Freedom's Forge (32 page)

In fact, the 700,000 tons Port Neches produced in the first half of that year was more rubber than the entire country was using in 1940.
²⁹

Roosevelt’s tour of the West Coast included not only Kaiser’s yards but Boeing in Seattle and Douglas Aircraft in California. A former plane designer for Glenn Martin, Donald Douglas had launched his aircraft company in Los Angeles, from the rented back room of a barber shop. He could remember the grim days of the thirties, when his company was the largest single supplier of aircraft to the U.S. military—in batches of thirty or forty.
³⁰

Now Douglas had three factories going in Southern California, and was introducing his new improved SBD-4 Dauntless dive-bomber, which would wreak havoc on Japanese warships. The SBD-4 outclassed the German Stuka and its Japanese counterpart in every respect, and starting in October Douglas would produce more than three thousand
for the Navy.
³¹
Plans were also under way to build new plants in Oklahoma City and outside Chicago at Orchard Place, to build the two most famous military transports of the war: the C-47 Skytrain and the four-thousand-mile-range C-54 Skymaster, which could carry American soldiers, paratroopers, and supplies from the skies over Normandy to bases on the other side of the Himalayas.

Nearby in San Diego, Consolidated Aircraft’s new president was Kaiser’s friend Tom Girdler, who was turning out B-24 bombers and PBY flying boats using his modified mass-production techniques. In Inglewood, North American was poised to replace Douglas as the country’s biggest plane maker as it turned out thousands of its two-engined Mitchell bombers and launched a new single-engine fighter, the P-51 Mustang, powered by those Rolls-Royce Merlin engines being made by Packard.
³²

Even more amazing, the coming of war forced an unprecedented cooperation among these aviation competitors. Old rivals shared aerodynamic and engineering data, exchanged information on tooling and equipment, and drew together a $250 million stockpile of parts and materials under the management of the Aircraft War Production Council, to provide emergency help to anyone who needed it. Douglas helped Consolidated build its B-24s at a plant in Tulsa, and helped Boeing build B-17s at its newest Long Beach plant. Lockheed did the same for Boeing at its Vega plant in Burbank.
³³

Consolidated-Vultee may have been the first aircraft company to hire women in its Downey plant,
^‖
and in 1943 the very first woman engineer, but the Lockheed Vega plant would make them famous. When
Life
magazine did a story on the Lockheed ladies, the picture of a tall girl named Vera Lowe with her hair in a kerchief and a riveting gun in her hand would catch the imagination of a nation as Rosie the Riveter.

“I was impressed by the large proportion of women employed,” Roosevelt would tell the country later, “doing skilled manual labor, running machines…. Within less than a year from now, there will
probably be as many women as men working in our war production plants.”
³⁴

He was nearly right. Six months after Pearl Harbor, barely 80,000 women worked in any defense industry. By the end of 1942, that number shot up to 3 million—and the War Manpower Commission warned they were going to need another 1.5 million as more and more men put on uniforms and went to war. By the fall of 1943, 36.5 percent of the workforce in the American aviation industry were women. They made up almost half the workforce in electrical equipment. There was no question that America could never have met its airplane production quotas after 1941 without them. For American airpower, they were truly the margin of victory.
³⁵

Roosevelt’s final stop on his war plant tour was New Orleans, where he met the man who symbolized the vision, ingenuity, and sheer drive that made up the Production Express. He was Andrew Jackson Higgins, whom some dubbed the Henry Kaiser of the South.

