Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

11. General Motors Corp., A History of Eastern Aircraft Division (n.p., 1944).

  12. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 448.

  13. Fortune, November 1943, 150–54; Walton, Miracle of World War II, 448–50.

  14. American Machinist, December 10, 1941, 1430.

  15. Business Week, May 10, 1941, 17.

  16. Time, November 16, 1942, 21.

  17. Barbara Forgy Schock, “The Prairie Shipyard,” www.thezephyr.com.

  18. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 469.

  19. Roger Franklin, The Defender: The Story of General Dynamics (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 92–93.

  20. Beasley, Knudsen, 357.

  21. Knudsen Papers: 1942 tour notes, quoted in Beasley, Knudsen, 360.

  22. Knudsen Papers: 1942 tour notes, quoted in Beasley, Knudsen, 360–61.

  23. Hagley Museum, National Association of Manufacturing Collection; J. A. Hartley, “The Public’s View of War and Profits,” NAM pamphlet, May 1942, 3.

  24. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 537.

  25. Business Week, March 15, 1941, 38–42.

  26. Leo Cherne, Your Business Goes to War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).

  27. Cherne, Your Business Goes to War, 50–53.

  28. Robert Connery, The Navy and Industrial Mobilization in World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 271–75.

  29. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 555.

  30. Time, March 23, 1943.

  31. National Archives, Image No. 80 G349504, reprinted on Hobbs and Pacific Hut site, historylink.com.

  32. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 555.

  33. Blum, V Was for Victory.

  34. Michael Barone, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1990), 154; Harold Vatter, The U.S. Economy in World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 51.

  35. Vatter, U.S. Economy, 54–55.

  36. Donald L. Losman, Irene Kyriakopoulos, and J. Dawson Ahalt, “Economics of America’s World War II Mobilization,” in Gropman, The Big “L,” 188.

  37. See Gregory Fossedal, Our Finest Hour: Will Clayton, the Marshall Plan, and the Triumph of Democracy (Stamford, CT: Hoover Institution Press, 1993), 124–26.

  38. Barone, Our Country, 154.

  39. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 249.

  40. Quoted in Blum, V Was for Victory, 186.

  41. Barone, Our Country, 160.

  42. Clay Bedford Jr., interview, October 13, 2010.

  43. HAER, Richmond Shipyard No. 3, 163.

  44. Blum, V Was for Victory, 191.

  45. Clive, State of War, 171–73.

  46. Blum, V Was for Victory, 201.

  47. Quoted in Blum, V Was for Victory, 203.

  48. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 374.

  49. American Machinist, June 11, 1941, 51–52; Business Week, March 15, 1941, 76.

  50. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 380.

  51. Beasley, Knudsen, 354.

  52. Walton, Miracle of World War II; HAER, 159.

  53. Life, June 5, 1944, 74–79.

  54. Emily Yellin, Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II (New York: Free Press, 2007).

  55. Clawson, Shipyard Diary, 5–6.

  56. Clawson, Shipyard Diary, 6.

  57. Clawson, Shipyard Diary, 89.

  58. Clawson, Shipyard Diary, 91–92.

  59. Roger Lotchin, The Bad City in the Good War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 139.

  60. Effie Walling interview, in Lotchin, The Bad City, 80.

  61. Katie Grant, “Wartime Memories” Rosie the Riveter Trust, www.rosietheriveter.org/memory.htm.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE MAN FROM FRISCO

  1. Foster, Kaiser, 117.

  2. Kaiser Papers: Nellie Bent to Kaiser, June 29, 1943, Carton 18.

  3. Lane, Ships for Victory, 612.

  4. Lane, Ships for Victory, 612; United States Naval Vessels (Division of Naval Intelligence, 1946; Schiffer, 1996) 47–48.

  5. Lane, Ships for Victory, 610.

  6. Heiner, Kaiser, 145.

  7. Lane, Ships for Victory, 611.

  8. Heiner, Kaiser, 145.

  9. Lane, Ships for Victory, 612–13.

  10. Heiner, Kaiser, 175.

  11. Heiner, Kaiser, 146.

  12. Lane, Ships for Victory, 613.

  13. Carl Abbott, Greater Portland: Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacfic Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 43.

