Big Three’s Two-Thirds

To beat plowshares into swords the U.S. Government has placed $1,900,000,000 in orders with Ford and General Motors. In the Detroit area, where Chrysler had showed the public what it was doing with its $400,000,000 in national-defense orders (TIME, Sept. 8), Ford and G.M. last week gave a condensed exhibition of what the rest of motors’ Big Three was doing.

Under the impact of the shows, run on successive days (with new motorcar model exhibitions as a sideshow—see p. 76), the eyes and pencils of 500 newsmen reeled. For in switching a big part of their vast productive machinery to making implements of war, G.M. and Ford (like Chrysler) have gone in for a more bewildering variety of products than they ever made before. News stories of the two shows were crammed with lists and statistics, from pinhead-sized ball bearings to four-motored bombers, passed over the new automobiles with a once-over-lightly.

G.M., with its tremendous slice of armament contracts ($1,200,000,000), was unable to give its guests a firsthand look at all the work it was doing. Its 500-odd defense jobs are parceled out among 60 manufacturing plants in 35 cities. But in a hall at the company proving ground at Milford, G.M.’s visitors saw samples of G.M.’s vast work-in-progress: airplane instruments, Army trucks ranging from earth-borers (for planting land mines) to floodlight units, guns, airplane, automobile and ship engines, propellers. Prime exhibit was an Allison airplane engine. G.M. has contracts for $242,000,000 worth of them, is turning them out in Indianapolis at a rate of close to 700 a month. Other G.M. jobs:

> $211,000,000 worth of 1,200-h.p. Pratt & Whitney radial engines, which Chevrolet and Buick hope to turn out at the rate of 2,000 a month by 1942’s end.

> $109,000,000 in .30-and .50-caliber machine guns (one of which south-pawed Board Chairman Alfred P. Sloan demonstrated, sighting with his left eye—see cut).

> $71,000,000 worth of controllable-pitch airplane propellers.

> $57,400,000 worth of trucks.

> $9,500,000 worth of 75-and 105-mm. shells for cannon.

> 18,000 of the Navy’s newest U.S. antiaircraft gun: the 20-mm. Oerlikon rapid-firer for use against low-flying attacks (cost secret).

Ford’s $700,000,000 defense job could be more easily comprehended. Fordmen led reporters through the great new Ford aircraft-engine plant where the first of 9,043 huge 2,000-h.p. Pratt & Whitney radials are being built, under a license agreement that will give United Aircraft Corp. a royalty of only $1 an engine. Completed in eleven months, the $37,000,000 plant is turning out one engine a day, should produce 300 a month by year’s end.

In thundering engine test cells, P. & W’s bellowed. Elsewhere engineers were working out Ford’s experimental 2,000-h.p., — G.M.’s Engineer Charles F. Kettering. liquid-cooled engine, seemed well satisfied with the progress they had made in less than a year. Also in the works was a small eight-cylinder, air-cooled engine for tanks and airplanes.

Walking themselves footsore around the great River Rouge plant, newsmen spotted Army Blitz-buggies everywhere. Ford has delivered 1,500 of them, has 2,500 still to come. They saw a great aircraft apprentice school geared to turn out aircraft mechanics 3,000 at a time. And, crossing a stretch of land that last year was a swamp, they saw Henry Ford’s favorite contribution to national defense: the Navy Service School. There, quartered in eight gleaming white barracks (built at Ford’s expense), live 1,400 sailormen, learning in factory shops and classrooms how to be mechanics, electricians, ship’s fitters, carpenters, metalsmiths for the Navy. By November enrollment will be 2,000, and a movie theater, 60-bed hospital and recreation hall will have been completed.

But the prize Ford national-defense exhibit was not at River Rouge. It was at Willow Run (near Ypsilanti), 17 miles away. There, on a stretch of flat Michigan landscape, Ford is building its $47,000,000 bomber factory.

Henry Ford assigned his crack speedster to run the job at Willow Run: hard-boiled Vice President Charles E. Sorensen, who is also the doctor in aircraft-engine building and all the other Ford production projects. Last week three-quarters of the steelwork on Willow Run’s vast plant (275 acres of floor space) was finished. Bricklaying was well under way, and under gaunt girders workmen were installing machinery. Alongside, workmen were inlaying the turf with the seven great runways of a new airport.

It was the biggest thing Detroit’s visitors had seen. It had to be big, for from that airport within a year Henry Ford expects to fly 250 brand-new four-motored Consolidated (6-24) bombers every month. And there was another reason for the blistering rate at which the work was going along. For Ford has already set the date when the first 6-24, powered by Pratt & Whitney engines made in the River Rouge plant, is expected to come off the line, ready for flight: the week before Christmas.