How WW2 America Would Eventually Dominate The Skies | War Factories | Timeline

hi everybody welcome to this timeline documentary my name is dan snow and here i am in a lancaster bomber cockpit one of the few remaining lancasters from the second world war to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hit it's like netflix for history hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians follow the information below this film or just search online for history hit and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show the untold story of war production all wars are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph over the other side hitler knows he needs industry if he wants to build a war machine this is a war between the factory [Music] the real story of how the second world war was fought and won the united states is about to launch the single greatest program of armament production in human history [Music] they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production the secret war of the factories that would decide the fate of the whole world gotta get back to work this is the industrial heartland of the american midwest here a half hours drive from detroit michigan sits willow run or what's left of it we're standing in the final assembly bay of the willow run bomber plant built at willow run airport back in 1941. the part we're looking at right now is 144 000 square feet of a 4.2 million square foot factory that was built to produce the b-24 bomber like so much of this part of the country the willow run factory has fallen into disrepair its place in history largely forgotten but the fall plant at willow run is perhaps more than any other factory a symbol of the economic and industrial revolution that won the allies the war [Music] when detroit and the factories of the american midwest were the arsenal of democracy this building is a manifestation one of the last one existing of that miracle of production that took place in the u.s and it's our duty here at the museum to continue preserving this artifact so that a hundred years from now people will come here and learn of this moment in american history when we stood up to the aggression in the world and made the world a better place just like they go to gettysburg today and visit d-day but before the great triumph of american industry would come the catastrophic collapse of europe may 15 1940 winston churchill has been prime minister of great britain for five days when he's woken by a phone call from the short-lived prime minister of france paul reynolds we are beaten he says we have lost the battle within a month of this phone call german troops are marching down the champs-elysees western europe has all but fallen in the battle of france the royal air force loses nearly half its aircraft britain's shores are left almost undefended fewer than 700 spitfires and hurricanes remain germany and the luftwaffe are camped across the channel with a force of over 4 000 fighters and bombers the speed at which the situation in europe goes from alarming to critical to virtually hopeless sends shock waves around the world and to one place in particular washington dc the german blitzkrieg has shown the world that modern warfare will be a battle for the skies british factories are working to full capacity to replace their decimated air force but britain is vulnerable and churchill fears that a german invasion may be imminent churchill realizes um that they can't manufacture enough aeroplanes to stay in the war so what he does is send a commissioner to the united states to ask for help [Music] but there's a problem america may be the world's great producer of motor vehicles but it is not a nation known for its aircraft at this point in time the united states doesn't even have an independent air force america was by far the most motorized nation on earth it was the only country where working class very average people routinely owned a car hot ziggy boys ain't she a dandy americans had more experience in using automated factory processes than any other country and doing it on a large scale but they're still relatively few aircraft being manufactured at uh the end of the depression as world war ii breaks out in 1939. in 1940 total american aircraft production is barely 550 a month britain once a thousand per month one of these you have to realize which is hard to grasp now living as we do in a world where the united states spends more money on defense than the rest of the planet put together is that before pearl harbor the american armed forces particularly the army and the air force were minute since the 20s the u.s has been dramatically scaling back its military the us after world war one became an isolationist nation and they figured if we never had a military we would never again become involved in a war war industries our only function is to make a profit for their owners in a war setting that hurts everyone so they shut down all the defense industries they punished companies who owned production tools to make war weapons americans want no more war most of all they want no more participation in foreign wars since then governments had done everything possible to hinder war production they impose profit caps on the sale of war materials they ban the sale of arms to foreign powers in a few short years the american war industry is effectively destroyed but across the atlantic ocean europe is preparing for war in may of 1940 the germans in their blitzkrieg invaded the low countries of france belgium holland and this was a wake-up call to the u.s roosevelt is warned that with the current state of the american armed forces germany would only need five divisions to take the country the united states is faced with a difficult decision bring back the war economy or risk invasion i ask this congress for authority and for funds sufficient to manufacture additional munitions and war supplies of many kinds to be turned over to those nations which are now in actual war with aggressor nations george c marshall head of the army went to president roosevelt and said you've got to bring the industrialists into this mobilization if we're going to succeed and roosevelt said i want the top manufacturing guys in this country and one of his top advisors said number one is bill newton of general