Battle of Detroit

(See Cover)

Something is happening that Adolf Hitler does not yet understand--a new re-enactment of the old American miracle of wheels and machinery, but on a new scale. This time it is a miracle of war production, and its miracle-worker is the automobile industry.

Even the American people do not appreciate the miracle, because it is too big for the eye to see in an hour, a day or a month. It is, in fact, too big to be described. It can only be understood by taking a sample.

There is no better sample than Henry Ford. Two years ago he was an earnest pacifist who refused to take an order for plane engines for Britain. Today, like the rest of the industry, he is not only working for war, but for war alone, and working as he never worked before. A generation ago he performed the first miracle of mass production. Today he is only one of many miracle-workers in his industry, but his part in their common job is itself greater than the greatest job he ever did before.

These things are not exaggerations, but the truth about Detroit today is not easy to believe.

Enormous Room. A year ago Willow Run was a lazy little creek west of Detroit, surrounded by woodlands, a few farmhouses, a few country schools. Today Willow Run is the most enormous room in the history of man: more than a half-mile long, nearly a quarter of a mile wide. In this great room errands are run by automobile; through the flash of moving machinery and the dust of construction, no man can see from one end to the other.

The plant contains 25,000 tons of structural steel. By summer, 70,000 men will work in this room; by December, 90,000.

In planning the building, Ford Motor Co.'s drafting room used five miles of blueprint paper a day, seven days a week, for six months.

In this enormous workroom Ford hopes eventually to turn out a four-motored Consolidated bomber every hour. The raw materials will go in at one end; from the other will emerge the 30-ton machines, coughing with life. The bombers will be born from half-mile assembly lines so fast that Ford will not try to store them. The deadly infants will be ranked on a great new airfield, stretching out from the assembly end of the plant, with enough white concrete runways to make a highway 22 miles long. From those runways the newborn bombers will make their test flights, then take off for service.

Detroit has other enormous rooms, and out of them armies will roll and fleets will fly. Endlessly the lines will send tanks, jeeps, machine guns, cannon, air torpedoes, armored cars. Ford's River Rouge plant, where Ford steamships dump coal and iron ore and limestone to be magicked into steel and glass and machinery, has turned its two square miles of self-contained industrial empire to the tools of war.

Chrysler already has three assembly lines of olive-drab tanks moving through its tank arsenal (soon it hopes to ship a trainload of tanks a day). Guns, shells and motors are at last in mass production. General Motors, once biggest of all automakers, is already producing arms of all kinds at the rate of a billion dollars a year. Packard and Studebaker are making airplane engines; Hudson makes anti-aircraft guns; Nash is at work on engines and propellers.

Once Detroit's conversion to war is complete, when the lines are all moving with the precision of timing and economy of motion that Detroit borrowed from the morning stars, they will pour out such a flood of war machines as no man has ever imagined. The onetime auto industry will employ a million men & women, twice as many as it ever did, will make a billion dollars' worth of armaments a month. If Armageddon is to be decided in Detroit, Armageddon is won.

Production alone cannot win the war. Airplanes and tanks are only war's tools; they must be put to work, used audaciously by great commanders and skillful soldiers. The nation is winning the Battle of Detroit. But the war cannot be won in Detroit alone, or even by production alone.

Blueprint for Future. Detroit is not alone. The U.S. could look at the vast Consolidated Aircraft plant, on the curving shore of San Diego Bay in California. There, for the first time in aeronautical history, heavy bombers were put together last week on a continuously moving assembly line.

A bull-tongued horn blasted through the echoing, vaulted reaches of the Consolidated plant. Slowly, laboriously the line began to move. At one end, a new bomber assembly was fed on to the line. At the other, a B-24 rolled off, ready for flight. The new era in aviation had dawned.

