Morris’s rivals proved far better at managing their shadow factories than the ageing viscount. Daimler of Coventry initially missed the point of the shadow factory scheme by building one directly behind their existing works at Radford, but then erected a second plant to the west of Coventry at Brown’s Lane in Allesley. Rootes and Standard also built shadow plants on the fringes of Coventry, at Stoke and Ryton (Rootes) and Canley and Banner Lane (Standard). Churchill was so impressed with Billy Rootes’s energy that he made the car maker head of Coventry’s reconstruction committee following the destruction of much of the city in the Blitz of 1940–1, chairman of the National Supply Council and a knight of the realm. (Sir William Rootes, as he now was, repaid Churchill’s faith by leading a successful fund-raising campaign for a new RAF squadron, later numbered 154, entirely financed by the motor industry.) Rover built shadow plants at Acocks Green in Birmingham and in Solihull, and was also asked to manage a new plant at Speke in Liverpool, designed to manufacture Blenheim light bombers.1 Ford used the site of its old plant at Trafford Park in Manchester to make Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and the Avro Lancaster bomber, while its principal plant at Dagenham made trucks, vans and tractors for the rear and Bren-gun carriers for the front, and its V-8 engines were used in almost everything from landing craft to barrage-balloon winches.
The wisdom of building shadow factories was soon evident. Traditional production centres such as Coventry and Birmingham were heavily bombed, but the outlying plants emerged largely unscathed and were able to continue manufacturing. In 1940–1 the centre of Coventry was subject to forty air raids; the most serious of these, on the night of 14–15 November 1940, killed 554 people and wrecked the medieval city centre, including the magnificent church of St Michael, since 1918 designated a cathedral. The Alvis car plant was completely destroyed (its wartime production was, as a result, dispersed all over England, from Hinckley in Leicestershire to Ealing in west London), while Daimler’s Radford factory also suffered very badly. But while the city lay devastated, the shadow factory sites offered the prospect of a miraculous, phoenixlike industrial rebirth.
Even as Coventry was being blitzed, many months before its formal entry into the war, in December 1941, America was being hailed by the allies as the Arsenal of Democracy. Early in 1942 President Roosevelt formally banned the manufacture of civilian cars; from then on, America’s mighty car makers were directed to concentrate solely on fulfilling military requirements. GM began making munitions in 1941 and by 1942 had switched all of its numerous plants over to war production. Chrysler plants made the Martin B-26 Marauder, Swedish-designed Bofors guns, Wright Cyclone engines, parts for B-17 and B-29 bombers, Helldivers and Corsairs, and their own Dodge trucks. From June 1942, Chrysler also manufactured America’s principal tank, the M4 Sherman, which was powered by a Chrysler engine; and by 1945 the company had added an assembly line for the new, heavy M26 Pershing tank. As we have seen, Ford built and ran the vast Willow Run plant,1 where B-24 Liberators were made, while the Rouge, Highland Park and other Ford plants churned out aircraft, tanks and shells. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Winston Churchill privately recognized that no other country or alliance in the world would be able to compete with or resist America’s vast military-industrial complex, a manufacturing base that relied heavily on the nation’s vast automotive industry.2 America’s car makers helped to make the allied victory certain.
