MANUFACTURING VICTORY
Despite researching material over the past five years for the nearly three hundred stories, albums, features and missives of Vintage News, I am still in awe of the historical, emotional and visual matrix that is the world wide web. While I am well aware that the web is not a universe of truth, fact, scholarly wisdom and purity of intent, it still astounds me every day for its ability to deliver to my hungry eyes images, stories and stored memories of humanity's recent and sometimes cataclysmic history.
In particular, it is my wont to follow leads and key words to find information and images that support our stories of Canada's aviation heritage and the heroes who populate this extraordinary and courageous legacy. I am, not weekly, not daily, but nearly every minute amazed by the images that I come across whilst researching a story's background. More than likely these photos may have nothing immediately to do with the story I am background checking. For a couple of years, I just gawked like a Sunday driver passing an accident scene and then moved on, but a couple of years ago, I opened a folder on my computer's desktop which I called Random Beauty, and into which I dragged the images that caught my eye. Soon, there were hundreds of these digital images and Random Beauty became an annual feature of Vintage News, sharing with our readers those riveting and sublime photographs found serendipitously and with apologies, lifted.
Over the past two years, I have divided this folder into a number of sub-categories with the intent of collecting images which were linked or of a similar subject until a critical mass was achieved and from this a story or feature might possibly emerge. I have folders with titles such as Large Aircraft Formations, WTF?, Burning Aircraft, Bad Taste Nose Art, Heroic Portraits, Martin Marauder, or Vintage Aviation Advertising. A year ago one of those folders, Low Flying, reached this critical mass and spawned a story entitled Lower Than a Snake's Belly in a Wagon Rut that went viral around the world and netted our website more than 100,000 visits in two months. Before that, another called The Squadron Dog told the story of the curs, mutts and pedigreed pooches that have permeated air force operation history since Orville and Wilbur and the Saint Bernard they called Scipio. Now, another of these collections, a folder called Aircraft Assembly Lines, has matured and gestated enough for me to wring from it a story. This is not a story told by someone who has extensively studied the production of Second World War Allied aircraft, but rather by someone who is simply in awe of it. Please correct me when I am wrong.
Some of the most compelling images I have ever seen of the Second World War are those which show the Ford Motor Company's Consolidated B-24 Liberator assembly line at Willow Run, near Ypsilanti, Michigan. Though Ford did not design the massive, slab-sided, utilitarian-to-the-bone, four-engined heavy bomber, the company's 40 years of assembly-line experience was brought to bear and Willow Run became perhaps the greatest example of America's military industrial might, ingenuity, determination, and commitment. Ford acquired the license to build Liberators, took the already well-developed science of the aircraft assembly line and elevated it to gargantuan, robotic and almost nightmarish (for the enemy anyway) proportions. At its peak, the plant employed 42,000 people.
At full operational capacity, Willow Run produced 650 B-24 Liberators in one month, one an hour in two shifts. By 1945, despite there being two other Liberator plants, Willow Run accounted for 70% of monthly B-24 production. The B-24 was built in staggering numbers, more than 18,000 in all. Willow Run, only a licensed manufacturing facility, produced 8,700 of them. Pilots and crews slept in a dormitory with 1,300 cots, awaiting the near hourly birth of a new bomber. The Willow Run plant was so large, it threatened to extend into two counties. In order to avoid paying taxes in both counties, Ford turned the assembly line 90 degrees about two thirds along its length. At this point were massive turntables which rotated partially assembled Liberators so that output could continue unabated. These became known as the “Tax Turns”.
The images of Willow Run, which are on the web in the hundreds, show two parallel lines of diagonally parked, overlapping and hulking B-24s in the final assembly hall marching off, not into the distance, but rather into what seems like infinity. One just has to consider the great hulking size of each of the “Libs”, extrapolate this dimension in one's head and the resulting realization of the shear volume of industrial space contained is breath-robbing. The overhead lighting is brilliant, infinite and galactic, indisputable evidence of power and energy unmolested by military threat from enemy aircraft. It is the luminescence of Victory, the incandescent glow on Inevitability.
Looking at these images, I imagine in my mind the musical score of the contemporary animated Disney feature, Fantasia playing on the PA system throughout the factory. Like the rapidly multiplying and infinitely disturbing images of robotic and multiplying brooms with buckets overwhelming Mickey Mouse in this movie, I see a force unleashed by the Axis aggression, a force for which they did not have the command or magic word to stop. Inexorable, relentless, angry, terrifying are words that come to mind.
