by A. J. Baime
Still, the confidential reports regarding production in America that crossed Roosevelt’s desk in the spring of 1944 were nothing short of miraculous—specifically when it came to four-engine bombers. According to a March 1944 top-secret report to the President: “Heavy bomber production was again outstanding with 1,508 acceptances of B-17s and B-24s.” The month before the D-Day invasion, a confidential war progress report stated: “May was a great month for planes . . . with heavy bombers making a brilliant showing.” Simultaneously, the President received secret wires to his map room telling of the Allies’ mastery of the skies in Europe. On May 8, 1944: “Operations of our Air Forces during the past four months have definitely resulted in marked depletion of German Air Power.”
In the final hours before D-Day, Roosevelt received another confidential production report. A chart showed “The ‘Big Ten’ of the Invasion,” listing the number of aircraft mass-produced between 1940 and 1944. Number one on the list: the B-24 Liberator. Over 10,000 of them had taken flight. Nearly half of those built so far had rolled out of Willow Run, and in the coming months Ford’s production would increase until it was making 70 percent of the nation’s Liberators. At the time of the invasion, the Liberator had already become America’s most mass-produced airplane of any kind, ever.
By June 5, twenty-four hours before D-Day, the tension in the White House had grown unbearable. Looking at the President, Eleanor Roosevelt saw that her husband had become elderly. Now in his fourth term in the White House and his third year of the war, he had given all he had to his country. According to one presidential secretary, “every movement of his face and hands reflected the tightly contained state of his nerves.” On that very day, Rome fell to the Allies. Roosevelt wrote to Churchill: “We have just heard of the fall of Rome and I am about to drink a mint julep to your very good health.” But no one could celebrate in the White House.
Operation Overlord—the D-Day invasion—was the largest, most hazardous military enterprise ever to be undertaken. The President had called on his nation to build the Arsenal of Democracy, and his nation had come through for him. All he could do now was sit and wait for news from Europe.
Under the cover of night in the early hours of June 6, 1944, the largest air armada in history banked downward over the beaches of Normandy, flying just 500 feet over the breaking waves. The decibels were immeasurable. “As dawn broke,” recalled one captain standing on the beach, “we could observe one of the most impressive sights of any wartime action. Wave after wave of medium and light bombers could be seen sweeping down the invasion beaches to drop their bombs.”
“Rosie the Riveter back home had been very busy,” said another American who witnessed this scene.
For CBS radio, Murrow was reporting from London, watching the bombers take off on their D-Day missions. “Early this morning we heard the bombers going out,” he announced. “It was the sound of a giant factory in the sky.”
The first planes to bomb the beaches were B-26 Marauders, built by the Glenn L. Martin Company outside Baltimore. They were powered by Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp engines, a huge number of them built at the Rouge factory in Dearborn, Michigan, under the supervision of Charlie Sorensen and Edsel Ford.
At the same time, 1,200 American heavy bombers swung low over the beaches and over the oil refineries of Ploesti, Romania. Over those oil refineries, 407 B-24s made their attack runs on D-Day, delivering knockout blows.
Flocks of Waco wooden invasion gliders, carrying equipment and airborne troops, whistled engineless over the Normandy beaches, nearly 1,500 aircraft strong. The Wacos had been built by many companies, such as Michigan’s Gibson Refrigerator and Arkansas’s Ward Furniture Company. But no outfit had built more of those gliders than Ford Motor Company. The predawn landings came in two waves: one named Chicago, the other Detroit.
The Allied forces rolled out their tanks and equipment and guns. Over 1,000 landing craft unloaded men, tanks, Jeeps, and trucks. In the first fifteen hours, American forces pushed 1,700 vehicles onto Utah Beach alone (there were five landing beaches in all).
By the time Overlord’s supreme commander, General Eisenhower, set foot on the sand, it was littered with broken vehicles, torn apart by enemy gun and cannon fire. “There was no sight in the war that so impressed me with the industrial might of America as the wreckage on the landing beaches,” Eisenhower recalled. “To any other nation the disaster would have been almost decisive. But so great was America’s productive capacity that the great storm occasioned little more than a ripple in the development of our build-up.”
From day one of World War II, the airplane had revolutionized combat. In the war’s climactic battle, it remained a key weapon. On the D-Day beaches, Eisenhower was joined by his son John, who had just graduated from West Point. Above them, Allied planes of all kinds flew over at low altitude, the furious exhaust notes of the engines driving through the percussion of gunfire.
“You’d never get away with this if you didn’t have air supremacy,” John said to his father.
“If I didn’t have air supremacy,” General Eisenhower answered, “I wouldn’t be here.”
The morning of D-Day, the moment clocks hit 10:00 AM in Detroit, citizens all over the city heard a strange orchestra of factory whistles and church bells. The deafening machinery in the myriad war factories was silenced. Workers put down their tools. Schoolchildren dropped their books and pencils on their desks. Buses and streetcars slowed to a stop. Pedestrians with newspapers tucked under their arms—which already had their D-Day headlines because of the time zone difference with Europe—stopped and hung their heads in prayer.
