire from behind his locked door, outside of which a heavily muscled secretary sat leaning over an instrument panel covered in signal lights and switches—telephonics that connected Bennett to all his underlings, his tentacles reaching the empire’s darkest corners. The secretary buzzed Henry II in, and he pulled a seat up next to Harry Bennett’s desk.

  The two men sat and chatted amiably, Bennett in his trademark bow tie, Henry II in a fine-tailored suit, as his father had always worn. Both men chuckled nervously, folding their hands on Bennett’s desk, the eye contact awkward and side-glancing. Bennett knew exactly what young Henry was up to. He had come to take over, to fill his father’s shoes—to exact revenge.

  This thing killed my father, Henry II thought to himself. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it kill me.

  During those first weeks after Edsel’s death, Henry II saw top engineers flee the company. Without Edsel, there was no protection from Bennett and the Ford Terror. All the old Edsel loyalists now stood to pay a price.

  At one point, Henry II got word that a top Willow Run engineer—William Pioch—was going to quit. Pioch had headed up tool design in the bomber-an-hour project and had himself designed the $250,000 machine that churned out bomber wings like baseball bats. Young Henry called for Pioch, who showed up in his corner office.

  “What do you want to quit us for?” Henry II asked.

  “Well, I don’t like this setup you’ve got.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t like it? What don’t you like about it?”

  “You’ve got a stinkin’ setup here,” Pioch said. “It’s rotten. The people that are trying to run this place, I hate to tell you this, but I don’t trust them. I don’t like the man that is running this place. He has a bunch of guys out there that I can’t work with.” Henry II knew exactly who this he was. “They don’t take any orders from me,” Pioch continued. “They don’t listen to me. They don’t report anything to me, and they are people that are supposed to be working for me. I’m not getting anyplace.”

  “Would you stay if you worked for me?” Henry II asked.

  “I certainly would.”

  Pioch agreed to give it more time.

  Still, the exodus of Edsel-loyalists continued. Famed Detroit auto men like Laurence Sheldrick and Joe Galamb, whose contributions to Henry Ford’s empire through the years were immeasurable, walked away forever. In place of these departing figures, Harry Bennett installed his own men. The power struggle at Ford became the talk of the town.

  “In Detroit today, a casual passing mention of the Ford name will elicit tales and elaborations of tales about portentous goings-on inside the Ford empire,” read a long story in Fortune magazine. “A visitor to Detroit encounters them everywhere. They all say that Henry Ford, who will be eighty-one on July 30, is dominated by Harry Bennett, the man who has run Ford’s private police for more than 20 years, and that all Ford executives who would not bend the knee to Bennett have ‘resigned.’”

  The bloodletting grew so severe that even Sorensen himself saw the writing on the wall: “I decided that I had had enough. The picture was very clear now; the team was breaking up. The captain was a sick man. . . . The line coaches were gone. If anyone made a brilliant play, he was called out. As for me, there was only one thing for me to do, see that Henry II stayed on.”

  As Henry II struggled to get his feet under him in the summer of 1943, a heat wave took hold of Detroit. The factories sweltered. Local authorities made contact over growing rumors that violence was about to break out in Ford’s factories. The racial strife had simmered for months. Now it appeared ready to boil over.

  Remembered Harry Bennett: “Everyone’s nerves were stretched to the breaking point. As a final complaint, we were soon faced with a situation of extreme racial tension in the Detroit area. We got a tip that if race tensions broke into violence, as seemed likely, it was going to begin at the Rouge or at Willow Run.”

  On the hot morning of June 20, 1943, foremen at Willow Run and the Rouge stopped work. Complaining of poor conditions and intimidation by Harry Bennett’s Service Men, they walked off the job. The machines ground to a halt. Local and state police came whistling to the factory grounds, fearing the worst. All day police carefully managed the standoff, trying to keep the peace.