If the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese were thinking men first and not steadfastly and blindly militaristic; if they could have paused the war in 1944, stepped back and seriously considered the implications for their countries, the consequences for their families; the simple odds; the complete impossibility of success; if they could have visited America, then a guided tour of the godless, churning, 3 1/2 million square foot aircraft assembly machine at Ford's Willow Run would have shaken them to their very Teutonic and bushido-ic souls. They would surely have realized that behind the endless output of Willow Run, there stood phalanx upon phalanx of similarly sized, victory-inspired factories spread across the land – East from Inglewood and Burbank, California and Seattle, Washington to Kansas and on to Farmington, Long Island and South from the heavy industrial belt city of Buffalo through the heartland to Fort Worth, Texas. The great manufacturers, born with the early race to conquer the air, and who would eventually devour each other, worked then in concert for the goal of ultimate victory – Beech, Bell, Boeing, Brewster, Consolidated, Curtiss, Douglas, Grumman, Lockheed, Martin, North American, Northrop, Republic, Seversky, Vought, Vultee and many more.
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Willow Run - the zenith of mass production of mass destruction.
Ordinary household demand for goods was low with rationing, and military demand was high. Industry went where the markets demanded–where the money was. Companies that had previously made tires, rolling stock for the railways or refrigerators now made sophisticated combat and transport aircraft. The scores of titanic assembly lines were supplied in turn by hundreds and hundreds of smaller, yet still substantial sub-assembly factories and those in turn were fed by materials factories and component shops in a complex web that blanketed America. And this was merely the aircraft industry. Layer on top of this shipbuilding, armor, weapons and munitions manufacturing, not to mention a nascent nuclear weapon industry, and the fate of our enemies was sealed the day they the convinced themselves it was a good idea to take what belonged to their neighbours.
America and its massive size was certainly the key, but it was not the only contributor to this mighty output of war machinery. After establishing aerial dominance over their homeland early in the war, the Brits would up their war output to dizzying levels, newly minted and massive Lancaster and Halifax bombers being towed off their assembly lines in astounding numbers. Factories for Airspeed, Armstrong-Whitworth, Avro, Blackburn, Bristol, de Havilland, Fairey, Gloster, Handley Page, Hawker, Miles, Short, Supermarine, Vickers, Westland and others designed and produced the flying machines that won back British security under the onslaught of the Nazi war machine. Long before Willow Run's enormity or Boeing's massive expansions, the famous Castle Bromwich plant was flying off many thousands of Spitfires to join the fight against tyranny.
Canada, previously a lightweight in the world of aeronautical manufacturing, yet gifted with natural resources, energy, an educated workforce and safe skies, rapidly tooled for war, starting with the training aircraft that would colour the Canadian countryside yellow during the war years. To provide the thousands of trainers needed for the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, traditional commercial aircraft manufacturers like de Havilland Canada, Fleet, Noorduyn and Fairchild built copies of foreign mother company designs, while other heavy industrial manufacturers like National Steel Car and Canadian Car and Foundry rejigged for aeronautics. There were Finches, Tiger Moths, and Cornells for elementary flying training and Harvards, Yales and Ansons for service flying and navigation training, Lysanders for target towing, Fleet Forts for wireless training, and Hurricanes and Bolingbrokes for OTUs.
Some Canadian manufacturers were already building American combat aircraft before that country entered the fight, and by war's end, companies like Victory (formerly National Steel Car and later Avro Canada), Canadian Vickers and de Havilland were constructing large numbers of premier Allied combat aircraft under license, including the Mosquito, Bolingbroke (Blenheim), PBY Canso, and Lancaster Mk X. In the same manner, Australia, faced with a long supply chain, spooled up its own aeronautical industry, license building Mosquitos, Tiger Moths, Beauforts, Beaufighters and others. Throw into that mix the massive output of the Soviet Union which, in just one spectacular case, built more than 38,000 Ilyushin Il-2 Sturmovik ground attack aircraft and one comes to the rapid understanding that the outcome of the Second World War, though seemingly threatened at times, was never in going to be in favour of the Axis.
Now, there is no doubt that the German and Japanese war machines had enormous capacity to construct quality aircraft. The German assembly lines for Arado, Dornier, Focke Wulf, Heinkel, Henschel, Horten, Fieseler, Junkers, Messerschmitt and others, were efficient, continuously operating despite the constant disruption of Allied bombing and above all, spectacularly innovative and creative. But, frankly speaking, regardless of the talent, the teutonic militarism, the blind belief in supremacy and the organizational skills of Albert Speer, they were about to be flattened by a tsunami of steel, aluminum and explosives.
