Freedom's Forge (44 page)

Kaiser never did. But he was not done with airplanes by a long shot.

His opportunity to redeem himself came with Brewster Aviation. The Long Island company had a $275 million contract to make dive-bombers
and one of the Navy’s finest fighters, the Vought F4U Corsair. In February 1943 it produced exactly eight planes. Not one was a Corsair.

The problem was partly poor materials control, which created bottlenecks and slowed production. But the heart of the matter was management’s battles with labor and the plant’s UAW boss, Tom Di Lorenzo. Di Lorenzo was a hard-nosed union man who had fiercely opposed the no-strike pledge taken at the beginning of the war. “Our policy is not to win the war at any cost,” he told the
Washington Post
, but “to win the war without sacrificing too many of [our] rights,” including the right to strike. The latest strike, a bruising one, had come in August 1943—the same month Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting in Quebec to plan Operation Overlord. When the strike was over, Brewster president Fred Riebel decided it was time to quit. He was Brewster’s fifth president in sixteen months.
⁴⁵

The Truman Committee felt it had to weigh in on this unacceptable interruption of production in a vital defense plant. It knew that Kaiser was on the board, so it presented him with a choice. Resign from the board, or take Brewster over. Kaiser was less than thrilled. “It’s not an alluring prospect to take over what is reputed to be the worst situation in the country,” he grumbled. But Undersecretary James Forrestal also intervened, asking Kaiser to take over as a personal favor. The Navy, he said, had to have those planes. So Kaiser agreed and handed the plant over to his younger son, Henry Jr. “Brewster will be back on schedule this month,” he said.
⁴⁶

More than seven thousand Brewster workers and managers were on hand on Sunday, November 7, 1943, when Kaiser landed at La Guardia Airport. They wanted to hear how he was going to heal the labor wounds and turn their plant around. He wanted to fill them with the same enthusiasm and optimism about the war effort he was feeling, despite Howard Hughes. He strode to the microphone.

“I feel so cheerful I could sing to you,” he announced. Then to the vast astonishment of his audience, he did.

“I can’t sing,” he told the newspapers afterward, “but … and seeing all those people there and the planes they helped to make, well, it gives you a feeling of confidence. That’s why I couldn’t help but to do my best in trying to sing.”
⁴⁷

Kaiser decided the best way to get Brewster Aviation productive again was to work out a deal with its labor leaders. “You don’t cure a patient by whipping him,” he said. But some in Congress, like Representative Melvin J. Maas of Minnesota, thought he was going too far.

Platitudes or not, Kaiser did get Brewster going again. The labor problems vanished and plane production rose. The youngest Kaiser got 60 planes out the door in January 1944, 74 in February, and 101 in March. When production reached 120 planes in April, the standard the Navy had demanded, Kaiser asked to hand over the factory to others.

For their seven months of work at Brewster, he, Henry Jr., and their operating team had worked for free, with no fee or remuneration.
⁴⁹
He
was ready to move on to his next big project, producing magnesium for the U.S. Air Forces.
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The war was moving on, as well. That February, Marines stormed Kwajalein Island in the Pacific, and then Eniwetok. American bombers clobbered the Marianas, only thirteen hundred miles from Tokyo, while others, including Willow Run B-24s, hit targets across Germany. Daylight bomber raids on Berlin were now normal, even as women made up 42 percent of the workforce building those bombers in West Coast aircraft plants.

As 1944 began, 70 percent of America’s manufacturing was focused on wartime production. American factories were building a plane every five minutes, and producing 150 tons of steel every minute. Shipyards were launching eight aircraft carriers a month, including Kaiser’s baby flattops, and fifty merchant ships a day.

Day and night, endless freight trains loaded with raw materials and finished war goods moved east and west to outfit a 12-million-strong American military and provide its British, Australian, Russian, and other allies almost $1 billion worth of aid a month—the equivalent of $50 billion in today’s dollars. The effort required more than 142 million carloads—the most massive cargo lift in human history.
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Yet, amazingly, while all this prodigious production was happening, more than half of America’s businesses were still cranking out goods and services for the civilian sector, from shoes and lightbulbs to paint and restaurant supplies and newsprint for the funny papers—including some, like GE and DuPont, who were the biggest war contractors.

What war had revealed was not the power of American industry, but the inexhaustible resources of the world’s biggest free-market economy.

Yet while the planes flew and the soldiers fought, and weapons poured out from America’s plants, the man who had set it all in motion, Bill Knudsen, was dealing with his most difficult challenge yet.

