The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

by A. J. Baime

  Edsel brought his sons with him. Henry II and Benson—both graduated from college now—had never flown in an airplane. They were excited to see a big bomber, and yet they were intimidated by the idea of rubbing elbows with military big shots. Before they left, Edsel confided in Sorensen. It was time to bring his boys into the company. He asked Sorensen if he would help groom them. Someday soon the empire would be theirs. Edsel could not realize at the time how soon their inheritance would come to them, and how hard they would have to fight for it.

  “They’ve had enough school,” Edsel told Sorensen. “And they want to go to work. I hope you’ll help me place them where they may learn how our departments run.”

  The oldest, Henry II, was expected to lead the clan someday. Now he was joining his father, taking his rightful place in the empire. He had long understood what the Ford Terror was doing to Edsel. With nervous anticipation, he boarded a flight bound for the West Coast.

  Upon landing in San Diego, Edsel and his group found a crowd of reporters waiting for them. The trip was just for exploration, Edsel told them. “We are dealing with a 50,000 pound plane,” he said. “Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ll get going. And the quicker I do, the faster the Ford company’s national defense effort will take shape.”

  At the Consolidated airplane factory, Major Reuben Fleet, the white-haired pilot and chief executive, welcomed the Ford team and led them on a tour of his operation. Edsel followed Fleet into the bomber plant, with his sons and Sorensen by his side. The plant was the size of three football fields—nearly half a million parts were manufactured here. The pieces were trucked outside, where the planes were built on a steel bed beneath the hot sun.

  Squinting his eyes in the bright California light, Edsel took in the B-24. The bomber was a new machine, the prototype completed just one year earlier. It appeared a monstrosity. The Liberator stood 66 feet 4 inches long and 17 feet 11 inches tall, with the longest wingspan of any airplane of any kind in America—110 feet. The wing, which was designed by an aeronautical engineer named David R. Davis, was oddly shaped—exceptionally long and unusually narrow, with a high-aspect ratio that provided extraordinary lift. It was mounted shoulder-level on the fuselage so that it looked like arms outstretched, and the four engines hung down. One look at the radial engines was enough to know that they possessed awesome amounts of power.

  As Fleet explained, the B-24 was America’s fastest heavy bomber, with a top speed over 300 miles per hour. It had greater range—nearly 3,000 miles—than any other American airplane. It could carry a bigger payload than any other American flying machine—8,000 pounds of TNT. With a takeoff weight of nearly 60,000 pounds, it was simply colossal.

  Edsel climbed aboard. For over three decades, he had studied the evolution of aviation from afar, his file cabinets crowded with papers on the latest innovations and airplane models. Now he was inside the B-24. The interior was cramped and claustrophobic. A crew of between seven and ten would man the aircraft in battle. In the cockpit, Edsel fingered the instrument panel’s twenty-seven gauges and twelve levers for controlling speed and fuel. Four radial engines combined for a total of 4,800 horsepower, the equivalent of a fleet of fifty-six Ford V8s. The view out the windscreen from inside the cockpit made the engine in Edsel’s rib cage race. He could only imagine what it would be like to steer this gargantuan machine at low altitude over Hitler’s Berlin.

  Down in the belly of the aircraft, the bombardier manned the payload doors. Machine gun turrets were affixed in the nose, tail, spine, and belly. Edsel looked closely at the Liberator’s tricycle landing gear. It was just like the landing gear he and his friend Van Auken had built on their airplane, back in that barn on Woodward Avenue thirty-two years before. Only, on this aircraft, the front tire was three feet high and capable of holding a load of nearly 27,000 pounds on its own.

  In 1939 the military had ordered seven B-24s, and the first Liberators had been delivered to Churchill’s Royal Air Force. The Ford men wanted to know how the plane got its name. Major Fleet explained that he was the one who had named it. As he told the British: “We chose the name Liberator because this airplane can carry destruction to the heart of the Hun, and thus help you and us to liberate those millions temporarily finding themselves under Hitler’s yoke.”

