by A. J. Baime
From every theater of war, the Allied leaders heard good news. In the Battle of the Atlantic, a police force of Very Long Range Liberators (B-24s rigged with extra fuel capacity for extreme range) had fanned out over U-boat hunting grounds, destroying Nazi subs, clearing the shipping routes for American munitions to reach Europe. Stalin’s Red Army had defeated the Germans at Stalingrad in one of the most brutally fought battles of modern times. American forces had seized Guadalcanal in the first major offensive victory over the Japanese. The Allies had launched Operation Husky—the invasion of Sicily, commanded by the military’s rising star, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sixteen days after the first paratrooper landings, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had been removed from office and had gone into hiding. His execution was imminent.
It was time for the Allied leaders to begin serious discussions on Operation Overlord—the invasion of Europe, the climactic battle of World War II. But Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin also had some celebrating to do. On November 30, the three gathered for a dinner to honor Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday, with top-ranking military officials from all three nations present. Never had so much brass gathered at a single dinner table before, and never had modern history concocted such a strange alliance as this one—specifically Stalin, who as the supreme dictator of the Soviet Union had allegedly ordered the execution of hundreds of thousands of his own citizens. He was hardly a friend of democracy.
“I think about a hundred toasts and speeches must have been given,” General Hap Arnold recalled. “Stalin went around the table and clicked glasses with all the military men. He drank his liquor out of his own bottle—it was rumored there was nothing but water in it.” When it was Stalin’s turn to speak, the Soviet leader rose and put World War II into perspective. Curiously, his toast sounded like something that Henry Ford might have said, if Henry had ever put on a military uniform. Or William Knudsen, Charlie Sorensen, or Edsel Ford.
“I want to tell you,” Stalin said, “from the Russian point of view, what the President and the United States have done to win the war. The most important things in this war are machines. The United States has proven that it can turn out from 8,000 to 10,000 airplanes per month. Russia can only turn out, at most, 3,000 a month. England turns out 3,000 to 3,500. . . . The United States, therefore, is the country of machines. Without the use of these machines, through Lend-Lease, we would lose the war.”
The proceedings made Roosevelt swell with pride. “If there was any supreme peak in Roosevelt’s career,” the President’s chief speechwriter Robert Sherwood said, “I believe it might well be fixed at this moment, at the end of the Tehran Conference.”
When it ended, the leaders and their military officials returned to their command centers and steeled themselves for the D-Day invasion. But first, as agreed upon at the Casablanca Conference nearly a year earlier, they needed to gain full mastery of the skies—total air supremacy over Europe. The Combined Bomber Offensive would gather all its four-engine bombers and let them loose over Nazi territory, in the most striking display of airpower ever executed. General Arnold gave the order to his top-ranking Air Corps officers on January 1, 1944.
“This is my personal directive to you: DESTROY THE ENEMY AIR FORCES, IN ITS FACTORIES ON THE GROUND AND IN THE AIR.”
28
Ford War Production Exceeds Dreams
Winter 1943 to Spring 1944
Detroit, where they stand in line for a glass of beer, where you can’t get a good steak even from Mr. Black, where more dames wear slacks than in Hollywood, where somebody made a mistake and a race riot resulted, where there are more hillbillies than in Arkansas, and where everybody has two sawbucks to rub against each other. Detroit, the hottest town in America. . . . If the backwoods improves after the war, Detroit can take a major share of the credit, for there are over 400,000 people here who previously lived in whistle stops, four corners, and fur pieces down the road.
—DAILY VARIETY, October 29, 1943
IN THE MOTOR CITY, news of the Tehran conference hit the front pages on the morning of December 6, 1943. For Detroiters, the “Big Three” meant the world’s biggest car companies—General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford. Now the Detroit News offered a new definition with a historic photo of Roosevelt flanked by Stalin and Churchill. Papers across the country ran the full text of the “Declaration by 3 Allied Powers.”
