Henry and Edgar Kaiser (second and third from left) with FDR at the Vancouver shipyards, September 1942. Clay Bedford stands behind Edgar. UPI photo file

The day of the West is at hand.

—Henry Kaiser

FOR DON NELSON, the steel shortage was an urgent but temporary worry.^* For Kaiser and other industrialists on the West Coast, the steel shortage had been chronic for almost a decade. Steel giants like Bethlehem and Republic and Carnegie-Illinois were eastern or Midwest-based (Carnegie-Illinois was in Duquesne). There simply were no major steel mills west of the Rockies.

Even as he was laying down the first shipways in the marshes of Richmond, Henry Kaiser had decided to change that. On April 21, 1941, just as Lend-Lease was getting under way, he wangled an interview with the president himself and showed him plans for a $150 million steel production complex. He forcefully argued it could draw all the power it needed from the hydroelectric dams Kaiser and Six Companies had already built, so he could produce the kind of steel plate he and others needed for the Liberty ships.¹ Roosevelt liked his enthusiasm and pushed Kaiser on to a panel of government engineers who, in effect, told him he was crazy. He had no definite site; he had no financing; no plans for the plant’s postwar use. A plant in Southern California, they argued, would also be vulnerable to possible Japanese attack or even sabotage. Above all, they cried, Kaiser knew nothing about producing steel.²

Henry Kaiser had never let that stop him before, and it did not stop him now. With his main energies still focused on Richmond and Portland, he continued to make phone calls and meet with Washington lobbyists, to get his dream realized—and to teach a lesson to the executives of Big Steel, who were hostile from the start. His biggest obstacle was still his old nemesis Bill Knudsen, but in mid-February 1942, Knudsen was gone. Facing a 4.2-million-ton steel shortfall just two months into the war, Donald Nelson and the WPB felt they had no choice but to approve.

The final hurdle was Jesse Jones. The crusty old Houston cotton broker didn’t care much for Henry Kaiser, or his business methods. He knew Kaiser was already making, on a fee basis, between $60,000 and $110,000 for every Liberty ship he was building. Jones’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation had already loaned him $28 million for a magnesium plant out in Utah, which was having huge problems getting started.³ Now Kaiser was asking for $100 million to start up a steel plant in Southern California, more than 175 miles from the nearest iron source.

It was unprecedented; it was almost outrageous. But Jones eventually agreed to the loan, provided Kaiser move it fifty miles inland for security reasons (Kaiser wanted something closer to the coast, like Terminal Island) and that he secure the loan with the fees from his shipbuilding. Kaiser said yes—in part, as Jones later wrote, “because if he had not done so, probably 90 percent of [the Liberty ship fees] would have been taken from him in excess profit taxes.”⁴

Still, it was a sweet deal that was finalized on March 19, 1942—two weeks after the internment of upward of 100,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast calmed any remaining fears of possible sabotage. Kaiser’s portion of the capitalization came to just under $100,000. All the rest, almost $111 million in the final tally, would come from the government. There was only one more condition, Donald Nelson said. The new mill would have to have a turbo-blower for the main blast furnace.

Kaiser said at once, “Why, that’s no problem. We’ll build our own.” He and Nelson and the others shook hands, and then Kaiser and his lawyer Chad Calhoun ambled out into the hall. As they headed out of the Social Security Building, Kaiser turned to Calhoun as his characteristic grin faded.

“What’s a turbo-blower?” he asked.

Calhoun couldn’t believe his ears. He assumed Kaiser would know. “Well,” he stammered, “it’s probably a turbine and a blower,”—and left it at that.⁵

Kaiser’s grin was back. “Then couldn’t we build one at Joshua Hendy?”

So he wired his engine wizard Charlie Moore out in Sunnyvale, who wired back: “Regarding turbine blower, can build unit in three to four months.”

That suited Kaiser. That was enough time, he figured, to get the plant built and ready to run—because he was determined to have that plant “blown in” before the end of the year.