motors number two is bill newton of general motors and we can all guess who number three was bill nudsen was the top man at general motors he'd emigrated from denmark at the age of 21 he had little formal education but had worked his way up to an important role at ford by 1911. he'd worked for ford through the company's development into the mass production icons they became before leaving to become president of chevrolet and then general motors knudsen was a famous organizer he really understood business industry and manufacturing like nobody else but this is going to be an enormous task you had almost no military infrastructure there was no large army there was virtually no air force it all had to be created from scratch in almost no time at all and the administration the government recognized very realistically that there was just no way they could do this by themselves what they had to do was to reach out to private industry the private sector and diverted to the war effort nutson is going to try something radically different to the other war economies of the world knudsen is going to keep the american war economy free unplanned and open and he will allow the companies therein to turn a profit there are two different ways of getting people to do something that you want them to do and these are famously the current mistake you can give people orders with the threat of severe sanctions ultimately being shot if you don't do what you want or you can give them a reason for doing it because they will gain from doing it and what the american government basically chose to do during world war ii was to rely upon carrots rather than sticks they provided an enormous carrot in the shape of highly profitable government contracts to produce the material that the war effort required but despite this new unshackling of american industry the british are short of options when it comes to fighter planes there's at that time not one single fighter plane being produced in america that would meet the standards required in europe at the time eventually the british approach a small aviation company called north american aviation but at this stage north american don't produce any fighters so the british approached them with the designs of a fighter from another company the curtis p40 warhawk mr knudson america's beaver brook with the assistant war secretary went to look at the tomahawk number 2000. north american uh looking at the designs pretty honestly and knowing they're not good enough so what they say to the british is do you know what give us 120 days and we will build you a prototype of a new fighter even for an experienced aircraft company this would be an exceptionally short window in which to design construct and fly a brand new fighter but there a modern manufacturing company run in the pioneering spirit of the american motor industry north american actually succeed in churning out a prototype with almost three weeks to spare and they put it in front of the british and they say ta-da the na73x and some brilliant british person says well that sounds absolutely rubbish and eventually we rename it the mustang the british place an order for 320 aircraft and north american go into production the mustang is a simple but elegant design it's built making use of all the most recent advances in american vehicle production by using new lightweight rivets the mustang is able to carry a new fuel tank massively increasing its range its various parts are produced separately and joined only later in the process keeping the final assembly as smooth as possible it was designed to be mass produced it was very successfully mass produced but completely set up to run in a different production mode from what was the standard or the norm for the british aircraft industry designed drawn and produced within 12 months which is incredible you couldn't do that now in 10 years but in britain the reaction to the mustang is mixed it is undoubtedly fast with a top speed of 380 miles per hour it's also highly maneuverable at heights of up to fifteen thousand feet but performance tails off dramatically at higher altitudes as a result the raf can only use it for low level operations and usaf show no interest in the fighter whatsoever the mustang might well have ended up in obscurity had it not been for ron harker who was a test pilot at rolls royce harker joined rolls-royce before the war and he'd flown a large number of aircraft and he liked a lot about the p-51 the mustang hawker realized that if it had a more powerful engine the mustang can actually be a great plane and of course because he's working for rolls royce he knows just the engine the rolls-royce merlin 61. everybody knows the merlin it powered all our aircraft to a greater or lesser extent then they decided to start fitting the merlin into the mustang to make that into the fighter it became the only problem is that britain simply does not have the capacity to produce enough rolls-royce merlin engines to power these planes their only hope is to have the engines produced in the united states when bill nudsen gets the phone call from the british there's only one company on his list who else would you go to to mass produce an engine but ford bill nutson is good friends with henry ford's son edsel who's by now president of the company so he gives him a ring and he tells him that britain has placed an order for 6 000 new merlin engines everything seems to be in place when knudsen receives a call from edsel ford his father the great henry fault has overruled him he refuses to make engines for the british war effort actually there are quite a few reasons why ford will not agree to this first of all he's anti-war he's also a massive isolationist and he simply doesn't believe that the us should be getting involved and there's another reason ford won't go anywhere near something that had roosevelt's paw prints on it [Music] in a meeting with knudsen henry ford vents his fury he warns knudsen that he's getting involved with bad people in washington many isolationists see roosevelt as a tyrant and see this government-backed production program as a play for power ford announces to the press that so long as he lives his company will not supply war materials to foreign powers he reneges on the deal and a knudsen will have to look elsewhere