  As the sun dipped into the west, however, word came that a fight had broken out in downtown Detroit, a brawl between blacks and whites. The violence was spreading out of control. Cars full of men left the Rouge and Willow Run, headed downtown along Michigan Avenue. When they reached the inner city, they found it on fire. Detroit was dynamite, and someone had lit the fuse.

  A heat wave had the city on edge that afternoon of June 20, 1943. The mercury spiked over 90 degrees, a thick humid heat that got under the skin. At Belle Isle Park, situated on an island in the Detroit River a short bridge from downtown, a thousand people—mostly black—were taking refuge in the breeze skimming off the water.

  As car and foot traffic headed back over the bridge at the end of the day, some black teenagers bumped into a white sailor and his girlfriend. The sailor didn’t take it kindly. A scuffle broke out. A white man came to the sailor’s aid—then another. A black man stepped in—then another. A white girl punched a black girl, who fell to the ground; she got up and bloodied the white girl’s nose. In a minute’s time, the violence began to spill from the bridge into the city—black against white.

  At the Forest Club—a famed jazz bar on Hastings Street in the heart of Paradise Valley, Detroit’s Harlem—black revelers were drinking and dancing to a jazz band when a man in a suit stopped the music. He grabbed a microphone and announced that a fight had broken out at Belle Isle Park, that some white men had thrown a Negro woman and her baby into the river, killing the child. For months, rage had mounted among the black community—rage against a government that would not let them fight in the war as soldiers next to their fellow white citizens, rage against white suppressors who confined them to overcrowded, vermin-infested neighborhoods and paid them less for the same assembly-line jobs. Now this bar full of black men emptied, all of them headed for the Belle Isle Bridge.

  At a navy hangout down the street from Belle Isle, a group of two hundred white sailors were killing time over card tables. A man out of breath came bursting through the door. Blacks were beating up some white men and women on the bridge, the guy shouted. They had to do something! Two hundred Caucasian sailors charged outside, boots clattering down the pavement.

  By sunset, brawls had broken out all over downtown Detroit. There were so many Southern black “hillbillies” and white “hoodlums” fighting in the streets that the police were outnumbered and helpless. Once the law lost control, there was no stemming the violence. Now the sun had set. It was dark, and the nation’s fourth-largest city was in the hands of enraged rioters.

  Mobs of white men—many of them members of the Ku Klux Klan—swarmed the slums, armed with baseball bats and
knives. Blacks amassed by the hundreds on Woodward Avenue, stoning innocent people’s cars and terrorizing storefront clerks. Teenage Mexican pachucos in zoot suits joined the rioting. When crowds emerged from the Roxy Theater into the hot night, white men pulled bewildered blacks out and beat them senseless in front of their wives and girlfriends.

  In city and state buildings, government officials sat in their offices, frightened for their lives. Surely the police would regain control. In the mayor’s office on the corner of Jefferson and Woodward Avenues, Mayor Edward Jeffries was stunned to learn that members of his police department were locking themselves inside their squad cars for their own safety. For months, Jeffries had witnessed what he called “the rising tide” of racial aggression in the city. He had argued for a policy of maintaining “racial characteristics of neighborhoods,” believing that the best way to avoid violence was to keep blacks and whites apart. One police sergeant had said of the surging antagonism: “It will either blow up or blow over.”

  It was now clear which would be the case.

  The first death was reported at 6:15 AM Monday morning, fourteen hours after the riot began. Mayor Jeffries phoned Governor Harry Kelly. It was time to declare martial law.

  At sunrise on June 21—“Bloody Monday”—the streets of Detroit had taken on a post-apocalyptic glow. Fires blazed in cars and in storefronts, with no engine siren signaling that help was on the way. Instead, air raid whistles howled. Mayor Jeffries ordered all schools and businesses closed. Governor Kelly canceled the Indians-Tigers game and the day’s horse races. The war factories in the city and surrounding villages locked down. Citizens were advised to stay in their homes and lock their doors. There were mobs hunting the streets, and no one to stop them.