  At the end of the day, Edsel and Sorensen came to a conclusion: Consolidated had created a hell of a weapon. But the aviation firm didn’t have the ability to produce it. The airplanes were pieced together by hand in a standing position, the parts brought to the plane rather than the other way around. There was no understanding of metallurgy, nor any real assembly line at all. Under the hot San Diego sun, the metal would expand and contract by night and day. Under these conditions, there was no way to make one plane exactly like another. Each aircraft was a tailor-made object, its production an incredibly time-consuming affair.

  As young Henry II stood by watching, his father and Sorensen criticized the operation unmercifully. Major Fleet bristled with anger.

  “How would you do it?” he asked.

  The answer: The Fords would make bombers like they made cars. Mass production. Fordism.

  That night, Edsel, Sorensen, and Edsel’s sons turned over the production problem for hours at a dinner table at San Diego’s Coronado Hotel. The idea presented a scintillating challenge. As Knudsen had said, what was a bomber but a large machine made of small pieces? Pieces that could be crafted just like automobile parts? Like a car, an airplane was a frame built with seats for humans, housing an engine that provided propulsion. The leap from a car to an airplane required the added theory of aerodynamics to supply liftoff and control of the skies, and heaps of horsepower to put that theory into practice. A car could conquer time and space. The airplane increased the distance exponentially and added an all-important dimension: altitude.

  Edsel loved talking through these engineering puzzles with his sons sitting next to him. It was as if this dinner table were a pulpit and the boys were learning their family religion.

  After dinner, Sorensen stayed up thinking the job through in his bed. Cast Iron Charlie was now sixty years old, the age at which he had promised himself and Henry Ford that he would retire. The man they used to call “Adonis” had white hair and tired, wrinkle-creased eyes, though he had lost only a little of his musculature. He had come to America as a young man with almost nothing in his pockets; now his fortune was estimated to be in the eight-figure range, in Depression-era dollars. For nearly four decades he had worked in Henry Ford’s factories. He would describe it as “the greatest industrial adventure in history,” one that took him and Henry “from a backyard machine shop to a billion dollar worldwide enterprise and creation of a magic name.”

  Now he sat with his notes spread out on the bed in the middle of the night in San Diego, his watch ticking away the hours. Little did he know at that moment that he was about to embark on a new adventure more ambitious than any Henry Ford had experienced.

  “To compare a Ford V-8 with a four-engine Liberator bomber was like matching a garage with a skyscraper,” Sorensen figured. “But despite their great differences I knew the same fundamentals applied to high-volume production of both, the same as they would to an electric egg beater or to a wrist watch. I saw no impossibility in such an idea even though mass production of anything approaching the size and complexity of a B-24 never had been attempted before.”

  All night Sorensen worked over his notes, imagining “the biggest challenge of my production career—bigger than any Model T assembly line sequence for Highland Park, more momentous than the layout and construction of the great River Rouge plant. . . . Now, in one night, I was applying 35 years of production experience to planning the layout for building not only something I had never put together before, but the largest and most complicated of all air transport and in numbers and at a rate never before thought possible.”

  The next morning, at breakfast in the hotel, Sorensen passed Edsel a sketch of a factory. It showed the outlin
e of a building a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, with railroad tracks running into it and a vast parking lot. Sorensen’s idea: to build the largest airplane factory in history—a factory that would roll out one heavy bomber every hour, spelling doom to the Nazi regime.

  There in the dining room Edsel examined the sketch that was about to throw his life into unimaginable upheaval. To Edsel, the airplane represented the dream that he had lost—the ambition, the identity, the innocence of his youth. He saw in the drawing, and in the bomber-an-hour proposal, a shot at redemption.

  For not serving in World War I.

  For the assaults on his patriotism.

  For enduring his father’s incessant attacks on his dignity and character.

  For Harry Bennett.

  With his sons at the table, Edsel pronounced that they would build such a factory. Everyone at the table—Edsel, his boys, and Sorensen—put their signature on the sketch, as if making some pact with the devil. They discussed the idea for an hour, then headed to meet Major Fleet with a $200 million proposition backed by nothing but a pencil sketch and the promise of Ford magic. Henry II nervously asked if he could stay behind. His father insisted he come along.

