Miracles in Minneapolis

It was mid-October off Guadalcanal. The Jap cruiser wheeled and turned like a crazed whale. On the pursuing U.S. destroyer Duncan nimble fingers adjusted a torpedo director, sent a tin fish on its way. Smoke and water geysered up. The Jap shuddered, rotted over, started towards the bottom.

The maker of that Jap-killing torpedo director was no oldtime munitions outfit, no veteran precision manufacturer, no war-wise Naval ordnance plant. It was energetic, ingenious General Mills Inc., which before the war was a peaceful flour miller (Gold Medal, Bisquick, Wheaties). But last week General Mills was running a huge Naval fire control plant, was hard at work turning out complicated gunsights, torpedo directors, smoke-screen gadgets, telescope and periscope prisms.

The Invitation. General Mills got into war work half by choice, half by invitation. The first war orders came naturally—dried eggs for Lend-Lease, precooked breakfast food and vitamin preparations for the Army, oat flour for paratroopers’ basic rations. Then General Mills thought of its small, efficient manufacturing division (food-packaging machinery, milling equipment), decided to get a few machine-made orders. The first job was making plungers for ammunition hoists. Then General Mills got a prism order, ran it off in record time by perfecting a device to grind 54 prisms simultaneously. With this greyhound start, the company decided to bid on bigger & tougher things.

Then & there General Mills planked down $1,000,000 for an abandoned two-block plant in Minneapolis, enough precision machinery to fill it and more headaches than the company had in 80 years of flour-milling. Sample: huge, 20-ft. high, 800-part Naval gunsights (parts must be machined to within 1/10,000 of an inch), which are perhaps the most complex type of Naval ordnance in production. General Mills upped its engineering-inventing staff from five to 100, increased ordnance employment from 50 to 1,500—and listened carefully to Navy advice.

The Credit. Results came fast: a sharp cut in gunsight building time, praise from the Navy and millions of dollars in orders for torpedo directors (1,000 parts, superfine machining), gyroscopic contraptions to offset warship roll, other precision instruments. Meanwhile General Mills put at least one super-secret device into production behind locked and guarded doors —a gadget to smoke-screen an entire city in seconds.

For this fancy production record General Mills is modest, even refuses to say who gets the credit. But one man stands out—glad-handing Harry A. Bullis, who started to learn the flour business as a mill laborer, in 20 years was auditor, comptroller, secretary and executive vice-president. An amateur prophet, Orator Harry Bullis in May 1940 publicly predicted the U.S. would be at war sooner than expected, started pushing the world’s largest flour miller into munitions work long before any mill-sized war contracts were in sight. Fortnight ago General Mills directors gave Harry Bullis a well-earned reward: the president’s chair.