Freedom's Forge (36 page)

B-24s in assembly line at Willow Run.
From the Henry Ford Collection (P.833.77362.4/THF91632)

IN MARCH 1941
, Willow Run was a sleepy creek west of Detroit, surrounded by woods and farmland. Early on the morning of the twenty-eighth, its rustic tranquility was broken by the sound of bulldozers.

Construction workers began cutting down and uprooting trees and filling and leveling the land. In little more than a month, it would be transformed into the site of the biggest factory on earth. In 1939, Henry Ford had established a summer camp at Willow Run for inner-city youth. Now as he inspected the site and saw the huge piles of oak, maple, and elm logs stacking up from the land clearing, he said, “Let’s build a sawmill and saw up the timber right here.” The lumber the Ford sawmill generated would almost all go into housing for the workers who would soon be flocking to work at the Willow Run plant—some 50,000, it was estimated—once ground was broken on April 18.
¹

In the end, Sorensen never got his mile-long factory. Kahn’s final design, however, did incorporate a mile-long assembly line housed in a giant L-shaped steel reinforced plant 3,200 feet long and 1,279 feet across at its widest point. Total factory area came to 3.5 million square feet covering 80 acres. (Once complete bombers were being built, it would grow to 4.7 million square feet.) Another 850 acres were set aside for a landing field with seven concrete fields where (it was hoped) in a little less than sixteen months Ford-built B-24s would be taking off around the clock, one every hour.
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Old Ford hand Harry Hanson had the staggering task of laying out the machinery and assembly stations in this vast space—“the most enormous room,”
Time
magazine put it, “in the history of man.” Technicians flew out from Detroit to San Diego seventy at a time, to learn all they could about the tools and dies and the sequence of operations and engineering skills needed to produce a fleet of bombers, while others chased down the aluminum, glass, steel, and bricks for the factory as well as the materials for making the planes themselves.
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Sorensen was learning this was a more complicated process than even he had imagined. The first thing he needed, he told Consolidated, was the blueprints for the plane. Consolidated had to inform him there weren’t any—certainly not any complete set. Consolidated engineers largely made them up as they went along, modifying here and incorporating new elements and changes there, as field tests and new Army specifications came along.

“All right,” Sorensen said, “we’ll send out enough engineers and draftsmen to make a complete set.”
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An entirely new Ford team took two freight car loads of drawings and plans from San Diego and redid the blueprints for everything, down to the tricycle landing gear (which the Ford people later completely redesigned). As for Consolidated, it began making changes of its own, including abandoning the old outdoor assembly process. Sorensen’s man on the spot, Roscoe Smith, wrote, “There is considerable comment in circulation to the effect that Ford has gotten them off their fanny.”
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When Smith flew back from San Diego to Detroit in late July, with his two hundred technicians and engineers in tow, he found at Willow Run the steel outlines of a factory, with bricklayers piling up the bricks—4.3 million of them—to build the walls. The last concrete floors were being poured. The site for the airport, which when Smith had left had been a sea of mud, was dry and level, with an elaborate sewer system. A special spur of the New York Central Railroad had been opened, for delivery of materials. A couple of weeks later, the first machine tools arrived.
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On August 29 the U.S. Army Air Forces command approved the final changes Ford proposed to make on the bomber design. September 7 saw Roscoe Smith, whom Sorensen appointed to head the plant, bringing in his first workers to work the first punch presses. They were still a long way from making planes, but Smith was ready to start training his labor force. On November 15 the first limited production of plane parts began.
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Charlie Sorensen gazed out on his creation with impatience, but also satisfaction. Much had been accomplished. Things were on schedule—a schedule unaffected by the events at Pearl Harbor. By the end of December, Willow Run still didn’t look like the industrial wonder he had planned. No part of the factory was done; the airfield was still a bare if vast empty plain. Most of his machine tools, including the huge Ingersoll mill he had ordered for drilling and milling the crucial wing sections, performing forty-two separate operations in thirty-five minutes, still hadn’t arrived.
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As for his workforce, they existed largely in his imagination.

Sorensen estimated he would need 60,000 workers once Willow
Run was up and running—although others thought the number might go as high as 100,000. No one, however, had a clear idea of where they would come from. Ypsilanti, a small, sleepy college town, couldn’t provide anywhere near that number—and the whole idea of moving the plant outside Detroit was to avoid tapping into the already overstretched labor market in that city. No one had called the War Manpower Commission, which kept track of such things, to see if there were better labor pools closer to Ford satellite plants like Houston or Cleveland—one time when advice from Washington would have been helpful. Cast-Iron Charlie’s attitude was, build the plant, and they will come.
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They did, but very slowly. Getting full production started was going to require 45,000 workers at a minimum. By April 7, 1942, there were only 9,000.
¹⁰
At the end of May, that had inched up to 15,000, including 1,800 women. Most had no place to live and were camped out in trailers and tents. Just training these newcomers to the laws of the assembly line took time and resources away from finishing the plant—and there were other interested visitors waiting in the wings. Walter Reuther of UAW and then CIO’s Philip Murray came by for a chat. Murray asked how many workers Sorensen would finally have. Sorensen said he estimated 60,000. Murray’s eyes lit up, thinking no doubt of all the new union members, and new union dues.

