On this episode of Our American Stories, America was woefully unprepared for World War II. Our army was about the size of Portugal's, our navy was outdated, and our "air force" was roughly equivalent to what the German Luftwaffe flew on a near-daily basis across Europe. Not only that, but nobody in America wanted war—or expected it to come to us. FDR was under no such delusion. We needed weapons, and we needed them fast. But how could we get it done? A.J. Baime, author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War, tells the remarkable story of how, through free enterprise, we became the strongest military power in the world.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, the story of a pivotal battle during World
War Two. That this battle wasn't fought on a tiny
island in the Pacific or in the hedgerows of France,
but in factories across America. You're to tell the story
(00:31):
of the arsenal. Democracy is aj Bame, take it away. AJ.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
People should really understand what life was like, not just
in America but all over the world in the nineteen thirties.
Twenty percent unemployment, millions and millions of people living below
the poverty line. People you know, of all generations, who
couldn't find work, couldn't find food, couldn't support their children.
(00:56):
And during that time, the American military really failed into oblivion.
We were not investing in our military for a number
of reasons. One, we didn't have any money to spend
on the military. Two, there was an extraordinary movement away
from militarism. So a lot of people of all ages
could remember World War One. Parents who had lost children,
(01:18):
people who had lost brothers and sisters, and just the
immense amount of destruction and death and of course, we
went into the nineteen twenties and had a rip rower
in time and drank a lot of booze and did
a lot of dancing. But by the nineteen thirties, when
people were really struggling and they couldn't support their kids,
they really did not want their government spending money tax
(01:40):
dollars on military equipment of any kind. We can't feed
our children, why would we be spending money on tanks
and airplanes. People should also recall nineteen thirty two slash
early nineteen thirty three. Two very important new leaders came
to power virtually at the same time.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
FDR in America.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
I Frank Bendlano Roosevelt.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
We saw him with Swab and Adolf Hitler in Germany.
And during the early days of Hitler's regime he did
a couple of things that you know, I hesitate to
compliment him because, you know, for all the obvious reasons,
(02:27):
probably the most you know, horrible man who's ever walked
the planet in modern times. But he pulled Germany out
of the depression in certain ways that didn't happen in America.
Unemployment fell away, the factories were churning, the economy was improving,
and one of the ways he did that was to
secretly begin secretly and then not so secretly, begin building
(02:48):
a giant military and most importantly, the first operational air force.
And as he was doing this, nobody in America is
really paying attention, because we thought, we're not going to
have a war.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
We're not going to have to fight this guy. It's
not going to happen.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
The anti war movement was so strong that huge numbers
and surveys taken of Americans believed that we never should.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Have gotten involved in World War One. To begin with.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
We had these great, big oceans on either side of
the United States. And keep in mind, the bomber aircraft
didn't really exist at this time, and airplanes themselves were
sort of new in warfare. They were used in World
War One, but not in any major strategic way. They
didn't have a lot of range at that time, so
it was hard for Americans to understand.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
How we could be attacked.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Nobody thought it was really possible, So there was this
isolationist movement. Even after Germany attacked Poland on September one,
nineteen thirty nine, there was a huge move in America
for people to say we don't want anything to do
with this. This is not our problem. It was incomprehensible
to them that we could be involved in World War two,
(04:10):
and the two most important Americans leading that movement were
Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
Has now been defeated and despite the propaganda and confusion
of recent months, it is now obvious that England is
losing war. And I have been fourth for the conclusion
that we cannot win this war for England regardless of
how much assistance we send. That is why the America
(04:40):
Person Committee has been formed.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford headed up what was called
at the time the America First Committee, and that was
an anti war, anti Roosevelt parade that traveled the country
even in nineteen forty one, getting people on board, selling
out arenas.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Saying hey, let's not get involved in this word. It's
going to be a disaster if we do.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Henry Ford was known to be an anti semi so
a lot of people were dubious of what his intentions were.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
They thought he was a Nazi.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
He had received a special medal from the German government
and refused to give it back even when he was
criticized for it.
Speaker 6 (05:22):
Here's Professor Jonathan Sarno speaking to the Jewish Learning Institute
in Brooklyn, New York, on Ford's anti Semitism. Every Ford
dealer would distribute Henry Ford's newspaper known as The Dearborn Independent,
and for ninety one straight issues, The Dearborn Independent targeted
(05:44):
Jews the world's foremost problem, as he said, and then
Henry Ford repackaged those articles into a series of volumes
entitled The International Jew. These books were sent free to
every library in America and were very widely distributed the city,
(06:09):
modern music, a new government programs, and whatever it was
he blamed on the Jews.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
If there's one thing you can say about Henry Ford,
yes he was definitely an anti semi, but I don't
think I don't think he was in any way a Nazi,
as he was accused at the time. What he was
was very much a pacifist. He thought that there was
an absolutely no reason for the United States to get
involved in a war. Lind Berg, the other member, also misunderstood.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
They called him a Nazi and he wasn't.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
And he was less of a pacifist than Henry Ford was.
Because once the war began both of these figures. Ironically,
both of them became very key figures in US defeating
the Nazis.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
In the end, what Were You became.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Really a contest of mass production and of horsepower, of
weapons mounted on wings and wheels. It was a mechanized one.
Speaker 7 (07:21):
We must be the great oaresomal of democracy when we
come back.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
More of this remarkable story here on Our American Stories,
Lee jbib Here again. Our American Stories tries to tell
the stories of America's past and present to Americans, and
we want to hear your stories too. There's some of
our favorites. Send them to us. Go to Ouramerican Stories
(07:48):
dot com and click the your stories tab. Again, please
go to Auramericanstories dot com and click the your stories tab.
(08:09):
And we returned to our American Stories and aj Bain
sharing the story of how America geared up for World
War Two. When we last left off, we learned what
America was like before the war. Simply put, we weren't
only unprepared, but we didn't want war. Chief among those
voices were Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. A great irony
(08:30):
of the story. Considering what happens next here again is
a J.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
Bain.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
In World War One, you began to see horses replaced
with motor vehicles. You began to see airplanes flying, but
for the most part, it was still guys with guns
and trenches in the mud, duking it out. The more
soldiers you could send to the front lines, the better
off you were. By the time World War Two started,
Hitler had already revolutionized the whole program.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
I'm going to give you a quote.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
This is Britain's spymaster, William Stevenson, whose code name was Intrepid.
He confided in Franklin Roosevelt before the United States had
joined the war. He said, quote, the Fewer is not
just a lunatic, He's an evil genius. The weapons in
his armory are like nothing in history. His propaganda is sophisticated.
(09:24):
He has torn up the military textbooks and written his own.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
And I think the easiest.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Way to really put that in perspective, how do we
really understand what that meant.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
I think what it.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Meant was Hitler had come out of World War One,
he was wounded in that war, and when he rose
to power, full of vitriol, he understood the idea of
Henry Ford what Henry Ford had successfully done on assembly
lines in America. What does that mean? It doesn't mean
(09:58):
just wow, the Model T is incredible. The genius of
Henry Ford wasn't the Model T. It was the factory
that could build the Model T and massive numbers. That
is what Hitler realized could revolutionize warfare in the future.
