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Arsenal of Democracy
A scene late in the epic miniseries Band of Brothers provides something of a shoutout to the role the Motor City played in World War II.
The men of Easy Company and other members of the 101st Airborne Division are heading up the autobahn in jeeps and trucks while a column of surrendered German troops marches or rides in horse-draw wagons in the other. Pvt. David Webster stands up in the back of a truck and yells at the Germans, “Say hello to Ford, and General f------ Motors! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking?”
Webster didn’t mention Chrysler, but he could have.
The scene is a bit of an overstatement. The Germans had some of the best-engineered weapon systems on the battlefield, but they were eventually overwhelmed by the sheer volume of burgeoning American industrial might. And much of it came from Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers, which quickly retooled their assembly lines to produce massive amounts of tanks, bombers and other war material.
The people of Detroit and the manufacturing might of southeast Michigan accounted for 30% of the war material produced in the United States during World War II, according to several estimates, more than any other American city. That contribution remains a source of pride for the city and state.
“It was really the mobilization of that manufacturing capacity surrounding the automotive community at the time that made the difference,” says Maj. Gen. Paul D. Rogers, the adjutant general of Michigan. “It was just an incredible transformation and an all of society commitment to the war effort.”
The 146th General Conference & Exhibition, Aug. 23–26, in Detroit will celebrate the Motor City’s efforts in World War II. They are incorporated into the conference theme, The National Guard: Built to Defend America.
Appropriately, Detroit grew to be known as “The Arsenal of Democracy,” a term coined by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during one of his Fireside Chat radio broadcasts.
On Dec. 29, 1940, almost a year before the United States formally entered World War II, Roosevelt called on the nation “to arm and support” the Allied powers, including Britain. He said the military assistance would “enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.”
The president urged Americans to stand up as the “arsenal of democracy” as though it was their own country at war. He called on the nation to unite to produce vast shipments of weapons to aid Europe, adding the American people had both the responsibility and the means to turn the tide of the war.
Roosevelt thought getting Detroit involved was key. Even before his speech to the nation, he installed the president of General Motors, William Knudsen, as the nation’s chairman of military production. Knudsen gave up one of the most lucrative jobs in the nation to take on a government position at a salary of $1.
Knudsen’s first assignment was to unite the auto industry behind the effort. He gave a keynote speech at the 1940 New York Auto Show that lit the flame of industrial Detroit. “The first half of 1941 is crucial,” Knudsen told a gathering of the most powerful Motor City executives. “Gentlemen, we must out-build Hitler.”
It was an ambitious goal. At the time, Nazi Germany was a superpower in control of much of Europe. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army ranked only 19th in size in the world, just behind Portugal, and had largely obsolete equipment. It also still used horses.
The effort also required Detroit to put the familiar on hold — manufacturing automobiles — and embrace the unfamiliar, producing war materials.
It was really the mobilization of that manufacturing capacity surrounding the automotive community at the time that made the difference.
—Maj. Gen. Paul D. Rogers, the adjutant general of Michigan
SOON AFTER TAKING OVER the chairman of military production, Knudsen reportedly called K.T. Keller, the chief executive of Chrysler, and asked him if Chrysler could build tanks. “I don’t know,” came the answer. “I don’t know what a tank looks like but show me one and I’ll tell you whether I can make it or not.”
According to Arthur Herman’s 2013 talk about his book Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World II,” Knudsen and Keller traveled to Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois. Keller and his chief engineer, Eddie Hunt, got a ride in an old M3 Lee tank. They stepped out and said, “Yeah, we can make these. How many do you need?”
Within weeks, Chrysler and the U.S. government signed a contract. The government agreed to build a plant in present-day Warren, Michigan, where Chrysler would make tanks. The company named the new plant the Detroit Arsenal.
But Chrysler quickly formed its own ideas about tanks and how to produce them, Herman says. Engineers noted design flaws in the M3 and problems that made them not only hard to make but also less effective on the battlefield. Riveted armor was one example. The Army believed welding was stronger. Chrysler proved that wasn’t the case.
Welding not only made it easier and faster to produce the tanks, but it also made them safer. When antitank shells hit riveted armor from the outside, the rivets would shake loose and become lethal pieces of metal that could wound or even kill the crewmen.
Even before the factory had been completed, the first Chrysler M3 tank rolled off the assembly line, according to History.com. The walls of the factory were not even up, so engineers brought a steam locomotive in to keep workers warm during Michigan’s bitter winter of 1940-41. As the factory swelled to 1.25 million square feet, the company switched to M4 Sherman tanks, one of the war’s best known armored vehicles.
When World War II ended in August 1945, the Chrysler Corporation had built 22,234 tanks in the Detroit Arsenal, more than the Third Reich during the war years.
Detroit also produced a variety and high volume of other material: bombs, rifles, torpedoes, ammunition, food, clothing and helmets. However, it was the complex systems that received the greatest recognition. This included jeeps, trucks, tanks and aircraft.
“We kept pumping out at volumes that the enemy could not,” says Brandt Rosenbusch, the collections manager at Chrysler Group LLC, which is now owned by Stellantis, another automaker. “The Germans and the Japanese just did not have the industrial might that the United States as a whole and the Chrysler Corporation could muster.”
Along the way, Detroit became a destination for those looking for good jobs. By the summer of 1943, 350,000 workers from other parts of the country had relocated to the Motor City. In all, more than 700,000 people worked in the Detroit war industry during World War II.
The demand for labor shattered many existing barriers. Scores of African Americans left the South for Detroit in what became known as “the Great Migration,” Rosenbusch says. Women also began performing jobs that once largely belonged to men. About 140,000 women were on or supporting the assembly lines in Detroit. At one point, Ford’s Willow Run plant near Detroit hired 117 women in one week. They made the same wage as their male counterparts — $1.60 an hour.
The Detroit Historical Society says the flood of newcomers strained the city’s housing and municipal services, with many new workers and their families forced to live in trailers or hastily built dorms. Food and gas rationing made life in the city even harder.
FORD TOOK ON THE BIGGEST PROJECT of the war, perhaps the most ambitious industrial project in history up to that time.
In the spring of 1941, months before Pearl Harbor but well after the war had begun in Europe, Ford began construction on 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.
Ford had never built a four-engine bomber, and aviation experts insisted the effort was doomed to fail.
The automaker completed the one-mile-long, 3.5-millionsquare-foot Willow Run Bomber Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, outside of Detroit in September 1942. It was the largest assembly plant ever built up to that time. It had an airport next to the factory.
The idea was to apply auto-making mass-production principles to 300-plus mph, 56,000-pound (when fully loaded) bombers. 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.”
And it worked. By the end of 1943, Willow Run produced bombers at a rate of one per hour. The last bomber, number 8,685, moved off the assembly line June 24, 1945.
Operational squadrons took possession of the B-24s right from the factory. Pilots, co-pilots, navigators and crew chiefs were assigned as crew for each aircraft, sleeping on 1,300 cots as they waited for aircraft to roll off the assembly line.
The B-24 and the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress were the kind of long-range, high-altitude heavy bombers Roosevelt and his advisors believed would be the decisive weapon in the war. They could strike the enemy’s heartland, hammering military installations, bridges, factories, rail yards, fuel storage tanks and communications centers.
Defense officials got exactly what they were looking for, thanks in large part to the Motor City.
John Goheen is the NGAUS director of communications. He can be reached at john.goheen@ngaus.org. Mark Hensch is the senior writer/editor. He can be reached at mark.hensch.@ngaus.org.
