by A. J. Baime
He later learned that German Ford executives had started a secret company using Ford machines to build material for the Nazis. “They were machining parts for the Junkers Airplane Works, or I suppose, any airplane parts,” Tallberg later said.
The Ford family was losing control of its German operations.
A master of propaganda, Hitler chose a strategic day in 1938 to make a public statement about his admiration for Henry Ford. On the occasion of Henry’s seventy-fifth birthday, the motor magnate attended an event in Detroit where—to his surprise—German officials were in attendance. They presented Henry with the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. The highest award Hitler ever offered to any non-German, the Cross was made of gold and adorned with four swastikas.
Henry stood emaciated in his old age at this Detroit function, unaware of the extreme political maelstrom he was tumbling into. He stood smiling in a light tan suit as a cameraman froze his image in celluloid at the very moment a member of the German consulate pinned the Eagle to his breast. The Fuehrer sent Henry a personal note thanking him for his “humanitarian ideals” and for his work toward “the cause of peace.” (Soon after, the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh received a similar award, as did General Motors’ head of European operations, James Mooney, who met personally with Adolf Hitler about business conditions in Germany on more than one occasion.)
Photos of Henry wearing the Nazi medal drew outrage. “I question the Americanism of Henry Ford,” the Jewish entertainer Eddie Cantor said in a statement to the press, “for accepting a citation from the biggest gangster in the world. . . . Doesn’t he realize that the German papers, reporting the citation, said all Americans were behind Nazism? Whose side is Mr. Ford on?”
Henry released a statement, saying there was “no sympathy on my part with Nazism. . . . Those who have known me for many years realize that anything that breeds hate is repulsive to me.”
Nevertheless, Henry refused to give the award back, likely for fear of angering Hitler personally. When Henry was asked by a reporter one day what to do about Hitler, he nodded toward his aide-de-camp Harry Bennett.
“Do you really want to get rid of Hitler?” Henry said. “I’ll send Harry over there with six of his men. They’ll get rid of Hitler for you in no time.”
At a board meeting on April 20, 1938, in Germany, Charlie Sorensen agreed to a contract to build trucks for the Nazi government under careful circumstances. The company would partner with another German concern, Ambi-Budd, which would furnish much of the labor and be the face of the venture. The plant would be built in Berlin, far from any foreign border, according to Hitler’s wishes. And access to the plant by Americans would be heavily restricted.
At the time, no one in America could imagine that the greatest catastrophe in human history was at hand. Hitler’s speeches had grown more ominous through the 1930s, and his book, Mein Kampf, had presaged incredible events. But who in America had read Mein Kampf? Campaigns against Jews had occurred before—pogroms in Poland, Russia, even France. How would another one be different? In fact, according to a Gallup poll taken in 1939 (the year after Ford Motor Company signed contracts to make trucks for the Hitler regime), 25 percent of Americans believed that a campaign against Jews was imminent inside the United States.
In Europe, it was clear that Germany had by far the strongest economy and that Hitler’s interests would soon expand outside his borders. The financial boon of investing in this economic powerhouse during the Depression was difficult for American businessmen to resist. And if there was war in Europe, it seemed clear that Germany would win, no matter the opponent.
“Whatever the political settlement may be,” Dr. Albert advised, “not only in official quarters but also in business circles, the opinion prevails that a radical change will take place . . . and that the German sphere of interest will be immensely enlarged. It is assumed that the greater part, if not the whole, of Europe will economically form one unit . . . Germany taking the lead.”
It was best to be in Hitler’s good graces.
In the fall of 1938, Dr. Albert supervised the opening of the new factory in Berlin to build trucks for the Nazi government. GM’s Opel was already building trucks for the regime. With no knowledge of the impending war, no crystal ball that could foresee violence and genocide, the Detroit auto companies were now heavily invested in building the Nazi arsenal.
Without the Internet and modern communications, few in America took notice of these overseas deals. And they were not entirely unique; other industries, such as banks and technology companies, were functioning similarly in Nazi Germany. When one GM stockholder raised concern, the company’s chairman, Alfred Sloan (William Knudsen’s boss), defended the contracts and the profits, which were critical to the balance sheets, especially during the Depression. The politics of Nazi Germany “should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors,” Sloan said. “We must conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization.” GM had obligations to its stockholders, Sloan said. “We have no right to shut down the plant.”
The events that followed shocked the world. November 1938 brought Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” an orgy of terror that left innumerable synagogues in flames inside Germany. Nearly 10,000 Jewish stores were looted and destroyed, and at least 91 Jews murdered. On March 15, 1939, the Nazis violated the Munich Pact by taking the entirety of Czechoslovakia.
Then, on September 1, 1939, Goering unleashed his Luftwaffe over Poland, while the Nazi Panzer tanks and trucks rolled over the border—a highly coordinated brand of warfare that Hitler called Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), powered by unprecedented amounts of horsepower, some of it built by Ford and GM. Goering offered a definition of Blitzkrieg for the newspapers.
