by A. J. Baime
Sorensen smiled. Henry II was tough all right. He had a rugged outer shell, something Edsel never possessed. The boy can take it, Sorensen thought to himself. Everything will work out all right.
Henry II amassed a small group of loyalists around him. There was the legendary Ford sales chief Jack Davis and the engineer Mead Bricker—a disciple of Sorensen’s who was now the superintendent of Willow Run. And then there was John Bugas, the former G-man. In a private dining room at the Detroit Athletic Club, Henry II and his allies held meetings early in 1944 and plotted a scheme to sink Harry Bennett.
Bugas came up with a good piece of advice. If they were going to challenge Bennett, they needed protection. “First,” Bugas told Henry II, “get your grandfather to sign a piece of paper saying that nobody can get fired around here without your permission.”
Harry Bennett had hired Bugas, but he soon figured out which side the former FBI man was on. Bugas was an Edsel loyalist, and Bennett grew wary. “He seemed to sit around most of the day,” Bennett recalled, “his jacket off and his gun jutting from the shoulder holster beneath his arm.” As for Bugas, “I was as isolated as a tuberculosis germ.” One day Bugas showed up for work to find that his desk had been moved into a bathroom, separated from a toilet by a partition.
The war in Dearborn was on.
Early in 1944, Henry Ford’s two most famous employees left him.
Charles Lindbergh got a call from Washington. He was given paperwork that allowed him to fly to the Far East, where he could put his aviation skills to work in the assault on Japanese-held islands. Each atoll was critical, as these tiny tropical isles gave the Allies opportunity to build airfields closer and closer to their ultimate targets in that hemisphere: Tokyo, Osaka, Kumamoto, Hiroshima.
Lindbergh lunched at Willow Run with Harry Bennett on March 29. Henry Ford and Henry II came to wish the aviator the best of luck. On the 31st, he took a train out of Detroit bound for Hartford, Connecticut, with a stopover in New York. The next morning, he arrived in a hospital room where a nurse laid out six humongous inoculation syringes.
“Is someone else taking this, too?” Lindbergh asked nervously.
“No,” said the nurse, “these are all for you.”
Schick test, typhoid, typhus, cholera, tetanus, smallpox. Lucky Lindy was headed for the jungle, where the expertise and agility he demonstrated in his flights over Willow Run would pay off. (As for his altitude experiments, Lindbergh’s highest flight above Willow Run was 43,020 feet, a rare accomplishment at that time for a pilot in a nonpressurized airplane.) The aviator bought himself a Brooks Brothers military uniform—he was to go on “technician status,” meaning he could wear a navy uniform without a rank insignia—and an Abercrombie & Fitch waterproof flashlight.
In two months’ time, he was piloting a TBF Avenger over the remote Japanese island of Rabaul, strafing a home in the jungle from which enemy tracer fire was blasting. “I hope there was no one in that building except soldiers—no women, no children,” he wrote after this mission. “I will never know. There is no time to think about it. Tree tops are 20 feet below, passing at 400 miles per hour.”
As for Cast Iron Charlie Sorensen, his departure after thirty-nine years at the company was tainted by political bickering—no surprise. On March 4, 1944, the newspapers carried a headline that was a shocker for those in the auto business: “Henry Ford Fires Sorensen.”
But the story was not as simple as it appeared.
At sixty-three, Sorensen could not bring himself to face another year. Any day now, Willow Run would reach its ultimate goal of a bomber an hour. Sorensen had lived through the hardest three years of his life and had said good-bye to his dear friend and boss Edsel in the process. He informed Henry Ford’s secretary, Frank Campsall, that he was going to retire. He spent his last days introducing Henry II to anyone and everyone he could and saying warm good-byes to the men he had managed with ferocious intimidation for decades.