Ford’s wartime record as a munitions supplier was initially disappointing. Critics were quick to point out that the Ford-Werke in Germany appeared happily to be supplying the enemy with hundreds of trucks (indeed, Ford and GM-built trucks and halftracks made up 70 per cent of the Wehrmacht’s motorized transport during the Second World War), while back in the US the conversion of Ford plants to wartime production moved agonizingly slowly. Although Ford agreed to make Pratt and Whitney aircraft engines under licence as early as November 1940, the incorrigible isolationist dragged his heels as much as he could, even after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941, and Hitler’s senseless declaration of war on the US four days later. Henry Ford blocked the proposed manufacture of the peerless Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the power plant of the Supermarine Spitfire fighter and Avro Lancaster bomber,1 on the grounds that the company should not be making engines for the British – despite Edsel Ford’s own enthusiastic backing for the project and the glaring fact that Ford’s German subsidiary was churning out large quantities of munitions for the Nazi war machine. Albert Kahn’s massive Ford-run bomber plant at Willow Run, Michigan, took far longer than planned to finish – the architect himself died before it was completed – and the first Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber only emerged from the new factory in September 1942.2
Even after 1942, as historian James J. Flink has noted, the increasingly paranoid Ford ‘feared that the military personnel at Willow Run were spies sent by Roosevelt to assassinate him and [he] took to carrying an automatic pistol under the cowl of his car’. When Roosevelt came to open Willow Run in 1942, Ford tried to hide from the president and was only introduced into the welcoming line-up under protest. Unsurprisingly, the US Army Air Force, exasperated by Henry Ford’s constant interference in bomber production, was soon urging the federal government to take control of the firm. The final straw came when the ageing autocrat let it be known that he intended to make the universally loathed Harry Bennett his sole successor. It was only the threat of Edsel’s widow, Eleanor, together with his own wife, the indefatigable Clara Ford, that they would sell all their company shares if Henry did not step down, thereby ending decades of family control, that induced the old tyrant finally to retire. He reluctantly accepted that Edsel’s son, the 26-year-old Henry Ford II, should be plucked from his naval training and given an immediate role in senior management with a view to his succeeding to the company presidency in 1945. Henry II was not happy with the idea, hoping to be posted to the Pacific, but was persuaded to go along with it for the time being.
Predictably, the company’s founder was determined not to go quietly. Between 1943 and 1945, as the federal government contemplated taking over the poorly managed Willow Run plant, Henry began to exhibit an irrational distrust of his grandson, and simultaneously allowed Harry Bennett to tighten his grip on the corporation’s throat. Bennett was even permitted to oust Ford’s long-serving production chief, Charles Sorenson (aided in this instance by Clara Ford, who feared Sorenson was trying to usurp her grandson). Henry also attempted to create a board of trustees, which would have been dominated by Bennett as board secretary, to control the company after his death, ‘until Henry II and the other grandchildren were old enough to manage the company themselves’. Fortunately, Henry II discovered the plot and forced Bennett to withdraw the plan. (Bennett later admitted to Ford’s chief lawyer that the document creating the board was no longer a legal entity, as ‘Mr Ford had carried the instrument around in his pocket for a long time and had made a lot of scribblings on it, including verses from the Bible’.)
As Henry II attempted to wrest control of the firm from Bennett, the Service Department chief found he could count on the founder’s support less and less, as Henry Ford spent most of his days in impenetrable reveries. When in a lucid moment, on 20 September 1945, he formally told his grandson that he could take over as president of the Ford Motor Company, Henry II only agreed, he later recalled, ‘if I had a completely free hand to make any changes I wanted to make’. Young Henry’s first executive act was, unsurprisingly, to fire Harry Bennett. Henry Ford’s reaction to this news was to exclaim: ‘Well now, Harry is back where he started from.’
As Henry Ford’s mind was failing, so was his body. From 1938 he suffered a series of strokes and spent increasing amounts of time withdrawn and silent. Even when he was more alert, he expressed a growing enthusiasm for reincarnation and began to announce that his son Edsel was not really dead. On the rare occasions when he was conducted around the Ford factories, Henry did not seem to have any idea what was ha
ppening there. (‘What are all those people doing?’ he once asked in the middle of the Rouge’s engineering department.) On the evening of 6 April 1947, the 83-year-old Henry Ford spoke his last recognizable words, to a maid at his Fair Lane mansion: ‘I’ll sleep well tonight. We’re going early to bed.’ Hours later it was evident that he was actually sleeping very badly, and Clara Ford summoned the doctor. By the time medical help arrived, Henry was dead.
