Freedom's Forge (17 page)

“There are your plans, Mr. Wilson,” the captain said, and walked away.
⁵⁵

Back in Detroit, Vincent and his engineers discovered they had to rewrite this vast mass of paper and intricate specifications, from start to finish. They not only had to be translated from English to American measurements, but made exact enough to fit the mathematical tolerance level the auto industry demanded for mass production—one ten-thousandth of an inch.

Nonetheless, by August 1941 Gilman and Vincent had a working prototype for testing. It proved as reliable and resilient as its British counterpart. The difference was that whereas the English Merlin was still made by hand, with workmen still shaping every part to fit each particular motor, Packard’s mass-production approach allowed relatively unskilled labor to do the same job three times faster. Indeed, one-third of Packard’s new employees were women who had never set foot on a factory floor.
⁵⁶

The first nine finished engines came off the assembly line in January 1942. During the war Packard would build more than 55,000 of them. Vincent even developed a maritime version of the Merlin XX. This included a supercharged 1800-horsepower model, four of which could send a 104-foot Navy PT boat hurtling across the water at fifty miles an hour. The aircraft version would be installed not just on the British Spitfire, Hurricane, and the twin-engine Mosquito; it would power to victory the finest fighter plane of World War II, the P-51 Mustang.

It was one of the production triumphs of the war—one of many. Yet while the first nine engines had cost both the government and Packard more than $6.25 million, the company’s profit for the entire Merlin deal came to barely $6,000.
⁵⁷

Merlin engines weren’t the only things coming across the Atlantic that summer.

In August a team of British scientists and engineers arrived in New York on the liner
Duchess of Richmond
. Like the Magi in the Bible, they bore gifts of inestimable value—not frankincense and myrrh this time, but the fruits of British technology and science.

They included proximity fuses, a working model for a power-driven airplane gun turret, and the cavity magnetron, the heart of a device the Brits called RDF but the Americans called radar. The team also brought news of a new aeronautical principle called jet propulsion.
⁵⁸
All represented new breakthroughs in the science of warfare that might shift the strategic balance—but only if they could be industrially engineered and mass-manufactured. The British knew they couldn’t do it, but they sensed Bill Knudsen and his American friends could.

The supply line to Britain was becoming a two-way thoroughfare. British science and American Industrial know-how would become an unbeatable formula—and nowhere more decisively than in the last gift the men on the
Duchess of Richmond
were able to offer.

It was a discovery by a German scientist, of all people, named Otto Frisch. Scientists on both sides of the Atlantic were trying to figure out how to set off a nuclear chain reaction, and Frisch theorized that if you used a peculiar substance called uranium 235, only a few pounds of it would be needed to do the job.

Getting those few pounds was the difficult part. It would require a series of industrial processes no one had conceived of, let alone built. Yet two years after the
Duchess of Richmond
returned to Britain, a clutch of American companies—Allis Chalmers, Houdaille-Hershey, and DuPont among them—would gather in the deep Appalachian wilderness of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to do just that. Under the code name “Manhattan Project,” their engineers would turn a formula on a chalkboard into the most decisive weapon of them all.

Meeting of the Automobile Manufacturers Association, October 1940. Bill Knudsen sits fifth from left, beside Packard’s Alvan Macauley, on his left. Edsel Ford is second from left. GM’s Alfred Sloan stands third from right.
Courtesy of the National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library

BY OCTOBER, BILL
Knudsen could report that he had overseen some 920 contracts worth nearly $3 billion for the Army and $6 billion for the Navy. More than five hundred companies had been drawn in to make everything from ships and tanks and aircraft engines to eleven new gunpowder and ammonia plants.
¹
The joke later would be that anyone with a lathe and a train ticket to Washington was getting a war contract.

Everyone, it seemed, except Henry Kaiser.

He wasn’t quite finished with work on the high dam at Grand Coulee when he learned a big buildup of America’s military was coming and large sums of federal money would be spent. For the next four months, he collared every administration official who was prepared to listen to what Henry Kaiser could do to help America prepare for war—if only the government would give him a contract.

Kaiser had behind him his team from Grand Coulee and Bonneville: his son Edgar, Clay Bedford, and chief engineer George Havas. The construction of Bonneville, an immense 1,027-foot dam holding back a larger volume of water than Boulder Dam, had taken four backbreaking years. “They said it couldn’t be done,” Kaiser said proudly, “but my kids went ahead and did it.”
²
In his mind they were ready for anything—even breaking into an entirely new industry.
^*

The first Kaiser looked at was steel. All this war materiel was going to require more steel. Production among the major domestic suppliers was sharply down. Why not bring in a newcomer?

From the start this required a partner who knew something about steelmaking. Kaiser turned to the president of Republic Steel and the king of the Little Steel companies, sixty-three-year-old titan Tom Girdler. He was perfect for Kaiser. Tough and self-made and born in Clark’s County, Indiana, Girdler had worked in his uncle’s cement factory until graduating from Lehigh University at the turn of the century.
³
Like Kaiser, he knew cement and construction. Like Kaiser, he had fought nonstop to grow his company in the teeth of the Depression (he became chairman of Republic three days before the Great Crash). Like Kaiser, he had a keen eye for new opportunities and talented subordinates.

