-All right, so it still might be loading for you guys,
but you should hopefully see -- I'm going to start
my webcam here.
Let's see.
You should see me in just 1 second.
Hello, everyone.
So you see me, and hopefully you hear me now, too.
You can also hear that I'm maybe a little stuffed up today,
so I apologize if you maybe hear me
hopefully not sneezing or coughing too much,
but with the crazy change in temperatures here in New Orleans
and everywhere you guys are, you know,
I'm sure there's a lot of people that have the sniffles today,
so please bear with me.
But today we have a really awesome program.
We here at the World War II Museum in New Orleans
there's me, Chrissy, and then, Megan, do you want
to pop in and wave?
-Hi!
-Megan will be managing that Q&A pod you see below me.
We really encourage you guys to type in questions
throughout the presentation.
We'll try to answer what we can.
We're going to have a Q&A session with both us
and the Yankee Air Museum at the end.
And if we don't get to your question,
feel free to include your e-mail as well when you type
in a question.
We're happy to answer it later, as well.
So that is for you guys to input any sorts of questions,
you know, about this topic, and Megan will be
kind of looking at that and managing it
throughout the session.
Also joining us in a little bit are the folks
in the Yankee Air Museum.
We have Randy, who is the historian on Willow Run,
and Rachel, who is the director of education
at the Yankee Air Museum in Belleville, Michigan.
The cool thing about this sort of technology
is that we can connect with all of you guys
from many different places, but also have
this really neat opportunity to have two different museums
present to you on this topic, so as I said, I'm really,
as you can tell, like, really excited today
that we're able to do this.
So the first 20 minutes or so will be me,
and then Randy and Rachel will take over
at the Yankee Air Museum, so what we're going to do today,
though, to kind of start you guys off,
start your brains, you know, working and all
that sort of stuff, is that I'm going to
ask you guys a question in a poll question.
For some of you folks that have done this before,
this might look familiar, but for some of you newbies,
this might be different and new.
You can see here I'm opening up a poll in Adobe Connect,
and I want you guys to answer this question
to start off today.
After what event did the United States
officially enter World War II?
And you can make your selection in there as you can see.
Germany invaded Poland, Japan invaded China,
Germany attacked England, in the Battle of Britain,
or Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii?
I'll give you a second.
It looks like, oh, you guys are super smart.
You know your stuff.
I'm going to broadcast it so you can see how smart you are.
You guys are exactly right, and maybe you know this
because you're studying World War II right now,
but also because the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor
is quickly approaching here, 100% saying, yes,
it's that fourth choice there.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii,
and this is really where our story starts today,
so that's why I asked you this question.
There'll be a few more poll questions
throughout the presentation here, so that happened
December 7th of 1941, and then this very famous speech
happened the day after I think.
-Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live
in infamy, the United States of America
were suddenly and deliberately attacked
by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
-...can hear me.
Okay, now you can hear me.
So you know that is a very famous speech
by a very famous individual -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
That was the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor
on December 8th of 1941.
He is addressing Congress to ask them to declare war on Japan,
which does happen.
Three days after that, Germany declares war
on the United States, so within the matter
of this very devastating, very tragic event
and with the matter of the days after,
the United States is at war, and we talk about this a lot,
of course, at our museum, how war changes the lives
of almost every single American.
Our military is tiny at this point,
but very soon, you know, within World War II,
we have 16 million Americans serving in uniform,
men and women, so in addition to that,
though, we have people here working on the home front,
and that's what we're really focusing on today,
and it actually leads me to my second poll question
in just 1 second.
So you guys know that we need people serving overseas,
but we also need people who are working in factories here,
building all these products, building all these materials
we need to win a war.
And that's actually the next poll question for you guys.
This one is a little bit different here.
This is where you type in your answer.
So I want to know from you all, what sort of materials
and equipment do you need to win a war?
And you can be kind of broad, or you can be very specific,
so I'm going to let you guys type in for a second.
Then I'm going to broadcast some of those results.
What kind of materials do you need to win a war
or at least fight in a war?
Okay, I'm going to start broadcasting these results
so you guys can see them.
Someone said, "Everything."
I think that's a really good response.
Food, raw materials, steel, airplanes, ships, ammunitions.
Yeah, you guys are creating this huge, long list as you should
because you need a lot of different materials to win
or, you know, at least to participate in a war.
And the United States, you know, had to be ready for this,
not only the people who were serving
but also people here on the home front who were building
these very, very critical materials,
and we usually think of, like, the big stuff.
People are mentioning, you know, bombs, Jeeps, you know, planes,
tanks, you know, that sort of thing,
but even these factories and these plants that are building
the smallest things, they matter, too.
What I'm going to show you now, I'm going to
close out this poll.
We're going to see our first video today, first video clip,
and what I'm going to do is pause my video and audio,
and hopefully this will play nice
and smoothly for you all, but this is a newsreel.
People would see little short clips like this,
little news stories before they would go to see
a show in a movie theater.
Remember, there's no television or no Internet back then,
so this was one of the, you know,
ways you could get news, and you'd see these kind of
short little fast-paced clips.
This one is all about production,
and I think it brings up some really important points.
So I'm going to bring that up.
