Freedom's Forge (39 page)

The company got its first military contract on September 23, 1939, making mule-pack howitzers for the Army, and pushed on from there. In the first year of the war, GE spent $78 million of its own money expanding its facilities for military production; the federal government threw in another $120 million. GE would go on to make propulsion plants for warships, turbo-superchargers for airplanes, searchlights and military radios, radar sets and naval gun directors, and motors for operating the ramps of LSTs and Higgins boats. GE also came up with three hundred new types of electric lamps and manufactured 400,000 electrically heated flying suits, as well as designing a new torpedo for the Navy. It also provided the turbines for 10 of the Navy’s carriers, 37 of its 43 cruisers, and 200 of its 364 destroyers. It even filled a contract for the Army for five thousand bazookas in thirty days, even though GE engineer Jim Power had to design the weapon himself in a marathon twenty-four-hour session, while four hundred workers labored around the clock to meet the deadline.
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Another major player was Knudsen’s own company, General Motors. The biggest automaker company in the world had been slow getting into war production. As late as May 1941, chairman Alfred Sloan scoffed at the idea that war was coming—and Sloan insisted on keeping GM’s overseas operations in Germany and Japan going far longer than even his close friends thought politically expedient.
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Yet when war came, GM shot from an almost standing start to converting almost 90 percent of its forty-one operating divisions to munitions production as war product sales shot from $406 million in 1941 to $3.5 billion in 1943. The automaking giant adopted a new slogan,
“Victory Is Our Business,” and business turned out to be pretty good. It saw net sales of $13.4 billion, and a net profit of $673 million. These were slender numbers compared to peacetime, but still enough to make GM the emperor of wartime industry—making 10 percent of everything America produced to fight the Second World War.
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In 1943, GM was also building trucks and tanks for the Army, as well as Grumman fighter and torpedo planes for the Navy. The GM engineers at Eastern Aircraft learned from Ford’s mistakes at Willow Run. By working closely with Grumman and by concentrating on subassemblies instead of entire planes, they produced 7,546 Avengers and 5,920 Wildcats before war’s end. Another 200 GM-built Wildcats wound up flying with the Royal Navy.
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It was also General Motors who discovered that eight Liberty ships could carry the same number of two-and-a-half-ton trucks disassembled as one hundred could carry fully assembled. All you needed was a place to do the assembling: A few portable cranes, battery chargers, a couple of portable Quonset huts or even tents, a poured concrete floor, and a tractor and trailer or two worked fine. And with 40,000 employees, GM’s Overseas Operations Division was perfectly poised to deliver and assemble whatever American forces needed, almost on the front line.

The first two temporary plants supported U.S. Army operations in Tunisia in 1942. Two more were set up in Heliopolis in Egypt for the Eighth Army. One was finally transferred to the southern terminus of the Burma Road. The other wound up repairing broken-down trucks in the jungle at Rangoon during the final push for the liberation of Burma.
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General Motors’ most amazing war-front plant, however, took shape in Iran. Liberty ships landed parts for the plant to supply Russian forces at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. A one-track railroad then moved the parts to the factory site at Andimeshk. The first GM employees reached Andimeshk in March 1942, to find it a hellhole with typhus, dysentery, sand-fly fever, and a running temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

The first sixty men began assembling trucks out in the open, while the others worked to build a makeshift factory. Roving jackals raided
the camp stores and kitchens at night. But by day the Andimeshk plant was soon turning out 2,500 military vehicles a month of all makes and types, with tool-working shops and a special oxygen-manufacturing unit for high-speed welding. For labor GM trained five thousand Iranians in the mass-production methods of Detroit, so that they could put together a complete truck in less than thirty minutes.

Once the trucks were tested and inspected, the General Motors men passed the keys to Russian drivers who took them over 800 miles of treacherous mountain roads to Tabriz and then across the border into the Soviet Union—each one heavily laden with Lend-Lease supplies. In July 1942 a second factory opened 185 miles south of Andimeshk at Khorramshahr.

