Freedom's Forge (13 page)

“Our greatest need is time,” Marshall told him. Knudsen could see that, but he also needed to know exactly what equipment Marshall and the Army needed and how many, and no one could tell him. The situation in the Navy was much the same.
³⁷
The truth began to dawn on Knudsen. He couldn’t get a straight answer because they were waiting for
him
to tell
them
what the American economy could produce, and how much. If the country was going to make itself seriously ready for war, neither the politicians nor the generals nor the admirals were willing to take the lead. American business and industry would have to figure it out on their own.

Others besides Harold Ickes had their doubts they could do it without a single person in charge. For them the lesson from the other side of the Atlantic was clear. America had to mobilize all its resources for war, and quickly. A comprehensive plan had to be devised, orders had to be given, and someone needed to take the helm: a Wizard of Oz figure, with his hands on all the production levers and whose stern commands carried the moral force of law.

“The nation clearly, almost violently wants a man of action,” thundered
Time
magazine the weekend after Dunkirk, “a powerhouse of strength and sureness.” It was worried that America was getting Bill Knudsen instead, “a ponderous, accented, self-made man, a production genius,” but evidently not
Time
editor Henry Luce’s first pick for a war production czar.
³⁸

Still, Knudsen believed he and his colleagues could do it without becoming czars or wizards. “Industry in the United States does more for the country in direct, or indirect, contributions to the public wealth than in any other country on earth,” he had told an audience in Detroit three years earlier. “And it will continue to do so if given the opportunity without restrictions.”
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Those restrictions had come in the thirties, with the Nye investigations that had essentially destroyed America’s munitions industry, and absurd new tax laws that made making armaments
almost prohibitive.
^‡
Even making as basic a compound as gunpowder, Knudsen was learning, America would have to start virtually from scratch.
⁴⁰

The evening after his sobering talk with Marshall, Knudsen sat up all night in his hotel room with a yellow legal pad. He had discovered how primitive the thinking about procurement still was in Army circles, where everything was based on units of one: If one man needed so much cotton for making his uniform at such and such a cost, then two men needed twice as much, and so on.
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From uniforms to rifles and tanks and airplanes, Knudsen knew mass production would introduce economies of scale and reduce such thinking to nonsense. “The first thing to do,” Knudsen told himself, “was to get started on the weapons that required a long cycle in manufacturing.” Those would be ships, tanks, airplanes, guns, smokeless powder, and TNT. The second was begin planning for the shorter-cycle items like trucks and vehicles, clothing, food, and smaller arms like rifles and machine guns. The third step was to assemble a team who understood the dynamic power of mass production, but also the technical problems facing a modern economy.

By dawn he had his list. One name he didn’t bother to write down. That was his fellow NDAC member Edward Stettinius, chairman of U.S. Steel. Stettinius had been on the short-lived War Resources Board. With Stettinius and his deputy Donald Nelson, the former president of Sears Roebuck, in charge of NDAC’s Materials Division, Knudsen knew he had a strong ally on that flank.

The name at the head of his sheet of legal pad paper was that of young, vigorous John D. Biggers, president of Libby-Owens Glass. Knudsen had known him since his Ford days, when Libby-Owens made the glass for Model T windshields, and had worked with him on
various charitable causes. Biggers was one of the most principled men Knudsen knew, and an FDR favorite.
⁴²
He decided to make Biggers his personal deputy, as well as head of procurement for trucks, tanks, and other large vehicles.

Then came Harold Vance, chairman of Studebaker, which had one of the smartest engineering divisions in the car business. Knudsen decided he would put Vance to work on machine tools, artillery, and artillery shells, while Earl Johnson, an alumnus of General Motors as well as of DuPont, would be in charge of explosives, small arms, and ammunition. At the end of World War I, America produced more gunpowder and TNT than Britain and France combined. In 1940 it produced almost none. Johnson’s skill in mobilizing this most basic side of war mobilization would earn him a nickname in the corridors of the War Department: “Powder Johnson.”
⁴³

There was Bill Harrison, head of construction from American Telephone and Telegraph, whose president had been the first to push for a National Defense Advisory Commission.
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Knudsen gave Harrison charge of finding communication and radio gear, as well as military construction; while Dr. George Mead, one of the most respected figures in American aviation, co-founder of Pratt and Whitney Aircraft and designer of the original Wasp engine, would deal with airplane production.

The last person on Knudsen’s list was a military man, not a business executive. He was Admiral Jerry Land, chairman of the United States Maritime Commission, a man with unparalleled knowledge of America’s shipyards, who would supervise what would become one of the biggest projects of the entire war: building up America’s merchant shipping fleet. In World War I, lack of an adequate merchant fleet had kept the growing supplies of equipment and munitions stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Knudsen was not going to let that happen this time. Balancing the shipbuilding needs of the Navy and the civilian fleet would remain one of his highest priorities.