It was the factory. It was the mechanical object that
the factory could build. That's what was going to win
(10:18):
wars in the future. Before everybody else is thinking about
these things, and the United States has mired the Great
Depression thinking that there's no way that any of this
is going to involve them. Hitler was making all that happen,
and what that meant was trucks, tanks, and airplanes. And
the moment he released all of that over Poland, this
idea of Blitzkrieg, which meant ground forces, weapons in the air,
(10:42):
all coordinated to deliver instant and sudden mass attack. He
was thought of as invincible. You have to put yourself
in the shoes of Americans at the time.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
What a shocker.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
This was the idea that airplanes could be so sophisticated.
The screaming set of the dive bombers, the detonation of
the bombs. This just terrifying people, and that terror itself
was a weapon in Here's Arthur al Herman, courtesy of
(11:15):
the National w War Ti Museum with more.
Speaker 8 (11:18):
What I want you to do is to put yourself
in the Oval Office.
Speaker 9 (11:23):
In May of nineteen forty.
Speaker 8 (11:25):
You're the president of the United States, and your military
advisors have told you, and your own guts, your own
instincts told you that your country is going to be
at war, and it's going to be a war unlike
anything the United States has ever fought before, of something
which your own military advisors themselves admit that they're totally
(11:45):
unprepared for.
Speaker 9 (11:45):
And you know that's true.
Speaker 8 (11:47):
You know, for example, sitting there in the Oval Office
that right now, the United States has the eighteenth largest
army in the world, eighteenth, just ahead of Holland. Argentina
has a bigger army than you did. Hungary has a
bigger army than you do. You got an air force
which consists of about fifteen hundred machines.
Speaker 9 (12:07):
And I use that word machines because that's what they are.
We're talking about.
Speaker 8 (12:10):
If you throw together all of the fighters obsolete trainers,
biplanes and so on. You come up with a force
of about fifteen hundred aircraft. Now fifteen hundred aircraft that's
what the German Luftwaff is flying every day. You've got
a situation which you have no defense industry. It was
all dismantled after World War One, hounded out of business
(12:31):
by congressional investigations into what we're called the merchants of death,
Cold and Remington, General Electric and Sperry and these other companies.
DuPont and so they just got out. They said, all O,
the We're not going to get involved this business anymore.
The contracts aren't worth us to us. DuPont, which had
been the largest manufacture of gunpowder in the world in
(12:53):
nineteen eighteen. By nineteen forty, it's shrunk to two percent
of its revenues.
Speaker 9 (13:00):
No defense industry.
Speaker 8 (13:01):
The Army's Chief of Staff, General George Marshall has said
to you, mister President, if Adolf Hitler lands five divisions
on the Atlantic coast, there's nothing we can do to
stop him. He can go from here to the Rockies.
War's coming. If not prepared, I have nothing, What do
you do?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
It was a pretty dismal Christmas in nineteen forty for
a lot of Americans, because war was on our doorstep,
there was a lot of uncertainty. Four days after, on
December twenty ninth, nineteen forty, Roosevelt gave a speech. The
largest radio audience in all of history gathered to hear
this speech. And why because the big question on everyone's
(13:43):
mind all over the world was will the United States
get involved in this war? Because that meant basically, would
there be any contest? Was Nazi journyman he going to
roll all over Europe uncontested and turned the entire continent
into Nazified Germany, which is what most Americans believe was
going to happen. All the world wanted to know what
(14:06):
was Fdr going to do? Was he prepared to stand
up to Hitler? And if he was going to stand
up to Hitler, how was he going to do it?
And so on December twenty ninth, nineteen forty, a few
months before nine pm, he wheeled himself in his wheelchair
into the Diplomatic reception room on the first floor of
the White House. He was wearing his favorite Harvard tie
(14:28):
and a gray wolf suit. There was all this recording
equipment and off he goes, and he gives the speech
that pretty much changes the world.
Speaker 7 (14:37):
This is not a fireside chat on war.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
This is a talk on national security, because the nub
of the whole purpose of your president is to keep
you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much
later out of a last ditch war for the reservation
of American independence. Never before, since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock,
(15:08):
has our American civilization been in such danger as now.
The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that
they intend not only to dominate all life and thought
in their own country, but also to enslave the whole
of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe
(15:30):
to dominate the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
He begins to unravel for American people the way that
the United States could step up against Hitler, to stand
up to Hitler, whether that meant joining the war or not.
Speaker 7 (15:48):
The cost that I advocate involves the least risk now
and the greatest hope for world peace. The people of
Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to
do their fighting.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
They ask us for the.
Speaker 7 (16:05):
Implements of war planes, the tanks, the guns which will
enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
If the United States, a democratic nation, could put together
our government, our military, and our free enterprise into one
fighting force, nobody could stop us.
Speaker 7 (16:30):
I want to make it clear that it is the
purpose of the nation to build now with all possible speed,
every machine, every arsenal, every factory that we need to
manufacture our defense material. We have the men, the skill,
(16:50):
the wealth, and above all the will. So I appeal
to the owners of plants, managers, to the workers, to
our own government employees, to put every ounce of effort
into producing these munitions swiftly and without stemm. We must
(17:16):
be the great arsenal of democracy.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
The arsenal of democracy could supply the guns, the tanks,
the ships, the airplanes to our allies who were fighting
Germany and losing, and ultimately, if we got involved in
the war, we would be prepared to win.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
When we come back more of this remarkable story, the
arsenal of democracy story here on our American stories, and
(18:08):
we returned to our American stories and the story of
the making of as Roosevelt coined it, the Great Arsenal
of Democracy. When we last left off, we learned that
despite a large amount of Americans thinking we'd never get
involved in the war. Roosevelt saw things differently and set
about convincing the American public and our business leaders to
(18:29):
start building the tanks, planes and guns for our European
allies and eventually us. Here again are aj Bame and
Arthur L.
Speaker 8 (18:39):
Herman.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
So how do you get all of these companies and
all of these people to pitch in and build this
arsenal of democracy?
Speaker 3 (18:49):
This is a democratic nation.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
In a totalitarian nation, the leader of that country would
just order everyone to do it and murder or jail
you if you didn't follow orders.
Speaker 8 (19:01):
Franklin Roosevelt was working against all of his instincts, leaving
this as a bottoms up voluntary system that used the
creative energies and drives of the free market system instead
of trying to do a top down, directed command war economy.
There were in Roosevelt's camp advisors who very much thought
that the Soviet model would be the way to go
(19:22):
in terms of mobilizing for war.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
In America. It was different.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
This took a lot of convincing because it was really
not in a lot of Americans' best interest. Alfred Sloan,
who was the head of General Motors. He didn't want
to set aside building chevrolets and buicks and oldsmobiles and
Cadillacs to start making tanks.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
So how do you get everybody on board?
Speaker 8 (19:43):
Well, if you're Franklin Roosevelt, which you do is you
pick up the phone and you call your chief fundraiser,
Bernard Baruch. And Baruch says to him, the man you
need to call is big Bill Knutsen, president of General Motors. Now,
Bill Knutson was a motor city legend. He was a
man who had, together with Henry Ford, really invented the
(20:03):
modern bottom motive assembly line production.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
One guy turns the screw, but he doesn't put the
bolt on. The next guy puts the bolt on. Every
single person had a highly specific job. And the idea
was you could create a factory that used human labor
and turn it into a giant machine.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
A factory could function like a clock right.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Out of time and highly specific, and it would function
to spit out the product. You were trying to make
each one exactly like the one before and the one after,
and by doing so you could create a massive number
at a very low price.