It was not until June 30, 1943, that the Army finally took over the operation. By then the ultimate capitalist corporation, General Motors had delivered 20,380 trucks to the Red Army.
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There was, however, another, less epic side to the nation’s war production machine. Bill Knudsen caught a glimpse of it in his Social Security Building office when a letter arrived from a retired railway worker in Reading, Pennsylvania.

This gentleman had an idea. He had figured out a way to recycle discarded boxcar wheels and suspensions, to convert them to wartime use. He already had the machine tools he needed, he said, in a warehouse near his home. There was no call for new steel or other priority materials. The wheels were deemed scrap. All he needed was a contract from the Army to get started.

Knudsen passed the letter on, first to Don Nelson at the Materials and Defense Contracts Division, then to the Army. The retired railway worker got his contract. In no time he had six men working for him, as they reground and refinished old boxcar wheels and got them ready for a new life with the United States Army.
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At nearly eighty, the man from Reading was the oldest defense contractor in World War II. But his wasn’t the smallest business. That honor belonged to Clyde Walling of Cleveland, Ohio. Mr. Walling was president
of a tool company that operated out of his two-car garage while he parked his car in the driveway to make room. By May 1941 he had an employee force of exactly three men.
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Subcontractors like Walling were the lifeblood of the American free enterprise system, as Bill Knudsen well knew. General Motors alone employed nearly 20,000 of them. Knudsen had aimed to make them the lifeblood of defense contracting, as well. They ranged in size from Clyde Walling’s garage to major companies like Timken, which was also based in Cleveland but had branches in Detroit and other cities, and made everything from machine tools to axles, with a fair number of metal and steel products in between.

Turning the productive power of a Timken loose had been Knudsen’s plan all along. For all the harping about how huge corporations snapped up the biggest contracts and made their fortunes during the war, it was the medium- to small-sized businesses that did much of the actual work—and made the arsenal of democracy work and grow.

Ma and Pa Harrington’s “defense plant,” for example, was a white clapboard farmhouse on a lonely crossroads near Rockford, Illinois. There they made machine tools for turning artillery shells and tank turrets, one thousand dollars a month’s worth right in their living room, while the rest of the house doubled and tripled as home office, sales branch, and factory. Their twin sons worked with them. They had started the business in the middle of the Depression, by borrowing some money to build a machine shop. When Richard and Russell Harrington learned that their main tool was going to cost more than four thousand dollars, they made their own out of a junked lathe, an old washing machine motor, and an oil pump salvaged from a 1926 Chevrolet. Their mother’s old washtub caught the oil that leaked from the bottom of the homemade tool.

When war came, the Harrington brothers pressed their father and mother into helping. Ma Harrington would run the lathes making parts for tank turrets and gun mounts before washing hands to make dinner. Pa Harrington, age sixty-eight, worked the grinder and would comment to visitors, “I have more fun than a kid in this place.” The first visitors were inspectors from the Harringtons’ various prime contractors,
who simply could not believe parts of this quality were being turned out in the quaint house with its gambrel roof, dormer windows, and flower boxes under every windowsill.

