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

by A. J. Baime

  Henry Ford’s secretary Frank Campsall read Henry’s letter of resignation. Halfway through, Bennett stood and headed for the door, but Campsall stopped reading. All present asked Bennett to remain until the end out of respect for the board of directors, which he did.

  Henry Ford II was named president of Ford Motor Company.

  After the meeting, Bennett marched to Henry II’s corner office. “You’re taking over a billion-dollar organization here that you haven’t contributed a thing to,” he said.

  Henry II responded by informing Bennett that he was fired.

  “I was frightened to death it would not stick,” Henry II later remembered. “I was physically scared and mentally scared.”

  The job fell to John Bugas to make sure it did stick. Later that day, the former G-man wiggled a .38 into his belt and headed for Bennett’s office in the basement of the Rouge. When he pushed open the door, he saw a pair of rabid eyes aimed his way.

  “You son of a bitch!” Bennett wailed.

  He pulled his .45 automatic.

  Bugas aimed his .38.

  And for a moment, the rivaling factions that had torn America’s most famous company apart for over two decades faced each other in the vessels of two men in suits, aiming gun barrels at each other across a mahogany desk.

  “Don’t make the mistake of pulling the trigger,” Bugas said, “because I’ll kill you. I won’t miss. I’ll put one right through your heart, Harry.”

  Bennett stared down the .38’s barrel. Bugas’s hand was steady. Bennett eased his .45 downward and offered his crooked smile. It was over.

  For the rest of the day, smoke spewed from behind Bennett’s office door as he burned all his papers. And for the next few weeks, Henry II took great pleasure in firing all of Bennett’s cronies, over 1,000 men, personally.

  Harry Bennett moved out of his “Castle.” He gave a statement to the press, trying to save face; the appointment of John Bugas in his place was “just as I planned it,” Bennett said. “I brought him into the company and expected him some day to fill my shoes.” Bennett then disappeared forever into obscurity.

  Facing retirement and his eighty-second birthday, Henry Ford complained bitterly over the disappearance of his aide-de-camp. On several occasions, he tried to reach Bennett by phone. But Bennett did not bother to answer. Then one day, after more than twenty years of seeing Bennett daily, the old man got used to not having him around.

  “Well,” Henry Ford said, “I guess Harry is back where he started from.”

  Epilogue

  I flew thirty-five missions as a copilot on B-24s with the 392nd Bomb Group. It’s almost certain that anyone who flew a B-24 in training or overseas would have flown a Ford B-24 at some point in time. When they reached the peak production at Willow Run, they were building one every fifty-eight minutes or something like that. It’s amazing. It’s a big airplane and it’s complicated, and there are many, many parts. Years after the war, I toured the Willow Run plant. I think General Motors was building transmissions there at the time. In my imagination, I could see the B-24s being built. It made me feel with wonder that such a thing could take place in such a short time. It’s an indication of how the entire country came together after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. It was a time that will not be experienced again. It’s difficult to describe exactly how it happened and why it happened. But it did.

  —OAK MACKEY, Mesa, Arizona

  AS DWIGHT EISENHOWER WROTE of World War II, “America’s record in production, as well as on the battle line, is one that will fill our histories forever.” “The American war production job,” wrote Donald Nelson, head of the War Production Board, “was probably the greatest collective achievement of all time. It makes the ‘seven wonders’ of the ancient world look like the doodling of a small boy.” Or as Roosevelt himself said before his death, “The production necessary to equip and maintain our vast forces of fighting men on global battlefronts is without parallel. I need not repeat the figures. The facts speak for themselves.”

  The United States produced 324,750 airplanes during World War II, more than Great Britain and the Soviet Union (the numbers two and three aircraft producers during the war) combined. To this day, the B-24 Liberator remains the most mass-produced American military aircraft ever. “The number of people involved in making it, in servicing it, and in flying the B-24 outnumbered those involved with any other airplane, in any country, in any time,” wrote Stephen Ambrose in The Wild Blue. “It would be an exaggeration to say that the B-24 won the war for the Allies. But don’t ask how they could have won the war without it.”