Not long before his final day, which came in January 1944, Sorensen attended a ceremony that moved him deeply. It was not a ceremony for his retirement. He was too impatient to endure such formalities. The ceremony was for Edsel. Sorensen accompanied Henry II to a small gathering at Henry Ford’s museum of antique machinery, where Henry had amassed all the original tools in the workshop where he had taught Edsel some basic skills, back when Edsel was a boy. This was the reconstructed workshop where Edsel first ran a band saw and swung a hammer, where he learned to respect the power of machinery after slicing a finger painfully.
At the ceremony, Sorensen stood with Henry Ford for a photograph. It was the last picture they shared together.
On January 15, 1944, Sorensen showed up for his final day of work. The towering white-haired Dane was on his way to his car when Henry Ford pulled up in his own chauffeur-driven ride. Sorensen said he was leaving in the morning for his place in Miami. He wanted to sail his boat into a sunset. He was never coming back. The two men stared awkwardly into each other’s tired eyes, wondering how the years had flown by so quickly.
Henry said, “I guess there’s something in life besides work.”
Sorensen nodded. Henry followed him to his car. They shook hands, and Sorensen pulled away. The two men never saw each other again.
About six weeks after Sorensen’s last day, the headlines appeared, saying not that he had retired but that he had been fired. It was likely Bennett’s last cheap shot. And with Sorensen gone, Bennett was one step closer to the ultimate prize, the presidency of Ford Motor Company. The news of Sorensen’s departure moved the Shakespearean power struggle into its final act.
“For months the world-straddling empire of Henry Ford has quivered and groaned like a leviathan with acute indigestion,” commented Time magazine. “Cause of the upheavals has been the rival ambitions of the empire’s two powerful princes: tough Director Harry Bennett and smooth Production Boss Charles E. Sorensen. Last week, the empire had its biggest convulsion of all.”
Sorensen moved down to his vacation home in Miami, where he tried to find meaning in the sound, not of roaring bomber engines, but of wind whistling through palm fronds. And the Motor City seemed to motor on without him. “He was a hard-boiled, hard-fisted fighter and probably would prefer to be known as such,” a Willow Run worker said of Sorensen upon his departure. One day in his mailbox, Sorensen found a letter from Henry Ford II.
“For myself,” young Henry wrote, “I have always felt that every time I had some opportunity to be with you in the shop I would learn something that would be of value to me, at some later date. The various trips we made to Pratt & Whitney, Consolidated, and other places, will always be something that I want to remember. In closing, I should like to say that I know all the rest of the family feel as I do, and I am sure my father would also if he were alive today. I should like to feel that you would call on me if I can ever be of any help in any way in the future.”
Sorensen folded the letter and placed it in a safe place with his most important documents. Then he slipped his exhausted body into a hammock. He was done with Detroit, he said to his wife. Done with the rubber shortages and the boiling hot metal and the Motor City politics. He couldn’t take one more day! Then the phone rang. It seemed there was a job open back in the auto business. The Jeep manufacturer Willys-Overland needed a chief executive. Was Sorensen interested?
He smiled. Damn right, he was.
29
D-Day
Winter to Spring 1944
In this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer. Almighty God. Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor . . . to set free a suffering humanity.
—ROOSEVELT’S D-DAY PRAYER, June 6, 1944
ON FEBRUARY 20, 1944, the US Air Corps unleashed its full bombing force upon Nazi-occupied Europe. Operation Argument—or “the Big Week,” as the press called it—dispatched an average of 722 heavy bombers with 768 fighter escorts daily from the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces, for six straight days
. As one German historian put it: “Nothing in war history up to that time was even remotely comparable to the annihilating capacity of those hordes in the sky.”
Secret military documents listed the American bombers’ targets for the President in the White House: eleven fighter plane factories, fifteen bomber factories, seventeen airplane engine plants, twenty submarine yards, thirty-eight locomotive building shops, thirty-seven electric plants, fourteen aluminum plants, two synthetic rubber plants, and twenty-three oil plants.
When the American bombers flew their first mission to strike hard at the heart of Berlin, on March 6, the city crumbled and burned. “The picture that greeted my eye on the Wilhelmplatz was one of utter desolation,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. At the beginning of the war, Goebbels had this to say: “What can the USA do faced with our arms capacity? They can do us no harm.” And now? “Blazing fires everywhere,” he wrote. “Meanwhile I learn that my mother and my mother-in-law were bombed out completely in Moabit. Their homes have simply vanished.”
