Planes from Detroit

The U. S. public last week got its answer to the big question: When, and on what scale, was the automobile industry going to turn its mass-production genius into the job of building airplanes for national defense? Fortnight ago, Ford and Chrysler announced that they would help with the business of building bombers. Last week the rest of the answer came from G. M.'s President Charles Erwin Wilson (successor to Big Bill Knudsen). General Motors was going into the bomber business, too. From the three, the U. S. should get its bombers at the rate of 5,000 a year, by March 1942.

In numbers as well as in product the planned output of the Big Three was a long way from the plan of C. I. O.'s Walter Reuther for putting Detroit to work (TIME, Dec. 30). Mr. Reuther had made a good but obvious point when he said that the automotive industry could do a big job of airplane building. But his further assertion that the industry, given a six months' start, could produce 500 pursuit planes a day had long since been dismissed as fantastic. For, even if that rate could be attained, nobody would know what to do with such a glut, 150,000 fighters a year.

Last week earnest Mr. Reuther announced that his 500-a-day figure was only his yardstick of Detroit's potential capacity, that the automotive industry could as well make an imposing (but lesser) number of two-and four-motored bombers.

This was where the Big Three came in. Their plan will not turn out complete planes in Detroit. General Motors, Chrysler and Ford will build airplane sub-assemblies, ship them to four midwest and southwest assembly plants, there to be put together by aircraft mechanics under the supervision of airplane manufacturers. Detroit has already prepared to build engines to fly bombers. Ford is building Pratt & Whitney engines, Buick will build a plant (near Chicago) to do the same. Studebaker will build Wrights. During the past three weeks, while the Big Three were preparing to produce airplane parts, order lists have been heavy with contracts for aircraft accessories, wing panels and other plane parts to automotive suppliers--Murry Corp. of America, Briggs Manufacturing Co., Hayes Manufacturing Corp.

General Motors' choice of an airplane to build was the Army's speedy 6-25, a slim, two-engined bomber made by big North American Aviation (in which G. M. owns a 29% stock interest). G. M.'s bits and pieces will be shipped to a new plant (owned by the Government, operated by North American), there assembled, tested, flown away for service.

Ford and Chrysler also have made their choice. In San Diego, Edsel Ford and his crack Production Chief Charles E. Sorensen spent a couple of days looking over a Consolidated (B24) four-motored bomber, then went north to Santa Monica to talk to Planemaker Donald Wills Douglas. Result of many conferences was Ford's announcement that it would build 6-245 for assembly in two plants. Consolidated will operate a plant at Fort Worth, and Don Douglas will see that his competitors' flying fortress is well made, properly tested, in a plant at Tulsa. Chrysler's pick was Glenn Martin's new 6-26, a two-engined medium bomber (TIME, Jan. 6) to be assembled by Martin men in a new plant at Omaha.

Meanwhile from Washington Big Bill Knudsen added a word. The four assembly plants, he told newsmen, will all be finished by winter. By early 1942 the Defense Commission expects a monthly production from them of 300 medium, 125 heavy bombers. Bill Knudsen said he had not yet given up hope of 33,000 planes by July 1942 (19,000 for the U. S., 14,000 for Britain) although "we were slow getting under way." The biggest part of aircraft's tooling up will be finished by April or May. said he, and in the long run the U. S. can make more warplanes "than any other country in the world can make--and better."

Implicit in his statement (and in the off-the-record conversations of aircraft manufacturers) was the considered expectation that by spring the planes would be pouring off U. S. production lines. But many an anxious U. S. citizen looked at performance instead of expectation, and what he saw was not good. In December the aircraft engine industry turned out 2,400 military engines, but it was still on the edge of quantity production of the high-output (2,000 h.p. and up) engines needed for such Air Corps bombers as Martin's B26. And plane production for the month was only 799 (of which 40% were trainers).

Big Bill Knudsen, working hard and conscientiously at a tough job, might have excellent grounds for hoping to set a production total of 33,000 by mid-1942. But since the U. S. had loafed into its armament program, it had learned a lot. About production it had learned what the experts knew all along: that expansion is a slow, complicated business. It had learned that the war may be decided by the German push in the spring. It had seen in black & white the fateful figures: should Britain be defeated the Axis will outnumber the U. S. on the sea and in the air. And mid-1942 seemed somehow further away than it was six months ago.

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