Congress declared war on Japan the next day. Three days after that, Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States, which reciprocated a few hours later.
With a badly damaged navy and an army that ranked as the world’s eighteenth largest, behind Holland, the United States appeared woefully unprepared to fight a war on three continents against three opponents that had been building up their military capability for years. The Axis powers had more than 6 million men under arms, compared with America’s less than half a million, an imbalance that moved Hitler to mock, “What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?”
As an admirer of Henry Ford and a self-proclaimed student of his mass-manufacturing techniques, the Führer should have known better. The industry that Ford and Ransom Olds founded at the beginning of the century now encompassed more than a thousand manufacturing companies and contained the world’s largest pool of mechanical and engineering talent, which made America the best-equipped country on earth to mass-produce the instruments of global warfare.
“When Hitler put his war on wheels, he ran it straight down our alley,” said the army’s supply commander, Lieutenant General Brehon “Bill” Somervell, after returning from a post–Pearl Harbor tour of Michigan automotive factories to assess their war production capability. “When he hitched his chariot to an internal combustion engine, he opened up a new battlefront—a front we know well. It is called ‘Detroit.’”
From the outset, President Roosevelt was counting on the auto industry to manufacture 75 percent of the aircraft engines, 80 percent of the tanks, a third of the machine guns, and all of the trucks the military would need to take the fight to the enemy. As Fortune magazine put it, “Detroit must now become the main plant in the Arsenal of Democracy.”
Thanks largely to William Knudsen’s eighteen months of cajoling, the industry was fully on board. “This is our war,” Chrysler chairman K. T. Keller told eight hundred executives attending the first meeting of the Automotive Council for War Production at Detroit’s Masonic Temple on January 24, 1942. Naming George Romney as its managing director, the council pledged that the industry’s theretofore brutally competitive companies now would cooperate in the war effort to the point of sharing research and production techniques. Packard chairman Alvan Macauley, the father of company styling chief Ed Macauley, told the attendees, “The job now is to clear the decks for the expanded war work that the government will require in the drive for victory.”
They all knew what that meant. Car manufacturing was consuming huge amounts of iron, steel, glass, rubber, and other materials badly needed by the military. So, on February 1, 1942, after functioning for two decades as the driving wheel of the American economy, the auto industry shut down. By government decree, no new civilian vehicles could be manufactured for the duration of the war, and the manufacturers’ unsold inventory of more than half a million 1942 models was to be stored in warehouses and carefully doled out to military personnel and civilian workers deemed critical to maintaining public safety—police, firefighters, doctors. Further restrictions included the rationing of gas to three gallons per week and the imposition of a national “victory” speed limit of thirty-five miles an hour. The latter was not intended to save gasoline, which was plentiful and cheap, but rather to preserve rubber, most of which came from a part of the world that Japan’s military controlled.
The scope and swiftness of the transformation from car economy to war economy was breathtaking. Within weeks, Packard assembly lines were rolling out 1,000-plus-horsepower airplane engines instead of Clipper sedans. Hudson workers were making antiaircraft cannons and armor-piercing artillery shells at the brand-new $21 million Naval Ordnance Plant in Warren, Michigan. Chrysler started building 28-ton M3 tanks at its new $20 million Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant even before the factory walls were fully up. Chrysler president Keller operated a bulldozer himself to help clear land for the more than one-million-square-foot facility, which he predicted would outproduce all Germany’s tank plants combined.
The Ford Motor Company began building an airplane factory near the tiny town of Ypsilanti, thirty miles west of Detroit, on 1,450 acres where Henry Ford had grown soybeans and apples for twenty-nine years and maintained a summer camp for disadvantaged young men whose fathers were killed or wounded in World War I. The company promised that the Willow Run plant—named for the stream that ran through the property, which Henry demanded be allowed to run undisturbed beneath the factory—would be the largest of its kind in the world, capable of turning out B-24 “Liberator” bombers at the rate of one per hour.