The following day he called up his chief engineer George Havas. “George,” Kaiser said, “you’re going to build me a steel mill.”

Havas, who like Kaiser had no experience in the business, asked, “What kind of steel mill?”

“Oh, just a small one,” Kaiser reassured him, then added, “At least at first.”⁶ The only other question Havas had was where to build it. The location they finally chose was three miles west of Fontana, California, deep in the heart of the San Bernardino Valley.

It had three things going for it. The first was it was in the middle of nowhere, where land was cheap and space plentiful: “Think big,” Kaiser liked to tell his men, “don’t allow operations to be cramped.” For a trifling sum, he was able to snap up two thousand acres of hog farms and orange and walnut groves. By the end of April 1942, ground had been broken and Havas’s men were laying out the plant.⁷

The second was that Fontana sat close to the junction of three major railroads. That meant Kaiser could bring his iron ore and coal from Utah and then ship the finished plate up to the shipyards.

Third, labor in Fontana was cheap. People were desperate for a better job than picking oranges. The day the employment office opened, it was swamped with applications. In charge of the entire operation was Tom Price, an old Boulder Dam hand and the third man Kaiser ever hired. Price had been down in Panama, getting ready to launch still another Kaiser project in the Canal Zone, when he got the call from Kaiser. He was on the next flight out and, together with Havas and another rising Kaiser star, Gene Threfethen, ran the entire show.⁸

It was an enormous undertaking—but by now Kaiser people were used to that. Kaiser had to bring in workers from Morris Knudsen to lay down an additional seventy miles of rails to connect him to the main lines. There were no natural water sources, so Kaiser’s men had to dig their own wells and devise a way to recycle every drop of the 160,000 gallons of water they would need to produce one ton of steel. The San Bernardino council was eager to get the plant, but worried about the soot and smoke drifting over their fair valley. So Kaiser had Price install a smokestack-scrubbing device on Fontana’s chimneys, making it the most advanced antipollution technology in the country.⁹

Then Tom Girdler gave Kaiser vital Republic Steel engineering drawings for building the main sections of the plant, and also sent out some of his own people to help out. Hundreds of new technicians had to be brought in, men never seen on a Kaiser site before. There were experts in coke ovens, blast furnaces, open hearths, rolling mills, and conveyor belts, plus engineers to install the turbo-blower used to speed the heating of the blast furnaces to the necessary degrees Fahrenheit.

“Most of the men who were hired from other companies,” Tom Price remembered, “came at the same salary they had been receiving.” So why did they come? For some it was a matter of patriotism. For others it was curiosity, and the desire to be part of a steel mill that they knew would be like no other. “They were inspired by Kaiser,” Price said simply, “and wanted to be part of his dream…. The men believed it, government officials believed it. It was a love child. How could it fail?”¹⁰

When it was done, Fontana had ninety coke ovens handling 1,720 tons of coal a day. In addition, Havas and Price installed a 1,200-ton blast furnace for smelting the raw ore into 438,000 tons of pig iron, which a giant conveyor system then carried to six massive 185-ton open hearths where the real work of making iron into steel was done. There Kaiser’s turbo-blower played its part in getting the Fontana plant producing 472,000 tons of steel plate every year—almost 10 percent of America’s capacity shortfall, and enough to supply shipyards up and down the West Coast.¹¹

The scale of the achievement became clear when weighed against the WPB’s other big steel plant venture, with U.S. Steel, in Geneva, Utah. Its builders had almost a year head start on Kaiser, yet Kaiser finished almost five months ahead of them. Geneva cost the government $220 million. Fontana came in at less than half that.

December 30, 1942, dawned bright and clear as Kaiser and his wife and son Henry Jr., and a dozen dignitaries from Washington and the San Bernardino County Council marched to a raised platform overlooking the vast complex. Almost eight thousand workers and onlookers had gathered, along with Kaiser’s usual brass bands and fireworks.

