Donald Nelson, then coordinator of defense purchases for Knudsen, sensed disaster. The Army desperately needed gasoline, the Air Force special 100-octane aviation fuel. Everyone needed butyl petroleum for synthetic rubber and toluene for explosives. If executives in companies like Sun Oil, which was also building oil tankers for the Navy, had to devote their time fighting lawsuits and watching their backs with the Justice Department instead of focusing on production, America’s rearmament would never get off the ground.
Knudsen agreed with Nelson. “The Production Express can’t afford to be late,” he said. Even Leon Henderson got the point, and had to explain to Arnold that national defense was a bigger priority than whether oil companies were forcing their filling stations to sell only their products (the main point of Arnold’s suit).18 Arnold, however, refused to yield. The lawsuit against the oil companies dragged on for a year and a half. Finally, in 1942 Nelson convinced Roosevelt that the standard antitrust rules would have to be bent if America was going to arm itself and keep a civilian economy going at the same time.
So Franklin Roosevelt, the bane of American business, issued an executive order suspending antitrust prosecution against companies deemed vital to defense production. Arnold and his allies fought back hard. But Roosevelt had an unexpected ally in the antitrust fight. The midterm elections in 1942 brought in a flood of Republicans, who sided with Nelson against the trust-busters. From 1943 on, Thurman Arnold troubled the defense buildup no more.19
Nor was Nelson afraid to defend his dependence on the dollar-a-year men, whom he now appointed and controlled. Early on, the Truman Committee pushed hard to abolish them, or at least enforce a rule that “no person shall be employed in any position in which he will make decisions directly affecting the affairs of his own company”—which could mean Bill Batt could offer no advice on the manufacturing of vital ball bearings, even though his former company was one of their biggest producers, and no Goodyear executive on loan to the War Production Board could make decisions affecting the rubber industry.
Nelson said no. If such a rule were enforced in a draconian way, nothing could ever get done. “On this job we must get the maximum results from American industry,” he patiently explained. “To do that we must have down here men who understand and can deal with industry’s intricate structure and operation.” He also pointed out that of the three hundred or so dollar-a-year men appointed since August 1940, more than 70 percent were technical engineers, production and operations managers, and heads of research divisions—not golf-playing board chairmen. As for making these men quit their jobs and become federal employees (another Truman idea), there was no way Washington could recruit top-caliber people with a meager civil service salary. These men would face daunting financial hardship if they went to Washington. The war effort’s tap into business talent would slow to a drip.
In fact, what it would mean in practice is that only people of truly independent means could afford to serve. “And I don’t think the Congress would like to limit the War Production Board to the ranks of the very wealthy,” Nelson concluded, with a wry smile.20
Truman backed off. The dollar-a-year-man system remained in place for the rest of the war. In the end, even severe critics had to admit it largely worked. It provided not only expertise but opened an easy line of communication between the government issuing the orders and the businesses carrying them out. When a man such as GE’s Charles Wilson weighed in with the electronics firms, they tended to sit up and listen. Bill Knudsen had pointed the way with his direct and intimate dealings with his friends in Detroit. Donald Nelson stuck to the Knudsen model to the end.
Of course, the ways of Washington sometimes baffled even the best business minds. The vice president of one New York bank applied for a post in the Office of Economic Warfare. He waited a long time in vain. Then one day the OEW’s director showed up at the bank to ask its president if he knew any likely candidates for the very same job. The president mentioned his vice president, and the man was hired on the spot.
He moved to Washington and soon found himself inundated with the usual paperwork related to the OEW. A month or two passed, and a letter arrived forwarded from his old New York address. It was a rejection letter, regretfully turning him down for the very post he now occupied.
Now familiar with Washington bureaucracy, this came as no surprise to him. The surprise was he had signed the letter himself.21
In 1942—the year of Midway, Guadalcanal, and Operation Torch—the production numbers began to hit, just as Knudsen had promised.