Speaker 8 (20:42):
But Newtsen had also taken that a step farther and
had created what was called flexible mass production. That, in
other words, whatever you were creating, where you were talking
about cars or planes or refrigerators or anything, that you
could introduce changes and modifications and improvements without having to
shut down the assembly line to retool, reassembling the assembly
(21:03):
line in order to produce the new product. This is
the big stumbling block. You know, you can make model
teas from here to doomsday, but to make a different
kind of car, while that was a whole different set
of problems.
Speaker 9 (21:13):
Nutson solved that.
Speaker 8 (21:15):
In fact, it's Bill Knutson who introduced Detroit's.
Speaker 9 (21:19):
Annual model changes all owed to.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Him when this idea of forwardism, and also, you know
the Industrial Revolution, when all of that could be applied
to warfare, sky was the limit.
Speaker 8 (21:34):
So Roosevelt makes the call to Detroit, Knutsen, can you
come to Washington help me do this. Knudsen hangs up
the phone immediately quits as president of General Motors. He's
just taken the job three years earlier. Now, this was
a move which shocked his family, and the family meeting
was stormy because they said to.
Speaker 9 (21:52):
Him, what are you doing.
Speaker 8 (21:54):
You're a Republican This is a Democrat. This is Franklin Roosevelt.
For God's sake, he's the man who is He's coriated
you in big corporations like General Motors. He's blamed you
for the depression.
Speaker 9 (22:04):
He's blamed you for our inability to get out.
Speaker 8 (22:06):
Of the depression. And now you're going to Washington to
go work for him. Why are you doing this? Bill
Knutson was born in Denmark, came to this country as
a Danish immigrant, worked his way up from the shop floor,
and he said to them, he said, I owe this
country everything, and when my president calls, I go. So
when it goes to Washington, looks at the situation, he
(22:30):
realizes they don't have a clue.
Speaker 9 (22:31):
And so he says to Roosevelt, look, let's do this.
Speaker 8 (22:34):
Let me call my friends. He said, if you give
me eighteen months, my friends and I will find a
way to gear up this country for war production without
changing anything in the overall function of the economy. And
you're going to have more planes and tanks and ships.
You can even imagine.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
It was really about debt spending, This idea that at
a time of an emergency, a government can just create
money like ghost dollars scratch and begin spending in it,
even though it doesn't really exist.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
That was a way to do it.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
And so the federal government started issuing contracts billions of
dollars two companies to start building weapons of war, and
this put the country in amazing amounts of debt, but
it didn't matter because once those factories started churning and
the economy started roaring, the country would be able to
pay itself back later. How were the contracts negotiated, It
(23:26):
came down to this. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimpson
said famously, if you don't pay companies in a democratic
nation to work, they won't work, and he was right.
All of these companies in a democratic nation in a
capitalist countries had to be able to make money doing it.
So it became a standard government contract that the government
would pay a company what it costs that company to
(23:48):
build a product of war, plus an eight percent profit.
It was called liberty plus eight percent, and that motivated
companies to sign these contracts and get on board. That
was the basic idea and altimate. It was a really
rough start, but it worked well.
Speaker 8 (24:04):
Of the first things he does in the process, he
makes a call in the summer of nineteen forty to
his pal kt Keller at Chrysler, President of Chrysler says, KT,
can you make tanks?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Roosevelt military leadership realized right away that we had to
build tanks, and nobody should have better tanks in the
United States of America because they were motorized vehicles and
we had the American auto industry, and so Ford did
a lot to build tank engines.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Believe it or not, Cadillac, the classic.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Great American car, the most luxurious American car, did all
kinds of work in tank production.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Cadillac tanks, believe it or not.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
But the company that probably did the most for tank work,
I think was Chrysler. Kt Keller, chief executive of Chrysler,
gets this phone call, can you build this tank?
Speaker 8 (24:50):
And KT said, well, I don't know, I don't know
what a tank looks like, but show me one and
I'll tell you whether I can make it or not.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
And he goes down to Rockford, Illinois.
Speaker 8 (24:58):
And they put him into a tank, one of those
old lead tanks, and they drive him around out there
with his chief engineer, Ed Hunt, and they step out
and said, yeah, we can make these.
Speaker 9 (25:06):
How many do you need. So they went to work.
Speaker 8 (25:09):
But in the process, and Bill Newtson knew this was
going to happen when you got people who were experts
in mass production and who understood how to make changes modifications.
The first things they noticed was is that these kinds
of tanks had all kinds of design flaws and problems.
For example, the fact that the lee tanks was all riveted,
all riveted armor, and so why have rivets? Why g
(25:30):
weld them? And the army says, now it won't work.
We use the rivets because the welding's not strong enough.
It won't hold together under fire. Trust me, trust me,
rivets is the way to go. And Bill news And says,
I don't believe that. So he went out to Detroit
and got some guys who he knew understood real industrial
welding and welded together two giant slabs of iron, flew
it back, showed it to the army and said, there,
(25:50):
try and pull out apart.
Speaker 9 (25:52):
And of course what.
Speaker 8 (25:52):
They discovered was that the welding not only made it
easier and faster to produce the tanks.
Speaker 9 (25:59):
But it also made them.
Speaker 8 (26:00):
When shells hit riveted armor, those rivets would shake loose,
and you get flying pieces of metal flying around inside
the tank that were killing an injury in crewman. And
that's why while the first models of the lead tank
were all riveted, why tanks like Sherman's are all welded.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
That one factory, Chrysler built more tanks than all of
Nazi Germany did in the entire war.
Speaker 9 (26:27):
Engineers love a challenge.
Speaker 8 (26:29):
If you say to them, make something you've never made before,
and I'll bet you can't do it. By and large,
it's hard for an engineer not to resist a chance
to try to give it a shot, to make things,
as I say, they've never made before. For example, one
was a company that made jukeboxes in Chicago, ran by
a guy the name of Mike rock Ola, good regional
jukebox maker. And then when the war came and the
(26:50):
opportunity came to get contracts to make M one carbines,
they never made a carbon lives, they never fired a
carbon in their lives here.
Speaker 9 (26:57):
But here was a challenge.
Speaker 8 (26:58):
And of course what happens is after the war, these
companies then came back and applied the lessons they had
learned to streamlining and making more.
Speaker 9 (27:06):
Efficient their own production. This is what happens with rock Cola.
Speaker 8 (27:09):
In in fact, the rock Cola machines become so ubiquitous that
they become forever identified with the new pop music that's played,
which is why it's called rock and roll.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Do you know that when we come back more of
the story of the Arsenal of Democracy here on our
American stories. And we returned to our American stories in
(27:39):
the final portion of the story of the making of
the Arsenal of Democracy telling it is aj Bain and
author L. Herman. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
So all the way leading up to war, Henry Ford
is the loudest anti war activist and the loudest anti
FDR activist, and he has his only son, edsel Ford,
who is pro FDR and wants to support the war effort.
Is this sort of Shakespearean saga. Edsel Ford is very ill,
(28:18):
dying of cancer. And what the Fords concoct after Pearl Harbor.
Even Henry Ford, the loudest anti war activist, the loudest
anti FDR activist in the country. After Pearl Harbor, he says,
you know what, we're in this war. There's nothing we
can do about it. I'm okay, let's pitch in. Let's
use our factories to win the war, which.