  14. See (Oregon Historical Quarterly 91, Fall 1990, quoted in Abbott, Greater Portland, 44–45.

  15. Lane, Ships for Victory; Heiner, Kaiser, 146.

  16. New York Times, April 3, 1943.

  17. Foster, Kaiser, 76–77.

  18. Sawyer and Mitchell, Liberty Ships, 114–15.

  19. Kaiser Papers: Stephen D. Bechtel to Kaiser, August 17, 1942, Carton 13.

  20. Foster, Kaiser, 120–22.

  21. Lane, Ships for Victory, 544–45.

  22. Journal of Commerce, February 1, 1943, 18.

  23. Lane, Ships for Victory, 547–48.

  24. Heiner, Kaiser, 128.

  25. U.S. Senate, Truman Committee hearings, Part 18, March 25, 1943/7350.

  26. Washington Post, March 26, 1943.

  27. Lane, Ships for Victory, 553.

  28. Lane, Ships for Victory, 554.

  29. Lane, Ships for Victory, 55.

  30. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington, 72.

  31. George Spangenberg, oral history interview, 1990, www.georgespangenberg.com, Oral History as PDF File, 75.

  32. Winchester, ed., U.S. Military Aircraft, 136–37.

  33. Time, July 27, 1942, 71.

  34. Heiner, Kaiser, 157.

  35. Kaiser Papers: handwritten draft of testimony on Hughes case, 7.

  36. Foster, Kaiser, 182–83.

  37. Heiner, Kaiser, 159.

  38. Kaiser Papers: Kaiser statement on Howard Hughes, 7, Carton 127, Folder 35.

  39. Foster, Kaiser, 183.

  40. WPB Papers, Ed Bern to Donald Nelson, August 30, 1943, quoted in Foster, Kaiser, 184.

  41. Fortune, September 1942, 184.

  42. Spangenberg oral history interview, 76.

  43. Kaiser Papers: Contract cancellation, Carton 127, Folder 12.

  44. Kaiser Papers: Kaiser statement on Hughes, 7, Carton 127, Folder 35.

  45. Time, October 18, 1943, 77.

  46. Time, October 18, 1943, 77.

  47. Heiner, Kaiser, 161.

  48. Heiner, Kaiser, 163–64.

  49. Heiner, Kaiser, 165.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SUPERBOMBER

  1. Beasley, Knudsen, 274.

  2. Quoted in Spector, Eagle Against the Sun, 227.

  3. George C. Kenney, General Kenney Reports: A Personal History of the Pacific War (1949; Washington, DC: U.S. Air Force, 1997), 14.

  4. Kenney, General Kenney Reports, 285.

  5. Beasley, Knudsen, 378.

  6. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun, 227–28.

  7. Knudsen Papers: Log of Pacific Trip, entry for August 26, 1943.

  8. Knudsen Papers: Conversation with Lieutenant General Kenney and Major General Whitehead, September 15, 1943.

  9. Knudsen Papers: Log of Pacific Trip, entry for September 1, 1943.

  10. Kenney, General Kenney Reports, 286.

  11. Minutes, War Production Board: July 27, 1943 meeting, 264.

  12. Knudsen Papers: Log of Pacific Trip, August 28, 1943.

  13. Beasley, Knudsen, 247.

  14. H. H. Arnold, Global Mission (New York: Harper and Row, 1949), 188.

  15. Lindbergh, War Journals, 183.

  16. Lindbergh, War Journals, 183; Arnold, Global Mission, 188.

  17. Arnold, Global Mission, 189.

  18. Arnold, Global Mission, 189.

  19. Geoffrey Perret, Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II (New York: Random House, 1993), 37.

  20. Harold Mansfield, Vis
ion: A Saga of the Sky (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1956), 158.

  21. Mary Wells Geer, Boeing’s Ed Wells (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 93–94.

  22. Geer, Boeing’s Ed Wells, 94.

  23. Gene Gurney, Journey of the Giants (New York: Coward-McCann, 1961), 23.

  24. Gurney, Journey, 24.

  25. Geer, Boeing’s Ed Wells, 96–97.

  26. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 404–5.