  Of the total 18,482 Liberators built during the war, 8,685 of them rolled out of Willow Run. A total of 80,774 workers (61 percent men, 39 percent women) staffed the bomber plant, with a peak employment of 42,331. The cost to make each Liberator dropped from $238,000 per ship at the beginning of production to $137,000 at the end. Under the guidance of Edsel Ford and Charlie Sorensen, Ford Motor Company also built 57,851 aviation engines at the Rouge, plus 277,896 Jeeps, 93,217 trucks, 26,954 tank engines, 2,718 tanks, 87,390 aircraft generators, 52,281 aircraft superchargers, 10,877 squad tents, 12,314 armored cars, and 2,401 jet bomb engines (which powered the new JB-2 Loon, the American copy of Hitler’s V1 and V2 flying bombs, the first-ever pilotless missiles). From its Kingsford lumber mill, the company built 4,291 invasion gliders. The total dollar figure of war matériel that came off the company’s assembly lines was $4,966,314,000 (in 1945 dollars).

  After V-J Day, Detroit held a jubilee, with William Knudsen—the sixty-six-year-old former president of General Motors and now lieutenant general in the US Army—as its master of ceremonies. The streets crowded with revelers, blacks celebrating side by side with whites the achievement of the Motor City. It was without a doubt the greatest collective achievement of any American city, in any time, and one that could never be replicated again, under any circumstance.

  For its role in World War II, Detroit still today enjoys the nickname “The Arsenal of Democracy.”

  In Washington, armies of office workers began the arduous job of cataloging all the government documents that, in their own way, tell the story of World War II. Among these millions upon millions of documents were the numerous reports on Treasury Department and other government agency investigations into the activities of American corporations in Nazi-occupied territory during the war.

  In the case of Edsel Ford, his relationship to Maurice Dollfus, and the mysterious 1943 African Ford company, no clear evidence presented itself that Edsel knowingly profited by helping to build Hitler’s arsenal after the war started. On the contrary, the Treasury investigation appeared to hinge on a misunderstanding of a single sentence, written by Edsel to Dollfus: “I have shown your letter to my father and Mr. Sorensen and they both join me in sending best wishes for you and your staff, and hope that you will continue to carry on with the good work you are doing.”

  Edsel was one among many American executives who got caught in Hitler’s web and who found himself in the position to fight for the survival of his family’s empire in Europe as a result. His father’s controversial stance against the war and his antipathy to the Roosevelt administration certainly did not help Edsel’s cause.

  Today the Treasury investigation report on Edsel Ford can be found in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, where journalists and authors are free to interpret it as they see fit.

  American military investigators swarmed Nazi Germany when it was all over to see for themselves what the bombers had accomplished. They brought trunks full of camera equipment and interviewed survivors. “People think they are wandering in an absurd dream,” remembered one German survivor. “The population seems to have melted down to a third or a quarter of what it was in one blow.” Said another: “The end of the world certainly can’t be worse.”

  Days after the Nazis surrendered, Charles Lindbergh ventured into Germany as a guest of some military officers. Lindbergh stood in awe of what he saw.
/>
  “When you looked at the cities, you felt it would take a century for the Germans to rebuild and reorganize,” he wrote in his journal. Lindbergh visited Hitler’s office, or what was left of it, and stood in the chamber where Hitler had thrown “the human world into the greatest convulsion it has ever known and from which it will be recuperating for generations,” as the aviator put it. Lindbergh also visited the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, where thousands of prisoners were worked to death building V-2 missiles for the Nazis in factories located in underground tunnels. “Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation,” he wrote.

