Freedom's Forge (48 page)

Knudsen found at Wichita a workforce that was entirely new to manufacturing work and trained entirely by Boeing—and made up of almost 40 percent women. It was a workforce as skilled and dedicated as any in the country. They literally worked longer than the day is long: three shifts of ten hours each, with every other weekend off and time and a half for every hour beyond forty hours a week.

Still, absenteeism was low, worker morale high, and the production numbers were impressive. The planes were apparently getting built, but somehow they weren’t getting to the Air Force. Knudsen thought this
was odd, because when he arrived he had noticed rows of B-29s on the airfield. Why weren’t they on their way? he asked. The manager had to point out that because of the rubber shortage, all the planes had wooden tail wheels and couldn’t be flown.

When Knudsen walked closer to one row of sixteen B-29s, he noticed something even odder.

None of them had engines.

Slowly the truth came out. In order to make their production quotas, managers were counting planes as complete even when all their parts hadn’t been installed, whether it was tail wheels or even engines. A manager shamefacedly explained that from time to time an engine would be taken off the assembly line and put into one of the “gliders” on the field. Otherwise, the planes were useless.

Knudsen shook his head. There was going to be a new rule, he said. No more B-29s could be turned out of the shop without engines. In fact, “we ruled that an airplane wasn’t really an airplane,” Knudsen said later, “until it was flown and accepted by the Air Force.”
¹⁰

The Battle of Kansas had begun.

From Wichita, Knudsen headed for Marietta. No facility was more of a sore point to the Army than the Bell plant there. Army generals all but accused Bell executives of deliberate sabotage. If Wichita was at least making airplanes, however incomplete, at the cost of $44 million Marietta was making none.

Knudsen saw at once what the problem was. The Bell executives, headquartered two thousand miles away in Buffalo, had gotten in over their heads. They had wildly underestimated how long it would take to get a four-million-square-foot plant built out in the middle of Cobb County in rural Georgia, and how long it would take to train a workforce of 40,000 rural Southerners to work on a complex assembly line like the B-29’s—when Cobb County’s entire population was only 35,000. People who were being trained to press aluminum sheets into wings and ailerons first had to be shown what aluminum looked like.
¹¹

Bell nonetheless had promised to have the plant producing planes by September 1942. But by the end of June that year, the building was still only 3 percent complete. My March 1943 the building was nearly finished, but only three thousand men were at work—most of them engineers
brought down from Buffalo—making tools for plants elsewhere. Worker morale was low and pay worse. In June 1943, five hundred workers simply walked out and never came back.

When, in July, the air-conditioning finally came on in the enormous Plant No. 6—it looked “like something from another and larger planet,” one Atlanta reporter said—Marietta had yet to make a complete plane.
¹²

Knudsen decided a change was needed at the top. He brought in Colonel Carl Cover, a former vice president for Douglas, to be in charge.
¹³
As time went on and the facilities were finished, it turned out Bell’s training program was one of the best in the industry. Schoolteachers, salesmen, clerks, hairdressers, bank tellers, and housewives became skilled aviation workers, learning to cut aluminum sheets, lay out electric cable, or buck and rivet for ten hours at a stretch.

One of those wielding a riveting gun when Knudsen visited was a widow who lived in a tiny trailer outside Atlanta. She had been at the gates of the Marietta factory the day it opened, and remained there working the 8
A.M
.-to-4:45
P.M
. shift every day until the war ended.

She wasn’t just any widow. Helen Dortch Longstreet was the widow of Confederate general James Longstreet, whom she had married when she was thirty-four and he was seventy-six. She was eighty when she started work at Bell. Every day she drove in to work in her Nash coupe in her black sweater and slacks and black visored cap, a cigarette dangling from her lips. The noise and vicious kick of the riveting gun bothered her not at all. “I was head of the class in riveting school,” she liked to tell people. “In fact, I was the only one in it.” Her foreman could tell Knudsen Mrs. Longstreet was never late and never missed a day of work.
¹⁴

Over time, Mrs. Longstreet and Colonel Cover almost made Marietta the most efficient B-29 plant of them all. In November the first plane came out the factory doors. General Wolfe confessed to the Bell people, “I didn’t think you could do it.”