At precisely 1:15 P.M., Henry Jr. asked his mother to throw the switch that would start the first “blow-in” of the famous turbo-blower of the main blast furnace—which Kaiser had named “Bess,” after his wife.

Then Kaiser spoke. His voice was taut with emotion as he spoke of how brave men had come to California in the 1840s in search of gold, and in the process opened up half a continent. “Today, we take another, a baser metal and process it for the service of mankind.” Then he said:

“The westward movement which began so long ago has not come to an end on the Pacific slope. It is poised now for the next great thrust. The day of the West is at hand.”¹²

His partner Charlie Moore of Joshua Hendy put it slightly differently. “It’s sort of a disease with us guys out here, building things this way and busting records,” he told Fortune magazine. “Nothing can stop this area now. The West is on its way.”¹³

Moore was right. Arming for total war was transforming the region, starting with California. The value of its manufactured goods tripled, to a figure three times the national average, from 1941 to 1945. The personal income of Californians doubled—even as millions of new immigrants poured into the state in what at least one historian has dubbed “the second gold rush.” Much of the funding flowed from defense contracts. In 1940, Washington had spent roughly $1.5 billion in California. In 1945 it was $8.5 billion, almost all defense-related. But for every two dollars from the government, a third dollar—or roughly one-third of the cost of California’s arming America for war—came from private banks and the businesses themselves.¹⁴

Meanwhile, the auto industry and Detroit were far ahead of them.

On February 10, 1942, a crowd of workers and managers had come together at the end of the assembly line at the River Rouge plant. A Ford V-8 came down the line, ready to be driven out of the factory. There was nothing unusual about that; what was unusual—and what had drawn the press and photographers—was that there was no car behind it. It was the last civilian production car at Ford. From now on, said the press, “the same assembly line that made Ford automobiles is now to be used for staff cars for Army officers”—as well as Navy service trucks, bomb service trucks, and, the most famous wartime vehicle of all, the jeep.

There was a little ceremony, even a speech. Then an army of technicians sprang into action. One by one they ripped out the machine tools and their fixtures, clearing the way for the new ones for trucks and military vehicles, which were stacked up in their packing cases outside.¹⁵ The American auto industry, a business bigger than the economies of every country except Germany, Russia, and Great Britain, was moving to full-time war production.

The fact that the auto industry would wind up producing 20 percent of all U.S. munitions in the war was due ultimately to two men. The first was Bill Knudsen. It was he who first called on his friends, rivals, and colleagues to start making parts for airplanes back in October 1940, who had pulled together the Automotive Council for War Production three weeks after Pearl Harbor, and who called together more than eight hundred executives for its first meeting on January 24, 1942, to tell them the time had come to switch to full-time production—a meeting he was never able to attend because his job was no more.

The second was the man WPB’s Don Nelson named to run the full-time conversion at that same meeting. He was Ernest Kanzler, whose success in overseeing the conversion Nelson later dubbed “nothing less than a miracle.”¹⁶

In fact, miracles had little to do with it, or government dictates. Kanzler was a former Ford executive and a lawyer by training, an elegant man with cosmopolitan tastes and a pillar of Detroit’s elite Grosse Pointe society. Kanzler was as much at home at the opera or the art museum as on the factory floor—or examining a car company balance sheet. Kanzler also knew the industry from inside and out, because after leaving Ford he had become head of Universal Credit Corporation, which handled the auto loan business for every major carmaker except GM. In the summer of 1942, no one was in a better position to know how to bring the diverse heads of the industry together for wartime production, win the support of the UAW and labor, and charm the skeptics in Washington than Ernest Kanzler.