Six names, six men. Later there would be others. For now Knudsen would get Bigger, Harrison, and Vance leave of absence from their companies (the others were retired or, in Land’s case, already in Washington). He also landed them offices near his own in the Federal Reserve
Building, the NDAC’s temporary home. They were the first of the so-called dollar-a-year men who would begin to descend on Washington from scores of other companies and business to take charge of the war production effort. As a group and as individuals, they would be scorned and vilified, dismissed as narrow-minded incompetents or, alternately, denounced as scheming greedy profiteers.

But as a team, Knudsen and his colleagues would guide the country into facing the greatest and most complex challenge in its history.

And thus far Henry Kaiser was not even a glimmer in anyone’s eye.

On June 12, a steamy Wednesday, the National Defense Advisory Commission held its first official meeting. Far away in Europe, Italy had declared war on France and Great Britain—a move Roosevelt denounced in a speech at the University of Virginia as a “stab in the back”—the most militant speech from the president on foreign policy so far. Meanwhile, a demoralized French government was groping toward an armistice with Hitler.

The big problem for the commission that day, however, was office space. William McReynolds, a wiry bespectacled thirty-four-year veteran of nearly every federal department in Washington before becoming FDR’s head of the Office of Emergency Management, and whom Roosevelt had loaned to Knudsen to help him get set up, proposed a solution. Everyone would move over to the new Social Security Building, which was nearly finished but had 200,000 square feet of empty offices.
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In the meantime, the Federal Reserve Building would be their temporary home. It also had the advantage of being air-conditioned, unlike the War or Navy buildings—and during one of the most torrid summers in Washington memory.

Bill Knudsen’s immediate focus was on how a commission that was entirely advisory, with no powers of its own, was going to proceed.

“First,” he told everyone, “we have to find out what the Army and Navy want, how much, and when.” The estimate they had given him of arming and equipping an additional 280,000 men would be, he believed, totally inadequate to the job that was coming. “I suspect the
Army and Navy can, and will, change their mind pretty fast…. So let’s not pay attention to that 280,000 figure.”
^46
§

He then explained to those who weren’t engineers how mass production worked. He showed how to take a complete unit like an airplane or a truck or a machine gun, break it down into little individual pieces, then machine the parts back together again so each was uniform and each subassembly functioned exactly like every other subassembly—and then every completed unit functioned exactly like all the rest. This, he said, would be the basic way in which everything necessary for defending the country would have to be made.

“Mass production has never depended on speed and never will,” he told his listeners. “Speed, as such, is worthless. The only thing that produces good work is accuracy.” Once factories and workers learned how to reproduce that accuracy with new unfamiliar products like tanks and planes, they could go on to make more complex weaponry at the same rate—perhaps weapons more complex than any ever seen.

“I’m not a soldier, and I’m not a sailor,” Knudsen concluded. “I am just a plain manufacturer. But I know if we get into war, the winning of it will be purely a question of material and production. If we know how to get out twice as much material as everyone else—know how to get it, how to get our hands on it, and use it—we are going to come out on top—and win.”
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Knudsen was happy, as well, because in addition to his own team, two more allies had turned up. One was Roosevelt’s new secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, a fellow Republican and Chicago newspaper publisher. The other, even more important, was Henry L. Stimson, the new secretary of war. At age seventy-two, Stimson was a Washington legend. Former secretary of war under President Taft and former secretary of state under Hoover, no man knew more about the ins and outs of American foreign policy—and, as a leading corporate lawyer, the moods and direction of American big business.

He and Knudsen soon discovered they were kindred spirits. “My
impression of Mr. Knudsen’s ability and his tact grows with each time I see him,” Stimson would write in his diary.
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He also agreed with Knudsen that the only way for America to prepare for war was through American private enterprise. “You have got to let business make money out of the process,” he would write in his diary, “or business won’t work.”
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Stimson became secretary of war on June 14. That same day the papers carried the news that the Germans had marched into Paris.

Back in New York, Alfred Sloan sat in his office in the General Motors Building and penned a note to his friend John Pratt.

Bill Knudsen was out to prove his former boss wrong.

“No one can do what we can do if we all get together,” he liked to boast. Americans’ love of freedom, of individuality, of doing things differently from the other guy—these were sources of strength, he believed, not weakness. He believed in the power of the average American worker—“Progress in the world is accomplished by average people,” he would tell audiences—and the power of American business. “American ingenuity has never failed to cope with every specific problem before it,” he told a national radio audience, “and if we have your support and confidence, we will surely succeed.”
⁵¹

On that count, some American businesses were already giving him a head start.