How Detroit Won the War-- Part 2

The media was getting into this turn-around.

The Washington Post reported:  "What may not be generally known is the amazing story of how Detroit is rapidly being transformed from a center of peacetime production into the greatest war production area to be found anywhere on the globe."

Look magazine:  "The scale of Detroit's war boom stuns the imagination."

And, Willow Run took center stage in that production.  The length of its assembly line expanded to over three times the length of the Empire State Building and four times the height of the Eiffel Tower reported the Christian Science Monitor.

A Washington Post report said Willow Run was "the greatest single manufacturing plant the world has ever seen... All 16 major league baseball teams could play simultaneous games before crowds of 30,000 each [inside Willow Run].  And there would be room enough left over for a full-sized football game before an additional 30,000 spectators."

The Wall Street Journal called the bomber plant "the production miracle of the war."

Yet, at the time, the Willow Run plant had not even produced one plane.

I wish Mr. Baime had included the date for this segment of his book, but I guess that is why you need to buy it.  Looks like a really interesting bit of research.  I'm guessing the excerpt comes from sometime in l;ate 1942.

A picture accompanies the article of then-Senator Harry S.Truman and Ford executive Charles Sorensen with a B-24 Liberator at Willow Run, so obviously it did go into production.

--GreGen

How Detroit Won the War-- Part 1

From the June AARP Bulletin Book excerpt by A.J. Baime.

The name of the book is "The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War" by A.J. Baime.  This "describes how the Ford Company shifted from making automobiles to manufacturing airplanes that would win WWII.  Baime portrays the growing pains of Ypsilanti's Willow Run plant, which by the summer of 1944, would produce 400 bombers a month."

There are not enough books on the home front as far as I'm concerned.  And the huge increase in war production was amazing.

"Cast Iron" Charlie Sorensen was Ford Motor Company's "Hercules" of the assembly line and he had news for Edsel Ford, the company's president.  Willow Run was Edsel Ford's,  attempt to build the world's largest airplane factory to turn out the Army Air Corps' biggest, fastest, most destructive bombers at a set goal of one per hour and was approaching completion.

Even bigger news was the war work in Detroit had captured the imagination of the nation, almost overnight.    Even FDR was making speeches about how the war was being fought, but also how it would be won not just by the military, but at home on the assembly lines.

--GreGen