As proud of his achievement as if he had just created Man was Consolidated's new board chairman, roundheaded, profane Steelman Tom Girdler. Tom Girdler, who took over Consolidated two weeks after Pearl Harbor, had two great plants at San Diego. The parts plant makes Consolidated's bits & pieces, from engines down to tiny hydraulic pumps. In the assembly plant they grow into planes--the famed B-24 with more than 3,000-mile range, its four-ton bomb load; the long-range, hard-working PBY-5 flying boat; the massive, four-motored PB2Y2, whose range and bomb load are military secrets.

Well might Tom Girdler be proud. Mass-producing bombers is as much more complicated than building autos as the growth of the human body is more complex than the growth of an amoeba. The average car has 15,000 parts. The bomber that rolled off Consolidated's line last week had 101,650 parts, laced together by more than 400,000 rivets.

Tom Girdler had set the first bomber assembly line in motion--no mean feat even for a company rich in aircraft experience. Detroit will draw on his experience. Its feat will be that, having started from scratch a few months ago, it will soon duplicate and reduplicate the deeds of the aircraft industry--if--the Great If--the U.S. maintains a steady flow of materials into the enormous rooms.

Detroit v. the Axis. In Manhattan last week some 360 members of the Society of Automotive Engineers inspected the motor of a Nazi twin-engined Junkers bomber shot down over England. They took it apart, put it together again, fiddled with screw drivers and flashlights--and smiled.

The Nazi motor was a designer's dream: the designers had used complicated parts, scarce materials. But by Detroit's notions of mass production it was a little too tricky to be really good: it was a hard motor to put on an assembly line. In making war machines, the Axis had a head start, but Detroit was confident it had a head start in know-how.

Many of the world's smartest manufacturing brains are concentrated in Detroit; so is much of the world's smartest machinery. Many a machine is no good for making anything but autos; that was why conversion was not the simple, button-pushing job that some people thought it should be. The great body and fender presses, half-embedded in concrete, are useless now; the great halls that held them are being walled off, spiders will spin webs on them until the war is over. The massive, complex, special-purpose machinery which was once Detroit's pride has been ripped out, carted to parking lots; there the machines stand now, coated with grease against the rains of nobody knows how many springs.

Genius in Shirt Sleeves. Detroit has more than machinery, more than the manufacturing brains of Henry Ford's generation. The industry's front line is manned by a little battalion of unknown men in battered felt hats, sitting shirt-sleeved in cubbyhole factory offices, darting out among the machines, spitting tobacco juice, profanity and ideas. These are Detroit's production men, fresh up from the ranks, a trace of grease still under their stubby fingernails. They know machines as only men can who have handled them. They are the men who play by ear, with near-perfect pitch. With dog-eared notebooks, pencil stubs and know-how they work out production problems that no textbook could solve.

Such a man is Bud Goodman, who quit the University of Illinois when his father died, got a job as a metal finisher, moved up so fast that now, at 37, he is manager of the Fisher Body plant at Flint. Thickset, horny-handed Bud Goodman is converting the plant 100% to tanks. He welds them by a new process that saves four-fifths of the machining time, bends them into shape on 480-ton presses, maneuvers them on 30-ton jigs like ducks on a spit. As the new assembly lines spring to life, Bud Goodman trots around them so swiftly he seems always to be jumping out from under his hat; he peers at his machinery like a farmer eyeing his land. He knows his men down to their latest babies, his machines to the last oil-point. When he has office visitors, he puts his coat on. He takes it off as soon as they leave.

Such a man too is Frank Morisette, 55, a fighting bantam who set up Chrysler's gun arsenal, cut the finishing time on anti-aircraft guns from 400 hours to 15 minutes. Morisette's standard approach to all problems is: "Let's go out and look at the goddamn thing." Such is Eddie Hunt, 50, of Chrysler's tank arsenal, who is built like an iron safe and never wore a white shirt until last year. Such is slim Roscoe Smith, the Willow Run manager, a veteran tool & diemaker, who at 50 looks 35.

These production men have the same tactile sensitivity to machinery as a surgeon has for muscle and nerve; they can make the machinery and blueprints come alive as a Toscanini brings notes off paper. They do not come readymade; they have to grow up with machines.

Henry Ford was such a man.

