Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

  Despite it all, Willow Run came through. By October B-24s were coming off the line at the rate of three hundred a month. A new production schedule drawn up by Bill Knudsen in December shifted still more subassembly work to outside plants, which relieved the labor shortage and sped up final delivery. As 1944 dawned, Willow Run finally achieved Sorensen’s vision of five hundred bombers a month, and on March 3—the day before American bombers launched their first daylight raid on Berlin—Don Nelson’s assistant Charlie Wilson sent Sorensen a congratulatory telegram:

  “Our confidence in your company’s ability to maintain a fine sustained production record has again been proven…. Our sincerest congratulations.”38

  Ford had turned a plane that used to cost two hundred thousand man-hours to make into one that cost only eighteen thousand hours. Willow Run built half of all the Liberators made during the war. But it had been a bitter, exhausting journey. Nelson’s telegram arrived just as Sorensen was being forced out by his old mentor, Henry Ford himself, after nearly forty years of service. He never set foot in a Ford factory again. The constant tensions over Willow Run almost certainly contributed to Henry Ford’s son Edsel’s health problems. He died in March 1943. As for Alfred Kahn, Willow Run was his last project. He died at his desk in 1942. The old man himself, Henry Ford, passed on April 7, 1947.

  Cast-Iron Charlie’s one-man battle against the world kept him going another quarter century, until his death in 1968.

  As one bomber after another took off from Willow Run and banked into the air, they headed south, where they flew into one of the arms of Henry Kaiser’s Six Companies octopus, Bechtel-McCone. Flush from their Calship success, Steve Bechtel and partner John McCone had won the contract from the Air Force in January 1943 to build its biggest modification center yet, with some two million square feet of factory space spread out over 285 acres near the Birmingham municipal airport. The $15 million facility had been built without any fee or profit.39 But it would change airplane modification from a series of temporary fixes into a systematic manufacturing process.

  Eighty-six percent of the people Bechtel and McCone hired to do the modification had never worked with airplanes before. More than half were women. But they carried out the immensely complicated and time-consuming work of removing parts of planes that required modification or replacement—parts sometimes buried deep in the engine or fuselage underneath a bewildering network of wires, hoses, or other parts—and replacing or altering them according to Air Force Materiel Command directives that, in the course of a single day, might cover a wall of the supervisor’s office. Some planes required as much as fifteen to sixteen hundred hours of labor.40

  Besides the Willow Run B-24s, others flew out from Consolidated’s own plant in San Diego, where Kaiser’s friend Tom Girdler had moved over from Vultee to replace Reuben Fleet. He and Harry Woodhead had hurled the plane into full Ford-style production, beginning with the C model and then the D, equipped with heavier armament and supercharged engines and redesigned engine nacelles, and finally the E, the basic design as the Willow Run bombers.

  But the most important of the B-24s that passed through Bechtel-McCone’s Birmingham center were the Very Long Range Liberators, or VLRs, which would change the course of the war in the Atlantic and open the way for the Allied buildup in Europe.

  Since September 1941 the British had been ordering B-24s through Lend-Lease in hopes the long-range bomber could close the so-called Atlantic Gap. This was the long, wide stretch southeast of Iceland that Atlantic convoys had to pass through but that no patrol plane could reach. The strategists in Washington and at Britain’s Coastal Command called it the Atlantic Gap. Seamen had another name for it: the Black Pit. This was the great kill zone of the German U-boat wolf packs, and the graveyard of dozens of Liberty ships and their crews.

  To everyone’s surprise, out over the Atlantic the B-24’s faults—its tough handling, its less-than-rugged airframe—faded to insignificance. Instead, its virtues—its long 2,850-mile range, its ability to carry a bigger load than the Flying Fortress, and its adaptability and versatility—stood out, especially on the B-24D, which the British dubbed the Mark III. Then Consolidated’s engineers back in San Diego took a British suggestion and installed extra fuel tanks in one of the three bomb bays. At one stroke it doubled the range of maritime patrols guarding the approaches to Britain. Carrying almost three thousand gallons of fuel, the VLR could fly to the middle of the Atlantic and back from either Aldergrove or Iceland. Once the Bechtel-McCone people in Birmingham acclimated the plane to the near-Arctic conditions in the North Atlantic, suddenly the Atlantic Gap didn’t look so large.