“We have concerted our plans for the destruction of the German forces,” the Tehran statement read. “We have reached complete agreement as to the scope and timing of operations, which will be undertaken from the east, west, and south. . . . No power on earth can prevent our destroying the German armies by land, their U-boats by sea, and their war plants from the air. Our attacks will be relentless and increasing.”
By this time, Detroit’s production frenzy had reached its crescendo, and the men, women, and children hustling along its frozen streets took pride in seeing that photo of the Big Three, knowing that their city had become the most important locus of wartime production in the world. From the fourth-largest city in America, some 30 percent of the nation’s war matériel was pouring forth onto ships and through the skies to overseas bases.
For years, the motor industry icons had battled against each other in ruthless capitalist warfare, the all-consuming clamor for automobile market share. Now they worked together as a team. “Ford is making all-important units for General Motors,” wrote one journalist in Collier’s magazine, “and the latter is loud in its praise of the lean, dry genius whom it used to pretend to ignore. It’s just as if the Brooklyn Dodgers took a few days off and won a few games for the Phillies.”
General Motors was about to deliver its 854,000th military truck. GM’s Oldsmobile division had already delivered nearly 40 million artillery rounds. Pontiac had reduced the cost of its complex Oerliken anti-aircraft gun by 23 percent. Chrysler’s Dodge division was moving shortwave radar systems out at $9,386 apiece; engineers had figured out how to make them at 57 percent less cost than eighteen months earlier. The company’s gyrocompasses, each weighing 1,300 pounds, were costing 55 percent of the original fee, saving the government over $19 million on that one contract alone.
Readers flipping through popular magazines (a common pastime before TV sets appeared en masse in households) saw pages upon pages of automobile company advertisements with no pictures of automobiles:
The Toughest Fords Ever Built . . . Hard-hitting M-4 Tanks and M-10 Tank Destroyers
Horsepower Wins Wars . . . Chrysler Division of Chrysler Corporation
Pontiac: Building Fast and Building Well . . . For Liberty
Even as the labor market more than doubled in the Detroit region, the auto men running war factories had taken drastic measures to fill them with workers. Cadillac’s general manager, Nicholas Dreystadt, had been tasked with building top-secret bombsights on assembly lines where two years earlier workers were crafting luxury automobiles with the first-ever automatic transmissions (“Announcing the New Cadillac-Engineered Hydra-Matic Drive”). Desperate for hands to run machines, Dreystadt recruited 2,000 black prostitutes off the streets of Detroit—and their madams.
“They know how to manage the women,” he said.
Dreystadt made training films on how to build gyroscopes and put these women to work building these complicated objects. The unions protested, calling the Cadillac manager “nigger lover” and “whore monger.”
“These women are my fellow workers,” Dreystadt argued. “Whatever their past, they are entitled to the same respect as any one of our associates. For the first time in their lives, these poor wretches are paid decently, work in decent conditions, and have some rights.”
Soon these “red light district” women were surpassing quotas, and the bombsights they built were helping airmen to hit their strategic targets aboard bombers over enemy territory.
At Willow Run, Henry Ford and Harry Bennett turned up each morning to watch bombers roll out of the factory’s gaping jaws and onto the airfield
runways. Striding through Willow Run among the half-built bombers, Henry appeared an anachronism, as skinny as an insect and barely alert. He famously said around this time: “I invented the modern age.” But the war had accelerated all the nuances of modernity. History was being made at an exponentially faster pace than Henry Ford could fathom, and there were few better examples than the destructive devices that surrounded him and flew overhead.
How the world had changed before Henry Ford’s eyes, since the day he unleashed his Quadricycle upon the streets of Detroit in June 1896, with its four horsepower and its doorbell for a horn.
All through the winter, the bomber plant’s speed quickened, its operations more finely tuned and perfectly integrated with each shift on the assembly line. Willow Run produced 125 Liberators in September 1943, 150 in November, 165 in December, and 210 in January. By November 1943, Willow Run had birthed its first 1,000 bombers—and the second thousand were quickly on the way.
Only a year earlier, “Will It Run” was an embarrassment, held as an example in the national spotlight of all that could go wrong in the conversion to wartime. Now company public relations men began inviting back all those reporters and public officials who had brutally maligned it.