He did it by letting the carmakers do it themselves. The Automotive Council for War Production had some two thousand members, but it was the big companies—Ford, GM, Chrsyler, Packard, Studebaker—who counted. Kanzler knew that once they were committed heart and mind to the fight, the subcontractors would follow. That was the secret to conversion, as Knudson had argued all along: the latent power of the subcontractors. Timken, a major axle manufacturer, was already making armor plate for Chrysler and Ford’s tank arsenal, and trying out new innovations in its design. Houdaille Hershey, a parts supplier specializing in shock absorbers, was eliminating costly steps in manufacturing the .30-caliber machine gun—steps that the Army thought necessary but weren’t. Soldiers found the aluminum handle broke easily; Houdaille Hershey found a sturdier substitute, which also saved on aluminum.¹⁷ When Saginaw Steering Gear started making the Army’s .50-caliber machine gun, engineer Bud Doerfner saw that the holes bored in the barrel for ventilation were elliptical. He told the Army that if they were round, he could drill three in a single operation instead of one. The Army tested it, and told him to go ahead. Soon Doerfner had a multi-spindle drill cutting ten at a time instead of three. In March 1942, Saginaw Steering Gear delivered 28,728 machine guns instead of the 2,000 they had first promised.

Bill Knudsen had foreseen it all. “I placed most of the business with big companies for the reason that there was a lot of engineering to be done on practically every job,” he wrote later. “They were the only ones who had that kind of talent.” But the subcontractors and “little business had an enormous part in the program,” once full conversion got going.¹⁸

And conversion did roll as smoothly as Ernest Kanzler’s tuxedo lapels. When civilian production halted at Plymouth’s Lynch Road plant and the old machine tools were pulled out, the new ones were in place by the time the night shift arrived. At Buick, workers gathered to cheer as the last car came down the line. On its windscreen was a sign: “Until Total Victory We Dedicate Ourselves to the Objective ‘When Better War Goods Are Built, Buick Workmen Will Build Them.’ ”

General Motors started up war production only twenty-nine days after ending the civilian line. In the end it would contribute 10 percent of all U.S. war production.¹⁹ The others weren’t far behind.

It was one of the great success stories of World War II. In 1939 the U.S. Army had barely 15,000 vehicles. In the spring of 1941, it was already looking to acquire a quarter million before Pearl Harbor raised everyone’s calculations. Not counting tanks, by the end of 1942 the Army would be the customer for 800,000 vehicles of some 330 different types. By 1945 the number would grow to 3.2 million—one vehicle for every 2.75 Americans in an Army uniform. Meantime the Wehrmacht, the model of modern warfare in 1940, still relied on horse-drawn transport. “When Hitler put his war on wheels,” General Brehon Somervell said at the end of the war, “he ran it straight down our alley.”²⁰

In the end, American automakers would produce 50 percent of all aircraft engines, 35 percent of aircraft propellers, 47 percent of all machine guns, 87 percent of all aerial bombs, 80 percent of tanks and tank parts, one-half the diesel engines for ships, submarines, and other naval craft; not to mention 100 percent of U.S. Army trucks, half-tracks, and other vehicles. They would go on to arm our allies as well, from the 200,000 Studebaker trucks supplied to the Soviet Red Army to the Bren gun carriers Ford built to British army specifications and shipped overseas for every army of the Dominion—13,893 of them.²¹

Kanzler saw to it that all this activity flowed through the coordinated effort of the Automotive Council for War Production—and the other industry associations that brought together the different subcontractors and distributors. At the ACWP’s head was Knudsen’s friend from Packard, Alvan Macauley, and he ran it according to Knudsen’s voluntarist model.²² When a problem or a need came up, a committee was formed. When it was solved, the committee dissolved. This allowed the auto industry to skirt a wave of steel shortages (another hit in 1943) by forming a salvage committee, which pooled data on factory scrap and came up with tons of scrap metal and rubber waiting to be recycled.

There were product committees, machine tool committees, labor committees including labor representatives, methods committees whose members met at each other’s plants to see and discuss new ways of saving time and labor.²³ There were advisory committees to the Army Ordnance Department, the Army Air Forces, and after 1943 the Armed Service Force. Everywhere there was volunteering of information, sharing of materials, pooling of resources and methods. The voluntarist model was so useful that soon aircraft manufacturers on the West Coast copied it, and then on the East Coast; while the British sent an industry research group to study how it achieved such prodigious results.