Over the course of the war, General Motors would produce nearly as much war matériel as all the other car companies combined—$12 billion worth, or 41 percent of the industry’s total. With all of its ninety-four factories dedicated to the effort, GM manufactured 2,300 different products for the military, ranging from tiny ball bearings to 30-ton tanks, in numbers that were astonishing—119,522,000 artillery shells, 1,900,000 machine guns, 3,142,000 carbines, 206,000 aircraft engines, 854,000 trucks, 190,000 cannons, 85,000 tanks—establishing the company as America’s preeminent industrial contributor to the war. “If the corporation ever had a supreme moment, a period of unqualified contribution to the commonweal,” wrote journalist Ed Cray, “it was during the years of 1940 through 1945.”
The contribution wasn’t only in matériel. Nearly 120,000 GM employees joined the military, including Harley Earl’s two favorite designers, Frank Hershey and Bill Mitchell. Clare MacKichan would have joined up, too, but high blood pressure disqualified him. He left Styling when the work slowed and layoffs seemed likely. With all the government money pouring into Detroit, he had no trouble finding a new job. He signed on with a company that needed tool designers. The work wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as designing cars, but it was guaranteed for the duration of the war, and with ample overtime, “it paid much better,” he said.
Harley tried to retain as many people as he could, working to ensure that Styling had enough defense work to keep them out of the draft. He named his interior design chief, Steve McDaniel, to head up a new Wartime Production Studio, which turned out thousands of detailed drawings, diagrams, and illustrations for military manuals and guides. When the military sought help in developing a more sophisticated form of camouflage, he contacted friends in the Royal Canadian Air Force in Ottawa. “You’ve got pilots coming back here for a rest after the [North] African campaign, haven’t you?” he said. “Would you mind letting them come down if we paid the expense, and let them lecture to us in our auditorium? I’m going to start a camouflage school, and I want to find out some things.”
After hearing the Canadian fliers explain how the Germans attempted to hide airfields, towns, and buildings from their bombers, he ordered the locks changed on the Styling Auditorium to make it top-secret secure and proceeded to turn the space into a smaller version of GM’s “Futurama” exhibit at the New York World’s Fair. Modelers constructed a scale-model city complete with miniature factories, houses, cars, and scenery, then interior department staffers experimented with ways of concealing it from the eyes of enemy pilots. “Colored cloth was used, paint effects, blending of backgrounds, all the techniques that were known and some that hadn’t been imagined before,” according to Stanley Brams. They checked the results by climbing up on tall stepladders and peering down on the mock terrain through reducing glasses that mimicked what pilots might see from altitudes up to 20,000 feet.
Harley went so far as to change the name of the Styling department to the Camouflage and War Service Section. But after producing a twenty-two-page pamphlet titled Camouflage Manual for General Motors Camouflage School, the project was abruptly canceled after the military developed intelligence that the enemy was using infrared technology that countered the effect of camouflage.
He had more success with a project that hewed closer to Styling’s original mission. The U.S. Ordnance Corps approached Buick about developing a n
ew class of armored vehicle for the army. Called the M18 tank destroyer, it was to be track-driven, like a tank, with a 76 mm gun mounted on a rotating top turret, and it needed to be considerably lighter, faster, and more maneuverable than the heavily armored German tanks it was intended to take out. Harley assigned his Oldsmobile studio chief, Art Ross, to design the M18, which Buick engineers dubbed the Hellcat. Working from Ross’s detailed designs, they built two prototypes with gun turrets that could swivel 360 degrees, and tested them at GM’s proving grounds in Milford, Michigan, where they proved capable of reaching speeds of 60 miles an hour (German tanks topped out at 25 mph), climbing low walls, fording six feet of water, and ramming through the walls of buildings. The army quickly approved the Hellcat for production at Buick’s Flint, Michigan, plant, but changed its name to the Wildcat.
Some months later, after the first M18s arrived for training exercises at Fort Hood, Texas, a general’s aide called Harley. “We have the Wildcats you fellows designed,” he said. “Now we’d like an armband for an outfit like ours whose mission is to crush the tank.” Buick designer Henry Lauve created a shoulder-patch logo showing a snarling black panther with tank tracks clamped in its teeth, encircled by the army’s tank force motto, “Seek. Strike. Destroy.”