I'm going to close out the poll.
You guys were really good at that.
I'm going to bring up this clip right now.
As I said, I'm going to pause myself, but I'll be coming back.
-American industry has met the challenge of war.
American factories have achieved the impossible.
American mass production is delivering the goods.
Going first to the great automobile assembly lines
capable of churning out 4 million trucks
and passenger cars a year, United States engineers
harness the skill, mobilize the resources
of the most efficient manufacturing system
in the world.
Peacetime construction was halted.
Overnight, tons of machinery and hundreds of plants
were hauled away for the duration by workmen
converting to war.
Armed guards took over.
The nation's key factories, already charted
for just such an emergency, were equipped and made ready.
In hundreds of peaceful towns, the Main Streets of America,
thousands of small industries were fitted into the national war production
plan.
Performing manufacturing miracles, workmen in Denver, Colorado,
for example, make parts and fashion tools
that may help build a battleship in a Navy yard
1,000 miles away.
Small stuff, the billions of bits and pieces,
100,000 different parts in a single Flying Fortress
and every possible plant that could be retooled
is churning them out, feeding them to the big
assembly lines night and day.
-Okay, so hopefully that played for everyone.
Just so you know, you know, some of you have some
Wi-Fi connections that might not be working totally right.
Those clips, you know, we're recording this program,
so you'll be able to watch those full clips,
you know, later as well, so if it's not playing for you right.
But that clip there just brought up
a lot of important ideas about production
here in the United States during World War II.
First off, factories in cities and towns across this country
were converting for war.
I bet you there was a factory not too far
from where you guys are right now
that was producing something for World War II.
It may not exist today anymore, but if you did
a little research on your, you know, local town or city,
I bet you could find that.
They were converting for war, which means they were, you know,
let's say a factory was making refrigerators
before World War II.
Well, now they're making airplane parts now
that the country is at war.
You also saw, too, that in that clip that, you know,
these factories that were making the tiniest of parts,
the little billions of bits and pieces that narrator said,
you know, they were just as important
as these huge assembly lines.
Later, as we connect with the Yankee Air Museum,
we're going to talk about the largest assembly line
at Willow Run, and then everyone,
every single person had a role to play in these factories,
whether they had a specific step
on the assembly line or as you saw,
making these little teeny tiny parts,
everybody was important to this production machine.
So our main presentation today here at the museum is,
we're talking about what was going on here in New Orleans,
but let's -- Before we really focus on that,
I'm going to show you some amazing,
staggering production numbers.
So check it out what we built here in the United States
in about 3 1/2 years of war -- 27 aircraft carriers,
352 destroyers, that's a type of large ship,
88,000 tanks, wow. 300,000 airplanes --
just gets bigger from here -- 26 million machine guns
and 41 billion-with-a-B bullets, so pretty crazy.
Think of all the other stuff you came up with,
you know, what we need for war.
Think of the huge quantities of those things.
All right.
So as I said, we're focusing on New Orleans today,
but we're focusing on this specific problem here,
so sometimes there are problems that our men and women
in the military faced, and they needed, you know,
something to fix that problem.
They needed some sort of equipment,
some sort of machinery to fix that problem,
so here's one of the problems -- It's difficult, you know,
during World War II, to invade port cities
because they are usually heavily defended by an enemy.
You know, how do you land millions and millions of troops
in these overrun continents across the world
where these harbors are in enemy hands?
So you can't bring your big ships
and all of your equipment to a harbor.
It's hard to attack a port.
So someone here, actually in New Orleans, has a solution.
His name is Andrew Higgins.
He's a New Orleans boat builder, and he created
these small amphibious craft that were able
to actually land, not, you know,
in these big harbors, but they could actually
even land on beached.
You guys see a map behind me of the Pacific,
but also think of World War II.
You know, the war occurred in many different
places all across this world, many that had beaches
and coastlines, and we could land potentially
anything on these coastlines.
That's what Andrew Higgins thought.
So I'm going to show you a little clip
in just a second about Andrew Higgins,
but I'm going to bring up -- I used the word earlier,
this word amphibious earlier.
A lot of students, you know, like, "What does that mean?"
So I'm going to have you guys vote on this.
What does that word amphibious mean?
And I'm going to broadcast it in just 1 second.
All right, looks like most of you are voting.
Let me show it to you now.
Yeah, as most of you said, it's something that's suited
to both land and water.
You probably heard that word amphibian before, like a frog,
something that could, you know, these amphibious craft,
these landing craft that Higgins eventually creates,
they could bring anything from tanks to troops,
from a big open ship out in open water
all the way to a beach, and they were really,
you know, revolutionized how we invaded these places
that were surrounded by water, had some sort of coastline.
But instead of me describing that,
I'm actually going to have -- There's one of these landing craft designs
right here, but I'm going to actually
show you a video about that right here
about Higgins.
-It starts in the bayous of Louisiana.
During the 1930s, oil companies and trappers need boats
that can navigate the shallow waters.
In New Orleans, Andrew Jackson Higgins
begins a small shipbuilding company to build those boats.
One of his designs, the Eureka, was to be the forerunner
of a whole series of amphibious craft,
craft that would play a critical role in the coming war.