  27. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 16–17; Walton, Miracle of World War II, 352.

  28. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 353.

  29. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 17.

  30. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 353; Geer, Boeing’s Ed Wells, 98.

  31. Gurney, Journey, 29.

  32. Yenne, American Aircraft Factory, 64.

  33. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 31.

  34. Tom Collison, The Superfortress Is Born (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1945).

  35. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 37.

  36. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 51.

  37. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 53.

  38. Robert Mann, The B-29 Superfortress Chronology, 1934–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 27.

  39. Geer, Boeing’s Ed Wells, 99.

  40. Steve Birdsall, Saga of the Superfortress (New York: Doubleday, 1980), 14.

  41. Gurney, Journey, 40–41.

  42. Gurney, Journey, 42.

  43. Graham White, Allied Aircraft Piston Engines, 368–69.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE BATTLE OF KANSAS

  1. Arnold, Global Mission, 478–79.

  2. Birdsall, Saga, 16.

  3. Mann, Superfortress Chronology, 28.

  4. Birdsall, Saga, 16.

  5. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 32.

  6. Perret, Winged Victory, 38.

  7. Beasley, Knudsen, 366.

  8. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 38.

  9. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 41.

  10. Beasley, Knudsen, 370.

  11. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 76.

  12. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 78.

  13. Beasley, Knudsen, 367.

  14. Life, December 27, 1943, 37.

  15. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 84–85; Beasley, Knudsen, 367.

  16. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 70.

  17. Beasley, Knudsen, 368.

  18. Goodyear Aircraft Corporation (New York: 1945), 17.

  19. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 31.

  20. White, Allied Aircraft Piston Engines, 256–59; Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 86–87.

  21. Beasley, Knudsen, 370–71.

  22. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 88, 92.

  23. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 92.

  24. Beasley, Knudsen, 371.

  25. Beasley, Knudsen, 368; Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 94.

  26. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 94.

  27. Beasley, Knudsen, 366.

  28. Leslie Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (1962; New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), 253–54.

  29. According to Groves, this was in the spring of 1944. Now It Can Be Told, 254.

  30. Beasley, Knudsen, 366.

  31. Beasley, Knudsen, 368.

  32. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 252.

  33. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 35.

  34. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 362–63.

  35. Beasley, Knudsen, 371.

  36. See chart in Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 54.

  37. Quoted in Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 96.

  38. Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, 96, 98.

  39. Beasley, Knudsen, 371.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: FIRE THIS TIME

  1. Gurney, Journey, 67.

  2. Birdsall, Saga, 43.

  3. Birdsall, Saga, 44.

  4. Gurney, Journey, 72.

  5. Barrett Tillman, Clash of the Carriers: The True Story of the Marianas Turkey Shoot of World War II (New York: New American Library, 2005) 16–17.

  6. Gurney, Journey, 160.

  7. General Curtis LeMay, Superfortress: The Story of the B-29 and American Air Power (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 103–5; Birdsall, Saga, 163–64.

  8. G. E. Patrick Murray, Bomber Mission (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006), 16.

  9. Gurney, Journey, 210.

  10. Gurney, Journey, 211.

  11. Beasley, Knudsen, 352–53.

  12. Don Whitehead, The Dow Story: The History of the Dow Chemical Company (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 85–86, 90.

  13. Actually, Kaiser’s interest dated back further than that, to January 1940, when Permanente Metals spent $25,000 to research the metal. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington, 65.

  14. Foster, Kaiser, 197.

  15. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington, 112–13.

  16. Whitehead, The Dow Story, 169–70.

  17. Heiner, Kaiser, 112.

  18. LeMay, Superfortress, 121–22.

  19. Kaiser Papers: “Speech by Captain G.E. Dawson, Chemical Warfare Service,” Carton 180; Heiner, Kaiser, 112–13.

  20. LeMay, Superfortress, 91.

  21. LeMay, Superfortress, 121.

  22. Murray, Bomber Missions, 16.

  23. Gurney, Journey, 210.

  24. LeMay, Superfortress, 123.

  25. Stimson, “On Active Service,” 619.

  26. Birdsall, Saga, 182.

  27. LeMay, Superfortress, 123.

  28. Beasley, Knudsen, 381.

  29. Mobilization: World War II and the U.S. Army, 21.

  30. See Herman Somers, Presidential Agency: OWMR, the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955).

  31. Quoted in Beasley, Knudsen, 381.

  32. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Touchstone, 1986), 583.

