Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

  In fact, miracles had little to do with it, or government dictates. Kanzler was a former Ford executive and a lawyer by training, an elegant man with cosmopolitan tastes and a pillar of Detroit’s elite Grosse Pointe society. Kanzler was as much at home at the opera or the art museum as on the factory floor—or examining a car company balance sheet. Kanzler also knew the industry from inside and out, because after leaving Ford he had become head of Universal Credit Corporation, which handled the auto loan business for every major carmaker except GM. In the summer of 1942, no one was in a better position to know how to bring the diverse heads of the industry together for wartime production, win the support of the UAW and labor, and charm the skeptics in Washington than Ernest Kanzler.

  He did it by letting the carmakers do it themselves. The Automotive Council for War Production had some two thousand members, but it was the big companies—Ford, GM, Chrsyler, Packard, Studebaker—who counted. Kanzler knew that once they were committed heart and mind to the fight, the subcontractors would follow. That was the secret to conversion, as Knudson had argued all along: the latent power of the subcontractors. Timken, a major axle manufacturer, was already making armor plate for Chrysler and Ford’s tank arsenal, and trying out new innovations in its design. Houdaille Hershey, a parts supplier specializing in shock absorbers, was eliminating costly steps in manufacturing the .30-caliber machine gun—steps that the Army thought necessary but weren’t. Soldiers found the aluminum handle broke easily; Houdaille Hershey found a sturdier substitute, which also saved on aluminum.17 When Saginaw Steering Gear started making the Army’s .50-caliber machine gun, engineer Bud Doerfner saw that the holes bored in the barrel for ventilation were elliptical. He told the Army that if they were round, he could drill three in a single operation instead of one. The Army tested it, and told him to go ahead. Soon Doerfner had a multi-spindle drill cutting ten at a time instead of three. In March 1942, Saginaw Steering Gear delivered 28,728 machine guns instead of the 2,000 they had first promised.

  Bill Knudsen had foreseen it all. “I placed most of the business with big companies for the reason that there was a lot of engineering to be done on practically every job,” he wrote later. “They were the only ones who had that kind of talent.” But the subcontractors and “little business had an enormous part in the program,” once full conversion got going.18

  And conversion did roll as smoothly as Ernest Kanzler’s tuxedo lapels. When civilian production halted at Plymouth’s Lynch Road plant and the old machine tools were pulled out, the new ones were in place by the time the night shift arrived. At Buick, workers gathered to cheer as the last car came down the line. On its windscreen was a sign: “Until Total Victory We Dedicate Ourselves to the Objective ‘When Better War Goods Are Built, Buick Workmen Will Build Them.’ ”

  General Motors started up war production only twenty-nine days after ending the civilian line. In the end it would contribute 10 percent of all U.S. war production.19 The others weren’t far behind.

  It was one of the great success stories of World War II. In 1939 the U.S. Army had barely 15,000 vehicles. In the spring of 1941, it was already looking to acquire a quarter million before Pearl Harbor raised everyone’s calculations. Not counting tanks, by the end of 1942 the Army would be the customer for 800,000 vehicles of some 330 different types. By 1945 the number would grow to 3.2 million—one vehicle for every 2.75 Americans in an Army uniform. Meantime the Wehrmacht, the model of modern warfare in 1940, still relied on horse-drawn transport. “When Hitler put his war on wheels,” General Brehon Somervell said at the end of the war, “he ran it straight down our alley.”20

  In the end, American automakers would produce 50 percent of all aircraft engines, 35 percent of aircraft propellers, 47 percent of all machine guns, 87 percent of all aerial bombs, 80 percent of tanks and tank parts, one-half the diesel engines for ships, submarines, and other naval craft; not to mention 100 percent of U.S. Army trucks, half-tracks, and other vehicles. They would go on to arm our allies as well, from the 200,000 Studebaker trucks supplied to the Soviet Red Army to the Bren gun carriers Ford built to British army specifications and shipped overseas for every army of the Dominion—13,893 of them.21

  Kanzler saw to it that all this activity flowed through the coordinated effort of the Automotive Council for War Production—and the other industry associations that brought together the different subcontractors and distributors. At the ACWP’s head was Knudsen’s friend from Packard, Alvan Macauley, and he ran it according to Knudsen’s voluntarist model.22 When a problem or a need came up, a committee was formed. When it was solved, the committee dissolved. This allowed the auto industry to skirt a wave of steel shortages (another hit in 1943) by forming a salvage committee, which pooled data on factory scrap and came up with tons of scrap metal and rubber waiting to be recycled.