-Beginning of World War II, the United States had
no capability for amphibious landing, period,
and Andrew Higgins had an idea.
-Throughout military history, it had been nearly unthinkable
to attack a heavily defended coastline from the sea,
but Higgins believed his craft could do the job.
First, however, he had to get the attention of the Navy.
To the Bureau of Ships, Higgins was just a small
boat dealer from the Deep South, but Higgins was shrewd
and persistent.
Finally he got the Navy's attention.
-We got the contract by force of his aggressive
Irish personality in part, but also because the Higgins boat was the
best boat ever designed for that purpose.
-Soon, he was designing and building boats
that could land anything from tanks to troops.
With the addition of a ramp, these landing craft proved
far superior to anything the Bureau of Ships had seen.
Massive orders started pouring in.
Long assembly lines churned out boats 24 hours a day,
7 days a week, 700 boats a month.
Over 25,000 workers including women and African-Americans,
Higgins Industries touched every neighborhood,
every street and every family in New Orleans.
-It was really a team effort, you know, a company-wide,
from-top-to-bottom effort, and everybody could put
their 2 cents in.
-All right.
So there's a little bit of Higgins history for you.
Now Higgins, as you heard in that video,
he initially had a hard time getting the attention
of the military, but with persistence,
with this superior product that you could hear
the narrator, Harry Connick, Jr. say, could land anything
from tanks to troops.
You know, he had the superior product
that could get the job done.
He was soon competing with the more
established shipyards in the Northeast,
and Higgins' designs won him these huge government contracts,
and his tiny business that only had,
you know, a few people working in it before World War II,
a handful, now had potentially now thousands of workers
here in New Orleans mobilized, and there's some really
interesting stories behind Higgins, too.
This is one of the big ones here.
Now, these Higgins craft were used
in every major amphibious landing during World War II,
so North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Pacific,
but also of course most famously during D-Day,
and this is -- You guys have maybe seen
this picture before if you've talked about D-Day,
the largest amphibious invasion in history.
There was a question.
Someone asked, "Wasn't it difficult
to land things on the beach?"
And that answer is, yes, it definitely was,
and you can even see that illustrated in this picture.
Sometimes they couldn't get quite all the way to the beach,
and these troops are wading through this kind of knee-deep,
waist-deep water to get to the beaches of Normandy.
But these craft played a critical role,
especially in this invasion.
D-Day opened up a second front in Europe,
and eventually these troops would make their way from France
into Belgium, into Germany, and, you know,, within months,
the war would be over, 11 months after opening
the second front here, as I said, the largest
amphibious invasion in history, taking over 175,000
people mobilized, and 150,000 of those landing
on these beaches here.
So that's why, you know, this craft is so important
to the story of World War II and to the story
of our museum here.
So this is probably my favorite image
of Higgins Industries, though.
This is, you know, those Higgins boats.
Their technical name is LCVP, landing craft
for vehicles and personnel, being pushed out
of the factories here, and I love that slogan
at the top there.
The guy who wrote, "Relaxes is helping the Axis,"
as, you know, pushing everybody to work as they possibly
can to produce these amazing numbers
of all these different materials.
It was this common viewpoint shared by many people
working in these factories at the time.
And this is an interesting story, too.
This is kind of a makeshift assembly line on the street.
Higgins won this contract to build these tank gliders,
and he was supposed to deliver 50 of them
to the military within 2 weeks.
That was kind of a difficult thing to, you know, achieve,
and actually at this one point, they even had to bring
the assembly line out onto the streets --
This is a New Orleans street -- to get it done.
So sometimes even innovative and interesting ways
of getting these materials produced.
Now I'm just going to briefly talk about this
because I know the folks at Willow Run
at Yankee Air Museum will talk about this more,
but of course all of these factory jobs,
this demand for workers and people to, you know,
work in these factories 24 hours a day,
7 days a week meant potentially new workers coming into,
you know, the field for the first time.
And of course one of those groups were women.
You heard the "Rosie the Riveter"
song over and over again.
There's that very famous poster of Rosie,
and actually the women back there
are welders from Delta Shipbuilding Company,
so, you know, there were over I think 6 million women
who went to work, you know, in these defense jobs
during World War II doing kind of some of this
really hard labor sort of stuff, and the next clip
I wanted to show you -- I think that's what's next --
it's actually women at Higgins.
Specifically this woman's name is Edna Donnelly.
This is one of my favorite oral histories from the museum.
She talks about her first day at Higgins.
She and her mom were welders.
It was a little bit overwhelming,
but they eventually got used -- -Women didn't work
much at that time.
You didn't hear of too many women going out to work,
but we did because they didn't have
enough men to do all the work, so in the shipyard,
and they had to hire women, too.
My mom decided that she and I were going to go
and go to work at Higgins, so we went and see
what we could do, and the first day
I walked in the shipyard, I'll never forget that
because it was so frightening all the noise.
I went to work in a fabrication department
where they put the bulkheads together.
They had all these riggers rigging all this metal
over your head, you know, as you was walking under
along all this big sheets of metal passing over your head.
I'll never forget that first day they put that shield on my head.