  33. Birdsall, Saga, 263–64.

  34. LeMay, Superfortress, 151.

  35. Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 260–61.

  36. LeMay, Superfortress, 150.

  37. Geer, Boeing’s Ed Wells, 105.

  38. Beasley, Knudsen, 387.

  CONCLUSION: RECKONING

  1. Thruelson, The Grumman Story, 220.

  2. Knudsen Papers: June 1, 1945; Beasley, Knudsen, 380.

  3. Eiler, Mobilizing America, 444.

  4. Gropman, The Big “L,” 81–92.

  5. Harrison, “Resource Mobilization for World War II,” 184.

  6. Gropman, The Big “L.”

  7. Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction (New York: Viking, 2006), 648–52.

  8. Paul Koistinen, “Warfare and Power Relations in America,” 102–3.

  9. Cooke, The American Home Front, 300–1; Brinkley, Washington Goes to War, 279; Cherne, The Rest of Your Life (New York: Doubleday, 1944).

  10. Quoted in Robert Sobel, The Worldly Economists (New York: Free Press, 1980), 101–2.

  11. Farber, Sloan Rules, 236.

  12. Robert Higgs, “Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s,” in Depression, War, and Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 74–75, 108.

  13. Barone, Our Country, 197.

  14. Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 22.

  15. Beasley, Knudsen, 381.

  16. Beasley, Knudsen, 389.

  17. Catton, War Lords of Washington, 310, 122.

  18. Quoted in Mark Skousen, The Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), 168.

  19. Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 494–95.

  20. Oakland Tribune, September 30, 1942.

  21. Foster, Kaiser, 139.

  22. Evan Thomas, Sea of Thunder (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 246.

  23. See Richard Langworth, Kaiser-Frazer: Last Assault on Detroit (New York: Automobile Quarterly Press,
1975).

  24. Tim Bedford interview, 1984, quoted in Foster, Kaiser, 241.

  25. Kaiser Papers: A. B. Ordway to H. Kaiser, June 14, 1966, quoted in Heiner, Kaiser, 188.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  Henry Kaiser Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  Henry L. Stimson, Diary (microfilm), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT.

  Knudsen Papers, National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library.

  National Association of Manufacturers Collection, Hagley Business History Museum, Wilmington, Delaware.

  War Production Board Records, National Archives, Washington, DC.

  Report of the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, U.S. Senate, 74th Congress, Second Session, February 24, 1936.

  Appropriations Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, 78th Congress, First Session, Higgins Contracts, Executive Hearings, Part 3.

  Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, U.S. Senate, 80th Congress, First Session, Part 40, July–August 1947.

  AMERICAN MACHINIST

  May 14, 1941

  June 11, 1941

  June 25, 1941

  December 10, 1941

  November 12, 1942

  July 6, 1944

  BUSINESS WEEK

  December 9, 1940

  March 15, 1941

  May 10, 1941

  May 24, 1941

  January 17, 1942

  DETROIT NEWS

  May 3, 1937

  May 28, 1940

  FORTUNE

  April 1941

  July 1943

  August 1943

  LIFE

  March 31, 1941

  November 30, 1942

  June 5, 1944

  THE NATION

  November 1940

  TIME

  June 12, 1940

  June 17, 1940

  April 28, 1941

  November 4, 1941

  January 19, 1942

  July 27, 1942

  November 16, 1942

  VITAL SPEECHES OF THE DAY

  April 1, 1941

  WASHINGTON POST

  May 14, 1940

  December 23, 1941

  Personal interview with Clay Bedford Jr., October 17, 2009.

  Personal interview with Peter Bedford, November 3, 2009.

  Personal interview with Frederick Eberstadt, May 11, 2010.

  Personal interview with Judith Knudsen Christie, November 2011.