“Long lines of huge B-24 heavy bombers standing along the edge of the airport at Willow Run give visual evidence at what is being done at the world’s largest airplane factory,” wrote one journalist. “The whole operation is so vast, so sensational, that it conveys the impression of a sort of Niagara Falls of industry. The wonder is that anyone could get such a vast plant into production in less than two years.”
The Hartford Courant: “Willow Run Performing Brilliantly.” The Christian Science Monitor: “Ford War Production Exceeds Dreams.”
Visitors turned up daily to eye the industrial marvel. Walt Disney came to see it, as did William Randolph Hearst, Navy chaplain William McGuire (famous for the phrase “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”), and a certain European female sniper who had personally killed 309 Nazis. (“She was a strange, rather good-looking girl,” said Sorensen. “Hard to believe that she could be a killer.”)
By the end of winter, even the hypercritical Charles Lindbergh had to admit that the factory was humming. “We have been ahead of schedule for several months now,” he wrote in his journal on March 27, 1944.
“Bring the Germans and Japs to see it,” Sorensen said of Willow Run. “Hell, they’ll blow their brains out!”
Around the time of Roosevelt’s Tehran Conference, the government asked a team of engineers from the aviation firm Curtiss-Wright to fly in for a quality control report on Ford’s Liberators. The engineers swarmed the factory and the airfield.
“That Ford is producing high-grade planes is obvious,” read their assessment. “For all operations from pre-flight to delivery there are only 30–40 crabs [problems that needed fixing] written on each ship. From our point of view, this was phenomenal. However, this wasn’t always so, for until a comparatively short time ago, the number of crabs ran as high as 800.”
Still, the ultimate goal—a bomber an hour—eluded Willow Run. The job was not done yet, not at home or abroad.
One morning during the winter after Edsel’s death, a beat-up old car pulled into the parking lot at Ford’s Administration Building, and out stepped tall and lanky John Bugas. He was no longer with the FBI. Starting on this day, he was an employee of Ford Motor Company. Bennett had hired Bugas. He had grown so tired of the G-man and his boys crawling all over the Rouge that he decided to poach Bugas from the Bureau and install him as his top assistant.
“John’s the smartest man they’ve got,” Bennett told his Service Department thugs. “I’m going to hire him. I can give him twice what he’s getting with the FBI, and he’s worth it. He can be a big shot in the company, and that’s what he likes. He doesn’t have to cater to any of the big shots we got. He’ll work for me.”
Bugas wasn’t expecting any job offer. He wrote his boss J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, as if embarrassed by the situation: “The offer came as a complete surprise, and without any solicitation whatsoever at any time from myself.”
Twice the pay? Bugas took the job.
That first day, he returned to the parking lot to find that his car had been stolen. After some investigating, he learned that Bennett had taken his old clunker and replaced it with a brand-new Lincoln, with a big engine and plenty of shiny chrome. A new car during the war? According to the rationing rules, this was highly illegal—unless Bennett had submitted all the special paperwork, which was doubtful. “I had a terrible time getting my old car back from him,” Bugas remembered.
As the company’s new head of industrial relations, Bugas found himself at Bennett’s side day and night. They had known each other since Bugas had first arrived to head up the FBI’s Detroit office five years earlier. All through those years, Bennett had served as one of Bugas’s top FBI informants. Now Bugas was taking his wife Maggie to Bennett’s “Castle” for parties and riding Bennett’s horses. Bugas was an athletic type with picaresque stories of busting spies and bare-knuckle gallantry—just the kind of guy who could fit into Bennett’s crowd, if he so desired. Maggie Bugas liked to tell the story of the time that she and her husband were on a train when a man started verbally abusing a girlfriend. Bugas stepped in to stop it, and when the man swung at him, Bugas grabbed him by the neck and let him have it.
At first, Bugas made Henry II nervous. The new executive struck young Henry as yet another hurdle, another one of Bennett’s pawns—and a crafty one at that. “At first,” recalled Henry II of Bugas, “I didn’t know how to play him.”