They didn't tell me what I had to do or anything,
and I put the thing down, and I couldn't see anything.
It was black.
I said, "Well, how am I going to do anything
if I can't see nothing?"
I didn't think I'd make it.
I said, "Oh, I doubt if I'll stay here a whole day,"
and then I did.
And then I stayed a week, and I stayed longer and longer
and then finally, well, we were at it.
Mama, she liked it.
She really did, and Mama, she stayed,
and eventually she got to be a certified welder,
and that's her biggest story now
is to tell everybody how she was a welder.
-All right.
You guys have lots of wonderful questions
that Megan is answering right now, but, yeah, as I said,
that's one of my favorite clips from our museum of Edna.
And, you know, her story is like many women who went to war.
Now, at Higgins, in 1938, he operated a single boatyard,
less then 75 workers.
Then by late 1943, there were seven plants,
employed more than 25,000 workers.
The first plant to be racially integrated
including whites, blacks, women, seniors,
people with disabilities, and even though women
were in the workforce before World War II,
more than 6 million of them engaged in industrial work,
though as we'll see as we study later history
post-War, female workers, many of them were forced
to leave their jobs as men returned home
from the war.
They kind of became the model of, you know,
and Rosie the Riveter became the model
for the women's liberation movement
which would happen later, you know, in our
American history, and they became
the model of, you know, these tough women
who went to work and, you know,
who deserved equal opportunity.
Similar, you know, story here in some ways
with African-Americans.
Now, as I said, there's a tremendous demand
now to have skilled labor in these factories,
and because of that racial inequality,
other aspects of life on the home front
came to light during these times while trying to recruit a labor
force for this industry.
Factory work could be segregated,
and women and minorities in some cases,
in many cases, actually, received unequal pay
for equal work, and as I said,
these men and women who worked in these factories,
they, you know, in some ways paved the way
for these future changes in labor,
and they were models for necessity
for equal opportunity for women, for African-Americans,
you know, leading, you know, to the civil rights movement
and, as I said earlier, to the women's liberation
movement from the 1950s or so to 1970s.
But factory work, as I said, was sometimes segregated,
but many African-Americans were provided new opportunities
as President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802,
which prohibited discrimination in factories
that were awarded defense contracts.
So it eased some of this, but there was still some
discrimination of course there, potentially even race rioting,
as well, and still unequal pay
for very, very equal work, but as I said, these folks
that were in these factories, you know, paved the way
for these future movements that we study
in American history.
As I said, I'm just touching on that right now,
but that's something you'll talk about in your class later,
but getting back to Higgins, though,
Higgins along with some other industries
here in the United States, some other companies,
were awarded the E for Excellence Award
by the U.S. government.
And that's what actually we see in this picture here.
They're celebrating that.
Behind them is the 10,000th Higgins boat,
so there's a big ceremony, and Higgins Industries here
during World War II in total, they constructed
20,000 vessels and close to 12,000 of those
LCVPs, what we call Higgins boats.
Eisenhower, who was a general during World War II,
later in life, he said that Higgins won the war for us.
But, you know, in some ways, actually, everyone,
this story although important to New Orleans
and important to our history, important to World War II,
is not unique.
There were things like this happening all across the country
during World War II, and that's actually where I turn
and toss it over now to our friends
at the Yankee Air Museum.
We'll have Randy and Rachel come on in just 1 second,
and they're going to talk about the amazing feats of production
at Willow Run, and this assembly line,
this over-mile-long assembly line,
where they produced B-24 bomber planes,
employing thousands and thousands of people,
and at one point, they could produce one bomber
I think per hour, and the bomber had
I think over 1.5 million different parts,
and so there are people working on this long,
long assembly line, being able to churn out
one of these humongous planes, one of the largest aircraft
that were built during World War II,
you know, within an hour, so a tremendous feat
of production at Willow Run.
And so I'm going to turn it over to them right now.
Let's see if they're all connected.
-Hello!
-So Randy and Rachel.
-Good.
-Is the mike on?
-Turn it over to you guys.
-Talk about Willow Run.
-Hey, there, Randy.
How you doing?
-Take it away.
-Good.
Well, as I said, I'm going to turn it over to you
to talk about Willow Run.
I'm going to -- -You see a poster here.
It says, "Watch The Fords Go By!" an old marketing slogan,
but you don't see any cars in that picture.
You see this big four-engine bomber.
Next slide.
World War II would be a bomber war.
Bombers would be the way the United States would fight
World War II, and the United States
elected to mass-produce bombers.
The bombers ultimately would probably
save hundreds of thousands of U.S. lives
by destroying our enemies.
Airplane production and bomber production
would be the biggest problems the U.S. faced in World War II,
and only the auto companies had the ability
to build those airplanes.
Next slide.
Did she hear me?
Next slide.
Detroit is where the masters at GM and Ford
had perfected mass production, and they did this
by the ability to produce huge volumes
of standardized precision parts, and this allowed a potential
rapid buildup of production, and one of the side stories
that's not widely known, 85% of the cars in the world
were registered in the United States in 1940.
The farm boys and the high school hot rodders
knew how to fix things.
The U.S. was mechanically literate, and that gave the U.S.
a tremendous advantage in the field.