  In fact, in the spring of 1943 the VLR Liberator slammed the Gap shut. In the first twenty days of March, the Germans sank ninety-seven Allied merchant ships—more than half a million tons. In the last ten days of March, Allied convoys lost exactly one ship, thanks to the VLR’s vigilance. Then in April, British Coastal Command began flying the first of their “shuttle” patrols from Gander in Newfoundland to Reykjavik—clear across the Gap and well within the Liberator’s range. In the seven patrols they ran that month, they spotted no fewer than ten submarines. Only failures in the depth-charge mechanisms saved the Germans from certain death. But as American crews in their own VLR squadron in Newfoundland, No. 6 Antisubmarine Squadron, soon learned, it wasn’t necessary for the planes to actually sink U-boats. They just had to spot them and alert the convoy escorts, to hugely increase the odds in the Allies’ favor.

  For the rest of April 1943, the battle seesawed back and forth, as American escort carriers joined in the fight, as well. Then came the decisive turning point on May 4, when convoy ONS5 came under concentrated attack after it had been battered by gales off the southern tip of Greenland. For the next three days, ONS5 lost twelve merchantmen, but combined air and sea counterattacks sank six submarines and damaged several more. A few days later, another attack on a convoy cost the Germans one submarine for every ship sunk—unacceptable losses for the Germans, especially when one of the U-boat skippers lost was Peter Dönitz, younger son of the German navy’s commander-in-chief. Attacks on the next four convoys cost the Germans six more boats, two of them killed by VLR Liberators. Every one of the Allied freighters got through unscathed.

  A chastened Admiral Karl Dönitz did the dismal math. On May 24, 1943, he decided to call off his wolf packs. Germany had lost the battle for the Atlantic. Then and later, Dönitz put the blame squarely on the closing of the Atlantic Gap, and the B-24s. Later, Admiralty analysts calculated that every VLR Liberator patrol saved no less than six Allied ships. All in all, the Liberator squadrons would be credited with no fewer than seventy-two U-boat kills.41

  Thanks to the B-24 and the men and women who made them, the way was fully clear for Kaiser’s Liberty ships across the Atlantic. America was ready to turn its war production loose.

  * * *

  * Today it is U.S. Interstate 94.

  † After the war, Strauss became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

  Workers posing with 5000th Flying Fortress, signed by 35,000 Boeing employees, May 1944. Copyright © Boeing

  I don’t think of the hope of reward as selfishness. Work is the prime mover of our economy, and the fuel that makes people work is profit.

  —Tom Girdler

  NINETEEN HUNDRED FORTY-THREE was the year certain issues that had been lingering since Bill Knudsen first came to Washington got resolved once and for all. One was that Washington’s long-simmering battle with Big Labor came to a boil. In April the leonine John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, decided it was time for his miners to get a raise. Their ranks were depleted by members who had left to join the armed services or for more lucrative and less dangerous work in war industries, while the rest worked longer. Unless they got another two dollars a day, Lewis thundered, they would go on strike. On April 28, 1943, strikes broke out in the Pittsburgh-area coalfields, and production came to a halt.

  When Roosevelt got th
e news, he exploded. He ordered the army to take over the mines and prepared a radio broadcast for May 2 appealing directly to the miners to go back to work. He was being wheeled down to the Oval Office to make the broadcast when word came that Lewis had struck a deal to have the miners return to work in two days. Roosevelt gave the speech anyway.1

  The Army never actually seized the mines, and no one at the White House had thought about how the Army would get the miners back to work if it did. “You can’t run a coal mine with bayonets,” Lewis said.2 But the threat, plus the loss of prestige with the public, was enough to get the UMW back to work—back, that is, until June. On June 19 more than 60,000 coal miners dropped tools and went home.

