Thinking Small (27 page)

Meanwhile, Hitler’s armies were sweeping through Europe as France and Britain tried to fend them off. The German tanks known as Panzers swarmed like ants. London was hammered with bombs. One by one, countries began to fall to the Nazi army. Yugoslavia surrendered. Greece surrendered. Norway surrendered. And once Mussolini joined his troops with Hitler’s, France was forced to surrender to Germany too. Now Britain found itself the last European bastion for democracy. In retrospect, it looks unavoidable that the United States would enter: How could they let a totalitarian regime conquer all of Europe? But even with the defeat of France, Americans still hoped they would not have to become entangled in a world war again. In 1939, Roosevelt had assured the country that the United States would remain neutral, but he’d also said “Even a neutral
⁶
[person] cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.” Now it was a year later and Europe was weighing much heavier on the mind of his administration, and he asked the people to help, not by sending their sons to fight, but by sending money and supplies instead: “Tonight over the once peaceful roads
⁷
of Belgium and France millions are … running from their homes to escape bombs and shells and fire,” Roosevelt told the country in the spring of 1940; “They stumble on, knowing not where the end of the road will be … each one of you that is listening to me tonight has a way of helping them. The American Red Cross, that represents each of us, is rushing food and clothing and medical supplies to these destitute civilian millions. Please, I beg you, please give according to your means … give as generously as you can. I ask this in the name of our common humanity.”

Now the whole world was debating the importance of democracy and the new threat posed by Hitler. One of Bill Bernbach’s favorite writers was the British philosopher Bertrand Russell,
⁸
a prominent intellectual in both the United States and Britain at the time. Russell had been an outspoken pacifist during
the First World War. For his views, Russell had been thrown in jail and fired from his job, but he stood strong by his beliefs. Now, twenty years later, Russell was not afraid to change his mind, knowing that what was right yesterday might not always be right today. As the Second World War hit, he urged the United States to intervene, saying that Adolf Hitler had shifted the balance. Sometimes war was the lesser of two evils, he said; if Hitler were allowed to conquer Europe, it would forever damage democracy everywhere. But it wasn’t a matter of rage; it was a matter of action. “It is a waste of time to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is a waste of time to be angry at a car that won’t go,” Russell wrote. It was necessary that words mean something, he said; strong action must back them up.

That strong action did eventually arrive, but not as anyone had expected. It was December 7, 1941. The Weintraub advertising offices where Bill Bernbach would soon work were as sober as any other office in New York City on that cold Monday when people returned to work with the knowledge that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese. Suddenly the United States had been jolted out of its isolationism. They had not gone to the war, but the war had come to their doorstep. “We are now in this war,”
⁹
Roosevelt told the country that Monday, “We are all in it—all the way.”

Sometimes public opinion really does change in a day. All the squabbles and competition and mistrust between corporations and government, between workers and corporations, between citizens and state now had to be overcome for the good of the country: The foundation they all shared had been attacked. To win the war, it would take private business, government intervention, union support, and the lives of millions of citizens. “Private industry will continue to be the source
¹⁰
of most of this [war] material … Private industry will have the responsibility of providing the best … most efficient mass production.…” Roosevelt said. What days before had seemed like giant problems, now no longer looked so monumental. People were ready to do whatever it might take for freedom, as the threat to democracy
and their country became immediate and real. Taxes were raised. Price and wage controls were introduced, and nearly every sector of production turned toward aiding the troops. Civilian car production came to a halt and the great factories in Detroit were retooled for war. (Even Sloan and Ford reluctantly joined in and agreed to produce equipment for the war.) Unions made a no-strike deal with the government. Immigrants flooded in, welcomed as some of the country’s best assets, many of them working as scientists and engineers for the United States military, others helping to fill factory jobs as men went off to fight. Women stepped out of their homes to assume new roles, providing a large push in the nation’s factory and business force. And young men joined (and were conscripted) into the U.S. army in droves. Everyone’s work mattered again.

Bill Bernbach was one of those men drafted shortly after Pearl Harbor was attacked. But aside from a little taste of training camp, he wouldn’t directly experience army life. He was deemed too weak for military purposes. Due to an astonishingly high pulse during his examination at boot camp, he was sent to the sick bay for a few days so that “whatever drug he must have taken could wear off.” But Bill hadn’t taken any drugs. Days later when he was released from his confinement, his heartbeat was still the same, a ridiculous 148 beats per minute. Bill was dismissed and sent back home. The world had another path in store for him.

Albert Speer’s
very first position in the Nazi Party was as head of his local chapter of the National Socialist Motor Corps, a paramilitary drivers’ organization—part AAA roadside service, part sports club—that Hitler formed in 1931 as part of his platform toward election. Many of Hitler’s closest acquaintances and
some of the earlier Nazi Party members were a part of this organization, a crew that would later be known as Hitler’s
“chaufferska.”
¹
The point of the National Socialist Motor Club was to train people to drive well and to engender attachment to the automobile. It also assisted people when their cars broke down. At the time of its formation, Albert Speer was only in his twenties, still with baby fat and the soft features of a boy. He was also the only person in his area of Berlin (known as Wannsee) who owned a car. Speer was hesitant about the Nazi Party at first, but he was impressed the first time he saw Hitler speak and eventually grew so enamored with the party that he joined. In later years, Speer would be considered one of Hitler’s closest associates, someone Hitler believed had an artistic soul close to his own. At the Nuremberg Trials, Speer would testify: “I belonged to a circle
²
which consisted of other artists and his personal staff. If Hitler had had any friends at all, I certainly would have been one of his close friends.”

