Because of Ford, the B-24 is still the most mass-produced American military aircraft of all time. The company turned out a total of 8,685 B-24s. The Washington Post called Willow Run “the greatest single manufacturing plant the world had ever seen,” while The Wall Street Journal called it “the production miracle of the war.”īy 1945, Ford had succeeded in building Liberators at a rate of one per hour. Its goal was to apply auto-making mass-production principles to 300-plus mph, 56,000-pound (when fully loaded) bombers. Ford had never built a four-engine bomber, and aviation experts insisted it could not be done.Ĭonstruction on the Willow Run Bomber Plant began that spring and it soon became the largest factory under one roof in the world. In the spring of 1941, months before Pearl Harbor but well after the war had begun in Europe, Edsel Ford (Henry Ford’s only son) and Charlie Sorensen, the company’s foremost production guru, began mobilizing the most ambitious industrial project in history up to that time: a factory that could turn out the biggest, most destructive bomber in the American arsenal, the B-24 Liberator, at a rate of one per hour. By 1945, Ford was churning out B-24 Liberators at the rate of one per hour. Production line at the Ford Willow Run bomber plant. READ MORE: These World War II Propaganda Posters Rallied the Homefront Ford's Willow Run plant: B-24 bombers armed services into the greatest military machine in history.” As Arthur Herman wrote in his book Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by the war’s end, Knudsen had gone from the president of GM to “the man who had built the U.S. Knudsen went on to become a lieutenant general in the Army, the first and only civilian American to receive this honor, and those Detroit auto men became heroes in the battle of the assembly lines. “The first half of 1941 is crucial,” Knudsen told a gathering of the most powerful Motor City executives. Soon after, at the New York Auto Show, Knudsen gave a keynote speech that lit the flame of industrial Detroit. So Knudsen gave up one of the most well compensated jobs in the nation to take on a government position at a salary of $1. William Knudsen was president of General Motors-the largest corporation in history-in 1940 when President Franklin Roosevelt charged him with heading up all military production in the U.S. Knudsen traded his high-paying auto-executive job for a $1 government salary to help lead Detroit's war-production effort. Roosevelt at the White House for the first meeting about the new National Defense Advisory Commission. William Knudsen, president of General Motors, meeting with President Franklin D. William Knudsen: 'Gentlemen, we must outbuild Hitler'
#Tanks the crusades full#
WATCH: Full Episodes of The Cars That Built the World online now. GALLERY: The Pictures that Defined World War II Here’s a look back at how Detroit became the biggest war boomtown of them all.
There were amphibious trucks, tanks, four-wheel-drive troop transporters, flame-throwing armored cars, jeeps, fighter planes, bombers… No entity did more to produce that machinery than the American automobile industry, which at the time of World War II, had a larger economy than almost every foreign nation on earth. The D-Day invasion, for example, utilized some 50,000 vehicles of all types, well over 5,000 ships and more than twice that number of airplanes. World War II was, in large part, a contest between the Allies and Axis powers to dream up ingenious war machines and mass produce them with unparalleled speed. But the story of victory during Operation Overlord, and the broader war, is also one of industrialism. War is about valor, heroism and sacrifice. “There was no sight in the war that so impressed me with the industrial might of America as the wreckage on the landing beaches,” he recalled in his memoirs. It looked like a junk yard of dead machinery-yet also, proof that the war was being won by the soldiers of the American workforce, on assembly lines thousands of miles away. Shortly after the landings, Ike toured the beaches, which were littered with broken, bullet-pierced vehicles. Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, would never forget the moment his boots hit the sand during Operation Overlord-the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944.
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