  This time the public reaction was overwhelming. Newspapers across the country denounced the strike as unpatriotic and vile. When Roosevelt threatened to strip the draft deferments from every mine worker, Lewis decided to halt the strike after three days, but the damage to organized labor was done. The Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Labor Disputes Act, ordering a thirty-day notice for all strikes and ending the secret ballot for union membership. On June 25, Roosevelt vetoed it. It took the Senate exactly eleven minutes to override him.3

  As Knudsen had observed, labor trouble, far more than business foot-dragging or profiteering, had been the bane of war production. Work stoppages in 1943 alone cost 13.5 million man-days: almost triple the man-days lost in 1942. On December 27 a threatened railroad strike forced the Army to intervene for real. It seized control and ran the nation’s rail system for more than three weeks before the strike ended.

  But Big Labor had learned its lesson. It could no longer afford to be seen hindering the war effort; on the contrary, it wanted its workers to share in the credit for arming America in record time. So labor troubles eased slightly in 1944, with only 8.7 million man-days lost—just about enough to build six 35,000-ton battleships on 14,344 B-24s, but still not enough to make any appreciable difference in the burgeoning production numbers.4

  Even so, a week before D-day, 70,000 workers were on strike at twenty-six plants in Detroit alone.5

  A second turning point came in February, when Donald Nelson managed to fend off a concerted effort to replace him with the kind of all-powerful production czar he and Knudsen had resisted from the start.* Although Nelson did finally step down in July as an Office of War Mobilization came into being under Roosevelt’s friend Supreme Court judge James Byrnes, the system he and Knudsen had devised for leaving defense production in the hands of business, not the government, remained—largely because everyone could now see how well it worked.

  This was the other point of no return. In 1943 the numbers Knudsen and his colleagues had promised were taking on a life of their own. Production of Liberty ships was reaching 160 a month, while 18,434 Navy battleships, cruisers, carriers, subs, and destroyers poured out of America’s shipyards—along with 16,000 landing craft. Heavy bombers soared from 2,618 in 1942 to 9,616—bombers that would soon be leveling Germany’s cities and industrial heartland by day, while the RAF attacked them at night.

  Tank production swelled to 29,495; small arms from 2.3 million in 1942 to almost 7 million; artillery shells from 693,000 to 800,000 tons; machine guns to 830,000; and airplanes of all kinds to 85,946—an air armada beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings.6 Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, the symbols of modern military power just two years earlier, were being drowned in the flood. In 1943, American war production was twice that of Germany and Japan combined.7 Victory, which had seemed so elusive just ten months before, was now assured.

  At the center of the effort, of course, were mammoth companies like General Electric. America’s fourth-largest corporation in 1940 with some 30 million square feet of production space available in its thirty-four main plants scattered from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Oakland, California, GE was a perfect illustration of Bill Knudsen’s principle that the biggest companies are the biggest because they by and large get the best results.

  The company got its first military contract on September 23, 1939, making mule-pack howitzers for the Army, and pushed on from there. In the first year of the war, GE spent $78 million of its own money expanding its facilities for military production; the federal government threw in another $120 million. GE would go on to make propulsion plants for warships, turbo-superchargers for airplanes, searchlights and military radios, radar sets and naval gun directors, and motors for operating the ramps of LSTs and Higgins boats. GE also came up with three hundred new types of electric lamps and manufactured 400,000 electrically heated flying suits, as well as designing a new torpedo for the Navy. It also provided the turbines for 10 of the Navy’s carriers, 37 of its 43 cruisers, and 200 of its 364 destroyers. It even filled a contract for the Army for five thousand bazookas in thirty days, even though GE engineer Jim Power had to design the weapon himself in a marathon twenty-four-hour session, while four hundred workers labored around the clock to meet the deadline.8

  Another major player was Knudsen’s own company, General Motors. The biggest automaker company in the world had been slow getting into war production. As late as May 1941, chairman Alfred Sloan scoffed at the idea that war was coming—and Sloan insisted on keeping GM’s overseas operations in Germany and Japan going far longer than even his close friends thought politically expedient.9

  Yet when war came, GM shot from an almost standing start to converting almost 90 percent of its forty-one operating divisions to munitions production as war product sales shot from $406 million in 1941 to $3.5 billion in 1943. The automaking giant adopted a new slogan, “Victory Is Our Business,” and business turned out to be pretty good. It saw net sales of $13.4 billion, and a net profit of $673 million. These were slender numbers compared to peacetime, but still enough to make GM the emperor of wartime industry—making 10 percent of everything America produced to fight the Second World War.10