In part because they both shared unique relationships with Hitler, Ferdinand Porsche and Albert Speer did not get along. Despite their common interest in the motor car, the two men aggravated each other to no end. After the unexpected death of Fritz Todt, a friend of Porsche’s and an engineer he had respected greatly, Speer took over Todt’s job as minister of armaments and war production with a fervor to put some order into a Nazi war machine he felt was chaotic and out of hand. And that meant, in his opinion, reining in men like Porsche.

The facts around Todt’s death were blurry and Porsche might have suspected Speer was complicit in it somehow; in any case, he didn’t like the young man and they had very different ideas about what was important during the war. Speer was concerned with efficiency. Porsche was not. And their very different energies seemed to collide any time they were in the same room. Speer was especially annoyed at the way Porsche and Hitler dreamed up crazy transportation ideas together and pored over ideas for the German tanks that Porsche was commissioned to design, one of which was a supertank called the Maus that
proved almost too fat to move. According to Ferry, it was Speer who took Porsche to see his first group of concentration camp prisoners, men who were laboring at breaking stones in a quarry. Speer then turned to Porsche and warned him that if he wasn’t careful, that’s where he’d end up. But Porsche was no better with Speer, always hesitating and delaying orders he did not like, doing what he wanted to do rather than what he was told. And it certainly must have annoyed Speer that Porsche seemed to have somehow escaped Hitler’s control. Porsche was one of the only men in Germany at the time who seemed safe from Nazi punishment. As historians Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger would later write:

As always, Porsche seemed to be operating in a different universe, concerned only with his own very specific plans. Speer found Porsche’s ideas of war juvenile and hated having to witness conversations such as the one where Porsche told Hitler that he should put an end to the war because the country was short on fuel, as if it were as simple as that. There was also the time when Porsche told Hitler, very seriously, that it would be better if only small men were put into
the tanks, because then he could make the tanks smaller. Hitler apparently found this comment rather charming and went out of his way not to embarrass Porsche, saying
“I think you have a very good idea there,
Professor …”
⁴
and explaining to others in the room that it was a known fact that short people tended to be very courageous, and citing Napoleon as an example. It’s no stretch to imagine that Speer would rather have left the room than listen to such talk. And there was also the fact that Speer was still a young man, and thus thought that Porsche, who was now approaching his late sixties, was far too old to have official power.
⁵
Speer believed that no man over the age of fifty should be in a position of management, and he tried very hard to implement this rule. Speer eventually became so annoyed with Porsche and his age and inefficiency that he “promoted” him to “Reich Armaments Councilor,” to get Porsche out of his direct vicinity, never mind that Porsche was now the head of an organization that did not really exist!

In 1942, Porsche was sixty-seven years old, and it had become clear that the war would not be ending anytime soon and that his beloved car factory would not be producing any Strength through Joy Cars as had been promised and planned. Instead, the plant would be rearranged to produce vehicles and armaments for war. It was a chaotic mix of projects: fuel tanks, airplane wing repairs, mines, bazookas, and (perhaps more notably) 20,000 V1 flying bombs. Porsche was also commissioned to turn his designs for a People’s Car into wartime vehicles of various sorts, some of which were tough-guy Beetles with big wheels and raised frames, others that were more like jeeps and known as Kübelwagens or Bucket Seat Cars. The lines for Porsche’s original cars were finally taken down and a second assembly line was set up for Kübelwagen production. This vehicle had an engine of 25 hp and a body that was redesigned to provide more ground area while remaining lightweight. It looked more like a jeep than a Bug, a pumped-up version with bigger wheels and a tougher spine. These gutsy little pug-nosed vehicles had the same air-cooled engine design and chassis as the People’s Car and they were a hit among both the Allied and Axis armies by the end of the war. The Volkswagen factory would eventually produce more than 66,000 of them. In addition
to the Bucket Seat Cars, Porsche also
⁶
revamped the VW design and made an amphibious vehicle that could either move through the water like a boat or drive over dry land. These strange creations were called Schwimmwagens and they were completely waterproof, with retractable propellers. In 1943, production of the military versions of Porsche’s design accounted for 41.5 percent of factory sales, pulling in a total of 93 million RM out of the 225 million RM the factory made that year.

Having worked on wartime projects for Austria in the First World War, it was not an unfamiliar mode for Porsche. But this time he had many more responsibilities and was constantly traveling between his company in Stuttgart, the factory in Wolfsburg, and numerous other factories and cities that required his presence during the war. His offices and workshop in Stuttgart grew considerably, employing hundreds as they tried to keep up with airplane, tank, and automotive design demands. Because Ferdinand was kept so busy with his wartime designs, it was his son-in-law, Anton Piëch, who, in 1941, took over as head of the Volkswagen plant in The Town of the Strength through Joy Car, moving with Louise to the little Porsche hut on the Klieversberg hill, so Porsche himself was around less and less as the factory retooled itself for war.