  In the meeting, Major Fleet listened to the proposal. He shook his head.

  “Get serious,” he said.

  He didn’t want Ford to build airplanes; he wanted help making parts so that he could build airplanes. “Why not make units for us, and we’ll assemble them?”

  “We are not interested in assemblies,” Sorensen boldly told Major Fleet. “We’ll make the complete plane or nothing.” If the Air Corps was willing to spend $200 million—an unfathomable gamble at the turn of 1941—“we will build and equip a plant capable of turning out one Liberator bomber an hour,” Sorensen said.

  Edsel smiled at the audacity of it all. Sorensen looked at him. Then he glanced over at Edsel’s son, Henry II, who was following the meeting silently. He saw something in young Henry’s eyes—the same look he could recall seeing so many years ago in Henry Ford’s eyes, back when they were building the first Model T at Highland Park. It was a look of excitement and determination, the knowledge that something great was about to happen.

  On January 8, 1941, without any official approval from Washington, Edsel Ford announced that his family would begin immediately with plans to build a new type of factory. He would build the largest, fastest, most destructive, and most expensive airplane in the US military arsenal, he claimed, in numbers never before dreamed possible.

  “We hope to be in production by the end of the year,” he said.

  All he had to prove that he could get the job done was his reputation and Sorensen’s sketch, across the top of which was written “1 plane per hr, 400 per mo.” The math, as Edsel and Sorensen figured it, was one plane every hour, two nine-hour shifts per day, six days a week. That added up to about four hundred bombers.

  Roosevelt’s Office of Production Management shot down the idea at least for the present, asking Ford to build parts and not the whole plane. The idea was simply too audacious.

  One week after the initial sketch, Edsel’s staff produced a new one—a more detailed drawing of a bomber factory with pencil sketches of long-winged planes moving down an assembly line like church crosses. It took nearly two months to convince the government to grant Ford a contract for complete bombers. By that time, Edsel, Sorensen, and their men were already moving at speed on the project.

  When news got around—that an automaker was claiming it could turn out a four-engine bomber every hour—the aircraft manufacturers scoffed. At a meeting held at Detroit’s Center Building to bring aviation and automotive minds together, North American Aviation’s chief executive, James “Dutch” Kindelberger, stood before the Motor City’s power elite and insisted that it couldn’t be done. The automotive companies did not have the experience to build good airplanes, with their ultra-minuscule tolerances and innumerable complexities.

  “You cannot expect blacksmiths to learn how to make wrist watches overnight,” Kindelberger argued.

  On March 3, 1941, Edsel’s first bomber contract came through, not for $200 million but for $480 million—an order for 1,200 B-24 “knockdown” airframe assemblies (practically everything but the engines, delivered in pieces) and 800 complete planes, with the authorization to build a government-owned factory. Edsel agreed to spend the first $47 million out of pocket to get the factory built, with the understanding that the government would reimburse Ford in total. According to the contract, the government would cover the cost of the planes and pay Ford an 8 percent profit.*

  In Washington, many were infuriated by the news that Henry Ford—Oval Office nemesis, union enemy number one—should be granted such an enormous government contract. Henry had defied the Supreme Court by refusing to sign a deal with the auto unions. Eleanor Roosevelt told delegates that it was “a bad thing to give contracts to uncooperative people.”

  But Roosevelt turned a blind eye. He told Secretary of War Henry Stimson that it was time “to let bygone issues go and concentrate on getting Ford to play fair with labor in the future.”

  The President needed bombers.

  One day after the contract was signed, the first team of Ford officials flew to San Diego to begin studying the B-24 Liberator. “We descended on the Consolidated people,” remembered Roscoe Smith, who would soon play a major role in the bomber program. Some checked into the San Diego Hotel, others the El Cortez. Smith rented a floor of office space in the Spreckels Building downtown for headquarters. “Of course we were all very much awed by the size and complexity of the whole thing. I know for two weeks after I got there, I was in a daze.”