  In 1943, GM was also building trucks and tanks for the Army, as well as Grumman fighter and torpedo planes for the Navy. The GM engineers at Eastern Aircraft learned from Ford’s mistakes at Willow Run. By working closely with Grumman and by concentrating on subassemblies instead of entire planes, they produced 7,546 Avengers and 5,920 Wildcats before war’s end. Another 200 GM-built Wildcats wound up flying with the Royal Navy.11

  It was also General Motors who discovered that eight Liberty ships could carry the same number of two-and-a-half-ton trucks disassembled as one hundred could carry fully assembled. All you needed was a place to do the assembling: A few portable cranes, battery chargers, a couple of portable Quonset huts or even tents, a poured concrete floor, and a tractor and trailer or two worked fine. And with 40,000 employees, GM’s Overseas Operations Division was perfectly poised to deliver and assemble whatever American forces needed, almost on the front line.

  The first two temporary plants supported U.S. Army operations in Tunisia in 1942. Two more were set up in Heliopolis in Egypt for the Eighth Army. One was finally transferred to the southern terminus of the Burma Road. The other wound up repairing broken-down trucks in the jungle at Rangoon during the final push for the liberation of Burma.12

  General Motors’ most amazing war-front plant, however, took shape in Iran. Liberty ships landed parts for the plant to supply Russian forces at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. A one-track railroad then moved the parts to the factory site at Andimeshk. The first GM employees reached Andimeshk in March 1942, to find it a hellhole with typhus, dysentery, sand-fly fever, and a running temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

  The first sixty men began assembling trucks out in the open, while the others worked to build a makeshift factory. Roving jackals raided the camp stores and kitchens at night. But by day the Andimeshk plant was soon turning out 2,500 military vehicles a month of all makes and types, with tool-working shops and a special oxygen-manufacturing unit for high-speed welding. For labor GM trained five thousand Iranians in the mass-production methods of Detroit, so that they could put together a complete truck in less
than thirty minutes.

  Once the trucks were tested and inspected, the General Motors men passed the keys to Russian drivers who took them over 800 miles of treacherous mountain roads to Tabriz and then across the border into the Soviet Union—each one heavily laden with Lend-Lease supplies. In July 1942 a second factory opened 185 miles south of Andimeshk at Khorramshahr.

  It was not until June 30, 1943, that the Army finally took over the operation. By then the ultimate capitalist corporation, General Motors had delivered 20,380 trucks to the Red Army.13

  There was, however, another, less epic side to the nation’s war production machine. Bill Knudsen caught a glimpse of it in his Social Security Building office when a letter arrived from a retired railway worker in Reading, Pennsylvania.

  This gentleman had an idea. He had figured out a way to recycle discarded boxcar wheels and suspensions, to convert them to wartime use. He already had the machine tools he needed, he said, in a warehouse near his home. There was no call for new steel or other priority materials. The wheels were deemed scrap. All he needed was a contract from the Army to get started.

  Knudsen passed the letter on, first to Don Nelson at the Materials and Defense Contracts Division, then to the Army. The retired railway worker got his contract. In no time he had six men working for him, as they reground and refinished old boxcar wheels and got them ready for a new life with the United States Army.14

  At nearly eighty, the man from Reading was the oldest defense contractor in World War II. But his wasn’t the smallest business. That honor belonged to Clyde Walling of Cleveland, Ohio. Mr. Walling was president of a tool company that operated out of his two-car garage while he parked his car in the driveway to make room. By May 1941 he had an employee force of exactly three men.15

  Subcontractors like Walling were the lifeblood of the American free enterprise system, as Bill Knudsen well knew. General Motors alone employed nearly 20,000 of them. Knudsen had aimed to make them the lifeblood of defense contracting, as well. They ranged in size from Clyde Walling’s garage to major companies like Timken, which was also based in Cleveland but had branches in Detroit and other cities, and made everything from machine tools to axles, with a fair number of metal and steel products in between.