Next slide.
Just after midnight on May 10, 1940,
President Roosevelt received a phone call
from the ambassador to Belgium.
The ambassador reported that the German Army
had crossed the borders in France, Belgium, and Holland.
In 10 days, the German Blitzkrieg had defeated the combined armies of France,
England, Belgium, and Holland.
The war in Europe had taken on a new urgency,
and although the U.S. did not want to become involved,
it could not be avoided.
At this time, the U.S. had neither an army or an air force
that ranked in the top 10 worldwide.
Next slide.
General George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff,
visits Roosevelt and tells him, "There is no longer time
to waste.
The way we've been doing things will not work.
We must act now.
You must bring the industrialists
into this mobilization," and FDR knew that
it was no ordinary time.
It was time for bold action.
He needed to mobilize the U.S., so he went to Congress
and called for production of 50,000 airplanes.
This was a number beyond comprehension.
When Hermann Goering, head of the German Luftwaffe,
heard this, he laughed and said, "That's pure propaganda.
No one can build 50,000 airplanes."
Four years later, the U.S. would build 100,000 airplanes.
President Roosevelt was about to turn to Detroit's industrialists
to solve the nation's mobilization emergency.
Next slide.
Detroit was about to be asked to save the world.
FDR asked a close friend, Bernard Baruch,
"Who would be the best person to head up
the mobilization of the United States?"
Baruch said, "There's only one man who knows what to do
and how to do it, and that's William Knudsen,
president of General Motors."
18 months prior to Pearl Harbor, the president of General Motors
was about to be asked to come to Washington
to mobilize the United States.
William Knudsen, a Danish immigrant
who came to the U.S. in 1900.
He had worked his way up the auto industry at Ford and GM.
He was known by and respected by almost everyone
in the auto industry.
Next slide.
Knudsen knows it's going to take 18 months
to have the machine tools in place.
It'll take another 18 months for production to peak.
This means the U.S. will be on the defensive for 3 years,
and it will be the summer of '43
before the U.S. might can be seen in the field.
He knows that aircraft and engine tooling
would be the biggest problems they face,
and he knows that only the auto companies
have the ability to do this.
Next slide.
Summer of 1940, orders go out for tens of thousands
of airplanes.
Congress says, "Oh, those companies
will make too much money.
We'll slash the profits."
Well, the auto companies and the aircraft companies go,
"Oh, well, we won't build anything then
because we're selling everything we have overseas,"
and the Army really doesn't want the auto companies involved,
and the aircraft companies don't want the auto companies involved
because they're afraid of postwar competition.
Next slide.
On October 15, 1940, Knudsen goes to the auto show
in New York City at Madison Square Garden.
As the dinner ended, he stood up and asked the attendees
to bear with him.
He had a request to make, and he said in his
broken Danish accent, "We need more bombers
than we can hope to get.
We need them sooner than we can hope to get them.
Will you help me get them?
I want to meet with you soon in Detroit."
Next slide.
The auto men gathered 2 weeks later
at the New Center Building in Detroit.
Everyone who has anyone in the auto industry was there --
Ford, GM, Briggs, Fisher Body, Budd, Studebaker, to name a few.
Once inside the building, the auto men met a panel
that Knudsen had assembled.
It was composed of Army Air Corps officers
and aviation executives and engineers.
Detroit was about to be turned loose
to solve the bomber-production bottleneck.
This project was not the brainchild
of some theorist politician or educator,
but a proposal from Knudsen, someone who truly
understood the capabilities and limitations
of the automakers, and he was a true patriot.
Next slide.
Okay.
Major Jimmy Doolittle, famed for his daring Tokyo raid,
led the Army Air Corps men.
He held a PhD in aeronautical engineering from MIT.
He'd been recalled to active duty in July
as an act of Congress, but he was assigned to Detroit
as a technical advisor to the auto industry.
In his words, he was to perform a shotgun marriage
between the auto industry and the aircraft industry.
Doolittle had laid out blueprints
and a series of engine and airframe parts
at the nearby Graham-Paige Factory in Western Detroit.
He took the automakers there and said,
"Here are the parts we need.
Pick out the ones you can build.
I will get you a contract," and these contracts
drifted down to the small shops, who made the small parts
to make the bigger parts.
Next slide.
The B-24 was the biggest problem that the Army faced.
It was slow production.
It was an advanced airplane.
In December, Doolittle visited Henry Ford in Dearborn.
Doolittle was hoping Ford could build parts
and be the answer to the B-24 production bottleneck
and speed up production of the B-24.
Consolidated was only producing one bomber a day.
The B-24 was the most problematic airplane
that the Army had at that time.
Next slide.
They were hoping that Ford could break that bottleneck
because Ford had the largest centralized
manufacturing facility in the world,
a place where raw materials came in on a truck
at one end and cars drove out the other end.
Ford could be the answer.
Next slide.
The next month, Charles Sorensen,
head of Ford Production, would visit Reuben Fleet's Consolidated B-24
factory in San Diego.
Sorensen wanted to determine the feasibility
of producing parts for B-24s.
What Sorensen observed was a disappointment.
He viewed the major aspects of Consolidated's
production with disdain.