Speaker 9 (28:38):
Is what happens.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
You can't make this up.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Edsel Ford along with his right hand man cast Iron
Charlie Sorenson, who had been pivotal in the original founding
the original Ford assembly lines, and Charles Sorensen. Charlie is
now an old man, and he and edsel Ford.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Have this idea.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
The we that the Allies need the most is the
bomber aircraft, the heavy bomber, the four engine bomber, the
airplane that can deliver huge payloads over a target. In
this new age where you have scientific mechanisms like radar
and bomb sites, the bomber is the weapon that's going
to change the war and defeat the enemy. So Edzel
(29:20):
has this idea to build the largest factory airplane factory
in the world and build a B twenty four Liberator
bomber at a rate of one per hour. And if
they could do this, if they could build a factory
using the four genius and ford Ism at a rate
of one per hour, there's no way the United States
and the Allies can lose because with that number of
(29:43):
bombers that we can unleash over our enemy enemies. That's it,
game over, we will win.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
It's called willow Run.
Speaker 10 (29:52):
This is the dary of willow Run, one of the
forward farms that virtually overnight became the largest aircraft plant.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
That had ever been built.
Speaker 10 (30:00):
Thousands of skilled workers were employed, pouring one hundred thousand
yards of concrete, erecting thirty eight thousand tons of structural steal,
setting ten million brakes, fitting miles of piping, and running
more miles of electric cable to operate the thousands of
machines that were to be installed in this truly giant structure.
Speaker 8 (30:19):
You have to understand at the time, Grumming, Lockheed, Boeing,
we all associate that Martin, all associate them with the
military industrial complexes producers of military aircraft. But that's not
how they all got started. That was part of their business.
They were all of them in the twenties and thirties
reducing civilian aircraft, civilian airliners.
Speaker 9 (30:42):
And for the military. They never thought of them as
being real innovators in terms of design and elements.
Speaker 8 (30:48):
I mean they've asked them to build a plane, you know,
make this fifty of these things, and these companies would
obligingly comply.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
No airplane had ever been really mass produced. It it never
really happened, and certainly not an airplane that could travel
twenty eight hundred and fifty miles, an airplane that had
four Pratt and Whitney engines totally forty eight hundred horsepower,
that could carry eight thousand pounds of bombs.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Nothing like this had ever been mass produced.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Everybody said it couldn't be done, and so they set
out to build it. Now, when Ford sends their engineers
and all their guys out to this tiny consolidated factory
in San Diego, believe it or not, there were hundreds
of artists, artists that Ford sent out because there were
(31:36):
no blueprints for the parts. They're stunned. There's no blueprints
the things sixty miles of wire, and the wiring in
each airplane was different. The artists literally had to reduce
the airplane down to its little tiny parts and draw
them so that production engineers could figure out how to
build these thousands and thousands of parts that would go
(31:59):
into each one of these bombers, just as if they
were model teas. So each bomber would be made of
these parts that could be replaced like spare parts. When
they got shut up in combat, there would be spare
parts for them because they would be produced one just
like the one before that. And it was very dramatic
and it definitely felt to all of them like literally
the world.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Was at stake. If they didn't figure this out, we
would all be speaking German.
Speaker 8 (32:24):
Every single plane that American pilots flew in that war
except one were all pre war designs, all pre war
just waiting for somebody to turn to them and sort
of start start producing it, because we're going to need them.
Speaker 9 (32:37):
In the numbers that you'll be able to produce for us.
Speaker 8 (32:41):
And that's also why planes built by the Americans were
so good, and why they progressively became better and better
as the war went on, because they were all designed
by commercial companies who understood design problems of all kinds.
Speaker 9 (32:56):
That's also one reason why.
Speaker 8 (33:00):
For tank, American tank sorry about this were so inferior
to access tank, particularly German tanks, because almost all of
the armored vehicles the American Army using world were designed
by the Army Board of Ordnance.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
It never occurred to them to.
Speaker 8 (33:16):
Go to a company like Chrysler or to go to
a company like Ford or a Studebaker and say, well,
how would you design a tank?
Speaker 2 (33:23):
The B twenty four Liberator is still to this day
the most mass produced American military aircraft of all time.
You also have to imagine as the guy who was
behind the building of will a Run, Henry Ford's son,
edsel Ford, was dying of cancer and he just you know,
his last remaining wish was to see that this factory
(33:45):
would be completed and that we would win the war.
There's this very dramatic scene when one day all of
these people come to the factory and they see the
flag at half masted. When they get there and they
realize that their leader, edsel Ford, had succumbed to cancer and.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
He had died. You just have to picture what it
was like.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
I get goosebumps and the hair stands up on the
back of my neck every time I think about it.
All these people who worked at that factory described this
moment when it was announced that edsel Ford had died.
The largest airplane in factory in the world. All of
a sudden, all the machine shut off, all the clanging
and banging. Think about how loud it was in there,
(34:29):
all of it just stopped and there was a moment
of silence, And in that moment of silence in this
gigantic factory, an irishman a tenor, began to sing Amazing
Grace and it echoed throughout the factory.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
It's just this moment that I just felt was so special.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
It's that moment where you know, when you write these books,
you don't want people to just understand what happened. You
want them to understand why it happened, but perhaps more importantly,
you wanted to feel what it felt like to be
in place in this time.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
And that was the moment where that really comes home.
Speaker 8 (35:05):
In the course of the war, at General Motors alone,
one hundred and eighty nine business executives, senior executives died
on the job, died of the job of heart attacks,
died simply wearing themselves out from the kind of work
stress environment in which they found themselves in trying to
meet those wartime goals.
Speaker 9 (35:26):
And time to achieve those kinds of goals.
Speaker 8 (35:28):
This was a war of sacrifice, not just sacrifice on
the battlefield, but also enormous sacrifices at home.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
In nineteen forty, FDR coined the term the arsenal of democracy,
and the idea was again, if you can join American military,
free enterprise, and government into one fighting force, nobody could
stop the United States of America. We would become undefeatable.
And in fact, the whole theory proved true.
Speaker 8 (36:00):
By the time that bombs do drop at Pearl Harbor,
our wartime production was already approaching that of Nazi Germany.
By the end of nineteen forty two, the United States
is producing more war material than all of the axes
put together. Ford Motor Company will produce alone, will produce
more war material than Fascist Italy did during the entire war.
(36:23):
And by the end of nineteen forty three, the United
States is producing war more material than Great Britain, Nazi Germany,
and Imperial Japan.
Speaker 9 (36:31):
Communed three hundred thousand.
Speaker 8 (36:34):
Planes, two and a half million machine guns, ninety thousand tanks,
two and a half million trucks, forty one billion rounds
of ammunition. By nineteen forty four, the United States was
producing eight aircraft carriers a month. The fact of the
matter is is that none of this war production effort
(36:54):
could have come together without the leadership. Leadership, first of all,
of Bill Knutson, the city legend who when he picked
up the phone and said, can you make us aircraft engines?
You didn't say no to Bill Knudson. And then finally
leadership from the business leaders who were.
Speaker 9 (37:12):
Taking enormous chances.
Speaker 8 (37:14):
You have to remember converting over your plant from producing
refrigerators to machine guns. Well, you don't sell a lot
of machine guns to your refrigerator customers. If war didn't come,
or if we lost the war, the resources that you
would have lost in producing for the ordinary civilian economy,
for your normal profits, for the normal course of your business,
(37:35):
will be lost forever. It was also to a war
of dedication, of dedication at home for those working on
the assembly lines, for those who planned out those assembly
lines and who took on the challenge that Bill Knutson
had given them and who had said.
Speaker 9 (37:51):
I know you've never made this before.
Speaker 8 (37:53):
We desperately needed and those men coming back and saying, yeah, Bill,
I think we can.