  “I remember we first talked of probably one plane an hour,” said Logan Miller, who was among the initial wave of engineers to arrive in San Diego. “That was a dream more or less, and considered by aircraft people an impossibility. When we were told to do a thing, it was always a policy never to say no.”

  More men flew in from Dearborn until the crew reached two hundred—engineers, production experts, layout men, tool and die makers. Since they were moving to the West Coast with no end date on the project, Edsel personally paid for each man to take his wife with him. As the team set up on the West Coast, news came from Europe that Bulgaria and Yugoslavia had joined the Axis alliance, offering more airfields, factories, and troops to the Nazi war machine. The word from Washington: speed!

  The team of engineers began the job with a “breakdown”—reducing the plane to its smallest pieces, which could be studied and produced en masse. The job came to a halt on day one.

  “They were supposed to have blueprints at San Diego,” said Smith. “Their blueprints were not up-to-date and neither were their templates. If we wanted to know what a part actually looked like, we had to go out to the ship and see what it was like on the ship, which was entirely different from the blueprint. There was an awful lot of redesigning done. I spent about six months in San Diego. We had all we could get out of them. The rest of it was strictly up to us.”

  Metallurgists studied the materials so they could begin sourcing them. Eighty-five percent of the plane was made of aluminum alloy; 13 percent steel; 0.33 percent magnesium; 0.66 percent brass, copper, and bronze; and 1.01 percent rubber, glass, and plastic. Electricians dug deep into the Liberator’s nervous system. There was no blueprint of the wiring. Each Consolidated plane had its own handcrafted electrical setup, designed according to the whims of the man on the job that day. The Ford men discovered that they would need over five miles of wire for each ship—of various thicknesses, cut into nearly three thousand pieces, with lengths varying from eight inches to thirty-two feet. It took four generators to run a Liberator. Each one supplied enough electricity to power an average household.

  In Dearborn, an army of professional artists came on board to draw airplane parts in three dimensions so the manufacturing men could figure out how to make each one. Blueprint makers used state-of-the-art developing machines, spitting
out 50,000 square feet of sensitized paper every day. By the end of four months, Edsel and Sorensen were nervously scratching their heads at over 5.9 million square feet of blueprints—all to make one plane.

  All this work had to be done as fast as possible, so the tool designers could order the machines—drills, lathes, X-ray machines, jigs, cranes (there would be twenty-nine miles of cranes), and presses that would weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds, nearly all of them custom-built. A thousand men worked around the clock seven days a week for months to design machine tools—according to automotive methods. The tool-design job was by far the most difficult ever undertaken. At one point, the chief tool designing engineer, William Pioch, came to Sorensen with an idea to build one machine that could carve out massive thirty-ton center wings, each one like the one before, like carving out wooden baseball bats. He showed his design to Sorensen.

  “Gee, that’s going to cost a lot of money,” Sorensen said.

  “Yes, but here’s the proposition,” said Pioch. “It takes 550 man-hours to do the operations that this one machine is going to do in six man-hours.” In other words, six men, one hour. That was the goal: a bomber an hour. At that rate, with labor cost savings, the machine would pay for itself in no time, Pioch argued. And unlike the B-24 center wings made at Consolidated in San Diego—each one different from the next—these wings would be alike, perfectly mass-produced. “I would like to build a good wing,” said Pioch.

  Sorensen gave it the okay. The machine would end up costing taxpayers $250,000. Would it work? Time would tell.

  At the same time, a plant layout committee working with Detroit’s most famed industrial architect, Albert Kahn, was carefully designing the floor space. This plant would have to accommodate some 1,600 machine tools, 7,000 fixtures and jigs, some of those jigs twelve times the height of Edsel Ford. Before placing any machine, the team had to figure out how many men would be working there, what the electrical requirements would be, and where to fit crane ways. A network of pipes and lines would be built into the structure like a circulatory system, moving oxygen, compressed air, paraffin, machine oil, steam, acetylene, hydrogen, oxygen, and two kinds of gasoline (73 octane for trucks and cars, 100 octane for airplanes) to different sections of the plant and the airfield hangar.