It was obvious to everyone except the Consolidated people
that Ford's precision parts with 2,000/10,000 of an inch would never fit
with Consolidated's handcrafted parts.
Sorensen told Consolidated he neither liked
what he saw or what he heard.
He said, "All this is pretty discouraging."
Fleet and his engineers looked at Sorensen, said,
"So how would you do it?"
Sorensen loved a challenge and answered,
"I don't know, but I'll have an answer for you in the morning."
Next slide.
Sorensen went back to his room, and the nation
was about to be shocked by Mr. Sorensen's proposal.
In his imagination, there would be no mere parts factory.
It would become the vortex of President Roosevelt's
arsenal of democracy.
Back up one slide.
He went to his room at the Coronado Hotel on North Island.
He was too restless to sleep.
Using his notes from the day and his 35 years
of manufacturing experience, he broke the B-24 bomber
down into subassemblies, section by section.
He figured out average job performance,
time flow and overhead cost.
There were stacks of papers in lines all over his room.
By 4:00 a.m., he had the proper sequence down,
production time allotted.
Then, he sketched out the floor plan of a bomber plant
that would produce one B-24 bomber in an hour.
The floor plan showed an assembly line
a mile long and 1/4 mile wide.
Next slide.
Sorensen went back the next morning to Fleet's office
with his papers under his arms.
He said to Fleet, "Ford could build a B-24 bomber in an hour
on an automotive-style assembly line."
Fleet was somewhat dazed by the scale of Sorensen's proposal
and said, "You're crazy.
No one can do that."
Sorensen's jaw set, and he responded,
"We're not interested in subassemblies.
We'll make a complete airplane or nothing."
The world was about to discover what Detroit could do.
Next slide.
Sorensen had just taken on the biggest project of his life
when he committed Ford Motor Company
to build a four-engine bomber an hour.
On the basis of pencil drawings on hotel stationery,
the Army was so desperate for airplanes
that they awarded a $200 million contract
to build the bombers and the bomber plant.
It was the largest single contract
ever awarded in that time of the history of the United States.
Sorensen was in a hurry to find 4 square miles
of flat land near Detroit, and he picked a piece of flat
land near Ypsilanti, Michigan, by a sleepy little creek
known as the Willow Run.
In April of 1941, ground was broken on a bomber plant
that would be called the Willow Run Bomber Plant.
Next slide.
People were evicted from their land here
to make sure that this plant could be built.
Next slide.
The factory was built on Washtenaw County
west of Detroit, and it would have extended
into Wayne County.
Henry Ford didn't want that, so the famous thing is,
there's a 90-degree turn in the assembly line
to keep the factory in Washtenaw County
so he could build trucks, tractors or cars
and not have to cross a county line after the war.
Next slide.
The plant was under construction.
Six months after they broke ground,
they were already producing parts in here.
Next slide.
By November 1941, 18 months after Knudsen came to Detroit,
before Pearl Harbor, all the major weapons
to be used in World War II were identified, plants being
built and under production.
In 18 months, this avalanche of material would crush the Axis.
Next slide.
1941, December, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
If the U.S. had waited until the Pearl Harbor attack to mobilize,
we might not have been able to respond
until the winter of '45 or the summer of '46
to this attack, and history could have
a much different line than it does today.
Next slide.
Called the Battle of Detroit in Time magazine,
they quoted saying that this was something
Hitler did not understand -- the miracle of
American production.
He fully understood the miracle of American production.
He feared it, but based on the German experience,
he thought it would be 4 years before we could respond.
Next slide.
Big problems came out.
When Ford got the B-24 contract, they asked Consolidated
for the blueprints, and Consolidated said,
"We don't have any blueprints.
We've got drawings, sketches, et cetera,"
and Ford had to do 30,000 engineering drawings.
That put them about 6 months behind.
Now the war comes.
Men are being drafted.
Men are volunteering for the service,
and they start hiring women off the street.
Women don't leave like the men do
because they're not being drafted,
and slowly the women in the workforce build up.
Next slide.
Production is stalled because of the tooling and the man power
and other problems coming up, so the bomber plant
is renamed "Will It Run?"
Then, the Truman Committee looking for fraud
in manufacturing comes into Detroit.
Next slide.
And they look at what's going on at Willow Run,
and there's high employee turnover.
The male workers are leaving.
There's no housing.
It's a subassembly plant being directed through a hierarchy.
Nobody will freeze the designs, and because
they change the design, they can't get production going.
Next slide.
Truman Committee gives Ford a clean bill of health and says,
"Nobody could run a factory.
What you need to do is get a dictator in this factory,"
and they appointed a plant manager
who had the ability to farm out manufacturing,
hire more women, freeze designs, and B-24 production takes off.
Next slide.
Employment peaks in 1943 at 42,000, and as I said,
because of the lower turnover of women to men,
the women increase in the bomber factory.
They make up 40% of the war.
They move into supervisory roles,
and these women were motivated by much more than the pay.
The women were motivated by a bigger calling
because they all had brothers, sons,
boyfriends, husbands overseas, and we had an interview
with one Rosie, and she talked about
she came in early in 1942, and she was a riveter
on cockpit.