By the summer of 1944, as the allied armies were advancing across France, the Russians were beating down German resistance in the east, and Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur were island-hopping their way towards Japan, most American auto companies were beginning to think of dusting down their 1941 ranges in order to have something to offer their customers when the war ended. Only one military vehicle, however, managed to make the transition from wartime to peacetime – the Jeep. In the ensuing years this basic form of transport established a reputation that became as classless and durable as Porsche’s ‘people’s car’, and outlived its creators to become a valuable brand in its own right. This rugged, four-wheel-drive equivalent of the Volkswagen became the people’s offroader, the ancestor of all of today’s sports utility vehicles (SUVs), and a household name.
The modest auto manufacturer Willys-Overland had been founded in Toledo, Ohio, in 1902, but had already gone bankrupt twice (in 1920 and again in 1933) by the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Today, Willys is only remembered because, to its great good fortune, it was the only firm that tendered for the US War Department’s little-noticed contract to manufacture a small military truck from a prototype recently designed by the American Bantam company of Butler, Pennsylvania.
Bantam was even less well known than Willys. The company had started life in 1929 as American Austin, the US subsidy of Britain’s Austin Motors, which concentrated on making American versions of the bestselling Austin Seven. Following its bankruptcy in 1935, the company was split from its British parent and renamed American Bantam, after the name of their Baby Austin derivative (which the firm still retained a licence to make). The car maker’s only claim to fame in these pre-war years came when a young animator named Walt Disney adapted a 1938 Bantam as the basis for a car for his new cartoon character Donald Duck. Even when, in 1940, Bantam seemed to strike gold by securing the War Department’s tender for a quarter-ton, four-wheel-drive, small truck for ‘command reconnaissance duties’, the firm proved too small and underresourced to reap the benefits of its success. Bantam had originally developed the contract-winning vehicle with the help of freelance engineer Karl Probst (who always resisted postwar claims that he was the ‘Father of the Jeep’, insisting that the design was a Bantam team effort). But Bantam had only made 2,675 of the miniature trucks before the federal government decided that the operation was far too small to produce the vehicle in the numbers they needed. (Bantam had already had to stop production of all of its civilian cars to work on the new army contract.) Willys was instead awarded the commission to adapt the Bantam vehicle and produce it on a far larger scale. In the event, the runaway success of the car meant that even Willys was not big enough to fulfil the US Army’s orders, and Ford was appointed as a back-up manufacturer.
Originally designated a General Purpose Vehicle (GP for short), it soon became known by the affectionate name of Jeep, a designation Willys formally trademarked in 1943. This marvellously simple and rugged four-wheel-drive runabout carried privates and presidents, and could go just about anywhere. Six hundred and sixty thousand were made during the war. In 1945 Willys bravely began making a civilian version, the CJ (Civilian Jeep), which was subsequently manufactured under licence by Hotchkiss in France and even by Mitsubishi and Toyota in Japan. Few in 1945, though, would have predicted that it would be the wartime Jeep brand that, sixty years later, would keep one of America’s legendary automotive giants afloat.1 As we will see, by 2000 it had proved almost as powerful and iconic a brand as the immortal Volkswagen.
1 After 1934 German racing cars, formerly in white, were left unpainted.
1 Britain’s first diesel-powered car did not arrive until 1954’s Standard Vanguard.
2 Not, strictly speaking, ‘Dr Porsche’, as he is often described. Porsche’s doctorate was merely an honorary one, bestowed for his wartime work for Austro-Daimler in 1916, and thus should not be used as a formal title.
1 Ganz’s subsequent career in Switzerland was mired in lawsuits and disappointments. He died in Australia in 1967.
1 The Schwimmwagen, unfortunately, was not such a triumph as its land-based cousin, since its thin skin could easily be penetrated by a rifle bullet.