Speaker 9 (37:57):
I think we can do it. And they did.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
And especial thanks to A. J. Bame, author of The
Arsenal of Democracy. Also a special thanks to Arthur L. Hermann,
The Story of America's Great Arsenal of Democracy here on
our American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, the story of a pivotal battle during World
War Two. That this battle wasn't fought on a tiny
island in the Pacific or in the hedgerows of France,
but in factories across America. You're to tell the story
(00:31):
of the arsenal. Democracy is aj Bame, take it away. AJ.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
People should really understand what life was like, not just
in America but all over the world in the nineteen thirties.
Twenty percent unemployment, millions and millions of people living below
the poverty line. People you know, of all generations, who
couldn't find work, couldn't find food, couldn't support their children.
(00:56):
And during that time, the American military really failed into oblivion.
We were not investing in our military for a number
of reasons. One, we didn't have any money to spend
on the military. Two, there was an extraordinary movement away
from militarism. So a lot of people of all ages
could remember World War One. Parents who had lost children,
(01:18):
people who had lost brothers and sisters, and just the
immense amount of destruction and death and of course, we
went into the nineteen twenties and had a rip rower
in time and drank a lot of booze and did
a lot of dancing. But by the nineteen thirties, when
people were really struggling and they couldn't support their kids,
they really did not want their government spending money tax
(01:40):
dollars on military equipment of any kind. We can't feed
our children, why would we be spending money on tanks
and airplanes. People should also recall nineteen thirty two slash
early nineteen thirty three. Two very important new leaders came
to power virtually at the same time.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
FDR in America.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
I Frank Bendlano Roosevelt.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
We saw him with Swab and Adolf Hitler in Germany.
And during the early days of Hitler's regime he did
a couple of things that you know, I hesitate to
compliment him because, you know, for all the obvious reasons,
(02:27):
probably the most you know, horrible man who's ever walked
the planet in modern times. But he pulled Germany out
of the depression in certain ways that didn't happen in America.
Unemployment fell away, the factories were churning, the economy was improving,
and one of the ways he did that was to
secretly begin secretly and then not so secretly, begin building
(02:48):
a giant military and most importantly, the first operational air force.
And as he was doing this, nobody in America is
really paying attention, because we thought, we're not going to
have a war.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
We're not going to have to fight this guy. It's
not going to happen.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
The anti war movement was so strong that huge numbers
and surveys taken of Americans believed that we never should.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Have gotten involved in World War One. To begin with.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
We had these great, big oceans on either side of
the United States. And keep in mind, the bomber aircraft
didn't really exist at this time, and airplanes themselves were
sort of new in warfare. They were used in World
War One, but not in any major strategic way. They
didn't have a lot of range at that time, so
it was hard for Americans to understand.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
How we could be attacked.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Nobody thought it was really possible, So there was this
isolationist movement. Even after Germany attacked Poland on September one,
nineteen thirty nine, there was a huge move in America
for people to say we don't want anything to do
with this. This is not our problem. It was incomprehensible
to them that we could be involved in World War two,
(04:10):
and the two most important Americans leading that movement were
Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
Has now been defeated and despite the propaganda and confusion
of recent months, it is now obvious that England is
losing war. And I have been fourth for the conclusion
that we cannot win this war for England regardless of
how much assistance we send. That is why the America
(04:40):
Person Committee has been formed.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford headed up what was called
at the time the America First Committee, and that was
an anti war, anti Roosevelt parade that traveled the country
even in nineteen forty one, getting people on board, selling
out arenas.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Saying hey, let's not get involved in this word. It's
going to be a disaster if we do.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Henry Ford was known to be an anti semi so
a lot of people were dubious of what his intentions were.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
They thought he was a Nazi.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
He had received a special medal from the German government
and refused to give it back even when he was
criticized for it.
Speaker 6 (05:22):
Here's Professor Jonathan Sarno speaking to the Jewish Learning Institute
in Brooklyn, New York, on Ford's anti Semitism. Every Ford
dealer would distribute Henry Ford's newspaper known as The Dearborn Independent,
and for ninety one straight issues, The Dearborn Independent targeted
(05:44):
Jews the world's foremost problem, as he said, and then
Henry Ford repackaged those articles into a series of volumes
entitled The International Jew. These books were sent free to
every library in America and were very widely distributed the city,
(06:09):
modern music, a new government programs, and whatever it was
he blamed on the Jews.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
If there's one thing you can say about Henry Ford,
yes he was definitely an anti semi, but I don't
think I don't think he was in any way a Nazi,
as he was accused at the time. What he was
was very much a pacifist. He thought that there was
an absolutely no reason for the United States to get
involved in a war. Lind Berg, the other member, also misunderstood.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
They called him a Nazi and he wasn't.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
And he was less of a pacifist than Henry Ford was.
Because once the war began both of these figures. Ironically,
both of them became very key figures in US defeating
the Nazis.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
In the end, what Were You became.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Really a contest of mass production and of horsepower, of
weapons mounted on wings and wheels. It was a mechanized one.
Speaker 7 (07:21):
We must be the great oaresomal of democracy when we
come back.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
More of this remarkable story here on Our American Stories,
Lee jbib Here again. Our American Stories tries to tell
the stories of America's past and present to Americans, and
we want to hear your stories too. There's some of
our favorites. Send them to us. Go to Ouramerican Stories
(07:48):
dot com and click the your stories tab. Again, please
go to Auramericanstories dot com and click the your stories tab.
(08:09):
And we returned to our American Stories and aj Bain
sharing the story of how America geared up for World
War Two. When we last left off, we learned what
America was like before the war. Simply put, we weren't
only unprepared, but we didn't want war. Chief among those
voices were Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. A great irony
(08:30):
of the story. Considering what happens next here again is
a J.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
Bain.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
In World War One, you began to see horses replaced
with motor vehicles. You began to see airplanes flying, but
for the most part, it was still guys with guns
and trenches in the mud, duking it out. The more
soldiers you could send to the front lines, the better
off you were. By the time World War Two started,
Hitler had already revolutionized the whole program.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
I'm going to give you a quote.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
This is Britain's spymaster, William Stevenson, whose code name was Intrepid.
He confided in Franklin Roosevelt before the United States had
joined the war. He said, quote, the Fewer is not
just a lunatic, He's an evil genius. The weapons in
his armory are like nothing in history. His propaganda is sophisticated.
(09:24):
He has torn up the military textbooks and written his own.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
And I think the easiest.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Way to really put that in perspective, how do we
really understand what that meant.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
I think what it.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Meant was Hitler had come out of World War One,
he was wounded in that war, and when he rose
to power, full of vitriol, he understood the idea of
Henry Ford what Henry Ford had successfully done on assembly
lines in America. What does that mean? It doesn't mean
(09:58):
just wow, the Model T is incredible. The genius of
Henry Ford wasn't the Model T. It was the factory
that could build the Model T and massive numbers. That
is what Hitler realized could revolutionize warfare in the future.
It was the factory. It was the mechanical object that
the factory could build. That's what was going to win
(10:18):
wars in the future. Before everybody else is thinking about
these things, and the United States has mired the Great
Depression thinking that there's no way that any of this
is going to involve them. Hitler was making all that happen,
and what that meant was trucks, tanks, and airplanes. And
the moment he released all of that over Poland, this
idea of Blitzkrieg, which meant ground forces, weapons in the air,
(10:42):
all coordinated to deliver instant and sudden mass attack. He
was thought of as invincible. You have to put yourself
in the shoes of Americans at the time.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
What a shocker.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
This was the idea that airplanes could be so sophisticated.
