During the war Porsche was made chairman of the Panzer Commission under the new minister of labour, Albert Speer, and helped to design some of Germany’s heavy battle-tanks, including the Tiger I of 1942, the Tiger II (which the allies called the ‘King Tiger’) of 1944, and the Type 205 Panzer VIII. The last-named, at 200 tons, remains the heaviest tank ever built. As big as a house, it was given the ironic nickname Die Maus, the mouse. It carried a monumental 128 mm gun and 18 inches of armour. Too heavy to cross bridges, it was expected to swim or snorkel across rivers. Only two prototypes had been completed by the time the Russians overran the factory. Porsche himself was arrested a few weeks later, on 30 May 1945. Twenty years on, however, his ‘people’s car’ had managed to shed its Nazi associations to become the Beetle (Der Käfer), a counterculture icon and lovable star of the 1969 Disney movie The Love Bug – which, dispiritingly, was the world’s highest-grossing film that year.
With the advent of war, Hitler’s championing of the automobile was revealed as only so much window-dressing. The Daimler-Benz and Auto Union factories were closed, and existing Mercedes and Auto Unions adapted to serve as staff cars for high-ranking army and SS officers. The KdF-Wagen factory turned to making not just Kübelwagens and Schwimmwagens but also tanks and, from 1944, parts for the Fieseler Fi 103, better known as the first of Hitler’s ‘vengeance weapons’ and the world’s first self-powered missile, the V-I flying bomb. By this time, however, Germany’s critical lack of fuel (the Reich’s synthetic fuel production had never reached significant levels) meant that those civilian models that still survived were unable to take to the road. By 1945 the Nazis’ grandiose ambitions for the automobile were a faint folk memory.
The Second World War did, however, provide a stage for the graduation of the car from utilitarian runabout and luxury racer to essential transport and symbol of rank. Daimler-Benz was not the only manufacturer to convert its models into military staff vehicles. General Montgomery famously used a Humber as his staff car in North Africa and Italy. (The car can still be seen today in Coventry’s excellent Transport Museum.) General Eisenhower, the allied supreme commander in Europe, and General MacArthur, army commander in the Pacific, both rode in a specially adapted Packard Clipper. The ambitious, extrovert General Patton inevitably had to go one better than his boss, Eisenhower, and appropriated a grand Cadillac. (It was while riding in his well-appointed Cadillac 75 in December 1945 that Patton was mortally injured when the car was hit by a 2½ ton truck.) By 1942, Detroit’s Big Three were competing to make staff cars for the American top brass; GM’s contender was the Buick Century Series 60, to which Ford replied with the CII Fordor and Chrysler with the Chrysler Royal. Chrysler also made a smaller rival, aimed at the larger market of mid-rank officers: the highly successful and, by 1944, ubiquitous Plymouth PII.
Aside from adapting models for staff use, however, car makers in combatant countries were forced to abandon civilian auto production and switch entirely to the manufacture of war materiel. Car use dwindled as petrol rationing and the blackout encouraged many private motorists to keep their cars at home. In Britain, pedestrian deaths, caused largely by the blackout, soared from the peacetime annual figure of 3,800 to 4,800 in 1941, a disturbing trend which was only reversed when petrol rationing was introduced in July 1942.
In occupied Europe, auto manufacturers were made to serve the military needs of their German conquerors. For some motor bosses this was not too much of an imposition, provided they and their firms still made a reasonable profit. Given, for example, that the majority of the French car makers of the pre-war era were of a distinctly rightwing political persuasion, it is not surprising that many of them greeted Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government with enthusiasm and their new German masters with equanimity. Thus Peugeot’s Sochaux plant continued in operation after 1940, making parts for Porsche’s military vehicles, tanks and V-IS. The company’s president, Jean-Pierre Peugeot, had always got on well with Ferdinand Porsche, and this relationship now began to pay handsome political and financial dividends. Even Ford’s French plant at Poissy, under its malleable boss, Maurice Dollfus, proved extremely helpful to the Vichy regime and its German masters. Unsurprisingly, Dollfus’s overt collaboration also won Henry Ford’s wholehearted approval.