But the choice of Girdler wound up being a bad one. The president of Republic was an outspoken critic of Big Labor and had told the press he would quit to grow potatoes and apples before he accepted collective bargaining. He had blasted the Congress of Industrial Organizations,
or CIO, as “an irresponsible, racketeering, violent, communistic body.” John L. Lewis thundered back that Girdler was “a monomaniac with murderous intentions.” The murder charge hung on the Memorial Day massacre in Chicago in 1937, when Chicago police fired on marching Republic Steel strikers, killing ten and wounding thirty.
⁴

Since 1940 was a presidential election year, President Roosevelt even devoted his last major campaign speech to a full-blast attack on the Republic Steel executive. “There are certain forces within our national community … who would destroy America. They are the forces of dictatorship in our own land—on one hand the Communists, and on the other the Girdlers.”
⁵

That was the end of any chance of a steel venture for Henry Kaiser.

He also faced another problem. His frenetic ways had raised the ire of the twin gatekeepers in the new high-stakes game of winning federal defense contracts, Jesse Jones and Bill Knudsen.

Jones viewed the smooth-talking, irresistibly affable Kaiser with deep suspicion. It got to the point where he forbade his people from ever meeting with the master salesman alone. “After seeing him they come back to me,” Jones used to complain, “and say, ‘Mr. Kaiser convinced me to give him my watch. Isn’t it wonderful?’ ”
⁶
As for Bill Knudsen, he and Kaiser took an immediate dislike to each other. This came as no surprise to anyone who knew them. Both men were blunt and outspoken; both shared a strong conviction that their way was best until proven otherwise. Underneath the frenetic charm of Henry Kaiser ran the hard starch of his German immigrant forebears. Knudsen, the immigrant who had boxed his way to fame in the Bronx shipyards, had drunk the same starch.

He also believed in the value of experience, and that was what turned him off about Kaiser. Describing those early days at NDAC later, he talked about being barraged by would-be defense contractors whose attitude was, “I’ve never done it before but I can do it again.” It was a clear reference to Kaiser.
⁷

That summer and fall as Britain’s fate hung in the balance, every effort Kaiser made to gain a Washington foothold failed. A lesser man would have packed his bags, checked out of the Shoreham, and headed
back to California. But not Henry Kaiser. “So what?” he scribbled on the margin of a letter from his lawyer Calhoun describing Knudsen’s skepticism about Kaiser.
⁸
He figured eventually his luck would turn. So it did, thanks, ironically enough, to his biggest skeptic.

It was October, and outside his office Knudsen could see the leaves on Constitution Avenue starting to turn. Far away in England, the Blitz had begun, as German bombers switched to nighttime raids on London. Japan had formally joined the German-Italian axis, and then occupied French Indochina.
⁹

Knudsen knew that the course of war would not wait for more planes, and neither could the Army and Navy. The Navy had already called up almost 28,000 reservists to man ships that were still under construction in yards in Philadelphia and Newport News. It had leased bases in Brazil and Chile in order to supply them. Registration for the draft under the Selective Service Act, passed in the teeth of fierce congressional opposition, would begin in a few days. Knudsen had also had a sobering meeting with the head of the Air Corps, General Hap Arnold. Unless America began making more planes, Arnold told him, Britain was finished.
¹⁰

His success with Chrysler and Packard gave him an idea. Why not turn the whole auto industry loose on the war production problem?

Car companies were already making aircraft engines. In addition to Packard, Knudsen had enticed Ford back into the game by getting him to agree to manufacture nine thousand Pratt and Whitney engines—for American planes this time, not British ones. GM’s Allison plant was putting together engines for the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk.
¹¹
While Chrysler was making tanks for the Army, Knudsen and Harold Vance had gotten them involved in manufacturing 40mm antiaircraft guns for the Navy—while Pontiac was getting ready to do the same with the 20mm Oerlikon.

Then on September 15, Knudsen had brought to Washington production men and engineers from Saginaw Steering Gear, AC Spark Plugs, Brown-Lipe-Chapin, and Frigidaire—four companies owned but not operated by GM.

“Can you make guns—a lot of guns—in a hurry?” Knudsen asked. Next to him was his small-arms man, Bill “Powder” Johnson.

A crate was hastily brought in and uniformed men pulled off the cover. Inside, carefully wrapped, were machine guns of various types and two principal calibers, .30 and .50. They came from different plants and arsenals, but all bore the expert mark of their designer, the Browning Company, which had engineered all the basic designs soon after the First World War. They had lain around largely unused and forgotten, until now.

The men gathered around, going over the weapons with their eyes and hands, probing and assessing. “Beautiful workmanship,” one of them murmured.

Then: “Do you want them as beautifully finished as these handmade products?”

No, they were told, the Army just wanted lots of guns.

“How many—and when?”

“A hundred a day—two years from today, if possible.”