2 Unlike Rommel’s accompanying Horch armoured cars, which mostly blew up.
1 Renault bought land opposite Citroen’s Javry factory on which he erected huge billboards bearing the name ‘RENAULT’.
1 The excellent Centurion tank, powered by an engine designed by Rolls-Royce and built by Rover, only reached the allied front line in May 1945, just as the war was ending.
1 When Speke was opened in 1937 the Bristol Blenheim was the fastest light bomber in the world, but by 1939 it was sadly obsolescent.
1 The Detroit Industrial Expressway, completed in 1942, was built to carry twenty thousand workers per day from metropolitan Detroit to Willow Run.
2 ‘So we had won after all!’ was Churchill’s comment in his diary at the time, later immortalized in his memoirs.
1 And, later, of the superlative American-built P-51 Mustang.
2 The Liberator’s stirring name, originally applied by the RAF, was subsequently taken up by the USAAF.
1 The Jeep brand survived not only the purchase of Willys by Kaiser in 1953 (the company actually renamed itself Kaiser-Jeep in 1963) but also its transfer to American Motors in 1970 and Chrysler in 1987.
6
Austerity Britain
The car industries of Western Europe emerged in a shaky condition from the debilitating trials of the Second World War. Most models that they offered in the immediate postwar years came from pre-war antecedents. In those European countries that still possessed car factories that had managed to survive years of bombing, there were generally too many small plants making too many models, and too many cars that were grossly underpowered, built according to the conditions and expectations of 1935 rather than of 1945. On top of all that, petrol rationing continued throughout much of Europe for many years, while petrol taxes were increased, ensuring that car ownership remained a luxury rather than a necessity. As if this were not enough, aside from the wrecked Axis powers of Germany and Italy, Europe was severely handicapped by its elderly road system which included no motorways and few dual carriageways.
In Brave New Britain, car manufacture fell well below housing and health on the long list of national priorities. Most cars were diverted by the government for export, in order to earn hard cash, although many British models failed to cope with testing foreign roads. Those models that did well abroad were rarely seen in Britain; few of the racy, boat-tailed Jaguar XK120S, which took America by storm after 1948, for example, were ever spotted on British roads; while all of the first forty-seven thousand Austin A40s produced at Longbridge were sold overseas. MG’s TC Midget of 1946 was not as fast as it looked, but it still held the road better than its American rivals and proved a vital earner of US dollars for cash-strapped Britain. Its successor, the uprated MGA of 1955, did even better. As late as 1952 Jaguar was exporting 96 per cent of its annual output, mostly to the US.
While the British government (effectively broke by 1947) still desperately needed foreign currency, it was also aware of the pressing need to improve Britain’s antiquated highway infrastructure. In 1946 Labour’s minister of transport, Alfred Barnes, announced a ten-year plan for the reconstruction of Britain’s road network, including the provision of several new multi-lane motorways. The key role motorized transport had played in winning the war, and the evident success of the American parkways, had softened the image of superhighways, which before 1939 h
ad been inevitably associated with the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. However, bankrupt Britain was in no state to build hundreds of miles of new highways. The route of the country’s first motorway, the London–Yorkshire MI, was not published until 1955, and work did not start on the road until 1959.
Attlee’s postwar government did manage to abolish the notorious horsepower tax, in 1946. But it retained the swingeing purchase tax of up to one third of a car’s value (two thirds after 1947), and petrol remained rationed until 1950. Added to this, the need to fulfil export quotas meant that many prospective car owners had to wait over five years for their vehicles. (Motor historian Michael Sedgwick remembered that ‘My family ordered a Morris Oxford in November 1948; it was not ready until 1954, by which time we could no longer afford it.’) Successive postwar governments tacitly kept to a low-growth, low-investment strategy for Britain’s largest manufacturing industry. The result was that by the early 1970s, when the oil crisis changed the motoring world forever, British car makers were crippled by appalling under-investment in plants, models and ideas. By 1974 annual investment in British Leyland was two thirds that of state-owned Renault and under half that of Volkswagen.
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