Soon Harrington brothers had other visitors, like the War Production Board’s local director and a reporter from
Time
magazine. “I don’t think they knew what they were getting into when they started,” the WPB man told the reporter, “but they had the nerve to make a success of it.”
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That might have been the motto of every American business, large and small, in World War II. There was Frigidaire, enlisted to manufacture .30-caliber machine guns, and Rock-Ola, the Chicago jukebox maker that was drawn into a contract to make M1 carbines alongside Underwood the typewriter company, National Postal Meter, Quality Hardware, and IBM. On the upper end of the scale, there was Ex-Cello of Detroit, which made thread-grinding machines for turning the millions of screws for military hardware from airplanes to trucks and towed artillery; Okonite of New Jersey, which insulated thousands of miles of electrical wiring; and Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron and Chicgo B&I, which built hundreds of Land Ship Tanks at yards they created in Evansville, Indiana, the so-called prairie shipyards where ex-farmhands built LSTs to float down to the Mississippi and New Orleans for service overseas.
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At the lower end, there was Frank Ix’s mill, in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was making parachute cloth for every airborne division going into action from Burma to D-day; and R.M.R. of Madison, Wisconsin, which made batteries for walkie-talkie sets and, when the Army decided to raise the order from 100,000 to 400,000 cells a day, organized a committee to ring doorbells and recruit housewives and office clerks to meet the order. By the spring of 1945, R.M.R. had four thousand part-time employees making half a million cells a day.
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In between was another Wisconsin firm, Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company. It made small cargo vessels for the carrying trade on the Great Lakes when in mid-1942 Electric Boat of Groton came to them with a proposition. Let us use your yards and facilities and laborers, they said, and our engineers, foremen, and production managers will train them to make submarines. The Manitowoc men were startled but game
to try. Before two years were out, twenty-eight Navy submarines would be launched from Manitowoc. They were powered by diesel engines being built for the Navy at a brand-new plant in Beloit, Wisconsin, by the weighing-scales company Fairbanks, Morse. The Manitowoc engineers also built huge pontoon docks to carry the finished subs through a series of shallow inland waterways, then down the Mississippi River to where the Navy took over in New Orleans. Halfway down they met Missouri Valley’s LSTs going the same way.
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Bill Knudsen got to know many of these companies on his travels for Army production. When he wrote later that in those years he “saw America at its best,” he meant precisely those companies with a few hundred to a couple of thousand employees who made the vital subassemblies, processed the raw materials, designed and made the tools and dies without which a Chrysler Tank Arsenal or Douglas Aircraft plant would have had to shut down. A myriad of others supplied the Kaiser shipyards, and the yards where battleships and submarines took shape in Chester, Pennsylvania; Camden, New Jersey; and Newport News, Virginia. They carried the spirit of free enterprise like a revitalizing force, with the power to meet the needs of total war without losing their identity or creativity or power of self-renewal.
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Lieutenant General Knudsen visited Eaton Manufacturing of Cleveland on his very first inspection trip, in February 1942. The company was filling orders for 8×8 axles for GM (1,000 axles a month), two-speed axles for Ford, Canada, and Chrysler, Canada (7,500 a month), 6×6 rear axles for Timken (1,200 a month), as well as axles for two manufacturers of the 40mm Bofors gun, Firestone and Koppers. Eaton and Timken were normally fierce rivals. Now the subcontracting web of defense work made them partners, and pooled their talents to get the Army on the move.
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In Elyria, Ohio, Knudsen visited General Industries, a company with twelve hundred employees, of whom only 20 percent were engaged in wartime work assembling M48 artillery fuses (this was in early 1942). With present and new orders, that was expected to jump to 50 percent—while the major parts for the fuses were themselves subcontracted. The rest of the company’s work was on miscellaneous plastic products. Knudsen made a note that Army Ordnance had just approved
three plastic parts to replace metal ones for a trench mortar fuse. Why not, he suggested, have those parts made here?
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The one thing Knudsen and the Army could
not
do, of course, was order General Industries or any other company to make the things they needed. The lines of Washington’s control over the economy had been carefully drawn. It intervened to affect the
consumption
of civilian goods, some of which were rationed, such as meat and gasoline and coffee, and others made according to their place in the system of priorities. It also regulated wages and, to a more limited degree, prices.

Production, however, remained an entirely voluntary process. The War Production Board could and did order companies
not
to produce things: new cars, for instance, and refrigerators and other heavy durable goods. It never told anyone
what
to make. That was left to the imagination of American business.

This was how Bill Knudsen had designed things from the start, and it remained the pivot point of the entire wartime system. Everything made for the war effort was made by those who saw some advantage for themselves in doing so, and therefore they brought all their skills and tools and knowledge to bear on the task—both to help the country and to make some money. This drove the New Dealers crazy, but it was what Adam Smith had recognized a century and a half before as the cornerstone of capitalism, when he wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” The same was true when it came to making planes and ships and artillery shells in record numbers.