This was the industrial juggernaut Knudsen and Kanzler had set in motion. And of all the automakers turned munitions makers, Kanzler’s former employer Ford, with its extensive network of thirty-four branch plants (including eighteen service parts distributors) and twenty-nine affiliated industries, would be among the most versatile.

Compared to Chrysler and GM and even Studebaker, it made only a small proportion of tanks and other vehicles produced during the war—fewer than 390,000 out of 2.66 million. But it would be famous for its aircraft engines and tank engines—nearly 27,000, most for the M4 Sherman. It would make aircraft parts, aircraft engine superchargers, aluminum, armor plate, magnesium, gun mounts, M7 antiaircraft gun directors (which required no fewer than 276 separate aluminum or die castings), and machine tools at its $117 million tool and die plant—probably the best in the entire car industry.²⁴

In March 1942 the Army approached Ford about making gliders for its airborne forces (the first American parachute unit was created just eighteen months earlier, in October 1940). Ford found a place to mass-produce in northern Michigan at Iron Mountain, with a sawmill and woodworking plant. The Army gave the go-ahead on March 27 and conversion got started.²⁵

In American landings on Sicily in 1943, Port Moresby in New Guinea, and finally in Normandy on June 6, 1944, in Operation Overlord, clouds of American glider troops led the way, and everywhere Ford-built gliders carried them and their equipment and supplies into battle. In 1942 less than 1 percent of all CG-4As were made by Ford. In 1943 that jumped to 36.6 percent. In 1944 it was 50 percent—and Ford’s methods had cut the cost per unit by more than half, from $25,000 to $10,000.²⁶

Ford also focused on specialized hard-to-make vehicles like British universal carriers, Navy cargo trucks, bomb service trucks, and of course the jeep, where plants at River Rouge, Dallas, and Louisville poured out 277,896 of them. Its plants at Chester, Pennsylvania, close by the Sun Company’s yards, and Richmond, California, close by Kaiser’s, would process and pack nearly everyone’s tanks for shipment across the Atlantic and Pacific.^†

All in all, the Ford Motor Company would produce more war materiel than the entire economy of Mussolini’s Italy.²⁷ Yet from the start, Ford’s wartime reputation boiled down to what one executive was doing at a place southeast of Ypsilanti called Willow Run.

It was a bright clear day in early January 1941 when a plane landed at San Diego Airport. A man with dark straw-blond hair and a square, determined jaw bounded down the stairway. He was Charles Sorensen—“Cast-Iron Charlie,” Henry Ford’s original wizard of mass production. Following close behind him was Dr. George Mead, Bill Knudsen’s aeronautics man.

An elegant man in a three-piece suit walked forward to greet them. Reuben Fleet was one of the great aviation pioneers, founder of Consolidated Aircraft and its top executive for nearly twenty years. The trio briefly shook hands before they were joined by Edsel Ford and his sons Henry II and Benson, and a team of engineers from Ford.

The week before Christmas, Mead and Major Jimmy Doolittle had approached Sorensen and Edsel Ford. Can you help us build these planes? they asked. They showed them plans for a four-engined Army bomber called the B-24, which Consolidated’s San Diego plant was turning out in less-than-stellar numbers. The Army was looking to add twelve hundred planes to the production total. They thought Ford could help.²⁸

Sorensen said he’d have to check things out for himself—as he always did. Now, on January 8, the Ford team had arrived to inspect the Consolidated facilities and make a judgment call.

Fleet made a gesture as if to say, “This way, gentlemen.” He didn’t realize that in less than twenty-four hours Cast-Iron Charlie would turn his world upside down.