By the fall of 1944, its 28,000 workers had made producing B-29s so routine that Bell was able to renegotiate its contract at a lower cost-per-plane basis, and even Cover’s tragic death in a plane crash did nothing to break the factory’s stride.
¹⁵
By the time the war ended, the Bell-Marietta airplane factory, once a symbol of government inefficiency
and corporate waste, had become a symbol of the New South. Its new general manager became so popular he was nominated for governor in 1946, and the plant remained a pillar of the Sun Belt industrial resurgence down to the 1990s.
^†

At Omaha, Knudsen found the situation a little better. Martin Aircraft had broken ground there in the spring of 1941, with a line of bulldozers and Euclid tractors, each with a Stars and Stripes flying from its rearview mirror. The plant had been built to supply the Army with B-26 Marauders, but production was phased out in July 1943 to shift to the B-29. When Knudsen first visited, the new jigs and dies were still showing up—at a cost to the Army of some $90 million.
¹⁶

But Knudsen liked the two Martin managers, Hartson and Willey, the latter a shrewd, thickset Englishman who had transferred from Martin’s Baltimore plant to oversee the new operations. In the end, however, the Omaha plant—like Boeing’s at Renton—would become a final assembly center for B-29 parts made elsewhere, a rendezvous point for so many of the companies and corporations that had made the arsenal of democracy.
¹⁷

From Chrysler came nose sections, nacelles, leading edges, and center wing flaps, shipping by rail from Detroit. From Goodyear in Akron came the all-important bomb-bay fuselage sections, sections so large that they took up the full height of the factory building in Akron. To make room, the massive concrete foundations that Goodyear engineers used to neutralize vibrations for jigs used for making wings for Martin B-26s had to be broken up with a one-ton wrecking ball and dragged away.
¹⁸

Meanwhile, Hudson Motors—which had designed one of the first weapons whose program Knudsen had overseen, the 20mm Oerlikon antiaircraft gun—supplied fuselage waste sections and tail gun turrets. J. I. Case, the tractor company, made outer wing panels, wing tips, and ailerons, and Bendix Corporation supplied the dorsal and belly turrets.
¹⁹

That still left the problem of the engines—and here even Knudsen found himself facing near-certain defeat.

The country’s second-biggest aircraft engine firm, Curtiss-Wright, had designed the R-3350 as far back as 1935 as the ultimate piston engine. On the drawing board, its eighteen cylinders could deliver no less than two thousand horsepower with less than half the weight of other engines. As Wright engineers liked to put it, it was as powerful as the average train locomotive but weighed as much as the average locomotive wheel.
²⁰
But there had been a host of problems. Its eighteen cylinders sat in radial fashion like spokes on a wheel, or rather two wheels of nine each, packed close to each other. Preventing overheating, including inside the exhaust system, proved almost impossible—as Eddie Allen had found at the cost of his life. Overheating problems in the reduction gears and exhaust system seemed destined to keep the engine from ever reaching production—that is, until Pearl Harbor.

In 1942 the Army suddenly set huge hopes on the R-3350, especially for its new Boeing superbomber. Millions of dollars poured into Wright Aeronautical to expand its plant in Woodridge, New Jersey, and Chrysler’s Dodge division agreed to mass-produce the engine at a completely new plant on South Cicero Street on Chicago’s West Side. It quickly eclipsed Willow Run as the largest manufacturing plant in the world, with some four million square feet. It was so huge that when Bill Knudsen paid a visit in late 1943, he almost forwent his usual personal walk-through. “I had quite a time trying to visualize that acreage filled with machine tools and people.”
²¹

Because the plant was still largely empty. The Wright engineers were having so many problems with the motors they were building that the Dodge people saw no point in opening up full production. The problems weren’t just engineering ones. The R-3350 required more than nine thousand separate machine cutting tools to make. It was the most complex piece of machinery ever mass-produced in the United States, but it had to be made by one of the country’s most inexperienced workforces.
²²
Most of the three thousand employees at Woodridge had never worked in a factory before. They were completely unprepared for the scale and complexity of the R-3350, as were their supervisors. And when Wright instituted an intensive training program on the engine, some employees learned enough to quit and get higher-paying jobs at aircraft plants elsewhere. No wonder
three of the inspection supervisors in the Woodridge crankcase and housing departments wound up leaving for psychiatric treatment.
²³