By the time the war broke out in 1939, Louis Renault in particular was deeply mired in anti-Semitic and pro-German politics. In 1938 he had met Hitler at the Berlin Motor Show and had declared that he hoped there would be no further wars between their two countries. Renault also referred to his great rival André Citroën in unrelentingly anti-Semitic terms, and delighted in identifying him as le petit Juif (‘the little Jew’).1 By then, Mme Renault had become a close friend of the rightwing writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, who since 1936 had been the chief ideologue for Jacques Doriot’s fascist and unapologetically anti-Semitic Parti Populaire Français (PPF), and who after 1940 was one of France’s most strident and enthusiastic collaborationists.
Renault spent the early months of the war complaining about the mobilization of some of his workers, yet seemed unperturbed by the drastic fall in production of Renault tanks and aircraft engines. He even cheerfully diverted some of the resources earmarked for war production to the development of a small family car. Visitors to Renault’s Billancourt factory commented on a depressing lack of urgency; but when the government complained about his firm’s lackadaisical war effort, Renault alleged that it was trying to nationalize his company.
Following the fall of France in 1940, Renault’s choices were stark. He could cooperate with the Germans, preventing them from taking over his company; already, in June 1940, he had been forced to accept senior executives from Daimler-Benz at Billancourt. Or he could resist the Germans, a path that would inevitably lead to the Nazis’ seizure of his automotive empire, the removal of his factories’ equipment to Germany, and his possible arrest. Renault chose the path of collaboration, finding many political soulmates in Marshal Pétain’s supine Vichy government. Having impressed Pétain himself in an interview with the aged Maréchal in 1942, he was left in charge of his factories, despite widespread calls from younger critics for his retirement.
In 1945 Renault maintained that he was never responsible for ‘external’ relations with Vichy’s German masters. Nevertheless, between the collapse of France in June 1940 and the allied liberation of August 1944, Renault’s plants manufactured 34,232 vehicles for the Germans. His argument at the time was that ‘by staying in operation he had saved thousands of workers from being transported to Germany’. To his colleagues, he insisted: ‘It is better to give them the butter, or they’ll take the cows.’ To many, though, Renault incarnated Vichy’s craven policy of collaboration. In 1943 he confirmed that impression when he refused to provide any financial aid for the rapidly growing French Resistance. Few noted that he simultaneously denounced the lawless activities of Doriot and Drieu la Rochelle’s increasingly despised far-right PPF.
Following the allied liberation of France, Renault realized that his world had changed forever. His antisocial personality rebounded on him as a series of fellow industrialists (who had, like Renault, previously supported the Vichy regime, but now hastily attempted to wrap themselves in the Free French flag) suddenly remembered that they had never liked Renault and, seeking a scapegoat, eagerly denounced his willing subservience to the Germans. On 21 August 1944, as allied tanks stood at the gates of Paris, Renault visited the Billancourt factory to be insulted and spat at on the shop floor. The next day he took shelter in a friend’s house, finding his home had become a target for Resistance reprisals. Three weeks later, following a vicious campaign against him in the newly liberated press (‘He made six billions in his transactions with the Boche’, screamed l’Humanité; ‘The unanimous opinion of the Resistance is that Louis Renault must pay for the deaths of our allied soldiers’), Renault surrendered to de Gaulle’s de facto government ‘on condition that he would not be jailed until indicted’. On 22 September he was fina
lly arrested for ‘trafficking with the enemy’.
Renault denied that his firm had received millions of marks from the Germans, and asserted that he had kept his plants going at the request of the more moderate members of the Vichy government in order to keep its materials and equipment out of Nazi hands, and, more importantly, to save his workers from deportation. However, while being kept in the notorious prison at Fresnes – previously a Gestapo jail, where members of the Resistance and the British SOE had been tortured and murdered – his health collapsed. Renault had already suffered a mental and physical collapse in 1942; now his interrogators used his physical and mental deterioration to prise a confession from him. On 5 October he was moved to a psychiatric hospital at Ville-Evrard, and then to a nearby private nursing home. There he lapsed into a coma, and died on 24 October 1944, four weeks after his incarceration and still awaiting trial.