the company he turns to to produce the merlins is the packard motor company packard's vast factory has loomed over the city of detroit since 1910 their main trade has always been luxury cars but they were of henry ford's generation and understood the principles by which he worked but when the plans for the merlin arrive at packard the american engineers are baffled they'd come expecting a few papers instead the plans fill a crate the size of a freight car it becomes clear that the british way of doing things is not going to work for the mass production techniques of packard surprising as it may seem the packard motor company wanted rolls-royce to be much more precise in its measurements when it came to the rolls-royce merlin why because they were building machines to make these engines they wanted to make them on a very large scale and they understood very well the mass production was precision production measurements are adapted from british to american and broken down into the levels of detail required for mass production before long merlin engines are rolling off the production line rather than the small highly trained and specialized workforce at the british factories packard's production line means they can recruit unskilled labour and produce the merlins at a rate three times faster than their counterparts so now the americans are mass producing the merlin engine but they're also mass producing the muster and the real game changer is when they put the two together the p51 mustang in almost every respect was superior to the german fighters it's only by chance that they experimented with this merlin engine and the p-51 airframe and you come up with this completely new kind of aircraft with the support of the american motor industry the battle for britain's skies is turning in the allies favor in 1940 german aircraft losses are twice as high as the british while they struggle to replace them at the same speed in 1939 germany produces four times as many aircraft as the united states by 1941 the us out produces germany by 50 percent by the end of 1940 bill nutson has already issued billions of dollars worth of war production contracts the germans during the nazi period saw america essentially through the lens of hollywood and also jewish banking they saw the united states as a combination of jewish finance and decadent jewish culture and they simply ignored the enormous productive power and capacity of the american economy for hitler and the nazis america had been corrupted by jewish culture hollywood was jewish capitalism was jewish and so they thought was america this is an economy that could produce enormous amounts of consumer goods that just shows how addicted to comfort the american public are what they did not realize of course was that an economy which was so enormously productive could equally produce enormous amounts of weapon systems and materiel what the axis powers realized by the end of 1941 is that the united states industrial program has barely started to realize its potential and if it ever does reach this potential they don't stand a chance well the japanese do see that the americans have a vast rearman program but until that mobilization fully kicked in which would be a couple of years japan had a window where they have tactical superiority on the 7th of december 1941 a japanese force of 400 aircraft launches a pre-emptive strike on the american naval base at pearl harbor hawaii more than 2 000 american servicemen are killed along with dozens of civilians 188 aircraft are destroyed along with three battleships the attack on pearl harbor does not affect america's war production really in the long term all they've done is hack off all of the isolationists that didn't want america to go to war and ensure that basically you've poked the bear [Music] the day after pearl harbor the united states declares war on japan germany and italy in their turn declare war on the united states at last america has entered another world war a national emergency is declared and america goes into full mobilization mode in an address to the nation roosevelt unleashes his plans for the new american war factory i believe that this nation should plan at this time a program that will provide us with 50 000 military and naval planes the way that the united states would reach these numbers would change the relationship between government and big business forever immediately before pearl harbor relations between the american political class in the shape of franklin roosevelt and his government and the american business class were probably at an all-time low the business class felt that they had an administration that was ideologically hostile to their interests and to the very existence of a free market economy then like a bolt from a blue the japanese attack on pearl harbor and quite suddenly everything has changed now was the time to actually reach out to uh large business in particular uh make a deal with them and bring them on board as part of a process of producing what was needed to win the war effort as a wartime president roosevelt is first and foremost a pragmatist he now puts his faith in knudsen and the business leaders of the country i think the way to understand the working of the u.s war production system is that it's essentially a kind of corporate capitalist model of the economy it's not a radical free enterprise approach but at the same time it is an explicit rejection of a command socialist economy since the german failure to take control of the skies in the battle of britain the tide has been beginning to turn against the luftwaffe the battle britain was won by the few the spitfires and hurricanes that rose up in the sky were defensive weapons to defend england [Music] the four engine bomber had been identified as the offensive weapon that would take the war to germany and the demand for four engine bombers outstripped manufacturing by eons the allies desperately need a new bomber and in vast numbers the only bomber that might fit the bill is the b-24 it carried more it went further and it went faster they wanted the b-24 by the tens of thousands but in 1941 american industry is still in a state of decline the depression and stagnation of the 1930s has left industry crippled new deal profit caps and over unionization had held back