But soon Henry II figured out where Bugas’s real allegiances lay: with Edsel Ford. Edsel had forged a friendship with Bugas before his death. Bugas had developed a keen sense of the difference between good and evil during his time with the FBI—including which side he belonged on. As one Ford biographer wrote, “The FBI man was actually a sort of time bomb Edsel had left ticking in Bennett’s vicinity.”
Sorensen and a handful of military officials stood one afternoon at the Willow Run airfield watching a tow-plane pull a Ford-built Waco CG-4A glider skyward. Before his death, Edsel had signed contracts to build the gliders from the family’s lumber mill in Kingsford, north of Detroit (today famous for its Kingsford brand of charcoal). Now officials from Washington had flown in to see the Ford glider in action, a sort of informal christening. The Allies were planning on using the gliders in massive numbers to land the first wave of troops behind the beaches on D-Day.
As Sorensen watched from below, the glider disengaged from the tow-plane and its pilot steered into a series of graceful maneuvers, diving into arcing bends, then straightening into a hover, the glider silent as it made its approach back to the ground.
The sound of an engine disrupted the scene. Sorensen turned and saw an automobile screech to a halt in front of him. One of Bennett’s Service Men jumped out, his face contorted with anger.
“Nobody invited Mr. Bennett!” he shouted.
Sorensen and the military officials looked at the man, amazed.
“Nobody invited Mr. Bennett!” he screamed again.
The group remained speechless. So the man jumped back in his car and tore out of there, leaving Sorensen chuckling to himself.
Still, Sorensen knew he had angered Bennett, who would certainly retaliate in some backhanded political machination. People were whispering about Sorensen—and he knew it. He was exhausted and slipping, and as the most powerful of all the Edsel supporters, he knew he was a prime target. Sorensen was also hearing a new wave of rumors that the President was going to sweep in and take over Ford Motor Company. A friend in Washington’s Office of Price Administration had personally called Sorensen on the phone to tell him that Roosevelt was adamant: Henry Ford had to be removed as president of the nation’s third-largest defense contractor. Roosevelt was about to place his own operative in charge.
Sorensen had one last fight in him. He prepared
to take Henry II on an important political mission. They would go to Washington, New York, everywhere they could get a meeting with the power elite of government, finance, and industry. After a train ride to New York City, Sorensen presented the new Henry Ford to the heads of the big banks. The pair flew together to Washington, where Henry II shook hands with General Arnold and General George Marshall, America’s highest-ranking military figure.
In his office in the recently completed Pentagon, General Arnold showed Henry II and Sorensen aerial surveillance photos of damage to a factory in Regensburg, Germany, which had been bombed by Allied planes—some very likely built at Willow Run. Arnold was able to enlarge one photo so they could look through the smashed roof into the Nazi factory.
Henry II must have thought of his dad, looking at the work Edsel had done in a new light. Sorensen saw his work in a new light too—direct evidence of what American bombers were doing to the enemy. “That is the way to win the war,” he said. “We will get all their essential plants.”
Exactly, General Arnold agreed. That was the strategy of the US Air Corps—to stop Hitler by stopping his war machine.
Henry II left Washington thrilled and empowered. He was rubbing elbows with the nation’s elite. Back in Dearborn, Sorensen was driving with Henry Ford I one day when the old man asked how Henry II was getting along.
“He’s doing fine,” Sorensen said. “I feel like a father toward him now. I’m going to help him every way I possibly can.”
Henry II was under fire. At every turn, he suffered the ignominy of Harry Bennett’s tactics. One day Henry II was meeting in his office with Sorensen when Bennett phoned. Young Henry picked up and got an earful. He couldn’t get a word in. Bennett was furious about something and letting Henry II have it. Sorensen left the room so that Henry II could endure the embarrassment in privacy. When Sorensen walked back in, he found Henry II utterly composed. Young Henry said nothing about the phone call and continued calmly with Sorensen where he had left off.