A high school dropout with a decade-long history of odd jobs and failed businesses, Higgins had landed work with a New Orleans lumber export firm on the eve of World War I. After he set up his own firm a couple of years later, the need for a boat able to haul logs out of shallow waters around his stands of timber near Natchez, Mississippi, got him into the boat-making business. Out of it would come his most important invention, the Eureka, or Higgins, boat. Built to do thirty miles an hour even in water as shallow as one inch, all Higgins needed to do was to cut a ramp out of the front and suddenly he had the perfect machine for loading and unloading U.S. Marines on the beach—as Marine general Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith realized when he first saw the Eureka boat in action.
³⁶

In 1940 and 1941, Andrew Jackson Higgins had a series of running battles with the Navy over the value of his boat, with Higgins and Smith pushing and the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair resisting. Once again, it was British orders that came to the rescue of an American manufacturer. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Higgins was standing knee-deep in swamp water near New Orleans’ Industrial
Canal surveying a site for a new factory to fill his British orders, when the car radio carried news about the attack on Pearl Harbor.
³⁷

At the time, landing craft ranked tenth on the Navy’s priority list. The Navy’s original plans for 1,189 landing craft grew to twice that number, and in April 1942 doubled again. They would need not just the Eureka but craft able to carry a medium tank onto the beach and into battle, and lightweight patrol torpedo, or PT, boats—for all of which Higgins had designs he had been pressing on the Navy for years, in vain.

Almost overnight Higgins went from persona non grata in the Navy Building to its production savior. By March 1942 he was employing more than three thousand workers filling orders for his ramp-equipped LCVPs, LCMs, and his ever-popular PT boats. On September 29, Roosevelt himself arrived to see what the fuss was all about.

Higgins and his four sons greeted the president at the siding, then offered him a ride in Roland Higgins’s convertible. As they passed slowly through the six-hundred-foot assembly bay with workers in white overalls and hard hats gawking and nudging each other, Roosevelt got a front-row view of LCVPs arranged in four production lines, the hulls turned upside down as frames were made using jigs and templates. Next he saw the plywood and planking being applied, after which a crane with special canvas slings hoisted the boat upright as workers followed it down the line to complete whatever work was still needed.
³⁸

Then he saw the bay where workers swarmed around two rows of unfinished PT boats. Raised walkways let workers move from one production line to the other, giving them free access to every side of the vessels. At the end of the hour tour, Higgins assembled all his employees at the far end of the factory, where the Higgins Industries marching band played “Hail to the Chief” and “Anchors Aweigh.” Roosevelt was in his element, smiling and keeping time by tapping his fingers on the side of the convertible. Then he was handed a sheet of music and lyrics, and followed silently along while the band played the composition of its popular trumpet player, a burly young man named Al Hirt. It was called “The Higgins Victory March.”

When it was done, Higgins stood up on the car cushions and yelled, “All right, everybody! For the world’s greatest man, three cheers!”
³⁹

Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!
Roosevelt grinned and waved, workers clapped each other on the back and shook hands. Not much more than an hour after he had arrived, Roosevelt’s train pulled away. Higgins returned to his office deeply satisfied. In a few months, he would be the biggest boatbuilder in America.

If Kaiser’s Liberty ships were crucial to America’s defensive phase of keeping the lines of supply and communication with the Allies open, Higgins’s boats would be crucial in the next, offensive phase. As 1942 drew to a close all across the country shipyards, factories, and boatyards would be making thousands of landing craft with a profusion of confusing designations—LCIs, LCMs, LCPLs, LCTs, LCI (L)s, and LSTs. Twenty-one of them were in the Great Lakes and Midwest. Many, if not all, would be using Higgins designs.

In all, Higgins would design 92 percent of the vessels used by the U.S. Navy in World War II—although none of them would be big enough or important enough to warrant a christening. For July 1943 his New Orleans factory built more landing craft than all the other factories in America. Even Hitler got to know his name, and dubbed him “the new Noah.” General Dwight Eisenhower simply called him “the man who won the war for us.”
⁴⁰

Yet the general was wrong. It was the American economy—where immigrants like Knudsen and Elmer Hann and high school dropouts like Higgins and Kaiser could become the arsenal of democracy’s most precious assets—that was shifting the balance of victory.

Donald Nelson knew this. He also knew what Knudsen had foreseen: that the key to winning this war of mass production was America’s free enterprise industrial system. That meant keeping the drive for war production as
voluntary
as possible, so that the right incentives—which included the profit motive—found the right people to do the job. That also meant keeping the
civilian economy
as strong as possible, something that his critics in the War Department sometimes didn’t seem to understand.