industry since roosevelt had taken power american industry might be willing and able but it wasn't ready when war was declared the knock-on effects of the great depression mean that america is lagging behind in industry in 1929 u.s machine tool sales had amounted to 185 million dollars by 1932 there were only 22 million america's factories are ill-equipped for the shift in production that lies ahead and the start-up costs for producing 125 000 planes a year would be enormous to handle an operation on this scale knudsen knows he will need an experienced manufacturer once again he turns to ford ford remained reluctant to enter the military economy but after the german declaration of war there can be no more question selling arms the british empire is one thing but providing weapons in the defense of his own nation is another now that the us has officially declared war ford finally agrees to be part of the war economy but he doesn't want to build engines or parts he and his team are going to be building planes this factory will be called willow run and it's going to be bigger than any factory ever built before the first thing that has to be done is to work out a production process for the new ford produced b-24s and the man that ford sends to observe the us air force's current operation is charles sorensen otherwise known as cast iron charlie charles sorensen was an old-time ford employee he'd been at ford 35 years and he'd worked his way from pattern maker to vice president of manufacturing he was the guy that designed the model t line he mastered cast iron in place of forging he was a master of manufacturing what he saw at the consolidated b-24 factory was a complete disaster [Music] sorensen went back to the coronado hotel which still stands in san diego and after dinner he went to his room and he took his notes from the day and he started on small scraps of paper flows to the middle of the room parts to minor assemblies major assemblies sub-assemblies and at four in the morning he had designed a factory that would build one b-24 bomber an hour and the army said start this project right now on the basis of pencil drawings on the back of hotel placemats the army awarded a 200 million dollar contract to start the willow run bomber factory the b-24 would be the ford model t of the sky [Music] charles sorensen will build his new factory here in the industrial suburbs of detroit it will be called willow run and it will be unlike anything the world has seen the b-24 liberators they'll be constructing here consist of nearly 500 000 different parts and components sorensen breaks down the assembly of these parts into a few thousand sequences that will themselves be divided into nine different departments the part we're looking at right now is and forty four thousand square feet of the 4.2 million square foot factory that was built to produce the b-24 bomber this is about five percent of the original factory there were two 3500 foot assembly lines that started and moved these airplanes through the factory assembly iron station one movement per hour until they came out the door but while willow run is an incredible sight to behold its production levels are falling well under what sorensen had promised the u.s air force and it's becoming a serious problem willow run did not get off the flying start in fact it earned the nickname will it run the timetable they had built which would allow them to start making production tooling to build airplanes was based upon the blueprints they developed in san diego in early 1940 but the airplane had been modified so much that much of the blueprints were obsolete and they had to go back and redesign the airplane the b-24s were not cars the technology was state-of-the-art and still being perfected it's not an easy leap to sort of be making door panels for a car one day and then making wing ribs or putting together a flap or an aileron for an aircraft a couple of weeks later the tolerances are far far greater the materials are much tougher to work with yes you're still dealing with drilling holes in luxury metal but the finish the finesse the limits involved a world away in desperation sorensen turns to his old rival at general motors bill nutson world war ii is full of cases where attempts are made to mass produce that essentially fail and the willow run factory is one example it's very easy to turn out identical aeroplanes but if you need to go back and change them you lose the advantage that you get from producing in the large scale in the first place knudsen sees that constant revision to the designs of the b-24 makes keeping the production moving almost impossible so ford went to consolidated and said i can build bombers if you freeze the design of the airplane i can't build a 1936 ford and then a 1937 ford and then a 1935 ford on a moving assembly line i will build 400 bombers no changes to these bombers once they agreed to freeze the design of the airplane now they could schedule production and the production line took off to match the bomber per hour prediction that sorensen made in january 1943 only 31 liberators are completed at willow run but in february they produced 74 in march 104 by the end of the year willow run is achieving the incredible output sorensen had promised and then some at its peak 650 b-24s are rolling out the doors of willow run every month a liberator had cost 200 000 hours from start to finish before willow run sorensen knudsen and ford cut this time by ninety percent ford motor company built about 8700 b-24 bombers here these right here are the doors that would open once per hour to let the b-24 bombers come off the assignment line 6700 of them flew away from this airport i'm awestruck by the industrial giants of detroit when they understood how to produce a product by now american bomber production is dwarfing the germans by far the most widely produced german bomber class was the junkers the u.s produces almost twice this number of b-24s the b-24s will be the most widely produced bomber in the war almost half are built at willow run this new plane can carry four tons of bombs and the allied air forces make the most of its destructive capacity raining fire upon the cities of europe north africa and asia but while ford and the men and women of willow run have been constructing the largest