In 1941 the United States had made 3,964 tanks—more than twice the number of the past three years. In 1942 it produced 24,754. In 1941 it produced 617,000 small arms and 97,000 machine guns. In 1942 the numbers swelled to 2.3 million and 663,000, respectively. Whereas the previous year saw 318 B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers coming off the assembly line, 1942 saw 2,618—along with 136,000 aircraft engines, 92,000 20mm antiaircraft guns (versus 2,042 in 1941), 20,000 75mm guns, and 10 million rounds of small-arms ammunition. As for total production of airplanes, it reached 47,873—just shy of the 50,000 Roosevelt had asked for just two years earlier, and which all the experts had said was impossible.22
Before 1942 was out, the United States was producing more war materiel than all three Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—combined.23
In September the president got his own front-row view of what was happening. Roosevelt’s visit with Henry and Edgar Kaiser was part of a nationwide tour of America’s defense plants to see Nelson’s “congregation,” in the WPB director’s phrase, in action.
His first stop was on September 18, at the Chrysler Tank Arsenal. K. T. Keller’s and Eddie Hunt’s experiment in making tanks the Detroit way had grown into a full-blown operation. It was already producing more than three thousand of the M3 Grants when in March 1942 Chrysler got the go-ahead to make one thousand of the new M4 tanks, dubbed Shermans, a month.
Albert Kahn had given them another 500,000 square feet of factory space to accommodate the new machine tools and parts, and expanded the test track where the big thirty-ton armored vehicles were put through their paces. When Continental Motors’ version of the nine-cylinder Wright engine was called out for airplane production, Chrysler engineers found a way to fasten together five of their own 200-horsepower six-cylinder car engines, then put an engine drive gear at the end of each crankshaft, then mesh the gears with a single big one doing the work of pushing the drive shaft.24
When the Chrysler production version of the Sherman came off the assembly line on July 22, it was the first of 7,500 with the “multibank” engine. American tank commanders and gunners never liked the Chrysler multibank engine because its size left less space for ammunition and supplies. But in the Tunisian desert, the British outfitted their Eighth Army with them, and at least one British officer pronounced the M4A4 “the finest tank in the world.”25
Keller also took Roosevelt to watch the graveyard shift engaged in gear cutting, and to watch an engine and transmission being installed in a Sherman. He also saw fifty of Chrysler’s tanks running the test-track course—all business as usual at eleven o’clock at night.
Chrysler’s success with the tank arsenal earned it its first Army-Navy “E” pennant for production excellence on August 10, 1942. The “E” award, too, had been Knudsen’s idea, as a way to give manufacturers public recognition for the best war production achievements.26 Another would be won by Fisher Body at its nearby plant in Flint, where production miracle worker Bud Goodman was making Shermans the GM way.
Goodman was only thirty-seven when he took over the Fisher Tank Arsenal. After quitting the University of Illinois when his father died, he had taken a job at Fisher as a metal finisher. He never looked back. Now in 1942 he was welding Shermans together with a new process that saved four-fifths of machining time, then bending them into shape using a 480-ton metal press. For the final assembly, huge thirty-ton jigs hoisted the tanks in the air and turned them around, as Time magaz
ine said, “like ducks on a spit.”27‡
Roosevelt set off for nearby Ypsilanti, where he watched Ford engineers doing amazing things with B-24 bombers, inside the biggest indoor plant in the world.§ Then there was a stop at the Allis-Chalmers plant in Milwaukee, which had been the scene of the bruising strike a year and a half earlier, but where men and women were now turning out aircraft engines by the hundreds. Nearby was the A. O. Smith factory, where Knudsen’s friend Larry Smith had shown him the right way to weld armor plate and where now the mighty iron pipe assembly line was turning out hundreds, eventually thousands, of one-thousand- and two-thousand-pound bombs to be dropped on Nazi Germany’s factories and cities.28
Roosevelt also stopped in Minneapolis at the Federal Cartridge Corporation, which was making .30- and .50-caliber machine gun rounds, and noted the high number of women already doing jobs that used to be considered fit only for men. Later the presidential train pushed on to Texas, where Todd Shipbuilding was making Liberty ships in Houston, Consolidated was erecting an enormous airplane plant in Fort Worth, and, at Port Neches, B.F. Goodrich was helping to build a synthetic rubber plant that government experts said would be producing up to 800,000 tons of butyl rubber by 1944. The actual number would be closer to 1.4 million tons.