  There were product committees, machine tool committees, labor committees including labor representatives, methods committees whose members met at each other’s plants to see and discuss new ways of saving time and labor.23 There were advisory committees to the Army Ordnance Department, the Army Air Forces, and after 1943 the Armed Service Force. Everywhere there was volunteering of information, sharing of materials, pooling of resources and methods. The voluntarist model was so useful that soon aircraft manufacturers on the West Coast copied it, and then on the East Coast; while the British sent an industry research group to study how it achieved such prodigious results.

  This was the industrial juggernaut Knudsen and Kanzler had set in motion. And of all the automakers turned munitions makers, Kanzler’s former employer Ford, with its extensive network of thirty-four branch plants (including eighteen service parts distributors) and twenty-nine affiliated industries, would be among the most versatile.

  Compared to Chrysler and GM and even Studebaker, it made only a small proportion of tanks and other vehicles produced during the war—fewer than 390,000 out of 2.66 million. But it would be famous for its aircraft engines and tank engines—nearly 27,000, most for the M4 Sherman. It would make aircraft parts, aircraft engine superchargers, aluminum, armor plate, magnesium, gun mounts, M7 antiaircraft gun directors (which required no fewer than 276 separate aluminum or die castings), and machine tools at its $117 million tool and die plant—probably the best in the entire car industry.24

  In March 1942 the Army approached Ford about making gliders for its airborne forces (the first American parachute unit was created just eighteen months earlier, in October 1940). Ford found a place to mass-produce in northern Michigan at Iron Mountain, with a sawmill and woodworking plant. The Army gave the go-ahead on March 27 and conversion got started.25

  In American landings on Sicily in 1943, Port Moresby in New Guinea, and finally in Normandy on June 6, 1944, in Operation Overlord, clouds of American glider troops led the way, and everywhere Ford-built gliders carried them and their equipment and supplies into battle. In 1942 less than 1 percent of all CG-4As were made by Ford. In 1943 that jumped to 36.6 percent. In 1944 it was 50 percent—and Ford’s methods had cut the cost per unit by more than half, from $25,000 to $10,000.26

  Ford also focused on specialized hard-to-make vehicles like British universal carriers, Navy cargo trucks, bomb service trucks, and of course the jeep, where plants at River Rouge, Dallas, and Louisville poured out 277,896 of them. Its plants at Chester, Pennsylvania, close by the Sun Company’s yards, and Richmond, California, close by Kaiser’s, would process and pack nearly everyone’s tanks for shipment across the Atlantic and Pacific.†

  All in all, the Ford Motor Company would produce more war materiel than the entire economy of Mussolini’s Italy.27 Yet from the start, Ford’s wartime reputation boiled down to what one executive was doing at a place southeast of Ypsilanti called Willow Run.

  It was a bright clear day in early January 1941 when a plane landed at San Diego Airport. A man with dark straw-blond hair and a square, determined jaw bounded down the stairway. He was Charles Sorensen—“Cast-Iron Charlie,” Henry
Ford’s original wizard of mass production. Following close behind him was Dr. George Mead, Bill Knudsen’s aeronautics man.

  An elegant man in a three-piece suit walked forward to greet them. Reuben Fleet was one of the great aviation pioneers, founder of Consolidated Aircraft and its top executive for nearly twenty years. The trio briefly shook hands before they were joined by Edsel Ford and his sons Henry II and Benson, and a team of engineers from Ford.

  The week before Christmas, Mead and Major Jimmy Doolittle had approached Sorensen and Edsel Ford. Can you help us build these planes? they asked. They showed them plans for a four-engined Army bomber called the B-24, which Consolidated’s San Diego plant was turning out in less-than-stellar numbers. The Army was looking to add twelve hundred planes to the production total. They thought Ford could help.28

  Sorensen said he’d have to check things out for himself—as he always did. Now, on January 8, the Ford team had arrived to inspect the Consolidated facilities and make a judgment call.