There will be those who think it was a closer thing and say "What If?” and cite the pressures and so-called close calls of the U-boat war, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the setbacks of the early war and other well-fought battles by the Axis. None of this matters in the face of Allied war production and particularly that of North America.
It was written on the walls of the main assembly hall at Willow Run. It was in the proud gaze of female workers who stepped up to the plate across the allied landscape. It was written in the signatures of the thousands and thousands of Boeing employees inscribed on the 5,000th Flying Fortress to roll off the assembly line at Seattle. In May, 1944, there was much pride, excitement and public relations hoohah surrounding 5 Grand, the Fortress in question, but by the time the last had rolled off the line in 1945, no one cared. Relentless, rhythmic, robotic production was simply a way of life, a way to bury the enemy.
The German war production machine was a thing of beauty in the early years of the war, but the Germans suffered from one very serious industrial problem – the war surrounded them on all their borders or the borders of the countries they conquered. All factories were simply within range, and subjected to the merciless rain of explosives from Allied enemy bombers. While they still made huge outputs throughout the war, they were molested, interrupted driven underground, short on materials, short on skilled workers and never, ever had any chance to spool up to match production, aircraft for aircraft, with their enemies.
Enough talk, how about a glimpse of the many found in the folder entitled Aircraft Assembly Lines? Given the broad range of material found I suspect there will be instances where I am out and out wrong or have misinterpreted what I read. I would welcome corrections, and even additions, but the real story is not necessarily in the details, but rather in the immensity of the Allied enterprise, which could not be denied.
Dave O'Malley
Pre-war production - slower, and on a smaller scale
Production beneath the Threat of Aerial Attack
German Production - under constant threat
Building Big Boeing Bombers
The Story of 5 Grand
In May 1944 5 Grand was officially delivered to the US Army Air Forces at Boeing Field and a bottle of champagne was ceremonially broken over the aircraft's nose. The USAAF even made sure that the crew assigned to 5 Grand were made up of locals from the Puget Sound area with Edward C. Unger of Seattle selected as the aircraft commander/pilot. 5 Grand was then flown to Kearney AAF depot in Nebraska for further modifications to make her combat ready. When she left the United States for the Eighth Air Force's bomber bases in Britain, over 35,000 signatures adorned the bare metal finish of 5 Grand. Some thought that the plane should be stripped as the Luftwaffe might make special effort to shoot down 5 Grand, but it was decided the signatures would stay in place. On the trans-Atlantic flight, the crew found the B-17G was about 7 mph slower than a stock B-17G due to the weight of the ink and paint used on the signatures and the surface roughness from some of the more colorful applications! The fuel consumption was higher and stronger-than-forecast winds aloft resulted in one of 5 Grand's engines cutting out on landing in the UK due to fuel starvation.
Assigned to the 333rd Bomber Squadron of the 96th Bomber Group at Snetterton Heath in Norfolk, one of its first local flights before combat missions were flown ended in near disaster when the electrical system failed and 5 Grand made a crash landing after ejecting its ball turret. She was repaired and reassigned to the 388th Bomber Group and would fly 78 missions over the Reich adorned with her signatures with her gunners claiming two Luftwaffe fighters destroyed.
On 14 June 1945 5 Grand returned home to the United States, first landing at Bradley Field in Connecticut before continuing on to Boeing Field in Seattle for refurbishment to go on a war bond tour. While in Seattle, many employees found their signatures still in place. Local officials wanted to preserve 5 Grand as a memorial to the city's home front war effort, but while the Seattle politicians debated the cost, 5 Grand was flown to Lubbock AAF in Texas for further repairs and refurbishment before being flown into storage at Kingman AAF in Arizona to be held in storage while Seattle officials decided how to proceed on the planned memorial incorporating 5 Grand. The US Army Air Forces were willing to donate 5 Grand to Seattle for the memorial planned by the Seattle Historical Society, but on 3 January 1946, Seattle city officials declined the donation of 5 Grand on the grounds that building a memorial with the aircraft represented too costly an endeavour.
Despite the efforts of Boeing employees who had signed 5 Grand, no one in the local government wished to take responsibility and the aircraft, still resplendent with its signatures, was sold off by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to the scrapper where 5 Grand was unceremoniously broken up and melted down, forever lost to history. Source: Aeroplane Monthly, June 2010, Volume 38, Number 6. "A Fort Named 5 Grand" by Howard Carter, p40-45