Charles Sorensen was the other Danish immigrant who remade Detroit. He was born in Copenhagen not far from Knudsen’s father’s shop, in 1881. He immigrated to the United States years earlier than Knudsen, landing at the same immigrant station at Castle Garden. He also had the same fascination with machines and, growing up in Buffalo, knew Knudsen’s mechanical alma mater, Keim Mills, well. As a boy Charlie Sorensen had even clambered over the Keim junk pile, pulling out discarded parts of bicycles and instinctively learning the principle of how interchangeable parts were laying the foundation for mass production.²⁹

Sorensen was sixteen when he left home for Detroit, where he found work in Henry Ford’s budding plant, starting as a shop floor hand. He was working at Highland Park the day machine tool wizard Walter Flanders explained to Ford how to position their machines on the factory floor in order to get the most out of them, and never forgot what he had learned. The pupil soon turned master. In no time Sorensen was showing Ford how to sequence the machining operations for his Model T’s, and how to stamp rather than cut the sheet metal he needed.³⁰

By the time Knudsen turned up with the rest of the Keim team in 1913, Sorensen was already one of the old boys, and a Henry Ford favorite. Sorensen’s first glimpse of his fellow countryman came when Knudsen emerged from an assembly pit one day, his face smeared with oil and his customary grin.³¹

They were not destined to be friends. Sorensen had been “present at the creation,” and the arrival of Knudsen—equally hardworking, quietly self-assertive, and gifted with production ideas of his own—disturbed the balance of power. Giants do not easily tolerate the presence of other giants, and in his autobiography Sorensen never lost an opportunity to poke fun at the rival Dane, or deprecate his accomplishments.^‡ When Knudsen finally left for GM, Sorensen must have drawn a deep sigh of relief. His relief stopped short in 1927 when Knudsen completed his revolution at Chevrolet, and Ford’s sales leadership fell into peril. Sorensen realized that production of the Model T, which he had spent two decades perfecting, would have to come to an end if Ford was to survive. He took his revenge by not only tearing out all the machine tools to make way for the Model A, but firing every engineer who had been part of creating the Model T, some of whom he had worked with for decades. It was a ruthless purge of the past to make way for the future.³²

Sorensen never cared what others thought. One day someone sent him a postcard from Italy with a picture of Mussolini. It read, “M is to Italy what you are to Ford.” Sorensen shrugged.³³ He wasn’t at Ford to make friends, but to make cars. During his years at Ford, there were rumors of his punching out employees. Sorensen scoffed at the stories, then and later.³⁴ But the fact that the rumors persisted was a warning sign. The old employer who had said Sorensen was a wild man and Knudsen a mild man knew what he was talking about.

He and Bill Knudsen had barely spoken to each other for years when they met at the famous New Center meeting in October 1940. Sorensen had listened to Knudsen’s speech, and looked over the plans Major Doolittle and others laid out, and agreed. Here was a good plan to get the auto industry involved in taking up the slack in warplane production. He had only one condition, he said, his jaw jutting in defiance and his hard blue eyes narrowing. Ford wasn’t just going to make parts and engines for airplanes; it was going to make the entire plane.

Knudsen didn’t think much of this idea. By now he understood the profound difference in the numbers of parts Sorensen was used to working with, versus a four-engined bomber like the B-24. A car demanded 15,000 parts; a B-24 almost half a million, plus 300,000 rivets in five hundred different sizes. The aviation industry had a completely different way of making dies for shaping parts—and airplane makers needed to be ready to change their engineering in order to keep up with a myriad of aeronautical variables, as well as those in combat.

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.³⁶

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.”⁴²

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.⁴⁶

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.”⁵¹

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.

---

* The issue was finally put to rest when Nelson’s assistant and investment banker Ferdinand Eberstadt devised the Controlled Materials Plan, which matched the supplies of critical raw materials like steel, copper, and aluminum directly to orders from the War and Navy departments.

† Supplying the packing material was Dow Chemical Company, which had invented a clear plastic sheeting that sealed every tank, machine gun, and airplane part tight against moisture and dust. It was called Saran, and so Saran Wrap made its debut solving one of World War II’s most difficult logistical problems.

‡ As for Knudsen, forty years later he could barely bring himself to mention Sorensen’s name.