  The detailed US Army investigation into the Combined Bomber Offensive’s relentless campaign against Nazi Germany unearthed the following facts:

  In the attack by Allied air power, almost 2,700,000 tons of bombs were dropped, more than 1,440,000 bomber sorties and 2,680,000 fighter sorties were flown. In the wake of these attacks there are great paths of destruction. In Germany, 3,600,000 dwelling units, approximately 20% of the total, were destroyed or heavily damaged. Survey estimates show some 300,000 civilians killed and 780,000 wounded. The number made homeless aggregates 7,500,000. The principal German cities have been largely reduced to hollow walls and piles of rubble. These are the scars across the face of the enemy, the preface to the victory that followed.

  It was a costly victory. Of the 416,800 American battle deaths in World War II, 79,265 were airmen.

  The Allied personnel marching through Nazi Germany in the spring and summer of 1945 found a surprise waiting for them. They discovered innumerable German military trucks, and later airplane parts, built by the German divisions of Detroit motor companies. Trucks built in Nazi-occupied territory by Ford-Werke AG and GM-owned Opel had mobilized Wehrmacht soldiers throughout the war. Little of this was reported in the press at the time. It was a small story that would grow bigger through the years, inconvenient for everyone involved.

  Among the many investigators working in Germany from the US Army’s Financial Branch, a Brooklyn-born thirty-five-year-old attorney named Henry Schneider was dispatched to look into the affairs of Ford Motor Company’s German division. When Schneider arrived at Ford’s Cologne factory, he found that much of the machinery had been dispersed to other locations, given that Cologne had taken a beating from the bombings. The factory itself, however, was largely intact, save for broken glass from shelling during the fall of the city to the Allies.

  Schneider found one Robert Schmidt in charge; Schmidt had been appointed by Hitler’s chief war production man, Albert Speer, to place all of Ford’s factories in Nazi-occupied territory in the service of the German war machine. Dr. Heinrich Albert—the man who had convinced Edsel Ford and Charlie Sorensen to agree to build trucks for the Nazis before the war—had been imprisoned for six months; he was suspected to have taken a part in the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944.

  At the Cologne factory, Schneider found in-house publications signed by Robert Schmidt swearing allegiance to the Nazis. (“We too are soldiers of the Fuehrer,” Schmidt had written.) In Schneider’s interviews with Schmidt, the German revealed the whole story: Before the war, and under pressure from the Nazi high command, he and Dr. Albert had convinced Ford of Dearborn to build trucks for the German government and had also bullied Ford of Dearborn into exporting critical raw materials like rubber and pig iron into Germany. He admitted that the German executives seized all of Ford’s assets in occupied territory (most notably in France and in Germany) from their American bosses when the war began.

  “Until 1939,” the Schneider report reads, “all important matters of policy were settled from America, but after the outbreak of war American influence decreased and ceased altogether in 1941.”

  According to the official report, “after the outbreak of the war the Cologne works became the most important supplier of trucks to the German armed forces concentrating on the 3-ton type. The number of employees increased from about 3,500 in 1937 to over 8,000 in 1944.” Schneider also learned that, as in most other Nazi war factories, Ford’s had utilized vast numbers of forced laborers. At the time of D-Day, the Cologne factory had 870 forced workers from Russia and Eastern Europe, 497 Italian POW workers—nearly 2,000 total workers from outside Germany helping to build Hitler’s arsenal.

  On the very day the Nazis announced their unconditional surrender, the first postwar truck rolled out of Ford-Werke in Cologne. Soon more trucks rolled out, by the hundreds. Among other things, these trucks were used to begin carrying slave laborers back to their homes.

  In 1998 a woman named Elsa Iwanowa filed a lawsuit against Ford Motor Company in the United States. She said she was abducted from her town in Russia and forced to work at Ford-Werke in Cologne. “The conditions were terrible. They put us in barracks, on three-tier bunks,” she said in an interview with the Washington Post. “It was very cold; they did not pay us at all and scarcely fed us. The only reason that we survived was that we were young and fit.”

  Iwanowa’s case was dismissed because the court lacked jurisdiction over the matter. However, following the lawsuit, Ford Motor Company launched a three-and-a-half-year research project with over forty-five archivists and historians to uncover exactly what happened at Ford-Werke during World War II. That study, Research Findings About Ford-Werke Under the Nazi Regime, can be found in various libraries. At no point, it concluded, did Edsel Ford, Charlie Sorensen, or any other American Ford executive play any role of aiding or approving of Nazi conduct during the war.