Great-Grand-Daddy. Henry Ford is 78 and a great-grandfather, but he is still lively, curious and productive. His shoulders are stooped by his years, his neat salt-&-pepper suits hang loosely on his spare limbs. But his body is still tough, his bright eyes dart restlessly as the fingers of a machine. The Ford Motor Co. is, as ever, a one-man show.

In the immense 30-bedroom house where he and his wife now live alone, he rises at 6 a.m. Before breakfast he takes a long walk around his estate, sometimes vaulting a stone fence to prove to himself that he can still do it. He drives to the engineering laboratories, prowls around, goes home for breakfast, is back at the plant at 10.

From then on Henry Ford's day is unpredictable. He wanders as the spirit moves him through the great River Rouge plant or greater Willow Run, talking, looking in on experiments, watching the Ford empire hum.

In 1932, when early attempts at casting the V-8 engine were a failure, Ford showed up one day at the foundry with a bundle under his arm, took out a pair of overalls and went to work until the job was done. He still pops up at trouble spots. "You can't solve these things by paper work," he says, like Frank Morisette, like all of them. "You have got to see them."

At 1 p.m. Ford has lunch with his closest assistants at his famed round table ("The Billion-Dollar Table") in a pine-paneled room of the engineering labs. He may discuss a big problem, get a new project under way, or he may only warn his staff that sugar on grapefruit causes arthritis--a theory widely ignored by physicians. Or, gnawing at his frugal lunch of raw carrots, soybean crackers and milk, he may say nothing at all. Whatever his mood, he dominates the meal. Even Son Edsel Ford, president of the company, seldom speaks up without The Boss's bidding.

Model "T." When World War II began, autocratic, headstrong, pacifistic Henry Ford looked like the least helpful of U.S. citizens. He hated war; he hated the New Deal's labor and foreign policies.

Henry Ford was an America Firster; he called Appeaser Neville Chamberlain "one of the greatest men who ever lived;" after war began he hoped that England and the Axis would club each other into a coma. In the summer of 1940 he refused to make Rolls-Royce airplane engines, when he learned that some of them were destined for Britain. (As usual, he had a good mechanic's reason: later, grief and headaches in other plants making English-designed munitions proved what he knew or had guessed--that the British blueprints were informal to the point of helter-skelter, had to be completely worked over, causing costly rejections, delays, waste.) In Canada, Henry Ford was assailed as a "menace to democracy"; a boycott of his cars was threatened. Matter-of-fact old Henry Ford was unmoved. Said he, firmly: "Anyone who would do that is a sugar tit."

But even the most whole-souled mechanic takes some time off, and Henry Ford, the lean Midwesterner with a farmer's flair for opinionating and a mechanic's scorn for words, was always two men. He was a cantankerous, stubborn, cracker-box philosopher who could not bear to be contradicted; and he was a maker, a maker of machines that work.

At the start of World War I, Ford had been the cracker-box philosopher; he was again it. But as soon as the U.S. got into the war, Ford the mechanic got to work: he built tractors and tanks, put up a mammoth plant for Eagle anti-submarine boats. When the Government offered 30-c- apiece for steel helmets, Ford made 3,000,000 of them for 7-c-. When the war ended, he turned back every cent of profit to the Government.

This time Ford did not wait for the declaration of war. Making cars had become routine; all the problems were licked. As an automaker he was an old hand, getting kind of tired of it. Mass-producing tanks and bombers was new and exciting. The gigantic engineering and production problems took him back to his bicycle-shop days, when mass production was just a bright gleam in his eye. His "1,000 airplanes a day" was neither an idle boast nor a positive promise; it was just good American cockiness--the kind it took to make the first million Model Ts.

Henry Ford is a man to whom the vast River Rouge plant, his rubber plantations in Brazil, the new plant to work ores from his Michigan magnesium deposits, are familiar and immediate. "We got a bad start on rubber," he says, "because I didn't go down there myself. . . . Now it is going all right." A visitor once asked him how he managed to keep track of every operation at River Rouge. "I don't think I could," he said, "if I hadn't seen it all built up one thing at a time."