When they complained about the amount of newsprint being consumed for advertising and want-ad space, he pointed out that
those ads might enable a defense worker to find an apartment or lead a military wife to a department store sale so she wouldn’t have to spend as much on a new hat or a pair of shoes. When the Army pushed for funding only those synthetic rubber facilities that produced for military use, Nelson had to explain that without tires for autos, buses, and trucks, none of those defense workers would be getting to work. Likewise with gasoline and aluminum and other critical materials: Unless civilian producers, often the smaller businesses, could count on their share, the entire infrastructure on which the military counted for its planes, tanks, and machine guns would slow down and grind to a halt.
⁴¹

Explaining elementary economics was never easy in Washington. Nelson had his work cut out for him. At one point a story circulated in the papers quoting a high Army official that the WPB’s policy had created a shortage of 100-octane aviation fuel so severe that important overseas military operations had to be suspended. Nelson looked into it, and the story wasn’t true.
⁴²
But people continued to act as if it
were
true, and the presence of spot shortages of raw materials—a perennial problem in any war (and, it should be added, any economy with price controls)—was taken as evidence not of the extraordinary demand generated by war production, or of the market-distorting effects of the Office of Price Administration, but of extraordinary incompetence on the part of Donald M. Nelson.

Indeed, Nelson and his people did face shortages that were painful and sometimes seemed chronic. Aluminum was a perennial sore spot, because of its demand in the aviation industry in unprecedented numbers. In 1939 the United States had only one producer making some 327 million pounds a year. By 1941 the need for aluminum had all but doubled. Nelson’s dollar-a-year man in charge, Alcoa’s Arthur Bunker, was under siege from the press and Capitol Hill from almost the moment he arrived in Washington.

Yet in just a year Bunker was able to hit the numbers with the help of Jesse Jones’s Defense Plant Corporation, which financed expanding facilities to meet the future need. By October 1943 the output had reached the point—2.25
billion
pounds—that one WPB official was quoted as saying America had aluminum “coming out of our ears.” By
then American companies held 42 percent of the world’s aluminum manufacturing capacity.
⁴³

Copper was a problem, too. In 1942 the shortage of this cheap but absolutely vital metal for making electrical wiring and brass for ammunition shells was so severe that the Army released 2,800 former copper miners from active duty to help. Then Nelson’s men found a substitute: silver. Releasing it from vaults where it was being kept as a currency reserve, Nelson and the WPB made it an industrial metal—one that would eventually help to turn the tide in enriching uranium at Oak Ridge Laboratories for the Manhattan Project.
⁴⁴

The most serious shortage Nelson struggled with, however, was steel. Nothing seemed to help in getting on top of the situation. America’s steel industry had taken a terrific pounding since the Great Depression. Annual production had slipped from 63 million metric tons in 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash, to barely 30 million. Under Knudsen at OPM and Nelson at SPAB, national output had jumped 5 million tons a year—but it wasn’t nearly enough. A nation at war was going to need at least 80 million tons, and more.

On January 1, 1942, steel plate producers had a 4.5-million-ton backlog in unfilled orders.
⁴⁵
There was an ongoing push to increase steel production by expanding and modernizing plants and pushing new technologies like the electric-arc melting furnace.
⁴⁶
Even with the federal government and the Defense Plant Corporation paying more than half the bills, steel’s production cycle was one of the slowest in heavy industry. Facilities going up in late 1941 wouldn’t be ready to produce until 1943 or even 1944. Nelson tried collecting and reusing metal scrap, but the results were never enough.

As fall turned into winter, the shortage in shipbuilding was looking critical, especially on the West Coast, far away from the major suppliers. In the Midwest it was starting to slow tank and tank engine production, including at the Chrysler plant.
⁴⁷
Machine tools, trucks and large landing craft, even vital new plant construction and expansion, might be next.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Henry Kaiser proved to be the hero of the hour.