In fact, the 700,000 tons Port Neches produced in the first half of that year was more rubber than the entire country was using in 1940.29
Roosevelt’s tour of the West Coast included not only Kaiser’s yards but Boeing in Seattle and Douglas Aircraft in California. A former plane designer for Glenn Martin, Donald Douglas had launched his aircraft company in Los Angeles, from the rented back room of a barber shop. He could remember the grim days of the thirties, when his company was the largest single supplier of aircraft to the U.S. military—in batches of thirty or forty.30
Now Douglas had three factories going in Southern California, and was introducing his new improved SBD-4 Dauntless dive-bomber, which would wreak havoc on Japanese warships. The SBD-4 outclassed the German Stuka and its Japanese counterpart in every respect, and starting in October Douglas would produce more than three thousand for the Navy.31 Plans were also under way to build new plants in Oklahoma City and outside Chicago at Orchard Place, to build the two most famous military transports of the war: the C-47 Skytrain and the four-thousand-mile-range C-54 Skymaster, which could carry American soldiers, paratroopers, and supplies from the skies over Normandy to bases on the other side of the Himalayas.
Nearby in San Diego, Consolidated Aircraft’s new president was Kaiser’s friend Tom Girdler, who was turning out B-24 bombers and PBY flying boats using his modified mass-production techniques. In Inglewood, North American was poised to replace Douglas as the country’s biggest plane maker as it turned out thousands of its two-engined Mitchell bombers and launched a new single-engine fighter, the P-51 Mustang, powered by those Rolls-Royce Merlin engines being made by Packard.32
Even more amazing, the coming of war forced an unprecedented cooperation among these aviation competitors. Old rivals shared aerodynamic and engineering data, exchanged information on tooling and equipment, and drew together a $250 million stockpile of parts and materials under the management of the Aircraft War Production Council, to provide emergency help to anyone who needed it. Douglas helped Consolidated build its B-24s at a plant in Tulsa, and helped Boeing build B-17s at its newest Long Beach plant. Lockheed did the same for Boeing at its Vega plant in Burbank.33
Consolidated-Vultee may have been the first aircraft company to hire women in its Downey plant,‖ and in 1943 the very first woman engineer, but the Lockheed Vega plant would make them famous. When Life magazine did a story on the Lockheed ladies, the picture of a tall girl named Vera Lowe with her hair in a kerchief and a riveting gun in her hand would catch the imagination of a nation as Rosie the Riveter.
“I was impressed by the large proportion of women employed,” Roosevelt would tell the country later, “doing skilled manual labor, running machines…. Within less than a year from now, there will probably be as many women as men working in our war production plants.”34
He was nearly right. Six months after Pearl Harbor, barely 80,000 women worked in any defense industry. By the end of 1942, that number shot up to 3 million—and the War Manpower Commission warned they were going to need another 1.5 million as more and more men put on uniforms and went to war. By the fall of 1943, 36.5 percent of the workforce in the American aviation industry were women. They made up almost half the workforce in electrical equipment. There was no question that America could never have met its airplane production quotas after 1941 without them. For American airpower, they were truly the margin of victory.35
Roosevelt’s final stop on his war plant tour was New Orleans, where he met the man who symbolized the vision, ingenuity, and sheer drive that made up the Production Express. He was Andrew Jackson Higgins, whom some dubbed the Henry Kaiser of the South.