The screaming set of the dive bombers, the detonation of
the bombs. This just terrifying people, and that terror itself
was a weapon in Here's Arthur al Herman, courtesy of
(11:15):
the National w War Ti Museum with more.
Speaker 8 (11:18):
What I want you to do is to put yourself
in the Oval Office.
Speaker 9 (11:23):
In May of nineteen forty.
Speaker 8 (11:25):
You're the president of the United States, and your military
advisors have told you, and your own guts, your own
instincts told you that your country is going to be
at war, and it's going to be a war unlike
anything the United States has ever fought before, of something
which your own military advisors themselves admit that they're totally
(11:45):
unprepared for.
Speaker 9 (11:45):
And you know that's true.
Speaker 8 (11:47):
You know, for example, sitting there in the Oval Office
that right now, the United States has the eighteenth largest
army in the world, eighteenth, just ahead of Holland. Argentina
has a bigger army than you did. Hungary has a
bigger army than you do. You got an air force
which consists of about fifteen hundred machines.
Speaker 9 (12:07):
And I use that word machines because that's what they are.
We're talking about.
Speaker 8 (12:10):
If you throw together all of the fighters obsolete trainers,
biplanes and so on. You come up with a force
of about fifteen hundred aircraft. Now fifteen hundred aircraft that's
what the German Luftwaff is flying every day. You've got
a situation which you have no defense industry. It was
all dismantled after World War One, hounded out of business
(12:31):
by congressional investigations into what we're called the merchants of death,
Cold and Remington, General Electric and Sperry and these other companies.
DuPont and so they just got out. They said, all O,
the We're not going to get involved this business anymore.
The contracts aren't worth us to us. DuPont, which had
been the largest manufacture of gunpowder in the world in
(12:53):
nineteen eighteen. By nineteen forty, it's shrunk to two percent
of its revenues.
Speaker 9 (13:00):
No defense industry.
Speaker 8 (13:01):
The Army's Chief of Staff, General George Marshall has said
to you, mister President, if Adolf Hitler lands five divisions
on the Atlantic coast, there's nothing we can do to
stop him. He can go from here to the Rockies.
War's coming. If not prepared, I have nothing, What do
you do?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
It was a pretty dismal Christmas in nineteen forty for
a lot of Americans, because war was on our doorstep,
there was a lot of uncertainty. Four days after, on
December twenty ninth, nineteen forty, Roosevelt gave a speech. The
largest radio audience in all of history gathered to hear
this speech. And why because the big question on everyone's
(13:43):
mind all over the world was will the United States
get involved in this war? Because that meant basically, would
there be any contest? Was Nazi journyman he going to
roll all over Europe uncontested and turned the entire continent
into Nazified Germany, which is what most Americans believe was
going to happen. All the world wanted to know what
(14:06):
was Fdr going to do? Was he prepared to stand
up to Hitler? And if he was going to stand
up to Hitler, how was he going to do it?
And so on December twenty ninth, nineteen forty, a few
months before nine pm, he wheeled himself in his wheelchair
into the Diplomatic reception room on the first floor of
the White House. He was wearing his favorite Harvard tie
(14:28):
and a gray wolf suit. There was all this recording
equipment and off he goes, and he gives the speech
that pretty much changes the world.
Speaker 7 (14:37):
This is not a fireside chat on war.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
This is a talk on national security, because the nub
of the whole purpose of your president is to keep
you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much
later out of a last ditch war for the reservation
of American independence. Never before, since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock,
(15:08):
has our American civilization been in such danger as now.
The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that
they intend not only to dominate all life and thought
in their own country, but also to enslave the whole
of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe
(15:30):
to dominate the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
He begins to unravel for American people the way that
the United States could step up against Hitler, to stand
up to Hitler, whether that meant joining the war or not.
Speaker 7 (15:48):
The cost that I advocate involves the least risk now
and the greatest hope for world peace. The people of
Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to
do their fighting.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
They ask us for the.
Speaker 7 (16:05):
Implements of war planes, the tanks, the guns which will
enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
If the United States, a democratic nation, could put together
our government, our military, and our free enterprise into one
fighting force, nobody could stop us.
Speaker 7 (16:30):
I want to make it clear that it is the
purpose of the nation to build now with all possible speed,
every machine, every arsenal, every factory that we need to
manufacture our defense material. We have the men, the skill,
(16:50):
the wealth, and above all the will. So I appeal
to the owners of plants, managers, to the workers, to
our own government employees, to put every ounce of effort
into producing these munitions swiftly and without stemm. We must
(17:16):
be the great arsenal of democracy.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
The arsenal of democracy could supply the guns, the tanks,
the ships, the airplanes to our allies who were fighting
Germany and losing, and ultimately, if we got involved in
the war, we would be prepared to win.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
When we come back more of this remarkable story, the
arsenal of democracy story here on our American stories, and
(18:08):
we returned to our American stories and the story of
the making of as Roosevelt coined it, the Great Arsenal
of Democracy. When we last left off, we learned that
despite a large amount of Americans thinking we'd never get
involved in the war. Roosevelt saw things differently and set
about convincing the American public and our business leaders to
(18:29):
start building the tanks, planes and guns for our European
allies and eventually us. Here again are aj Bame and
Arthur L.
Speaker 8 (18:39):
Herman.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
So how do you get all of these companies and
all of these people to pitch in and build this
arsenal of democracy?
Speaker 3 (18:49):
This is a democratic nation.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
In a totalitarian nation, the leader of that country would
just order everyone to do it and murder or jail
you if you didn't follow orders.
Speaker 8 (19:01):
Franklin Roosevelt was working against all of his instincts, leaving
this as a bottoms up voluntary system that used the
creative energies and drives of the free market system instead
of trying to do a top down, directed command war economy.
There were in Roosevelt's camp advisors who very much thought
that the Soviet model would be the way to go
(19:22):
in terms of mobilizing for war.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
In America. It was different.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
This took a lot of convincing because it was really
not in a lot of Americans' best interest. Alfred Sloan,
who was the head of General Motors. He didn't want
to set aside building chevrolets and buicks and oldsmobiles and
Cadillacs to start making tanks.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
So how do you get everybody on board?
Speaker 8 (19:43):
Well, if you're Franklin Roosevelt, which you do is you
pick up the phone and you call your chief fundraiser,
Bernard Baruch. And Baruch says to him, the man you
need to call is big Bill Knutsen, president of General Motors. Now,
Bill Knutson was a motor city legend. He was a
man who had, together with Henry Ford, really invented the
(20:03):
modern bottom motive assembly line production.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
One guy turns the screw, but he doesn't put the
bolt on. The next guy puts the bolt on. Every
single person had a highly specific job. And the idea
was you could create a factory that used human labor
and turn it into a giant machine.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
A factory could function like a clock right.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Out of time and highly specific, and it would function
to spit out the product. You were trying to make
each one exactly like the one before and the one after,
and by doing so you could create a massive number
at a very low price.
Speaker 8 (20:42):
But Newtsen had also taken that a step farther and
had created what was called flexible mass production. That, in
other words, whatever you were creating, where you were talking
about cars or planes or refrigerators or anything, that you
could introduce changes and modifications and improvements without having to
shut down the assembly line to retool, reassembling the assembly
(21:03):
line in order to produce the new product. This is
the big stumbling block. You know, you can make model
teas from here to doomsday, but to make a different
kind of car, while that was a whole different set
of problems.