M18s were widely deployed during the Allies’ slog across Europe following the D-day invasion. Five Wildcats from the 704th Tank Destroyer Battalion ambushed a column of more than thirty German tanks in September 1944 and knocked out nineteen of them. Three months later, during the Battle of the Bulge, four Wildcats joined in an attack on Germany’s Second Panzer (Tank) Division as it neared the Belgian town of Bastogne, where American forces were surrounded and defiantly refusing to surrender. In what became one of the most famous anecdotes of the war, Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe, the commander of the besieged American troops, responded to the Germans’ surrender demand with a succinct written refusal: “Nuts!”
The Wildcats were credited with slowing the panzers’ advance long enough for reinforcements under the command of General George Patton to reach the trapped Americans. It’s a safe bet that Art Ross and Harley never expected to be credited in military annals as the designers of such a vehicle.
Harley’s staff continued to shrink as his designers enlisted or were drafted, until only thirty-five remained from a prewar high of nearly a hundred. He busied himself overseeing the design of instrument panels for tanks and airplanes, dividing his time between his office and studios downtown and airplane hangars at Wayne County Airport and Selfridge Field. He was constantly called upon to serve as host to visiting generals and admirals, easily winning them over with his man’s-man charm, salty language, colorful apparel, and imposing physique. He had no worries about losing his job. Although he was just one of twenty-nine GM vice presidents, none had a closer relationship with Alfred Sloan, who believed Styling had been the key to the company’s rise before the war and would be equally if not more important after it ended. Sloan had recently lost two close friends and automotive mentors—first Walter Chrysler, who succumbed to a stroke in 1940, and then Bill Knudsen, who committed the sin of going to work for Roosevelt. With them gone, the GM chairman turned more and more to Harley for counsel in areas beyond styling, even bringing him into early discussions with Charles Kettering about building a new GM headquarters complex outside the city after the war—just the three of them quietly imagining what the company’s role in America might be in the second half of the twentieth century.
After years of renting, Harley and Sue bought a house in Grosse Pointe Farms in 1942, a white stone mansion formerly owned by millionaire industrialist J. B. Ford Jr., the heir to a glass fortune and no relation to Henry Ford. The new house had a large marble entrance hall, high ceilings, six bedrooms, five bathrooms, and maids’ quarters. Sue employed a housekeeper and cook who lived in, plus a personal maid, one or two “cleaning ladies,” and a laundress, but no chauffeur. At seven o’clock every morning, she drove to the Red Cross blood bank downtown, where she was in charge of volunteer workers. She also initiated and supervised the annual Christmas bazaar for Planned Parenthood, then in its infancy and focused primarily on promoting birth control to combat overpopulation, as controversial an idea in heavily Catholic Detroit at the time as legalized abortion would be thirty years later. An Episcopalian, she simply thought there were too many unwanted babies being born.
The Earl boys were privileged but not pampered. Jim and his younger brother, Jerry, supported the war effort and earned extra spending money by cruising the neighborhood on their bikes to collect old newspapers, which they carted in bulk to collection centers set up to help with a national paper shortage. In the late summer of 1943, Sue took fifteen-year-old Jim and his friend David Robb on a trip to see one of her oldest friends in Newport, Rhode Island. Newport was a navy town and the harbor was full of destroyers and frigates. The boys spent much of their time walking the streets trying to spot battle ribbons on the throngs of sailors and marines, most of whom didn’t look much older than they thought they did. When they got back home to Detroit, David persuaded his older brother to drive them to Windsor, Ontario, where they attempted to enlist in the Essex Scottish Infantry Regiment of the Canadian army. As much as they thought they might be the key to winning the war, they were relieved when the recruiting sergeant gently turned them down.
The following summer, Jim and another sixteen-year-old friend landed jobs at a factory that made tank parts, earning a whopping seventy-five cents an hour, which pointed up a dramatic turnabout from the not-so-distant days of the Depression when thousands of unemployed men huddled around trash-can fires outside the gates of padlocked manufacturing plants.