“Our enemies should take note,” he said. “Aerial attacks, stupendous in their mass effect, surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination from within, the murder of leading men, overwhelming attacks on all weak points in the enemy’s defense, sudden attacks, all in the same second, without regard for reserves or losses.”
World War II had begun. Though the Nazis were adept at utilizing all forms of weaponry, it was the airplane that revolutionized military engagement on that first morning of the war. Never had a weapon dealt death and destruction with such economy, nor had one proved so capable of distilling a psychology of fear. To mark the occasion, Hitler mounted cameras on his Stuka dive-bombers. When he sat later to watch the film, he marveled at the velocity of the machines, the power of the engines, the impact of the bombs.
“That is what will happen to them!” he cried out. “That is how we will annihilate them!”
PART II
THE LIBERATOR
I was a ball turret gunner on a B-24 Liberator. My first experience in a ball turret was in combat. It was not exhilarating. It was terrifying. All just flak. Flak—that’s what killed most of our people. In the ball turret, you had a good view. It was hell. You could see the bombs land. We weren’t sending enough of the bombs down as far as I was concerned. I didn’t care what we did to the people on the ground. They were shooting at me and I wanted them gone. I flew thirty missions. We flew the old B-24s with open windows in back. The noise was horrific. We took terrible beatings. We lost an engine, two engines, and still the plane would fly. The Liberator was a very sturdy plane. It got me out alive.
—MARVIN GRAHAM, Shreveport, LA
8
Fifty Thousand Airplanes
Spring 1940
If Roosevelt took this country into war and won, he might be one of the great figures of all history. But if we lost, he would be damned forever. The cards are now stacked against us.
—CHARLES LINDBERGH, January 7, 1941
ON THE EVENING OF May 9, 1940, Franklin Roosevelt sat in his second-floor study in the White House in his high-backed red leather chair, a precise replica of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite chair during his presidency. Roosevelt heard his phone ring at 11:00 PM. On the line, his Belgian ambassador, Joh
n Cudahy, reported jolting news.
Under a veil of darkness, Hitler had launched an all-out attack. Nazi warplanes were sweeping low over Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and parts of France. At that moment, Europe’s old citadels were crumbling, Cudahy reported. Women and children were panicking in the streets.
Roosevelt hung up the phone. For years he had anticipated this moment—all-out war in Europe. As he knew from experience, war had a magnetic force, a way of sucking in ever-greater populations. Would the United States of America be capable of resisting this force?
He spent a sleepless night on the phone with his advisers. At 10:30 the next morning, the doors to the Oval Office burst open and the President appeared, sleepless but alert, wheeled in his chair by an aide. Roosevelt’s cabinet was already assembled around a mahogany conference table—trusted confidants like Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the treasury; Cordell Hull, secretary of state; and General George C. Marshall, the grim-faced and gimlet-eyed army chief of staff. Roosevelt had the walls of the Oval Office crowded with pictures of ships, a tribute to his love of sailing and his navy days. Though he was a crippled man, he was a wellspring of charisma, a man whose mere presence heightened the sentience of everyone in the room.
Roosevelt took command. He was fifty-eight years old, a man of peerless prestige, with blazing blue-gray eyes and a voice that boomed from his big chest with all the intonations of a patrician education: Groton, Harvard (where he was editor of the newspaper), Columbia Law. Raised the son of wealthy sixth-generation Americans in Hyde Park, New York, he had traveled often as a boy in Europe and could speak French and German. He was a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the United States. During World War I, before he was elected governor of his home state of New York, Roosevelt had served as assistant secretary of the navy, and while he had spent most of the war in Washington, he had seen enough of the battlefield in Europe to envision the gutters of Brussels and Rotterdam flowing with blood that morning in 1940.
“I have seen war on land and sea,” he said about his experience during World War I. “I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. . . . I hate war.”
With his staff that morning, the President examined the American armed forces, a military drained of all resources by the Great Depression. The fighting forces had little weaponry. There was no legitimate munitions industry. In one embarrassing instance in the year past, General George Patton had needed nuts and bolts to repair some rusty tanks. The army had none, so he had to order his own from a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. The US Army was smaller than that of Belgium, a nation that could fit inside Maryland. On that very morning, in Louisiana, the army was carrying out war games—using broomsticks in place of guns and eggs in place of grenades.
“We Americans treat our Army like a mangy old dog,” said General Marshall.
The group had themselves to blame. Most had supported Congress’s Neutrality Acts in the 1930s, all of which the President had signed. These laws were meant to isolate the United States from its allies in the event of war—to essentially make war illegal in America. “It was born of the belief that we could legislate ourselves out of war,” said Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt’s chief speechwriter, “as we had once legislated ourselves out of the saloons (and into the speakeasies). Like Prohibition, it was an experiment ‘noble in motive’ but disastrous in result.”
What frightened Roosevelt most was the military’s critical lack of airplanes. The airplane had played a role in World War I many years earlier, but hardly a big one. In traditional warfare, troops and ships moved at five or ten miles per hour. In traditional warfare, the oceans protected the American mainland from attack.