Speaker 9 (21:13):
Nutson solved that.
Speaker 8 (21:15):
In fact, it's Bill Knutson who introduced Detroit's.
Speaker 9 (21:19):
Annual model changes all owed to.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Him when this idea of forwardism, and also, you know
the Industrial Revolution, when all of that could be applied
to warfare, sky was the limit.
Speaker 8 (21:34):
So Roosevelt makes the call to Detroit, Knutsen, can you
come to Washington help me do this. Knudsen hangs up
the phone immediately quits as president of General Motors. He's
just taken the job three years earlier. Now, this was
a move which shocked his family, and the family meeting
was stormy because they said to.
Speaker 9 (21:52):
Him, what are you doing.
Speaker 8 (21:54):
You're a Republican This is a Democrat. This is Franklin Roosevelt.
For God's sake, he's the man who is He's coriated
you in big corporations like General Motors. He's blamed you
for the depression.
Speaker 9 (22:04):
He's blamed you for our inability to get out.
Speaker 8 (22:06):
Of the depression. And now you're going to Washington to
go work for him. Why are you doing this? Bill
Knutson was born in Denmark, came to this country as
a Danish immigrant, worked his way up from the shop floor,
and he said to them, he said, I owe this
country everything, and when my president calls, I go. So
when it goes to Washington, looks at the situation, he
(22:30):
realizes they don't have a clue.
Speaker 9 (22:31):
And so he says to Roosevelt, look, let's do this.
Speaker 8 (22:34):
Let me call my friends. He said, if you give
me eighteen months, my friends and I will find a
way to gear up this country for war production without
changing anything in the overall function of the economy. And
you're going to have more planes and tanks and ships.
You can even imagine.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
It was really about debt spending, This idea that at
a time of an emergency, a government can just create
money like ghost dollars scratch and begin spending in it,
even though it doesn't really exist.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
That was a way to do it.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
And so the federal government started issuing contracts billions of
dollars two companies to start building weapons of war, and
this put the country in amazing amounts of debt, but
it didn't matter because once those factories started churning and
the economy started roaring, the country would be able to
pay itself back later. How were the contracts negotiated, It
(23:26):
came down to this. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimpson
said famously, if you don't pay companies in a democratic
nation to work, they won't work, and he was right.
All of these companies in a democratic nation in a
capitalist countries had to be able to make money doing it.
So it became a standard government contract that the government
would pay a company what it costs that company to
(23:48):
build a product of war, plus an eight percent profit.
It was called liberty plus eight percent, and that motivated
companies to sign these contracts and get on board. That
was the basic idea and altimate. It was a really
rough start, but it worked well.
Speaker 8 (24:04):
Of the first things he does in the process, he
makes a call in the summer of nineteen forty to
his pal kt Keller at Chrysler, President of Chrysler says, KT,
can you make tanks?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Roosevelt military leadership realized right away that we had to
build tanks, and nobody should have better tanks in the
United States of America because they were motorized vehicles and
we had the American auto industry, and so Ford did
a lot to build tank engines.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Believe it or not, Cadillac, the classic.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Great American car, the most luxurious American car, did all
kinds of work in tank production.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Cadillac tanks, believe it or not.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
But the company that probably did the most for tank work,
I think was Chrysler. Kt Keller, chief executive of Chrysler,
gets this phone call, can you build this tank?
Speaker 8 (24:50):
And KT said, well, I don't know, I don't know
what a tank looks like, but show me one and
I'll tell you whether I can make it or not.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
And he goes down to Rockford, Illinois.
Speaker 8 (24:58):
And they put him into a tank, one of those
old lead tanks, and they drive him around out there
with his chief engineer, Ed Hunt, and they step out
and said, yeah, we can make these.
Speaker 9 (25:06):
How many do you need. So they went to work.
Speaker 8 (25:09):
But in the process, and Bill Newtson knew this was
going to happen when you got people who were experts
in mass production and who understood how to make changes modifications.
The first things they noticed was is that these kinds
of tanks had all kinds of design flaws and problems.
For example, the fact that the lee tanks was all riveted,
all riveted armor, and so why have rivets? Why g
(25:30):
weld them? And the army says, now it won't work.
We use the rivets because the welding's not strong enough.
It won't hold together under fire. Trust me, trust me,
rivets is the way to go. And Bill news And says,
I don't believe that. So he went out to Detroit
and got some guys who he knew understood real industrial
welding and welded together two giant slabs of iron, flew
it back, showed it to the army and said, there,
(25:50):
try and pull out apart.
Speaker 9 (25:52):
And of course what.
Speaker 8 (25:52):
They discovered was that the welding not only made it
easier and faster to produce the tanks.
Speaker 9 (25:59):
But it also made them.
Speaker 8 (26:00):
When shells hit riveted armor, those rivets would shake loose,
and you get flying pieces of metal flying around inside
the tank that were killing an injury in crewman. And
that's why while the first models of the lead tank
were all riveted, why tanks like Sherman's are all welded.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
That one factory, Chrysler built more tanks than all of
Nazi Germany did in the entire war.
Speaker 9 (26:27):
Engineers love a challenge.
Speaker 8 (26:29):
If you say to them, make something you've never made before,
and I'll bet you can't do it. By and large,
it's hard for an engineer not to resist a chance
to try to give it a shot, to make things,
as I say, they've never made before. For example, one
was a company that made jukeboxes in Chicago, ran by
a guy the name of Mike rock Ola, good regional
jukebox maker. And then when the war came and the
(26:50):
opportunity came to get contracts to make M one carbines,
they never made a carbon lives, they never fired a
carbon in their lives here.
Speaker 9 (26:57):
But here was a challenge.
Speaker 8 (26:58):
And of course what happens is after the war, these
companies then came back and applied the lessons they had
learned to streamlining and making more.
Speaker 9 (27:06):
Efficient their own production. This is what happens with rock Cola.
Speaker 8 (27:09):
In in fact, the rock Cola machines become so ubiquitous that
they become forever identified with the new pop music that's played,
which is why it's called rock and roll.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Do you know that when we come back more of
the story of the Arsenal of Democracy here on our
American stories. And we returned to our American stories in
(27:39):
the final portion of the story of the making of
the Arsenal of Democracy telling it is aj Bain and
author L. Herman. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
So all the way leading up to war, Henry Ford
is the loudest anti war activist and the loudest anti
FDR activist, and he has his only son, edsel Ford,
who is pro FDR and wants to support the war effort.
Is this sort of Shakespearean saga. Edsel Ford is very ill,
(28:18):
dying of cancer. And what the Fords concoct after Pearl Harbor.
Even Henry Ford, the loudest anti war activist, the loudest
anti FDR activist in the country. After Pearl Harbor, he says,
you know what, we're in this war. There's nothing we
can do about it. I'm okay, let's pitch in. Let's
use our factories to win the war, which.
Speaker 9 (28:38):
Is what happens.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
You can't make this up.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Edsel Ford along with his right hand man cast Iron
Charlie Sorenson, who had been pivotal in the original founding
the original Ford assembly lines, and Charles Sorensen. Charlie is
now an old man, and he and edsel Ford.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Have this idea.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
The we that the Allies need the most is the
bomber aircraft, the heavy bomber, the four engine bomber, the
airplane that can deliver huge payloads over a target. In
this new age where you have scientific mechanisms like radar
and bomb sites, the bomber is the weapon that's going
to change the war and defeat the enemy. So Edzel
(29:20):
has this idea to build the largest factory airplane factory
in the world and build a B twenty four Liberator
bomber at a rate of one per hour. And if
they could do this, if they could build a factory
using the four genius and ford Ism at a rate
of one per hour, there's no way the United States
and the Allies can lose because with that number of
(29:43):
bombers that we can unleash over our enemy enemies. That's it,
game over, we will win.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
It's called willow Run.