[ Audio cuts out ] -Uh-oh.
It looks like we lost Randy's audio.
Oh.
Uh-oh.
And webcam.
We're going to give them a second to start back up
so they can start talking about Willow Run
and the employment of all these Rosie the Riveters.
You know, as they're getting this started up,
probably this plant is the most famous for, you know,
those women who went to work at the war,
so I'm going to let them get back signed in,
and they can talk about it a little more.
I want to tell you all, just as a side note,
you are providing so many wonderful questions,
and Megan and Rachel there are, you know, doing their best
to answer all of them, so this is really, really
great that you guys are -- You know, I think it's the most
questions that we have ever had.
So you'll see Megan.
It says me technically, but you'll see
Megan responding to them but also of course
Rachel, as well, if you see her
chiming in, as well, the director of education
at the Yankee Air Museum.
We're just going to give them another second
to get connected again.
Let's see here, and I'm going to --
Looks like they're back on now, and I'm going to
give them a second to get connected
one more time to get the story.
All right.
Here we go.
Back again.
Here we go.
Back again.
-I don't know how much you missed,
but I'm going to go back to the interview
we had with one of the Rosies we interviewed here.
-Sure.
-She came to work -- -Sure.
-Did you get that?
-Yeah, that will be great.
-You already heard that story.
Okay.
-No, we did not hear that story.
No, we did not hear that story.
-What happened was a woman came to work here in early 1942,
and she was riveting the cockpit floor for the pilots,
and after about 6 months, she was doing a good job.
They appointed her supervisor, and they gave her a metal die,
and no cockpit floor was to leave her department
unless she put her initials on it,
and 50 years later, she still had that die.
She was so proud of her role, and she said,
"No floor left my department unless it was perfect.
I had to do my part for the boys overseas
because they were our husbands, our boyfriends, our brothers,"
and another thing, Ford paid men and women the same from day one.
That was just one of his equal opportunity things.
Next slide.
I'm going to go through these next series of slides,
and you'll see the enormity of this factory
and all of the jigs and production tools.
Next slide.
And you see the prefabricated parts all going together.
They're all identical.
They're prefit.
They snap together like a set of LEGOs.
Next slide.
You see the rows of the riveters here
actually driving the rivets to put this wing together,
and a good riveter could do six rivets a minute,
and they were driving them by that rate millions per day.
Next.
And you see the center wing now going on the assembly line.
They start adding all the parts to it.
Next slide.
The cockpits with all the wiring,
all the tubing are being put together.
Next slide.
And you can see the women putting
the prefabricated parts on the wings
as the airplane comes down the assembly line.
This airplane you're looking at right
there will be flying in 5 days.
Next slide.
And you see them coming to the 90-degree turn.
Now, go through these really quick,
and you'll see there's two parallel assembly lines
with 90 airplanes under production at any one time,
and they're all moving.
Every 2 hours, these airplanes will move forward
to keep that bomber-an-hour production rate.
Next slide.
You see them going into the paint booth
and coming out the door once an hour.
Incidentally, this is the part of the factory
that the museum here has saved,
and this is going to be our future home.
The Willow Run Bomber Plant will now be open
to the public in about 4 years.
Next slide.
You can see they build the first airplane in October of '42.
A year later, they were doing 365 a month.
They could have gone to 650, but the Army literally said,
"We have no place to park them.
Slow down."
Next slide.
By 1944, 50% of the bomber weight
and 75% of the bomber engines are coming from Detroit.
Next slide.
Women make up 40% of the workforce.
They would not have been able to build
the bombers without the women.
There was such a shortage of man power in this country
that women were brought in, not for equal opportunity,
not because they needed to, but because they could do the job,
and they got these bombers.
There would have not have been the bomber force
without the women.
Next slide.
Last bomber comes off the assembly line June of 1945,
and we say farewell here at Willow Run to the bomber.
Next slide.
There, you see the last airplane built there
with the single tail coming off the assembly line.
It wasn't actually the last one.
It was going to be the last model they build,
and that became the major airport in Detroit,
and that road at the bottom became Interstate 94
when Eisenhower did the Interstate Act.
Next slide.
Was Willow Run a success?
Well, yes and no.
Production peaked after the war had basically been won,
but if the war had gone badly, had '44 been like '42 or '43,
they would have desperately needed the production.
Willow Run was making a pound of airframe
in half the time of the industry standard.
Next slide.
Following World War II, the Army evaluated the auto industry
contribution to production and said,
"The question of whether the auto industry
could be converted to production aircraft
was settled beyond debate during the war."
The success left no room for argument,
and given the limited capacity of the aircraft industry
and the enormous pressure for airplanes after May of 1940,
it's fair to conclude the Army Air Force
was justified in underwriting the Ford experiment.
Willow Run was a manifestation of the miracle
of Detroit's manufacturing mastery.
Next slide.
This is what the factory looked like.
The little red square there on the right
is the part we have saved for our future museum.
Next slide.
And this is what it looks like today.
You can see our part there at the end of the assembly line.
I thank you very much for letting me make
this presentation.
Open to Q&A.
-Thank you so much, Randy.