Then, after those few minutes of tribute, the streetcars and autos and buses and factories gunned their engines again. There was a job to do, and the soldiers in the Battle of Production were going to work.
In the offices at Ford Motor Company—as in offices in every city in America—men in suits stood, steadying their nerves, listening over the radio to the speech General Eisenhower gave to his troops upon sending them into battle on D-Day morning. Many would describe a sensation of terrific fragility while listening to Eisenhower’s voice. The speech came over the radio again and again, all day long.
Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force. You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. . . . Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war. . . . The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!
One month after D-Day, Willow Run met its goal of a bomber an hour, 400 per month, and then exceeded it. Newspapers across the nation heralded the achievement of Edsel Ford and Charlie Sorensen’s bomber factory. Willow Run produced 415 Liberators in July 1944. A month later, that number hit 432.
For the rest of 1944 and deep into 1945, Allied airpower rained terror on the Nazis. It became clear that the war was going to be won, and soon. In his father’s corner office, Henry II could see in the newspaper and radio reports what the rest of America was seeing. Under the relentless pounding of heavy bombers and under the conquering treads of Sherman tanks, the Third Reich was crumbling. Good would defeat evil in the end.
But in Dearborn, there was one battle left to fight.
30
The Final Battle
Spring to Fall 1945
Don’t make the mistake of pulling the trigger, because I’ll kill you. I won’t miss. I’ll put one right through your heart, Harry.
—JOHN BUGAS
A RUMOR SPREAD THROUGH the Ford offi
ces in 1945 like some kind of bad odor. Henry Ford had created a codicil to his will, it was whispered, and the codicil stipulated that no one could be named president of Ford Motor Company for the present time and for ten years after his death. When Henry passed away, according to these rumors, the board of directors would run the corporation’s day-to-day affairs, with Harry Bennett as secretary.
Now eighty-one, Henry’s grip on reality had continued to slip away. He was succumbing to time. “There was a great change in his physical appearance,” remembered longtime Ford man Charles Voorhess. “He had lost his contented nervous energy and drive.” Henry would begin sentences and forget what he was saying. He would ask to see employees who had not worked for him for years or, in some cases, decades. When Henry II visited his grandfather at Fair Lane, he was unable to get through to the old man. It was as if he were talking to a replica of the real Henry Ford.
Young Henry took the news of the codicil gravely. He told the few trusted colleagues he had that he was considering leaving it all behind, that he had just about had enough. He faced the same decision his father had faced so many years before. Edsel could have walked away as a young man and lived a quiet life of luxury, putting his family over his job duties. Instead, he took on the challenge of running the empire. It was probably the hardest decision Edsel ever made, and the one that earned him the most respect in his life.
Henry II pressed on. He agreed with his confidant John Bugas that the only way to handle this situation was to confront Bennett about the codicil. So Bugas went to see Bennett in his office in the basement of the Rouge. Bennett’s secretary buzzed him through the door. Bugas found Bennett agreeable.
“You come in here tomorrow,” Bennett said, “and we’ll straighten the whole thing out.”
When Bugas arrived the next day, Bennett produced the document. In a bitter display, he dropped the codicil on the floor, lit a match, and set fire to it. When the document was reduced to a pile of ashes, Bennett swept them up, dumped them in an envelope, and handed it to Bugas.
“Take this back to Henry,” he said.
(“It wasn’t any good anyway,” Bennett later said of the document, when questioned by the company’s chief legal counsel, I. A. Capizzi. “Mr. Ford had carried the instrument around in his pocket for a long time and had made a lot of scribblings on it, including verses from the Bible.”)
Next, Henry II paid a visit to Fair Lane. He made sure that his grandmother Clara was present, as well as Henry.
“I think it’s about time we did something to clean this place up,” Henry II told his ailing grandfather.
Clara Ford spoke up, trying to get through to her husband. “Henry, I think young Henry should take over.”
Henry II left Fair Lane without getting the answer he wanted. But he returned. He refused to give up.
“Look, you’re not well,” Clara Ford told Henry. “And it’s about time somebody got in there.”
Henry II said, “There are things going on that shouldn’t be going on, and I think we’ve really got to stand up and do some things. I think that I’ve got to do some things, and I just can’t get to you often enough to discuss all the details with you.”
As the legend of Ford Motor Company goes, it was Eleanor Ford—Edsel’s widow—who came to her son’s aid. It was Eleanor who ultimately played a chess move that could not be defended. “He killed my husband,” she allegedly said of Henry Ford. “And he’s not going to kill my son.” She demanded that Henry Ford II become president of Ford Motor Company. “If this is not done,” she told the family, “I shall sell my stock.”
Her demand sent a shock wave through Dearborn. If Eleanor Ford sold her stock, a large portion of the company would go to the highest bidders on Wall Street. Not in over two decades had anyone owned a crumb of Ford Motor Company outside of the Ford family.
