Freedom's Forge (35 page)

Sorensen only shook his head. “It’s the complete plane, or nothing.” And when Cast-Iron Charlie got an idea into his brain, it was never going away until it was done.
³⁵

For two months nothing happened. Then came the meeting just before Christmas with Mead and Doolittle, and Sorensen felt vindicated. He arrived for the tour of Consolidated feeling something close to triumph. Before it was over, he was almost in despair.

Certainly the B-24 was a hard plane to fall in love with.

Hap Arnold had asked Reuben Fleet and his chief designer, Isaac “Mac” Laddon, back in January 1939 to give him a plane that would be everything the B-17 was
not
. It was to have a longer range, almost three thousand miles; a higher ceiling; and a bigger payload, 2,500 versus 2,000 pounds. Laddon saw at once this meant dramatically increasing the wing lift. Fortunately, he had just the thing he needed right in the Consolidated plant.

It was the creation of David Davis, a wealthy aviation fan who gave Douglas Aircraft its first $40,000 to build a plant and a plane to fly across the country. In 1938, however, Davis had gone broke. His own chance to recoup his fortunes was to sell the aviation industry on a special wing he had designed in his spare time, whose cross section resembled a teardrop. He told potential investors it would provide more aerodynamic lift than any airfoil ever made, but no one believed him until Reuben Fleet agreed to give him a chance. A team of professors from Cal Tech gave a Davis wing model a test in the Consolidated wind tunnel. They ran the test three times because no one could believe the final result. The Davis wing had a 102 percent efficiency rating, unheard of for the time.
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Mac Laddon tried it out on the Model 31 flying boat he was developing for the Navy—which later became the PBY Catalina. He also saw it as the solution to Arnold’s specifications for the new XB-24, and on December 29, 1939, the plane took its maiden flight. In addition to the Davis wing, it had another innovation: the so-called wet wing fuel tank. Self-sealing fuel tanks at the time were still clumsy, heavy things, so the Consolidated engineers had sprayed the interior of the wing fuel tank with Duprene sealer, a DuPont product, which acted to prevent wing punctures from leaking or igniting a fire—or worse.
³⁷

As for the XB-24’s engines Laddon wanted, for once Materiel Command
did things right. It encouraged a competition between Buick and Chevrolet to see who could produce its Pratt and Whitney RB-1830 power plants faster, and at the lowest cost. It worked, and when the Army came to order 2,434 B-24s to be delivered in 1942, there were more than enough engines to get them in the air and flying.

“The B-24 has
guts
,” said the Air Force’s instruction manual for the plane. “It can take it and dish it out.” Still, pilots found it was a tricky plane to handle. Fleet had added an extra three feet to the plane’s fuselage, and when the French government ordered a shipment, they demanded a forward-firing turret, which Fleet retained for all his models. When loaded up with heavy .50-caliber machine guns, the turret proved a drag on the plane’s performance. Someone who flew B-24s in nearly sixty missions, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Stewart, learned how the plane could suddenly lose altitude if your attention wandered from the controls. “You could never trim the son of a gun,” another B-24 pilot remembered, “[you] had to horse it around constantly.”
³⁸
The constant pulling and pushing needed to keep the B-24 in the air made one pilot the arm-wrestling champion of his squadron.

By and large, American fliers and crews liked the B-17 better, and nobody ever made a movie about the B-24. The British, however, fastened quickly onto the plane, to which they gave its nickname: the Liberator. A B-24 Liberator became Winston Churchill’s personal plane, and both Bomber and Coastal Command wanted them. It was that increase in British orders which forced Bill Knudsen’s team to turn to Ford for help.

That clear January day in San Diego, Sorensen spent his time looking, listening, and jotting down notes. “I liked neither what I saw nor what I heard,” he wrote later. If this was how aircraft companies worked, he thought, then the Air Force program was doomed.

