Something is happening that Adolf Hitler does not yet understand—a new
re-enactment of the old American miracle of wheels and machinery, but
on a new scale. This time it is a miracle of war production, and its
miracle-worker is the automobile industry. Even the American people do not appreciate the miracle, because it is
too big for the eye to see in an hour, a day or a month. It is, in
fact, too big to be described. It can only be understood by taking a sample. There is no better sample than Henry Ford. Two years ago he was an
earnest pacifist who refused to take an order for plane engines for
Britain. Today, like the rest of the industry, he is not only working
for war, but for war alone, and working as he never worked before. A
generation ago he performed the first miracle of mass production. Today
he is only one of many miracle-workers in his industry, but his part in
their common job is itself greater than the greatest job he ever did before. These things are not exaggerations, but the truth about Detroit today is
not easy to believe. Enormous Room. A year ago Willow Run was a lazy little creek west of
Detroit, surrounded by woodlands, a few farmhouses, a few country
schools. Today Willow Run is the most enormous room in the history of
man: more than a half-mile long, nearly a quarter of a mile wide. In
this great room errands are run by automobile; through the flash of
moving machinery and the dust of construction, no man can see from one
end to the other. The plant contains 25,000 tons of structural steel. By summer, 70,000
men will work in this room; by December, 90,000. In planning the building, Ford Motor Co.'s drafting room used five miles
of blueprint paper a day, seven days a week, for six months. In this enormous workroom Ford hopes eventually to turn out a
four-motored Consolidated bomber every hour. The raw materials will go
in at one end; from the other will emerge the 30-ton machines, coughing
with life. The bombers will be born from half-mile assembly lines so
fast that Ford will not try to store them. The deadly infants will be
ranked on a great new airfield, stretching out from the assembly end of
the plant, with enough white concrete runways to make a highway 22
miles long. From those runways the newborn bombers will make their
test flights, then take off for service. Detroit has other enormous rooms, and out of them armies will roll and
fleets will fly. Endlessly the lines will send tanks, jeeps, machine
guns, cannon, air torpedoes, armored cars. Ford's River Rouge plant,
where Ford steamships dump coal and iron ore and limestone to be
magicked into steel and glass and machinery, has turned its two square
miles of self-contained industrial empire to the tools of war. Chrysler already has three assembly lines of olive-drab tanks moving
through its tank arsenal . Guns, shells and motors are at last in mass production. General
Motors, once biggest of all automakers, is already producing arms of
all kinds at the rate of a billion dollars a year. Packard and
Studebaker are making airplane engines; Hudson makes anti-aircraft guns;
Nash is at work on engines and propellers.