  Fleet made a gesture as if to say, “This way, gentlemen.” He didn’t realize that in less than twenty-four hours Cast-Iron Charlie would turn his world upside down.

  Charles Sorensen was the other Danish immigrant who remade Detroit. He was born in Copenhagen not far from Knudsen’s father’s shop, in 1881. He immigrated to the United States years earlier than Knudsen, landing at the same immigrant station at Castle Garden. He also had the same fascination with machines and, growing up in Buffalo, knew Knudsen’s mechanical alma mater, Keim Mills, well. As a boy Charlie Sorensen had even clambered over the Keim junk pile, pulling out discarded parts of bicycles and instinctively learning the principle of how interchangeable parts were laying the foundation for mass production.29

  Sorensen was sixteen when he left home for Detroit, where he found work in Henry Ford’s budding plant, starting as a shop floor hand. He was working at Highland Park the day machine tool wizard Walter Flanders explained to Ford how to position their machines on the factory floor in order to get the most out of them, and never forgot what he had learned. The pupil soon turned master. In no time Sorensen was showing Ford how to sequence the machining operations for his Model T’s, and how to stamp rather than cut the sheet metal he needed.30

  By the time Knudsen turned up with the rest of the Keim team in 1913, Sorensen was already one of the old boys, and a Henry Ford favorite. Sorensen’s first glimpse of his fellow countryman came when Knudsen emerged from an assembly pit one day, his face smeared with oil and his customary grin.31

  They were not destined to be friends. Sorensen had been “present at the creation,” and the arrival of Knudsen—equally hardworking, quietly self-assertive, and gifted with production ideas of his own—disturbed the balance of power. Giants do not easily tolerate the presence of other giants, and in his autobiography Sorensen never lost an opportunity to poke fun at the rival Dane, or deprecate his accomplishments.‡ When Knudsen finally left for GM, Sorensen must have drawn a deep sigh of relief. His relief stopped short in 1927 when Knudsen completed his revolution at Chevrolet, and Ford’s sales leadership fell into peril. Sorensen realized that production of the Model T, which he had spent two decades perfecting, would have to come to an end if Ford was to survive. He took his revenge by not only tearing out all the machine tools to make way for the Model A, but firing every engineer who had been part of creating the Model T, some of whom he had worked with for decades. It was a ruthless purge of the past to make way for the future.32

  Sorensen never cared what others thought. One day someone sent him a postcard from Italy with a picture of Mussolini. It read, “M is to Italy what you are to Ford.” Sorensen shrugged.33 He wasn’t at Ford to make friends, but to make cars. During his years at Ford, there were rumors of his punching out employees. Sorensen scoffed at the stories, then and later.34 But the fact that the rumors persisted was a warning sign. The old employer who had said Sorensen was a wild man and Knudsen a mild man knew what he was talking about.

  He and Bill Knudsen had barely spoken to each other for years when they met at the famous New Center meeting in October 1940. Sorensen had listened to Knudsen’s speech, and looked over the plans Major Doolittle and others laid out, and agreed. Here was a good plan to get the auto industry involved in taking up the slack in warplane production. He had only one condition, he said, his jaw jutting in defiance and his hard blue eyes narrowing. Ford wasn’t just going to make parts and engines for airplanes; it was going to make the entire plane.

  Knudsen didn’t think much of this idea. By now he understood the profound difference in the numbers of parts Sorensen was used to working with, versus a four-engined bomber like the B-24. A car demanded 15,000 parts; a B-24 almost half a million, plus 300,000 rivets in five hundred different sizes. The aviation industry had a completely different way of making dies for shaping parts—and airplane makers needed to be ready to change their engineering in order to keep up with a myriad of aeronautical variables, as well as those in combat.

  Sorensen only shook his head. “It’s the complete plane, or nothing.” And when Cast-Iron Charlie got an idea into his brain, it was never going away until it was done.35

  For two months nothing happened. Then came the meeting just before Christmas with Mead and Doolittle, and Sorensen felt vindicated. He arrived for the tour of Consolidated feeling something close to triumph. Before it was over, he was almost in despair.

  Certainly the B-24 was a hard plane to fall in love with.