“Inside the plant I watched men putting together wing sections and portions of the fuselage…. What I saw reminded me of nearly thirty-five years previously when we were making Model N Fords at the Piquette Avenue plant before Walter Flanders rearranged our machines,” and got Ford going in assembly-line production. There was no orderly sequence or flow of materials, no sense of forward motion in the assembly process, no reliance on machined parts and machined
parts only. “Here was a custom-made plane,” Sorensen thought, “put together as a tailor would cut and fit a suit of clothes.”
³⁹

Then he watched the final assembly take place outside, on a structural steel frame. Workers brought out the wings, tail, and fuselage as little by little the B-24 took shape. At the same time, the hot California sun expanded the aluminum metal so that parts that were made to fit inside the plant suddenly needed new custom adjustments before they came together. Sorensen shook his head. It was obvious that no B-24 ended up exactly like another; and obvious to everyone except the Consolidated people that any parts Ford made for the planes would almost certainly not fit once they were ready to put in place.

Fleet told him they intended to make 350 B-24s a year. Sorensen sensed at a glance that the facilities were woefully inadequate to hit that number. Yet no one wanted to stop to revamp or expand, for fear it would undercut existing production. Dr. Mead told him they preferred a little bit now, rather than none at the moment but lots later.

“All this was pretty discouraging, and I said so.” Fleet and his engineers looked at each other, then posed the obvious question: So how would you do it?

“I don’t know,” Sorensen said, “but I’ll have an answer for you tomorrow morning.”
⁴⁰

All through dinner that night with Edsel and the Ford team, Sorensen kept running over the options in his mind. Comparing a Ford V-8 to a B-24 was like comparing a garage to a skyscraper, he knew, but the principles for assembling the one and the other were the same. “First break the plane’s design down into essential units,” he kept saying, “and make a separate production layout for each unit.” Then you deliver each unit to its assigned place in the sequence until you have a finished plane. Finally you build a plant large enough to house the entire process—something much bigger than Consolidated’s current plant.
⁴¹

After dinner Sorensen went back to his room at the Coronado Hotel. He was too restless to sleep. Instead he sat down with his notes from the day’s tour on one side, a pad of blank paper on the other, and rethought the entire problem.

He broke the bomber down on paper, section by section and subassembly
by subassembly, and schemed out the production time of each based on his notes. As the hours ticked by, he added in the notes he had on Consolidated’s labor force and average job performance, and the overhead costs. “I computed each unit operation, its timing, and required floor space as I saw them, and paper began to fly.” Soon there were stacks of paper representing each unit piled up all around the room. In his mind he was back at the Piquette Avenue plant, sketching out Ford’s assembly-line layout—and in his head he kept hearing Old Man Ford’s words: “Unless you see a thing, you can’t simplify it. And if you can’t simplify it, it’s a good sign you can’t make it.”
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By 4
A
.
M
. Sorensen had the proper sequence down, and the production time allotted for each unit. Then he sat down once more and sketched out the floor plan of a plant that would produce B-24 bombers in this mass-production way: more bombers than anyone had reasonably imagined. Consolidated hoped for a bomber a day. Sorensen figured he could give them a bomber an hour. If Sorensen could get a dozen plants going at once, America was looking at close to three hundred brand-new bombers every twenty-four hours. “I was elated by the certainty that the Germans had neither the facilities nor the conception” to mass-produce planes in this way, Sorensen remembered.
⁴³
It would turn the tide of airpower in the future.

And, he must have thought as the sun shone through the windows and he turned off the light, it would finally give him one up on Big Bill Knudsen.

At breakfast he showed Edsel Ford the sketches he had made. The son of the master of mass production was dazzled and urged him to go see the Consolidated people at once. Sorensen went to Reuben Fleet’s office with his papers under his arm and Edsel’s two sons in tow. Fleet was a former Army pilot who had founded Consolidated in 1923 with $15,000 of his own money and $25,000 borrowed from his sister.
⁴⁴
Underneath his smooth executive exterior, he was an old fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants man, and he was somewhat dazed by the scale of Sorensen’s proposition. It’s not clear if he really understood it all.

