The walls of the factory were not even up, so engineers brought a steam locomotive in to keep the place warm for the workers during Michigan’s bitter winter of 1940-41. Its goal: to build swarms of tanks according to auto-making mass production principles-something never accomplished before.Įven before the factory had been completed, the first Chrysler M3 tank rolled off the assembly line. “I’ve never seen one of these things.” Soon after, Chrysler broke ground on what would come to be known as the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant, situated in what is now the suburb of Warren. Keller, the chief executive of Chrysler, and asked him if Chrysler could build tanks. The company's first tank rolled off the assembly line even before the factory walls were completely built. Workers at a Chrysler plant assemble tanks. It’s as faithful as a dog, as strong as a mule and as agile as a goat.” The famed WWII war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote of the jeep (just before he was killed in 1945, next to the one he had been riding in), “Good Lord, I don’t think we could continue the war without the jeep. Veterans Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Alabama.Īs this vehicle took on the name jeep (the origin of the moniker is highly debated), it also took on a life of its own, and today it has been called the grandfather of all SUVs. Miraculously, the first jeep that Ford constructed-GP No.1 Pygmy-still exists it’s on display at the U.S. Because the vehicles by both had to use interchangeable parts, they were very similar. The first two went on to make some 660,000 “blitz buggies”-Willys built 376,397 and Ford, 282,352. Three companies built prototypes: Willys-Overland, Ford and Bantam. The vehicle had to conquer all kinds of terrain, and it had to be able to carry a 625-pound load. In 1940, the Army asked car companies to come up with a design for a lightweight (2,175 pounds or less), four-wheel-drive vehicle that could be mass-produced and essentially take the place of what horses had been in warfare for centuries. Jeeps have been called the grandfather of all SUVs. Because of Ford, the B-24 is still the most mass-produced American military aircraft of all time.Ī Bantam jeep negotiates rough terrain. The company turned out a total of 8,685 B-24s.

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.”īy 1945, Ford had succeeded in building Liberators at a rate of one per hour. Its goal was to apply auto-making mass-production principles to 300-plus mph, 56,000-pound (when fully loaded) bombers. Ford had never built a four-engine bomber, and aviation experts insisted it could not be done.Ĭonstruction on the Willow Run Bomber Plant began that spring and it soon became the largest factory under one roof in the world. In the spring of 1941, months before Pearl Harbor but well after the war had begun in Europe, Edsel Ford (Henry Ford’s only son) and Charlie Sorensen, the company’s foremost production guru, began mobilizing the most ambitious industrial project in history up to that time: 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. By 1945, Ford was churning out B-24 Liberators at the rate of one per hour. Production line at the Ford Willow Run bomber plant. armed services into the greatest military machine in history.” As Arthur Herman wrote in his book Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by the war’s end, Knudsen had gone from the president of GM to “the man who had built the U.S. Knudsen went on to become a lieutenant general in the Army, the first and only civilian American to receive this honor, and those Detroit auto men became heroes in the battle of the assembly lines.

“The first half of 1941 is crucial,” Knudsen told a gathering of the most powerful Motor City executives. Soon after, at the New York Auto Show, Knudsen gave a keynote speech that lit the flame of industrial Detroit. So Knudsen gave up one of the most well compensated jobs in the nation to take on a government position at a salary of $1. William Knudsen was president of General Motors-the largest corporation in history-in 1940 when President Franklin Roosevelt charged him with heading up all military production in the U.S. Knudsen traded his high-paying auto-executive job for a $1 government salary to help lead Detroit's war-production effort. Roosevelt at the White House for the first meeting about the new National Defense Advisory Commission. William Knudsen, president of General Motors, meeting with President Franklin D.

Crazy tanks from wwii