“Of course,” Murray said casually, “we will take advantage of all our prerogatives,” meaning for enforcing union maintenance. Sorensen watched him, sensing trouble ahead. He was right.
¹¹

Eventually the only place Sorensen was going to get his workers was from Detroit. But the roads to Ypsilanti were lousy and dirt paved: No one was going to be able to drive out unless something was done. So more construction time had to be diverted to building a multilane modern highway complete with concrete bridges and median strips.
^12
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Then there was the confusion over phasing in the plant layout. Sorensen’s machines began to arrive, some 16,000 tools and 7,000 jigs. The Ingersoll milling machine for the central wing sections was meant to reduce the work done by thirty men at Consolidated to three, and
the man-hours spent riveting from fifteen hundred to twenty-six. The problem was where to put it. The walls and roof were still not done. Installing and wiring up all the new tools didn’t just require more workers, it meant more managers, as well—and Sorensen was short on both.

He heard that one of his men, engine tooling expert Walter Wagner, had been offered the post of manager of the Ford plant in Houston, at three times his current salary. Sorensen called him over to the unfinished engine building and grabbed him by the lapel.

“Listen,” he barked. “You belong to us. I’m going to take you over to the bomber plant and you’re going to be a superintendent.”

Wagner must have wondered if Sorensen was going to hit him. “But, Mr. Sorensen,” he complained, “I don’t know a thing about airplanes.”

Sorensen responded, “Who the hell does over there?”
¹³

It was a cry of frustration, as the unfinished walls of Willow Run began to close in. He made Wagner the assistant to Logan Miller, one of Mead Bricker’s staff. Wagner was shocked the first time he entered the plant. It looked to him like an abandoned cave with workers and machines strewn about and huge gaps in the roof. How the place was supposed to make anything, let alone four-engined bombers, seemed anyone’s guess.
¹⁴

Finally Henry Ford turned to an old friend to help out. Charles Lindbergh had been one of the pillars of his America First Committee, and longtime advisor on matters aviational. In April he was asked to come to Willow Run as a consultant and help to pull things together from an aeronautical point of view. The plant would soon be scheduled to turn out its first knockdown B-24s—a goal that seemed nowhere in sight.

Lindbergh drove out to Willow Run on April 7, 1942. Starting at the unloading platforms where New Central’s freight cars would pull into the building, he walked through all the various departments. The sheer size of the place was stupendous. It seemed to him “a sort of Grand Canyon of the mechanized world,” with machine tools going full blast making parts in one corner while contractors were still erecting steel walls in another. Most of the machinery was not yet installed, and the concrete was still being poured for the final assembly floor. Yet Lindbergh
felt certain the first bombers would be coming out even before construction was done (handmade Consolidated versions, not the full mass-produced ones). “Since this has been done to a large extent on theory,” he added in his private diary, “we must expect many unforeseen problems.”
¹⁵

He was less impressed by the plane itself. He did an hour test flight with one of the B-24Cs Consolidated had sent out and “found the controls to be the stiffest and heaviest I have ever handled.” He much preferred flying the B-17, and thought crews would, too. “I would certainly hate to be in a bomber of this type” if a couple of Messerschmitts caught up with it—which they would soon be doing, once the Willow Run B-24s made their way out to Europe.
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As for Charlie Sorensen, Lindbergh found him “a man of exceptionally strong character but with a number of weaknesses that often accompany strong character and obvious success.” One was vanity. Another was a belief in his own ideas no matter how ill conceived, and a corresponding disbelief in what others, no matter how experienced, might say about it.

One of Sorensen’s new obsessions, for example, was the idea of building a cargo plane with a one-thousand-foot wingspan. Air Force officials were appalled, and said so. Undeterred, Sorensen unveiled his plans to Lindbergh on the phone. Equally stunned, Lindbergh suggested starting with a five-hundred-foot wing instead. “You fellas are always blocking me, blocking me,” Sorensen burst out, and hung up.
¹⁷

Lindbergh also noted Sorensen’s bullying ways. As they walked together through the plant, Lindbergh watched workers’ eyes drop to their work, avoiding meeting Sorensen’s terrifying stare. “No man wishes to cross him,” he remarked sadly, “and no man can cross him and hold his job.” It was no way to get at the truth of potential problems, or of how to correct them. The famed aviator summed it up this way: “His heart is so filled with the love of the machine that it has somewhat crowded out his love of the men who must run it.”
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Still, Lindbergh could not deny the Ford man’s ability: “He is certainly one of the men who has built this nation into what it is today.” He also believed Sorensen’s belief in Willow Run was correct. Once production was fully under way, “the output will be tremendous.”
¹⁹

When that would come about was, of course, the crucial question. That May the Ford team had to admit to Lindbergh they were at least a month behind schedule. Sorensen and Harry Bennett were at each other’s throats, and Roscoe Smith found himself caught in the middle.

Bennett had his own ideas about where machines and men should be placed to speed things up, and began ordering certain equipment to be installed, which Smith ordered removed. There was an unholy row, and both Sorensen and Bennett stormed into Smith’s office. Voices were raised, chairs were pushed back.

Suddenly Bennett lunged at Sorensen, who backed away, fists raised. Smith tried to step between the two men, and caught Bennett’s punch on the jaw, sending him to the floor. When Smith tried to get up, Bennett knocked him down again.

Sorensen watched, then simply said, “Harry, I’m surprised at you,” and walked out. Bennett called the old man to tell him his version of what happened. Henry Ford said, “Well, Harry, I think you hit the wrong fellow.” When the story of the fistfight whirled around the Ford offices, everyone knew whom he meant.
²⁰

Roscoe Smith never set foot in Willow Run again.

Mead Bricker now took over the plant. No one envied him. A new battle developed, over tools and dies. The aircraft industry all made their molds, or dies, for parts from rubber and various soft metal alloys. Sorensen and the Ford people scoffed at this. It made exact measurements extremely difficult, especially since the dies were used over and over and lost their original firmness. Ford was going to use steel for their dies. After all, these would be mass-producing thousands of parts, and the expense involved, Sorensen’s team felt, would be more than worth it.