Fleet suggested maybe Ford would make the parts for wing sections, and offered a contract for one thousand sets of wings.

Sorensen’s face became set. He repeated what he had said to Knudsen
the previous October. “We’ll make the complete plane,” he said, “or nothing.”
⁴⁵

Then Sorensen laid the full proposal out to Dr. Mead. If the Army Air Forces spent $200 million for the plant and equipment, he told him, Ford would do what no one, not even Knudsen, had imagined: build bombers with the speed and ease of building cars. Mead signed on at once; that left Fleet no choice but to go along. On February 25, 1941, Sorensen got his contract with Washington and Consolidated agreed to license the design for its heavy bombers. Ford was in the airplane business.

Back in Dearborn, the old man was fascinated. He immediately told Consolidated to fly out a B-24 for them to look over. He and Sorensen then had workmen take it apart piece by piece, rivet by rivet, so they could look at every component from propeller to tail, and then put it back together again.
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It was no small task. The B-24’s 488,193 separate parts broke down into 30,000 components. Working side by side, Ford and Sorensen managed to work out the plane’s preassembly into nine different departments, one for each section. Those were center wing section, two wings, two wing tips, nose and front pilot sections, then the nacelle and tail sections.
⁴⁷
It was a little more complicated because the British order substituted a standard self-sealing tank for the Duprene-covered version. But things were beginning to come together and make sense in reality as well as on paper.

Then came thinking about the plant itself. Consolidated’s plant had fifty-four separate workstations, which required an average of six hours for each unit to clear before it was ready to move on to the next station. Since Sorensen intended to cut the manpower hours from 140,000 to less than 100,000, a production flow chart based on six-hour intervals was useless. Instead he had architects draw up an imaginary cross section of a plant high enough to allow even the biggest sections to be stood on end if necessary (the tail assembly alone was as long as a city bus) with room for an overhead crane system; wide enough to allow an aisle between machines and the assembly line you could drive a car through; and long enough to more than double the number of subassembly stations (Consolidated had two sections for its fuselage, while
Ford would have thirty-three), all in order to speed up the manufacturing process.
⁴⁸

When they finished, the result impressed even Sorensen. It would be the single biggest factory in the world. The main assembly line of Consolidated’s San Diego plant was three thousand feet long, or ten football fields. This one would be
one mile
long. Sorensen knew there was only one man in the world with the skill and vision to design such a plant. He placed a call to Albert Kahn’s office, and overnight Kahn was working on the preliminary drawings.

That left the question of how to proceed. Even Sorensen knew he wasn’t going to be able to start producing planes right away, no matter how sophisticated the plant facilities. There was too much to learn, and too many variables. He figured he would build the B-24s in three stages. First would come an “educational order” for making parts and dies. Then Ford would make all the parts for the B-24, which would then be assembled by the plane makers Consolidated and Douglas at new plants in Forth Worth, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
⁴⁹

Finally, when Sorensen’s team was really ready, Ford would embark on the third stage: manufacturing the complete plane from start to finish. Sorensen calculated that he could have the first “knockdown” versions of the B-24 shipped out to Tulsa and Fort Worth, one hundred per month, by May 20, 1942. The first finished Ford bombers would roll down the assembly line that September.

He had no doubt everything would come together as planned. “It can’t be done” was a phrase that didn’t exist in his vocabulary. In fact, old-timers could remember Cast-Iron Charlie firing men on the spot who dared to utter those words in his presence.
⁵⁰

The final word, however, belonged to the old man himself. Ford was impressed by Sorensen’s preparations. But he couldn’t disguise his skepticism. “By the time you get your first planes finished,” he told his old protégé, “the war will be over.”
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Henry Ford was wrong. Thanks to Sorensen, the U.S. Army Air Forces would get more B-24s than any other bomber. But even Ford could not have guessed what an avalanche of problems Sorensen’s vision—his obsession almost—was about to bring down on his company’s head.