The threat worked. Days later, Henry Ford called his grandson to Fair Lane. Henry I offered Henry II the company’s presidency. “Okay, Henry,” the old man said, “you take over. You call the board meeting and I’ll write my letter of resignation.”
Already, Henry II had begun to evolve into the legendary chief executive he was about to become. A year and a half had passed since he had left the navy and returned to Dearborn. In the name of his father, he had fought for the reins of one of the biggest companies in the world—and now he had won. Facing his grandfather’s offer of the presidency, Henry II’s answer set the tone for the company’s next forty years.
“I’ll take it only if I have completely free hand to make any change I want to make.”
In April 1945, the Allies closed in on Berlin. On the 12th, with American troops less than 100 miles from the Nazi capital, Roosevelt was visiting his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had a special pool for polio victims that was built through a charitable donation by Edsel Ford. It was a Thursday. The President was sitting for a portrait by the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff. As his staff set a lunch table, he told them the portrait would soon be done, to wait just a bit to bring the food.
“We have just fifteen minutes more,” he said.
He raised his right hand to his forehead “in a jerky way,” as Shoumatoff recalled. After a pause, he put his left hand to the back of his head and muttered his final words: “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.”
His eyes closed and he lost consciousness. Franklin Roosevelt was dead. The President was sixty-two years old, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage. Today Shoumatoff’s painting—Unfinished Portrait—hangs in the Little White House Historic Site in Warm Springs.
With American troops closing in, Adolf Hitler remained locked in a secret Berlin bunker with his wife Eva Braun (they had married in a private ceremony on April 29) and his dog Blondi. Also present was Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, with his wife and six kids. They danced, enjoyed champagne, all the while readying themselves for suicide. There was no more use fighting off the American air offensive. “Hitler said it was no good to bomb American airplanes because more of them would come like bees,” Goering later recalled.
“Believe me,” Hitler said of these final hours, “it will be easy to end my life. A brief moment, and I am freed from everything, released from this miserable existence.”
The dog was the first to go, poisoned with prussic acid. Eva Braun was next, also taking the poison. When she had sucked in her last breath, Hitler sat to the right of her slumped figure and whiffed the almond stink of the acid she had swallowed. He lifted his 7.65-millimeter Walther, aimed at his right temple, and pulled the trigger. The date was April 30, ten days after his fifty-sixth birthday. Goebbels followed, taking his wife and all six of his young children with him in the act of suicide.
Berlin fell two days later.
On May 7, 1945, Nazi Germany offered the unconditional surrender that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had called for at the Casablanca Conference. In Detroit that morning, the streets crowded with revelers who stood ankle-deep in confetti hurled out the windows of the tall buildings downtown. Fearing the worst, the State Liquor Control Commission ordered all liquor stores closed and locked for twenty-four hours. Thousands huddled around radios to listen to the official announcement of V-E Day from the new president, Harry Truman, whose ambitious work with the Truman Committee throughout the war had vaulted the Missouri senator all the way to the vice presidency and now, with the death of Roosevelt, the office of the nation’s chief executive.
On August 6, under orders from President Truman, the Allies’ new superbomber, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, dropped the “Little Boy” bomb on Hiroshima in Japan. Three days after “Little Boy,” the second atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” landed on Nagasaki.
Japan surrendered on August 14. On that morning, the Detroit News banner headline read: “Truman’s Proclamation—War Ends!”
The month that Hitler died, signs appeared all over Willow Run.
“To the Employees of The Ford Willow Run Plant: Changing war needs and the rapid coll
apse of the German Luftwaffe have reduced requirements by the Army Air Forces for the B-24 Bomber. Consequently, production will be scaled down progressively and will cease not later than August 1, 1945.”
So swift was the fall of the Third Reich, however, that production ended sooner, at the end of June. When the last of the bombers rolled out of Willow Run—the 8,685th ship—Henry Ford II was there to host a ceremony. The ship was named the Henry Ford, though Henry I asked that his name be removed so that the workers who had built the bomber could sign their names before the army took possession.
Already by this time, the first newsreels from the liberated Nazi concentration camps had reached the masses in the United States. In these camps, the principles of American-style mass production had been applied to murder by Hitler’s chief henchmen, Heinrich Himmler (who died of suicide on May 23, 1945) and Adolf Eichmann (who escaped to South America before his capture and execution in 1962), among others. When Henry Ford saw these images on newsreels, he suffered an attack of anxiety and ran out of the room. Even for Henry, the great pacifist, the images of the concentration camps redefined the work of Willow Run. It had been the work not of war but of justice.
On September 21, five weeks after Japan’s surrender, the board of directors of Ford Motor Company gathered in an office in Dearborn. Henry II arrived. His mother Eleanor stood beside him. There in the conference room, a picture of Edsel hung on the wall. Harry Bennett arrived in his usual bow tie, quite aware of what was about to unfold. Henry II’s younger brother Benson refused to attend, having sworn never to be in the same room with Bennett.