To report on the state of Berlin for CBS radio, Edward R. Murrow flew over Germany’s capital in an Air Corps bomber. “Berlin was a kind of orchestrated hell, a terrible symphony of light and flame,” he said in one report. “The job isn’t pleasant; it’s terribly tiring. Men die in the sky while others are roasted alive in their cellars. . . . This is a calculated, remorseless campaign of destruction.”
Following the Big Week, nearly every day in March 1944 bombers with fighter escorts—fleets of some 1,500 warplanes per day—struck at Nazi targets. In April the bombers returned to Ploesti in Romania to destroy Hitler’s most important source of oil. The first mission flew on April 5; nine groups of B-24s and four groups of B-17s dropped nearly 1.2 million pounds of TNT on Ploesti on this single mission alone. The TNT reduced the oil refineries to towering columns of smoke that could be seen from tens of miles away.
“We really clobbered them that day,” recalled Bill Harvey, a bombardier aboard a Liberator named Maiden USA. “Flames shot high in the air and we could see secondary explosions in the refinery and loading areas.”
For the next month, bombers continued to rain explosives over Ploesti’s refineries, culminating in a May 31 pounding by 428 Liberators.
Inside Germany, Nazi leaders struggled to comprehend the images of Berlin that surrounded them. “Along the Kaiserdamm everything is still on fire,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “Groups of people scamper across the streets like veritable ghosts. . . . The misery that meets my eyes is indescribable. My heart is convulsed at the sights. But we grit our teeth. Sometimes I have the impression that the Berliners are almost in a religious trance.”
The bombings assaulted Hitler’s nerves so intensely that he had trouble writing his own name. With his hands shaking violently, he found it difficult to sign the forms that crossed his desk day and night. Goering had all but disappeared from the scene; Hitler refused to see him, calling Goering’s once-“invincible” Luftwaffe an “absolute failure.” By this time, two of Goering’s top deputies, Ernst Udet and Hans Jeschonnek, had committed suicide. And each day the American bombers returned, roaring over cities and villages. As Hitler’s production chief, Albert Speer, later wrote in his memoirs: “I could see the omens of the war’s end almost every day in the blue southern sky when the bombers of the American 15th Air Force crossed the Alps from their Italian bases to attack German industrial targets.”
With Ploesti in ruins, Hitler’s Panzer tanks stopped in their tracks, robbed of their lifeblood. The Luftwaffe also all but ran out of gas. Speer informed Hitler that “the enemy has succeeded in increasing our losses of aviation gasoline up to 90%.”
Crew who flew aboard the Liberators on these missions saw fewer attacking pursuit planes as the spring weeks passed. The Liberators sailed in ever-increasing numbers over Germany, with painted pinups on the fuselages, exotic names (“Strawberry Bitch,” “Shady Lady”), and bomb markings indicating the number that each plane had dropped on Nazi-occupied territory. The Liberator airmen called their bomber the “Flying Box Car,” “Spam Can in the Sky,” and “Old Agony Wagon.” Among those who flew aboard B-24s over Germany in these missions were Hollywood leading men Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, journalists Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney, and future presidential candidate George McGovern, among thousands of others.
When Allied military leaders honed in on France’s network of railroads, a fierce debate broke out. Bombing the rails would paralyze the Nazis’ ability to move munitions about France, upon whose coast the D-Day invasion was about to land. However, it would be impossible to bomb the railroads without killing scores of innocent French citizens who lived nearby.
“Postwar France must be our friend,” Churchill pleaded. “It is not alone a question of humanitarianism. It is also a question of high state policy.”
In the end, the Free French leaders agreed with General Eisenhower that the plan had to go ahead. French citizens were told by radio and leaflet to evacuate any area near a railroad. In the days before D-Day, Allied heavy bombers dropped seventy-six kilotons of TNT on France’s railroad system—about five times the explosive power of the atomic bomb that would soon be dropped on Hiroshima.
