The Washington Post called Willow Run “the greatest single manufacturing plant the world had ever seen,” while The Wall Street Journal called it “the production miracle of the war.”īy 1945, Ford had succeeded in building Liberators at a rate of one per hour. Its goal was to apply auto-making mass-production principles to 300-plus mph, 56,000-pound (when fully loaded) bombers. Ford had never built a four-engine bomber, and aviation experts insisted it could not be done.Ĭonstruction on the Willow Run Bomber Plant began that spring and it soon became the largest factory under one roof in the world. ![]() In the spring of 1941, months before Pearl Harbor but well after the war had begun in Europe, Edsel Ford (Henry Ford’s only son) and Charlie Sorensen, the company’s foremost production guru, began mobilizing the most ambitious industrial project in history up to that time: a factory that could turn out the biggest, most destructive bomber in the American arsenal, the B-24 Liberator, at a rate of one per hour. By 1945, Ford was churning out B-24 Liberators at the rate of one per hour. Production line at the Ford Willow Run bomber plant. armed services into the greatest military machine in history.” As Arthur Herman wrote in his book Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by the war’s end, Knudsen had gone from the president of GM to “the man who had built the U.S. Knudsen went on to become a lieutenant general in the Army, the first and only civilian American to receive this honor, and those Detroit auto men became heroes in the battle of the assembly lines. ![]() “The first half of 1941 is crucial,” Knudsen told a gathering of the most powerful Motor City executives. Soon after, at the New York Auto Show, Knudsen gave a keynote speech that lit the flame of industrial Detroit. ![]() So Knudsen gave up one of the most well compensated jobs in the nation to take on a government position at a salary of $1. William Knudsen was president of General Motors-the largest corporation in history-in 1940 when President Franklin Roosevelt charged him with heading up all military production in the U.S. Knudsen traded his high-paying auto-executive job for a $1 government salary to help lead Detroit's war-production effort. Roosevelt at the White House for the first meeting about the new National Defense Advisory Commission. William Knudsen, president of General Motors, meeting with President Franklin D.
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