A visibly strained Lieutenant General Bill Knudsen (left) and Secretary of War Robert Patterson meet Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea, August 1943.
Courtesy of the National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library

ON AUGUST 17
, 1943, a U.S. Army Air Force plane was making its way from Brisbane, Australia, to Port Moresby, New Guinea. It was Lieutenant General Bill Knudsen’s longest trip yet as head of the Army war production effort, covering more than 9,000 miles from Washington
and Los Angeles, to New Guinea, headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur’s command.

Knudsen had no windows to catch a glance of the Pacific’s azure waters as they began their descent to Port Moresby, and the incessant roar of the plane’s four engines made conversation with his companion, Assistant War Secretary Bob Patterson, almost impossible. Flying in Air Force bombers had taken some getting used to. It meant lots of noise, no pressurization, and icy cold at cruising altitude even here in the steamy South Pacific. Knudsen had flown in his first when he was on the Defense Advisory Committee and made a field trip out to the airplane factories on the West Coast.
¹
That was almost three years ago, he realized, when everyone wondered if America could produce a thousand airplanes, let alone fifty thousand. They had left those numbers far behind. Now, at Secretary Patterson’s invitation, he was going to see how those planes and other weapons they were producing at such prodigious rates were being used on the battlefield.

As they touched down on the tarmac, the tropical jungle heat rose up to embrace them. Knudsen stripped off the coat he had been wearing and tucked it under his arm as General Douglas MacArthur and an array of generals and admirals stepped forward to greet their two distinguished visitors. Under MacArthur, Americans had just scored two significant victories, first at Buna and then in the battle of the Bismarck Sea, securing a foothold in Japanese-occupied New Guinea. The general gestured the way toward Government House, where he intended to explain to Patterson and Knudsen his plan for victory on the island, and then his strategy for the ultimate goal: the liberation of the Philippines.

In the crowd Knudsen picked out a familiar face. It was a long, rather cynical face that someone might have mistaken for that of film actor Humphrey Bogart, sitting atop a tall lean figure in an Air Force general’s uniform. It was MacArthur’s air chief and commander of the Fifth Air Force, General George Kenney. Knudsen had met him in Washington a year ago when he was still settling into being head of Army production and had to help Kenney get the planes, equipment, and spare parts he would need for his new South Pacific command.

George Kenney was tough, charismatic, outspoken. When MacArthur’s chief of staff tried to protest how Kenney was handling his airplanes and crews, Kenney had grabbed a piece of paper and drew a pencil dot. “The blank area represents what I know about air matters,” he growled. “The dot represents what
you
know.”
²

Kenney respected few men in or out of his profession, but one of them was Bill Knudsen. “His expertise in his field was unquestionable,” he remembered after the war, and Kenney was drawn to Knudsen’s simple, straightforward patriotism and wry sense of humor. Once Knudsen came out of a long Munitions Building meeting where no decision had been reached, shaking his head with a weary smile. Suddenly Knudsen said, “George, do you know what a conference is?”

Kenney said no.

“A conference is a gathering of guys that
singly
can do nothing and
together
decide nothing can be done.” Knudsen also gave him his succinct translation of
status quo
. “That’s Latin for what a hell of a fix we’re in.”
³

Now Knudsen found himself standing next to Kenney. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly six o’clock. “If you can give me dinner,” Knudsen whispered to Kenney, “I’d like to get away from all the brass hats and talk airplanes.”

And so they did.

Their dinner lasted almost until one o’clock in the morning, and would have gone on longer if Kenney hadn’t promised to get Knudsen back to MacArthur in time for a breakfast meeting.
⁴
As Knudsen recalled, “In our talk we practically took planes apart and put them back together”—just the kind of talk he loved.
⁵
They talked about the B-24 Liberator, which Kenney believed was the perfect bomber for long-range operations among the widely scattered islands between New Guinea and the New Hebrides, and North American’s twin-engined B-25 Mitchell, which Kenney’s engineering wizard Irving “Pappy” Gunn and North American field rep Jack Fox were transforming into a low-flying strafing machine—at one point even trying out a 75mm cannon in the nose.
⁶

Knudsen in turn told him his impressions of the captured Japanese planes he had seen when he stopped in Brisbane, including the
much-vaunted Japanese Zero. He had been less than impressed. The planes struck him as “standard construction, but generally lighter than ours”—and the products of a Japanese industrial base that was still stuck, like the German’s, in a handcraft tradition.
⁷

But mostly they talked about the twin-engined Lockheed P-38 fighter, which the British had nicknamed the Lightning and which had become the mainstay of Kenney’s fighter force. “The Jap fliers give her wide berth,” Kenney told him, and with her twin Allison turbocharged engines with sixteen hundred pounds of thrust supplying her speed (up to 414 miles per hour) and power, and allowing her to carry four .50-caliber guns, a 20mm cannon, and enough fuel to travel 475 miles, the Lightning was just the sort of long-range fighter needed over the big distances of the Pacific.
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