Thanks to the war, Detroit’s employment rate was nearly 100 percent, with more government contract jobs available than there were able-bodied men or women to do them. To meet manpower needs at its Willow Run plant, Ford Motors sent recruiters to Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas, and hired workers from Egypt, Iceland, New Zealand, Panama, Turkey, Chile, and Cuba. Ford’s various war plants reportedly employed 4,390 blind or deaf workers, 111 deaf-mutes, 3 armless men, and 10 legless men.
When Cadillac general manager Nicholas Dreystadt contracted to manufacture sophisticated electronic airplane bombsights, the division’s personnel manager, James Roche, told him it would be impossible because the city’s workforce was utterly depleted. There were no unskilled workers left, he said, let alone the kind of trained mechanics it would take to machine the bombsights. Dreystadt was undeterred. “It’s got to be done,” he said, “and if we at Cadillac can’t do it, then who can?”
So they went looking for workers on the Lower East Side of the city just north of the river, in an area where few GM executives ever ventured. Early French settlers called it “Black Bottom” because of its rich, black river-bottom soil, though most modern-day Detroiters thought the name derived from the fact that 90 percent of the city’s black population lived there. Whites referred to it as “the colored district.”
Dreystadt knew Black Bottom, especially its vibrant commercial sector, known as Paradise Valley, where well-heeled white patrons looking for a memorable night on the town were more than happy to sit in mixed-race audiences at the Paradise Theater to see the likes of Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson or feast on fried squash under glass in the Ebony Dining Room of the Gotham Hotel, where heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis always stayed when he came back to his hometown. It was in Paradise Valley, with its 350 black-owned businesses, that Dreystadt discovered the well-to-do black entrepreneurs and professionals who helped him save the Cadillac division during the Depression.
In the early 1940s, the lure of wartime jobs drew several hundred thousand additional migrants to Detroit from rural Michigan and the southern states, creating a housing shortage throughout the city, but particularly in Black Bottom, where an estimated fifty thousand African American arrivals increased the number of residents to a teeming
two hundred thousand, all crammed into sixty square blocks bounded by the Detroit River on one side and fiercely segregated white neighborhoods on the other three. Not surprisingly, Black Bottom became a tinderbox of racial tension, and when the federal government attempted to ease the crisis by building a public housing project in a bordering white neighborhood, the whole thing exploded.
An estimated twelve hundred whites turned out to protest the project’s opening and tried to block black families from moving into their new homes. The confrontation turned violent and led to scores of arrests, mostly of blacks. Months of gang fights, vandalism, police beatings, and more arrests followed, culminating in what was then the worst race riot in U.S. history. On Saturday evening, June 20, 1943, a false rumor started in a Black Bottom social club: a group of white men supposedly had thrown a black woman and her baby off the Belle Isle Bridge, which connected Black Bottom to a popular recreational island park in the middle of the Detroit River. A furious mob stormed out of the club and moved along Woodward Avenue, breaking windows, looting businesses, and assaulting whites.
They were met at the corner of Davenport Street by a white mob motivated by another false rumor: that blacks had killed a white sailor and raped his girlfriend. An estimated ten thousand people ultimately converged on the intersection, and before the melee was brought under control the next afternoon with the help of six thousand federal troops, thirty-five people were dead—twenty-five of them black—nearly a thousand were injured, and thirteen hundred had been arrested—again, most of them black.
In that charged environment, Nicholas Dreystadt found the last untapped workforce in Detroit. Along Hastings Street, a seamy Black Bottom thoroughfare lined with blues bars, gambling dens, pool halls, strip clubs, and brothels, he recruited two thousand black prostitutes to make the bombsights in his factory. He hired their madams, too, figuring they “knew how to manage the women,” according to Peter F. Drucker, who was in the midst of conducting a management-approved study of GM’s corporate systems and practices at the time and included an account of the Cadillac women in his memoir Adventures of a Bystander.
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