General de Gaulle’s new provisional government immediately nationalized his company (Renault’s wife and his son, Jean-Louis, who together owned 95 per cent of the company stock, received nothing in compensation), and Louis Renault was charged posthumously with ‘guilty enrichment obtained by those who worked for the enemy’. Some years later Christiane Renault, who always maintained that her husband had been murdered, had his body exhumed for a proper autopsy, which had not been conducted in 1944. Doctors found that the 67-yearold Renault had in fact had been severely tortured and beaten while in prison. A nun who had been working at Fresnes prison in 1944 came forward to testify that she had seen Renault collapse after being hit over the head by a jailer ‘wielding a helmet’, an allegation corroborated by a subsequent X-ray which showed that the vertebrae of Renault’s neck had been broken. In 1967 Jean-Louis Renault received minor compensation for his personal losses. Yet during the celebrations in 1999 for the centenary of the original Renault Frères company, the executives of Régie Renault pointedly ignored the grandchildren of their founder. Today both the car maker and the French government continue to fight the family’s demands for financial compensation for Renault’s untimely death.
Not all French motor manufacturers were like Peugeot and Renault. Marcel Michelin, the second son of the founder of the great tyre-making firm, André Michelin, and a pillar of the new Michelin-Citroën combine, was arrested by the Germans in 1943 for organizing a Resistance cell in Puy-de-Dôme. He died in Ohrdruf concentration camp in January 1945, only two months before the camp was liberated by the Americans. Two of Marcel’s sons escaped to England and flew with the RAF; the other two were killed working for the French Resistance. André’s son, Bernard, having been dismissed from the Vichy air force in February 1941 for being Jewish, walked across the Pyrenees to Barcelona. Twenty weeks later, and still on foot, he reached Lisbon; from there he travelled to England, where he subsequently flew Douglas Bostons with 324 Squadron. The late André Citroën’s nephew, Louis-Hugues, became a Resistance leader in Marseilles, but was captured at Nîmes in November 1943 and executed at Auschwitz. Many more from the Citroën family perished at Auschwitz, including two of André Citroën’s nieces. With hideous irony, the Gestapo chose to cruise round occupied France in black Citroën Traction Avants they had requisitioned from local citizens.
At the Citroën plants, company boss Pierre-Jules Boulanger took his cue from the Michelin and Citroën families and took care to distance himself as much as possible from France’s German occupiers. He refused to meet Nazi motor supremo Ferdinand Porsche and insisted on dealing with the Germans, who had requisitioned his factories in order to build lorries for the Wehrmacht, only through intermediaries. As the war went on, Boulanger slowed production as far as he dared, and sabotaged an attempt in 1944 to transplant Citroën’s machine tools to Germany. He was also an early supporter of de Gaulle – in marked contrast to most of his fellow car makers, most of whom were eager Vichyites. Unsurprisingly, Boulanger appeared on the Nazi blacklist of sixty-seven prominent Frenchmen who would be immediately executed in the event of an Allied invasion or a French rising.
Across occupied Europe, car plants were put to more sinister use by the Germans. Hitler had been delighted to acquire the famous Škoda works outside Prague without a fight in the spring of 1939, and the plant was soon producing light tanks for the Wehrmacht (the Panzer 35 and 38), along with countless guns and shells. While civilian auto production was now subjugated to military needs, Škoda was also commissioned to produce the Type 903 command car, the ubiquitous transport of Nazi generals, and a would-be rival to the American Jeep, the Type 923. However, during the furious fight for Prague between the Germans and the advancing Russians of 6–11 May 1945, much of the Škoda plant was destroyed.
The motor manufacturers of Hitler’s Axis partners also played their part. In Italy, Giovanni Agnelli’s pampered grandson (also called Giovanni, but popularly known as ‘Gianni’) actually fought for Mussolini’s army on the Russian front. When Italy surrendered to the allies in 1943, Gianni, like many of Italy’s combatants, swiftly changed sides and enthusiastically welcomed his country’s British and American ‘liberators’. His grandfather, however, was too deeply mired in fascist politics to execute such a neat about-turn. Somewhat fortunately for Fiat’s postwar reputation, the 79-year-old Giovanni died in December 1945, just as the allies were beginning to examine Fiat’s suspiciously intimate ties with Mussolini’s deposed fascist regime.
In Germany, Ford’s subsidiary was doing Hitler’s bidding as early as July 1939, two months before the invasion of Poland precipitated the conflict and over two years before Hitler’s declaration of war on America, on 11 December 1941. As German armies advanced across Europe, Ford’s other European outposts were added to this ersatz Ford empire.