On May 4, 1944, a month before the D-Day invasion, the machines at Willow Run shut down momentarily so that workers could gather outside the east end of the assembly building at 2:15 PM. It was a beautiful spring day in southern Michigan, thousands of miles from the combat in Europe and the Far East. On a stage, the American Legion Edsel B. Ford Post Band played, the tubas honking out “America the Beautiful.” Harry Wismer—one of the first big sportscasters, who had called the play-by-play for the Detroit Lions on the radio before the war had started—grabbed a microphone as master of ceremonies. The crowd had gathered for the presentation of the Army-Navy “E” Excellence Award for the Willow Run bomber plant.
Willow Run had continued to accelerate production all spring long, speeding toward its goal of a bomber an hour, 400 a month. In March, Ford built 324 Liberators. In April, 325. In May, 350. Soon, there was no doubt, it would hit its mark. The presentation of the Army-Navy Excellence flag signified the approval of Washington—and confirmation that the experiment at Willow Run had fulfilled its promise, that Edsel Ford and Charlie Sorensen had proven all the naysayers wrong.
Onstage, Henry Ford II accepted the “E” flag from the navy’s Captain Robert Velz and lifted it triumphantly so that it rippled in a light breeze as the crowd whistled and applauded. The band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” while navy men raised the E flag and the American flag on either side of the stage. Then Henry II took his place in front of the microphone and prepared to give his first speech as a representative of the Ford family. It was fitting that his first major official duty was to honor Willow Run. Henry II was standing in for his father, in what would have been Edsel’s most triumphant moment.
He appeared different from a year earlier. His eyes were harder, less forgiving. His face had hardened too. In the months since he had left the navy, under the careful tutelage of Charlie Sorensen, Henry II had grown into himself and acquired confidence that he would not end up a footnote in the history of the Motor City. He’d begun to exhibit the fearlessness that would define him in later years, when he would become one of the most powerful businessmen in the world. The Ford scion sipped in a breath and began.
“It is certainly with mixed emotions that we meet here today,” he said. “Four years ago this spring there was no Willow Run. This land—1,800 acres of it, covered today by a gigantic monument to industrial might—was producing agricultural products. But war was upon the world and our country’s participation was nearing. Mass production of the B-24 Liberator bomber, the largest, fastest and hardest-hitting of them all, was handed to us as our job.”
Henry II spoke of the engineering miracle, of the Truman investigation, of the overwhelming social problems that accompanied this industrial adventure. How everything had gone so wrong, and how, through sheer determinat
ion and patriotism, the men and women who ran this factory and worked inside it had turned it around. Now everything was going right.
“It is just another proof that in America we can do the impossible,” he said. “And that the impossible always proves the nemesis of those enemies of peace and progress who attempt every so often to upset our relentless struggle upward toward a better world for all men everywhere.”
In the White House, the President was studying top-secret documents in preparation for D-Day. A military force of staggering size and complexity had already begun to amass in Britain, a force that would swell until it reached 175,000 men, 50,000 vehicles of all types, well over 5,000 ships, and over 11,000 airplanes, plus guns, bullets, medicine, food, and cartons upon cartons of cigarettes from the tobacco fields in the American South, all scheduled to land on French soil in the space of twenty-four hours. This was the Arsenal of Democracy at its height, built not just by the United States but with fantastic contributions from Britain and Canada.
In the Battle of Production, the Nazis were proving an extraordinary foe. Suffering the brutal ravage of the Allied bombers, their production of war munitions continued, the factories filled with slave labor. So ingenious were Hitler’s engineers, so nimble and intelligent was his top production man, Albert Speer, that Germany had managed to move machine tools out of bombed-out factories and into underground caves. Airplane engines were being constructed inside mountains. Church bells were melted so that the metal could be used for munitions. One company alone, Krupp, was producing U-boats, 88 anti-aircraft cannons, tanks, guns, and armor of all kinds.