Now Henry Ford had a chance to apply this hands-and-eyes knowledge to the greatest industrial problem of the time. He jumped at the chance.

Model "A." One sure way to make H.F. say "No" is to tell him he ought to do something. The Army & Navy never did. A Navy man simply asked Ford one day if he could take a few sailors into his trade school. Ford asked how many mechanics the Navy needed, promptly spent $1,000,000 of his own money to build a school. Now his school trains 1,200 Navy mechanics at a time.

Ford was always three jumps ahead of old OPM's red-tapeworm. While OPM was conferring and writing interoffice memos, Ford was proving his old theory of one-man control. He had no stockholders; he was more interested in making things than making money; all he had to do, to get a new plant built, was call in Production Boss Charles E. Sorensen and say: "All right, Charlie, let's go ahead."

Ford and Charlie Sorensen started making Pratt & Whitney airplane engines before they even had an order. When the Government finally asked Ford to put up a Pratt & Whitney plant, he figured that OPM had set its sights too low, left one end of the building open for extensions. Without any nod from Washington, he turned an engineer loose on a V12 liquid-cooled engine of his own. He started putting up Willow Run on the sole basis of a relatively small order for sub-assemblies.

"We ought to make the whole plane, and that way there can be no buck-passing if it isn't right," Ford told Sorensen. "Go ahead and start the plant . . . but leave it so we can expand it quickly to handle the whole job. They are going to need a lot more bombers than they think." He had thousands of men at work long before the Government told him to shoot the works.

Model "X." Any lingering America-Firstism in Henry Ford's soul was bombed away at Pearl Harbor. Like any good Midwesterner, Henry Ford hit the roof when the U.S. was attacked. He called in his executives and said (weeks before the new War Production Board ordered auto production stopped): "We might as well quit making cars now." The same week he piled some of his aides into an automobile, made a tour of the whole Dearborn empire. At each building he discussed what was made there, at each building ordered: "Get a defense job going in there quick."

Henry Ford is happier and younger than he was two years ago. He lost his fight against New Deal labor policies; after a strike and a court decision that he had violated the Wagner Act, he signed a contract with the United Automobile Workers last year. But he lost in his own peculiar way: once he had made up his mind, he called in his labor-herder, Harry Bennett, asked what the union wanted. He knew what he wanted. Said Henry Ford: "Why in the hell don't we give it [the union shop and checkoff] to them now and save all that trouble? We've got to get ahead with some work around here."

Twice in one lifetime he lost his fight against war. He lost that in his own peculiar way, too. All Henry Ford's talents, all the empire he has built in his 78 years, all his acres and masonry, locomotives and ships, are dedicated to winning it.

Now he even sees, in World War II, a hope for a better world to come. Once again he can see his old dream of a world federation, with the industry and agriculture of all nations combining to make a better place to live.

"We didn't make any money out of the last war and we don't want to make any money out of this one. If we come out with as much as we went in, we'll be doing all right. . . .

"The more we produce, the quicker it will be over and the sooner we can get back to the job of building up the country. . . .

"Sure the war has a value. We'll learn to do a lot of things better than we were ever able to do them before. . . .

"All these big new defense plants will be used after the war to meet the needs of the people. We never had plant enough to do it before, but now we will have."

On such a day, when the U.S. has "plant enough," the nation will need something else, 100-more men like Henry Ford: individualistic, cocky, lively, curious and productive.

With his farmer's spare frame, his mechanic's hands, his stubborn chin and his restless eyes, his quick opinions, his respect for makers and the things they make, his dual personality and his rebellion against orders, Henry Ford is more like most Americans than most Americans realize. Henry Ford and his empire have converted themselves to war. The whole automobile industry has gone to war. Detroit--and not only its Henry Fords but its Bud Goodmans and Frank Morisettes and Eddie Hunts and Roscoe Smiths--had gone to war. The whole U.S. nation was going to roll up its sleeves and fix Armageddon.

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