Meanwhile, GM’s Opel subsidiary made the three-ton Blitz truck for the Wehrmacht and also helped to make parts for the Junkers Ju-88 fast fighter-bomber. Despite the company’s key role in providing vital equipment for the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe – the Blitz truck was the mainstay of the German army’s mechanized transport – Alfred Sloan remained on the Opel board during the entire duration of the war. After 1945 he even had the gall to demand compensation from the US government for allied damage to Opel’s plants. Insisting that all US personnel had resigned from Opel ‘as early as October 1939’, and that the American parent had ceased to have any connection with its German affiliate after September 1941, while conveniently ignoring the fact that the legal connection between Detroit and Rüsselsheim was never severed, in 1967 GM successfully extracted $33 million from the US government in reparations for ‘troubles and destruction’ to their German factories during the war.
Allied car factories also became essential weapons in the fight for survival. In Britain, new ‘shadow factories’ were built in the Midlands and the north of England, sited near to existing car plants but generally outside urban centres so as not to attract the attention of enemy bombers. Run by established car makers, they were to build tanks, aircraft and munitions. As early as 1936, William Morris had agreed to operate the vast new Castle Bromwich shadow factory, built adjacent to an existing airfield to the east of Birmingham. Castle Bromwich became the most successful of the shadow factories and the aircraft it produced played a major part in sustaining Britain’s war effort. The plant made the superlative Supermarine Spitfire (over twenty thousand of which were made there, making Castle Bromwich the largest producer of Spitfires in the country) and later added an assembly line for the equally successful Avro Lancaster heavy bomber. However, by the time the tools for the Lancaster had begun to appear in the factory, Morris’s involvement in the site had been terminated, his limitations as an industrial dynamo having been swiftly revealed. Having been made director general of maintenance of the RAF at the beginning of the war, Morris childishly refused to come to London and instead stayed in his Morris offices at the Cowley works in Oxford. By the time the Germans invaded Holland, Belgium and France in May 1940, it was clear that Morris’s assembly-line mentality was unable to encompass factors such as the constant al
terations that had to be made to machine tools for complex aircraft like the Spitfire and Lancaster, of which many disparate marks were made. The autocratic Morris had met his match in the minister of aircraft production, Lord Beaverbrook, who could be just as ruthless and demanding as the automobile tycoon. When Morris rang Beaverbrook to complain about the RAF’s constant requests for modifications, the car maker finally erupted with the threat: ‘Maybe you would like me to give up control of the Spitfire factory?’ Beaverbrook instantly seized his chance, replying: ‘Nuffield, that’s very generous of you. I accept.’ He slammed the phone down. Morris, seething, stormed up to London and confronted Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, over the issue, tactlessly reminding the premier how much money Morris had in the past donated to Churchill’s Conservative Party. But Churchill stood by his pugnacious minister and Morris had to retreat to Oxford with his tail between his legs. (Miles Thomas later commented that thereafter Morris ‘seemed to lose the vital force that drove him inexorably to greater and greater things’.) The running of Castle Bromwich was handed by Beaverbrook to Vickers, since 1936 the owners of Supermarine. Vickers ironed out the production difficulties and produced twenty-two different types of Spitfire during the war years. Meanwhile, Morris himself displayed little interest in the sterling work his Cowley works played in making Tiger Moth trainers and repairing and refitting damaged aircraft, a vital task so memorably captured by artist Paul Nash in his evocative wartime paintings.
Morris Motors also failed to distinguish themselves at their other shadow factory. On the Birmingham site of the former Wolseley plant, the Nuffield Organization’s military arm, Nuffield Mechanization and Aero, designed and built the uninspiring Covenanter tank of 1939. On the outbreak of war, Morris adapted this into a model which was little better, the Crusader VI tank of 1940. Fast, but lamentably under-gunned and notoriously prone to breakdowns, the Crusader’s shortcomings were cruelly exposed in North Africa in 1941. Its thin armour made it easy prey for the Rommel’s Panzers, and its appalling unreliability – an ominous trait that was to plague Morris’s civilian products after the war – led to its withdrawal from front-line service during 1942. The Crusaders were replaced by American Grants, Lees and Shermans, and, less successfully, by British Cromwell tanks (designed by Leyland Motors and made at the Rover Car Company) and Churchill tanks (made by Morris’s GM-owned rival, Vauxhall Motors). Morris Motors’ subsequent ‘improvement’ of the Crusader format, in the shape of the Cavalier, proved even more inadequate. It is strange that a nation that produced so many outstanding aircraft during the Second World War could never design and build a good wartime tank.1
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