Speaker 10 (29:52):
This is the dary of willow Run, one of the
forward farms that virtually overnight became the largest aircraft plant.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
That had ever been built.
Speaker 10 (30:00):
Thousands of skilled workers were employed, pouring one hundred thousand
yards of concrete, erecting thirty eight thousand tons of structural steal,
setting ten million brakes, fitting miles of piping, and running
more miles of electric cable to operate the thousands of
machines that were to be installed in this truly giant structure.
Speaker 8 (30:19):
You have to understand at the time, Grumming, Lockheed, Boeing,
we all associate that Martin, all associate them with the
military industrial complexes producers of military aircraft. But that's not
how they all got started. That was part of their business.
They were all of them in the twenties and thirties
reducing civilian aircraft, civilian airliners.
Speaker 9 (30:42):
And for the military. They never thought of them as
being real innovators in terms of design and elements.
Speaker 8 (30:48):
I mean they've asked them to build a plane, you know,
make this fifty of these things, and these companies would
obligingly comply.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
No airplane had ever been really mass produced. It it never
really happened, and certainly not an airplane that could travel
twenty eight hundred and fifty miles, an airplane that had
four Pratt and Whitney engines totally forty eight hundred horsepower,
that could carry eight thousand pounds of bombs.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Nothing like this had ever been mass produced.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Everybody said it couldn't be done, and so they set
out to build it. Now, when Ford sends their engineers
and all their guys out to this tiny consolidated factory
in San Diego, believe it or not, there were hundreds
of artists, artists that Ford sent out because there were
(31:36):
no blueprints for the parts. They're stunned. There's no blueprints
the things sixty miles of wire, and the wiring in
each airplane was different. The artists literally had to reduce
the airplane down to its little tiny parts and draw
them so that production engineers could figure out how to
build these thousands and thousands of parts that would go
(31:59):
into each one of these bombers, just as if they
were model teas. So each bomber would be made of
these parts that could be replaced like spare parts. When
they got shut up in combat, there would be spare
parts for them because they would be produced one just
like the one before that. And it was very dramatic
and it definitely felt to all of them like literally
the world.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Was at stake. If they didn't figure this out, we
would all be speaking German.
Speaker 8 (32:24):
Every single plane that American pilots flew in that war
except one were all pre war designs, all pre war
just waiting for somebody to turn to them and sort
of start start producing it, because we're going to need them.
Speaker 9 (32:37):
In the numbers that you'll be able to produce for us.
Speaker 8 (32:41):
And that's also why planes built by the Americans were
so good, and why they progressively became better and better
as the war went on, because they were all designed
by commercial companies who understood design problems of all kinds.
Speaker 9 (32:56):
That's also one reason why.
Speaker 8 (33:00):
For tank, American tank sorry about this were so inferior
to access tank, particularly German tanks, because almost all of
the armored vehicles the American Army using world were designed
by the Army Board of Ordnance.
Speaker 9 (33:15):
It never occurred to them to.
Speaker 8 (33:16):
Go to a company like Chrysler or to go to
a company like Ford or a Studebaker and say, well,
how would you design a tank?
Speaker 2 (33:23):
The B twenty four Liberator is still to this day
the most mass produced American military aircraft of all time.
You also have to imagine as the guy who was
behind the building of will a Run, Henry Ford's son,
edsel Ford, was dying of cancer and he just you know,
his last remaining wish was to see that this factory
(33:45):
would be completed and that we would win the war.
There's this very dramatic scene when one day all of
these people come to the factory and they see the
flag at half masted. When they get there and they
realize that their leader, edsel Ford, had succumbed to cancer and.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
He had died. You just have to picture what it
was like.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
I get goosebumps and the hair stands up on the
back of my neck every time I think about it.
All these people who worked at that factory described this
moment when it was announced that edsel Ford had died.
The largest airplane in factory in the world. All of
a sudden, all the machine shut off, all the clanging
and banging. Think about how loud it was in there,
(34:29):
all of it just stopped and there was a moment
of silence, And in that moment of silence in this
gigantic factory, an irishman a tenor, began to sing Amazing
Grace and it echoed throughout the factory.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
It's just this moment that I just felt was so special.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
It's that moment where you know, when you write these books,
you don't want people to just understand what happened. You
want them to understand why it happened, but perhaps more importantly,
you wanted to feel what it felt like to be
in place in this time.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
And that was the moment where that really comes home.
Speaker 8 (35:05):
In the course of the war, at General Motors alone,
one hundred and eighty nine business executives, senior executives died
on the job, died of the job of heart attacks,
died simply wearing themselves out from the kind of work
stress environment in which they found themselves in trying to
meet those wartime goals.
Speaker 9 (35:26):
And time to achieve those kinds of goals.
Speaker 8 (35:28):
This was a war of sacrifice, not just sacrifice on
the battlefield, but also enormous sacrifices at home.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
In nineteen forty, FDR coined the term the arsenal of democracy,
and the idea was again, if you can join American military,
free enterprise, and government into one fighting force, nobody could
stop the United States of America. We would become undefeatable.
And in fact, the whole theory proved true.
Speaker 8 (36:00):
By the time that bombs do drop at Pearl Harbor,
our wartime production was already approaching that of Nazi Germany.
By the end of nineteen forty two, the United States
is producing more war material than all of the axes
put together. Ford Motor Company will produce alone, will produce
more war material than Fascist Italy did during the entire war.
(36:23):
And by the end of nineteen forty three, the United
States is producing war more material than Great Britain, Nazi Germany,
and Imperial Japan.
Speaker 9 (36:31):
Communed three hundred thousand.
Speaker 8 (36:34):
Planes, two and a half million machine guns, ninety thousand tanks,
two and a half million trucks, forty one billion rounds
of ammunition. By nineteen forty four, the United States was
producing eight aircraft carriers a month. The fact of the
matter is is that none of this war production effort
(36:54):
could have come together without the leadership. Leadership, first of all,
of Bill Knutson, the city legend who when he picked
up the phone and said, can you make us aircraft engines?
You didn't say no to Bill Knudson. And then finally
leadership from the business leaders who were.
Speaker 9 (37:12):
Taking enormous chances.
Speaker 8 (37:14):
You have to remember converting over your plant from producing
refrigerators to machine guns. Well, you don't sell a lot
of machine guns to your refrigerator customers. If war didn't come,
or if we lost the war, the resources that you
would have lost in producing for the ordinary civilian economy,
for your normal profits, for the normal course of your business,
(37:35):
will be lost forever. It was also to a war
of dedication, of dedication at home for those working on
the assembly lines, for those who planned out those assembly
lines and who took on the challenge that Bill Knutson
had given them and who had said.
Speaker 9 (37:51):
I know you've never made this before.
Speaker 8 (37:53):
We desperately needed and those men coming back and saying, yeah, Bill,
I think we can.
Speaker 9 (37:57):
I think we can do it. And they did.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
And especial thanks to A. J. Bame, author of The
Arsenal of Democracy. Also a special thanks to Arthur L. Hermann,
The Story of America's Great Arsenal of Democracy here on
our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.