A high school dropout with a decade-long history of odd jobs and failed businesses, Higgins had landed work with a New Orleans lumber export firm on the eve of World War I. After he set up his own firm a couple of years later, the need for a boat able to haul logs out of shallow waters around his stands of timber near Natchez, Mississippi, got him into the boat-making business. Out of it would come his most important invention, the Eureka, or Higgins, boat. Built to do thirty miles an hour even in water as shallow as one inch, all Higgins needed to do was to cut a ramp out of the front and suddenly he had the perfect machine for loading and unloading U.S. Marines on the beach—as Marine general Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith realized when he first saw the Eureka boat in action.36
In 1940 and 1941, Andrew Jackson Higgins had a series of running battles with the Navy over the value of his boat, with Higgins and Smith pushing and the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair resisting. Once again, it was British orders that came to the rescue of an American manufacturer. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Higgins was standing knee-deep in swamp water near New Orleans’ Industrial Canal surveying a site for a new factory to fill his British orders, when the car radio carried news about the attack on Pearl Harbor.37
At the time, landing craft ranked tenth on the Navy’s priority list. The Navy’s original plans for 1,189 landing craft grew to twice that number, and in April 1942 doubled again. They would need not just the Eureka but craft able to carry a medium tank onto the beach and into battle, and lightweight patrol torpedo, or PT, boats—for all of which Higgins had designs he had been pressing on the Navy for years, in vain.
Almost overnight Higgins went from persona non grata in the Navy Building to its production savior. By March 1942 he was employing more than three thousand workers filling orders for his ramp-equipped LCVPs, LCMs, and his ever-popular PT boats. On September 29, Roosevelt himself arrived to see what the fuss was all about.
Higgins and his four sons greeted the president at the siding, then offered him a ride in Roland Higgins’s convertible. As they passed slowly through the six-hundred-foot assembly bay with workers in white overalls and hard hats gawking and nudging each other, Roosevelt got a front-row view of LCVPs arranged in four production lines, the hulls turned upside down as frames were made using jigs and templates. Next he saw the plywood and planking being applied, after which a crane with special canvas slings hoisted the boat upright as workers followed it down the line to complete whatever work was still needed.38
Then he saw the bay where workers swarmed around two rows of unfinished PT boats. Raised walkways let workers move from one production line to the other, giving them free access to every side of the vessels. At the end of the hour tour, Higgins assembled all his employees at the far end of the factory, where the Higgins Industries marching band played “Hail to the Chief” and “Anchors Aweigh.” Roosevelt was in his element, smiling and keeping time by tapping his fingers on the side of the convertible. Then he was handed a sheet of music and lyrics, and followed silently along while the band played the composition of its popular trumpet
player, a burly young man named Al Hirt. It was called “The Higgins Victory March.”
When it was done, Higgins stood up on the car cushions and yelled, “All right, everybody! For the world’s greatest man, three cheers!”39
Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Roosevelt grinned and waved, workers clapped each other on the back and shook hands. Not much more than an hour after he had arrived, Roosevelt’s train pulled away. Higgins returned to his office deeply satisfied. In a few months, he would be the biggest boatbuilder in America.
If Kaiser’s Liberty ships were crucial to America’s defensive phase of keeping the lines of supply and communication with the Allies open, Higgins’s boats would be crucial in the next, offensive phase. As 1942 drew to a close all across the country shipyards, factories, and boatyards would be making thousands of landing craft with a profusion of confusing designations—LCIs, LCMs, LCPLs, LCTs, LCI (L)s, and LSTs. Twenty-one of them were in the Great Lakes and Midwest. Many, if not all, would be using Higgins designs.
In all, Higgins would design 92 percent of the vessels used by the U.S. Navy in World War II—although none of them would be big enough or important enough to warrant a christening. For July 1943 his New Orleans factory built more landing craft than all the other factories in America. Even Hitler got to know his name, and dubbed him “the new Noah.” General Dwight Eisenhower simply called him “the man who won the war for us.”40
Yet the general was wrong. It was the American economy—where immigrants like Knudsen and Elmer Hann and high school dropouts like Higgins and Kaiser could become the arsenal of democracy’s most precious assets—that was shifting the balance of victory.
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