“But the new element—air navigation—steps up the speed of possible attack to 200, to 300 miles an hour,” Roosevelt said. “From a base in the outer West Indies, the coast of Florida could be reached in 200 minutes. The Azores are only 2,000 miles from parts of our eastern seaboard and if Bermuda fell into hostile hands it is a matter of less than three hours for modern bombers to reach our shores.”
The most accurate intelligence on the Nazi Luftwaffe made the spine of Washington tingle with fear. Goering, it was estimated, could manufacture some 18,000 airplanes a year.
And American airpower?
“Well, to be realistic, we were practically nonexistent,” General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, head of the US Army Air Corps, later said of the situation in 1940.
As Roosevelt’s cabinet meeting continued, more bad news arrived over the wire. “I remember the dismay with which we heard of the crumbling of the fortresses along the Belgian eastern frontier,” recalled Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who sat uncomfortably in the Oval Office that morning. “Worst of all was the increasing apprehension that the German war machine was so overwhelmingly superior in might, quality, strategy, material, and morale.”
The President ordered his staff to assess everything it would need to reinvent the American military and turn it into a force that could match the Nazi war machine—and with terrific speed. Then he steeled himself, digging deep and summoning the facade—his famous optimism. “You know,” he once told Orson Welles, “you and I are the two best actors in America.” He ordered the doors to the Oval Office opened. When reporters swarmed, they found the President smiling calmly and confidently, his cigarette holder sticking out from between his tobacco-stained teeth.
“Good morning,” Roosevelt began as photographers clicked and pencils scribbled. “I hope you had more sleep than I did. I guess most of you were pretty busy all night.” The President met question after question. Not once did he mention the words “Nazi” or “Hitler.” There was one question he refused to answer.
What were the chances of America entering the war?
The truth was that Roosevelt knew war was inevitable. And he had already come up with a plan. As Sears, Roebuck executive Donald Nelson, who would soon be appointed head of the War Production Board, later wrote of the spring of 1940: “Who among us, except the President of the United States, really saw the magnitude of the job ahead, the awful mission of the United States in a world running berserk?
“I can testify that all the people I met and talked to, including members of the General Staff, the Army and Navy’s highest ranking officers, distinguished statesmen and legislators, thought of the defense program as only a means for equipping ourselves to keep the enemy away from the shores of the United States. None of us—not one that I know of, except the President—saw that we might be fighting Germany and Japan all over the world.”
One week later, on May 16, 1940, the President sat in his limousine en route from the White House to the Capitol Building. As he passed the Labor Department and the Justice Department, the buildings appeared dull and gray, soaked in a heavy rain. The sullen mood of the city that morning reflected the overall mood of the nation. This was a country still in the grip of depression, with 8 million people out of work and 7.5 million more making less than the minimum wage (30 cents an hour).
Inside the House chamber—that dramatic setting where presidents delivered State of the Union Addresses—Roosevelt stood at the rostrum with steel buckles locking his lifeless legs in place. Always, there existed an elaborate production around the President to conceal his disability and any hint of weakness from the American public. Standing upright, he smiled as two hundred of Washington’s most powerful men gave him an ovation that lasted two full minutes. Despite the applause, they were a grim-looking lot. As one journalist described the scene, “Every Cabinet member present appeared sunk in serious thought.”
“These are ominous days,” Roosevelt began. “The clear fact is that the American people must recast their thinking about national protection. The brutal force of modern offensive war has been loosed in all its horror. New powers of destruction, incredibly swift and deadly, have been developed; and those who wield them are rut
hless and daring.”
Roosevelt was prepared to challenge the nation as it had never been challenged before in its 164-year history. “This means [the creation of] military implements—not on paper—which are ready and available to meet any lightning offensive against our American interest,” he said. “It means also that facilities for production must be ready to turn out munitions and equipment at top speed.”
Standing before his political friends and foes, he asked Congress for $1.28 billion for the military. Then he dropped a number that confounded all experts: “I believe that this nation should plan at this time a program that would provide us with 50,000 military and naval planes.”
The crowd erupted in roars and applause, on both sides of the aisle. But silently, everyone present came to the same conclusion: Fifty thousand military planes? Impossible.
Even before the war had started, Roosevelt had envisioned the future of modern combat. Control of the skies, with the threat of instant apocalyptic devastation, would win the day. Even the threat of it would be enough to change the course of political action among nations.
As early as 1938, he had argued in a meeting with military advisers for a fleet of state-of-the-art aircraft. US Army Air Corps chief Hap Arnold remembered the meeting as airpower’s “Magna Carta.” “The President came straight out for air power,” Arnold recalled. “Airplanes—now—and lots of them!” Roosevelt spoke most about “mass production” on American assembly lines—making airplanes like they made cars in Detroit. His closest aide, Harry Hopkins, later recalled, “The President was sure then that we were going to get into war and he believed that airpower would win it.”