  Henry Ford said during World War II that when it was over, he would use Willow Run to begin producing a Ford cargo plane. Those plans, however, were scrapped. Employees spent weeks at the bomber plant picking apart the B-24s flown back home from theaters of war. The Liberators were pocked with bullet holes, torn up by the legendary German 88 anti-aircraft cannons, and stained with the blood of the men who flew aboard them. Government equipment (bombs, machine guns, bombsights) was removed and confiscated. Laborers oiled the planes for storage, and hundreds were shipped to a desert facility in New Mexico, where they were left to rot.

  The Liberator’s time had come and gone. It was already technologically obsolete. Today there are but a few left, mostly in the hands of aviation museums. The last of the Liberators built at Willow Run—Bomber Ship 8685, which held the signatures of Willow Run employees on its silver fuselage—was moved to downtown Detroit in 1945 and enshrined as a peace memorial for Edsel Ford. There it sat, beaten by the sun in summer and frozen by the Detroit winds in winter. Soon, it too rusted out and was taken away for scrap.

  On April 7, 1947, Henry Ford died peacefully in his home at the age of eighty-three. He rests today at Ford Cemetery in Detroit. Not long before his death, he admitted his fears for the future, for what technology and machinery could do to our planet: “We have progressed so rapidly in developing machinery for killing people that humanity could not survive another war.”

  In Edsel Ford’s corner office, Henry Ford II took control of his family’s empire. He presented the first postwar Ford automobile as a gift to the new president, Harry Truman. In the following years, Henry II put in place many of the plans his father Edsel had tried to implement: a new corporate flow chart, a team of college-educated executives, nuance of every kind. Having entered the war far behind Chrysler Corporation as the number three automaker in the nation, Ford Motor Company was soon battling once again for the title of America’s car brand. In honor of his father Edsel, Henry II engineered the greatest corporate comeback ever at the time. Among his most important executives was John Bugas, who made company vice president in 1959 and continued to work for Ford until his retirement in 1968.

  When Henry II died in 1987, Ford Motor Company was the biggest and most technologically advanced automaker in the world.

  Willow Run was sold to General Motors in 1953. GM built over 82 million transmissions in the factory until 2010, when the giant plant closed its doors for good. As of press time
for this book, the factory is scheduled to be demolished. History’s wrecking ball will reduce the plant to dust. But the story of the bomber-an-hour adventure—a true tale that “rivals the weirdest of fiction and the wildest imaginings of the comic books,” in Cast Iron Charlie Sorensen’s words—will live on.

  A Note on the Text and Acknowledgments

  I USED INNUMERABLE SOURCES to synthesize this narrative and its dialogue, and yet no two sources ever tell the same story. In some cases, points of view vary wildly—both those of people who were present during the events depicted in this book and those who have examined them through history’s looking glass. What I tried to do was to see these events unfolding through as many points of view as possible, so that I could mold all the sources and opinions and emotions that I came across in my years of research into a narrative that I feel is honorable, while taking the form of a book that can be consumed with clarity.

  The dialogue was reconstituted using innumerable sources; I did not make up a word of it myself. In rare instances, I pulled characters’ descriptions of events and used their own words as dialogue. For example, in a scene in the White House on May 10, 1940, Franklin Roosevelt sat with his trusted confidants around him, discussing the shocking news of Hitler’s attack on Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and parts of France. I have him saying: “But the new element—air navigation—steps up the speed of possible attack to 200, to 300 miles an hour.” Various sources confirm the subject matter of the conversation that morning in the White House. Roosevelt uttered these specific words two days later in a speech. I re-created the scene in the White House by putting his exact words in his mouth. In these rare instances where a piece of dialogue was moved from one moment in time to another, I was careful to preserve the context in which the words were uttered so that their meaning did not change in any way.