For Knudsen, too, it was a depressing experience. “It was rather tough for me,” he confessed later, “a production man, to face these manufacturers at a time when all the engines they would have in their plants would be for that day’s production,” with no other inventory on hand “and no shipping data for the next supply.” As he paced the vast half-empty bays of the Chicago facility and saw workers sullenly standing, sleeping, and shooting craps in the dark corners of the Woodridge plant, he must have wondered if finally, with the R-3350, he had chosen an assignment too tough even for him.
²⁴

Still, Knudsen crossed his fingers and stayed hopeful. He knew there were powerful companies behind the engine project—he had arranged for GM’s Fisher Body to start building the B-29’s enormous engine nacelles—and that the key to making the operation more efficient was not just better handling of employees, but better use of subcontractors. Starting in September 1943, Wright-Woodridge and Dodge-Chicago began exchanging those parts each was producing more efficiently, in order to speed up output. A bevy of new subcontractors were found. They included Studebaker; American Radiator in Elyria, Ohio; U.S. Radiator of Geneva, New York; Bohn Aluminum; and Dow Chemical. Chrysler assigned workers from plants in Detroit and Kokomo to make R-3350 parts, while Wright turned to its satellite plants in Ohio and New Jersey to do the same.
²⁵

All in all, the B-29 engine program turned Curtiss-Wright into the second-biggest prime military contractor in the country, right after General Motors.
^‡
Morale at Woodridge gradually improved, as the Air Force and Knudsen insisted on raising workers’ pay, especially those working in the hot and dangerous foundry section, and tying pay bonuses to production quotas. Workers came alive to the fact that the
machines they were building were going to have a massive impact on the future of the war.

One twenty-year-old woman from Georgia told a reporter how her Air Force boyfriend had been killed in action, and how working at Woodridge made her feel she was helping to make sure other boys didn’t die the same way. “We’ve got to stick to our jobs to get these engines out,” one Bronx woman declared, “so we can get those B-29s across the water where they can knock hell out of the Japs”
²⁶

Knudsen agreed, and was ready for the next stage. In December—just as Dwight Eisenhower was named Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe and after the Marines suffered three thousand killed and wounded taking the island of Tarawa—General Wolfe flew off to China to build the first airfields for the B-29, and Knudsen took over the entire program.
²⁷

Meanwhile, Hap Arnold had had a visitor.

It was General Leslie Groves from the Army Corps of Engineers, who had spent the last year working with a team of the country’s most distinguished scientists and engineers from DuPont, Union Carbide, Allis-Chalmers, Tennessee Eastman, and other corporations, on what he could only describe to Arnold as a superweapon—one that could win the war.
^§
To deliver it, they were going to need a superplane, he said, a plane big and fast enough to carry it into action.

“In calling on him at this time,” Grove remembered after the war, “I was of course assuming that our work would be successful”—since they still had not extracted an ounce of enriched uranium, and the first test of a bomb was more than six months away.
²⁸
Still, the chief worry was whether Arnold’s superbomber would be ready in time. Neither Boeing’s B-17 nor Consolidated’s B-24 would be up to the job. Groves warned they might have to consider using a British plane, the Avro Lancaster, instead.

Arnold shook his head. An American plane was going to carry that bomb, he said, and he would have the B-29 ready. What he would work out with Groves over the next year was modifying the size and shape of the bomb to fit into the Superfortress’s bomb bay compartment,
while the Air Force and Boeing engineers would figure out the rest.
²⁹

The Manhattan Project (so called for its early location at Columbia University and other sites around Manhattan) had engaged the nation’s brightest minds and biggest corporations in a $2 billion venture—one that an American economy fully engaged in war production could find the time, energy, and resources for. It was, in historian Paul Johnson’s words, a truly “capitalist bomb.” Now the biggest industrial program in the nation’s history, to build the most destructive weapon ever conceived, was converging with the second biggest, the race for a plane beyond anyone’s dreams. As America’s factories, shipyards, offices, and plants were still getting war production into high gear, light began to dawn on a new horizon.