  Hap Arnold had asked Reuben Fleet and his chief designer, Isaac “Mac” Laddon, back in January 1939 to give him a plane that would be everything the B-17 was not. It was to have a longer range, almost three thousand miles; a higher ceiling; and a bigger payload, 2,500 versus 2,000 pounds. Laddon saw at once this meant dramatically increasing the wing lift. Fortunately, he had just the thing he needed right in the Consolidated plant.

  It was the creation of David Davis, a wealthy aviation fan who gave Douglas Aircraft its first $40,000 to build a plant and a plane to fly across the country. In 1938, however, Davis had gone broke. His own chance to recoup his fortunes was to sell the aviation industry on a special wing he had designed in his spare time, whose cross section resembled a teardrop. He told potential investors it would provide more aerodynamic lift than any airfoil ever made, but no one believed him until Reuben Fleet agreed to give him a chance. A team of professors from Cal Tech gave a Davis wing model a test in the Consolidated wind tunnel. They ran the test three times because no one could believe the final result. The Davis wing had a 102 percent efficiency rating, unheard of for the time.36

  Mac Laddon tried it out on the Model 31 flying boat he was developing for the Navy—which later became the PBY Catalina. He also saw it as the solution to Arnold’s specifications for the new XB-24, and on December 29, 1939, the plane took its maiden flight. In addition to the Davis wing, it had another innovation: the so-called wet wing fuel tank. Self-sealing fuel tanks at the time were still clumsy, heavy things, so the Consolidated engineers had sprayed the interior of the wing fuel tank with Duprene sealer, a DuPont product, which acted to prevent wing punctures from leaking or igniting a fire—or worse.37

  As for the XB-24’s engines Laddon wanted, for once Materiel Command did things right. It encouraged a competition between Buick and Chevrolet to see who could produce its Pratt and Whitney RB-1830 power plants faster, and at the lowest cost. It worked, and when the Army came to order 2,434 B-24s to be delivered in 1942, there were more than enough engines to get them in the air and flying.

  “The B-24 has guts,” said the Air Force’s instruction manual for the plane. “It can take it and dish it out.” Still, pilots found it was a tricky plane to handle. Fleet had added an extra three feet to the plane’s fuselage, and when the French government ordered a shipment, they demanded a forward-firing turret, which Fleet retained for all his models. When loaded up with heavy .50-caliber machine guns, the turret proved a drag on the plane’s performance. Someone who flew B-24s in near
ly sixty missions, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Stewart, learned how the plane could suddenly lose altitude if your attention wandered from the controls. “You could never trim the son of a gun,” another B-24 pilot remembered, “[you] had to horse it around constantly.”38 The constant pulling and pushing needed to keep the B-24 in the air made one pilot the arm-wrestling champion of his squadron.

  By and large, American fliers and crews liked the B-17 better, and nobody ever made a movie about the B-24. The British, however, fastened quickly onto the plane, to which they gave its nickname: the Liberator. A B-24 Liberator became Winston Churchill’s personal plane, and both Bomber and Coastal Command wanted them. It was that increase in British orders which forced Bill Knudsen’s team to turn to Ford for help.

  That clear January day in San Diego, Sorensen spent his time looking, listening, and jotting down notes. “I liked neither what I saw nor what I heard,” he wrote later. If this was how aircraft companies worked, he thought, then the Air Force program was doomed.

  “Inside the plant I watched men putting together wing sections and portions of the fuselage…. What I saw reminded me of nearly thirty-five years previously when we were making Model N Fords at the Piquette Avenue plant before Walter Flanders rearranged our machines,” and got Ford going in assembly-line production. There was no orderly sequence or flow of materials, no sense of forward motion in the assembly process, no reliance on machined parts and machined parts only. “Here was a custom-made plane,” Sorensen thought, “put together as a tailor would cut and fit a suit of clothes.”39

  Then he watched the final assembly take place outside, on a structural steel frame. Workers brought out the wings, tail, and fuselage as little by little the B-24 took shape. At the same time, the hot California sun expanded the aluminum metal so that parts that were made to fit inside the plant suddenly needed new custom adjustments before they came together. Sorensen shook his head. It was obvious that no B-24 ended up exactly like another; and obvious to everyone except the Consolidated people that any parts Ford made for the planes would almost certainly not fit once they were ready to put in place.