I'm going to pop back on, too, and I know we have
a little bit of a delay, everyone, so bear with us.
So we've had some wonderful questions,
probably the most that we've ever had in one webinar,
which is crazy.
What would you say, Megan, like, 40 questions at least?
-It's probably the most that we've ever had.
-So we've been interacting privately with you all.
-I actually have a couple questions
I thought it would be great if you could answer as a group.
-A lot of people, yeah, were curious.
You talked about a little bit the state
of Willow Run after 1945.
What happened to it?
Is the rest of it going to be demolished?
What's the story there after 1945?
[ Audio cutting out ] Is the rest of it
going to be demolished?
What's the story there after 1945?
-What happened to the factory after 1945?
It was given to the University of Michigan,
and the University of Michigan then sold it to Kaiser-Frazer Corporation
to build cars there, and they built cars until 1953,
and then General Motors' transmission factory
burned down, and General Motors
bought the bomber plant and built transmissions
there until 2010...
-Wow.
So you guys -- -...when, as part
of the bankruptcy, they eliminated this from
their production facilities.
-That's really, really amazing.
So when will Yankee Air Museum be open?
So you guys -- Yeah, that part of --
So that's really, really amazing, so when will
Yankee Air Museum be open?
-It looks like -- Oh, your volume --
-I noticed that.
Is it -- -Yeah, I know.
[ Indistinct chatter ] It looks like your volume.
-You're breaking up.
-I'm actually -- Yeah, I know.
-So if you could turn your speaker volume --
-All right.
That should be better.
-You think down or up?
-All right.
That should be better.
-So when will you guys be in that facility?
-That was loud and clear.
-So when will you guys be in that facility?
-We plan to open part of it to the public
in the spring of 2017.
-Wow.
And you'll have a new name, right?
-And that's our goal and to have it up and running by 2018.
-Wow.
And you'll have a new name, right?
-Yes, we do, and it's the National Museum of Aviation...
-Well, that is just great.
-...and Technology Located at Historic Willow Run.
-I just want to thank everyone.
We're running a little low on time,
so I just want to thank everyone for spending time with us today.
Randy and Rachel, any final, you know,
things you want to say to the audience?
Uh-oh.
It looks like you're on mute.
I'm sorry about that.
Rachel, if you wouldn't mind connecting that one more time.
Ah, technology.
-Okay.
All I can say is, if you're in the area, come visit us.
We've got a lot of fantastic things to show here and --
-Thank you.
Thank you very much, you guys, for participating today,
such a neat story.
I learned so much about Willow Run.
I had no idea about Consolidated not even having blueprints
or all that sort of stuff, the crazy things
and amazing feats that happened at this place,
so hopefully, as I said, I can get up there one day, too,
and see you guys at the museum.
I'm going to transition into another area
right now to close it all out.
You guys have been a wonderful, super-awesome audience,
as I said, most questions we've ever gotten.
Like, it's crazy, and, you know, the participation
was at its max.
If we haven't answered all of your questions,
you know, feel free to submit your e-mail,
and we can try to answer them after the webinar, as well,
so we can answer them that way.
A couple things to remind you of here in this area,
first off, on that slide, you see that Pearl Harbor
is about 2 weeks or so from now, and we don't have a special
webinar on it this year because we did this one,
but I want to remind you all that we did
a really cool one last year with author Graham Salisbury.
He wrote the book "Under the Blood Red Sun."
It was actually just turned into a film
if you guys are interested, and it's a really great
Q&A with him and a great overview
of the attack on Pearl Harbor, so there's the link there.
We've got lesson plans and fact sheets on it,
and also, a few years ago, we had a special
exhibit about it, so you can see artifacts
from that special exhibit, so that's what's on that slide.
Now, resources related to the things that we've been
talking about today, so you see resources
for teachers below that, so that's a lesson plan,
an activity and a fact sheet that, actually, my coworker
Megan, who's been answering your questions,
that she put together related to our special exhibit
that is currently up called "Manufacturing Victory:
The Arsenal of Democracy," so a lot of the things that
you saw today were from that.
Also, related to that are really important links,
so the special exhibit website, which is the top there,
the "Manufacturing Victory" one, our educational resources
at the museum, of course the Yankee Air Museum,
and some of you might have been asking numbers about production,
like, "How many of this sort of thing did we make?
How many of that sort of thing?"
That "World War II by the Numbers" is a great,
you know, answers a lot of those questions,
and then last but not least, I am always curious.
We are planning to do more of these webinars.
We do try to do four of them per school year,
so, teachers, see that little poll at the end there.
Select which webinar you'd be most interested in watching.
Hopefully, I mean, as a little hint to you guys watching live,
I plan to do all of these.
You know, we're still working out the details for some,
but I would really like to see what you
all would be most interested in participating in,
in the future, and, as I said, you know,
we'll also continue to answer your questions.
We'll try to via e-mail, any of those that didn't get answered.
Big shout-out, big thank-you to Rachel and Randy
from the Yankee Air Museum.
As I said, we learned so much from you guys,
and I hope everybody has a wonderful Friday,
a wonderful weekend and a wonderful Thanksgiving.
From Megan and Chrissy at the National World War II Museum
in New Orleans --