class of bombers ever assembled another bomber has already been in the works for several years in strict secrecy boeing have been developing a bomber since before pearl harbor that could change the course of the war they would call the plane the b-29 or the super fortress [Music] by 1944 the nazi stranglehold on europe is starting to weaken thousands of aircraft swarm the skies and the allies prepare for the end but on the other side of the world the war is only intensifying as the americans press further into the japanese empire the casualties on both sides are enormous japan is problematic because it's a coastal empire comprising hundreds of ireland they're fiercely defended and every time you land on one it's going to cost you dearly defeating the entire japanese empire you're potentially looking at a cost of millions of men without a vast invasion force the only way to reach japan is with a bomber but this job is well beyond the b-24 the only bomber capable of reaching japan is the newly developed b-29 the b-24 is a very complex aircraft but now you move to the b-29 the b-29 requires literally thousands of changes and adaptations during its design career boeing's b-29 has been in development since the start of the war but progress has been slow and millions have been poured into the project before a prototype ever leaves the ground in almost every respect it is a totally new conception of what a bomber can be from engine power weight to wing loading remote controlled gun turrets and cabin pressurization the b-29 bomber was the most advanced airplane in the world at the time it was being designed and built and it was the foundation of the airline industry following world war ii but the early designs are riddled with problems and over the meatpacking district of seattle in december 1943 disaster strikes during a test flight in seattle the lead b-29 prototype suffers this appalling engine cooling failure shortly after it takes off and as it tries to come into land all these witnesses can see smoke billowing from this engine now the pilot's a man called edmund t allen he's immensely experienced he's the lead test pilot on the program and the man who knows more than anyone else about the project but as this aircraft is kind of storming towards the runway even he can't control it and the b29 suddenly veers off course it cuts through these power lines above seattle streets and it hurtles into the side of this local office building and all 11 crew members are killed along with some 20 office workers in the building the b-29 program has been dealt a sickening blow by the end of 1943 only 15 air-worthy b-29s had been delivered they're implementing technologies that haven't ever been used on aircraft before and that's not just for a prototype they're at the same time envisaging that they will have to mass produce this and turn them out at a rapid rate as well it's a completely chaotic process bringing the b-29 into being when they do though it's remarkable how quickly they can turn them out after four years of work boeing finalized their design for the b-29 in 1943 now they can draw up plans for factory production boeing quickly realized that they need entirely new warehouses for the super fortresses assembly no plant that they or indeed anyone else has access to will suffice for a project of this scale to make matters even more complicated it will all have to take place in total secrecy the whole project is becoming so fiendishly complicated that the war production board won't go anywhere near it so in the end the production plan will be this incredible coordinated project to boeing along with north american bell aircraft right aeronautics and general motors the site chosen for boeing's new plant is just outside the little town of wichita kansas right aeronautics will work on the engines in paterson new jersey while general motors will operate another smaller plant in cleveland ohio this is rapidly becoming the largest and most expensive project in aeronautics history they were building a plane for the army air forces that would reduce the huge fortresses of liberators to medium bombers they were building the boeing designed b-29 super fortress the production line they design at boeing in wichita completely eclipses henry ford's willow run factory it's to build the b-29 which has got more than double the amount of parts of a b-24 over a million rivets and they even have to instigate a new process um to be able to mass-produce them and that's called multi-lining in the multi-lining process six assembly lines work in tandem eventually joining at their ends and merging to form three lines which finally come to a head at the vast main warehouse of the plant there four whole superfortresses would be pulled together by dozens of cranes and hundreds of workers all dwarfed by the scale of their equipment to keep the production line moving they have to ensure that the 1400 different suppliers of all the various parts that went into the assembly were also functioning smoothly and on time this means general electric bendix dupont and goodyear one stoppage in the chain could bring the entire assembly line to a standstill this was by 1943 not only the most expensive airplane ever produced but the most expensive machine of any kind despite this the production speed is incredible the 150th b-29 rolls off the assembly line in april 1944 but within a year 2 000 have been built by the beginning of 1944 you know that japan are done but it's still costing an obscene amount in men and material to continue fighting there with the result that the american solution is just instead of trying to overcome the japanese forces in japan is just to bomb the living daylights out of them so with this new fleet of super fortresses the b-29 they know that they can sort of dull japan into submission swiftly in july and august the americans capture saipan guam and tinyan in the mariana islands far closer to japan and five new airfields are hastily built to accommodate 180 super fortresses and the men of the newly created 20th air force the man transferred to take control of the b-29 campaign is general curtis lemay curtis lemay surmises that most japanese cities and towns are constructed mainly of wood so obviously wood doesn't like fire so incendiary bombing will be the way to go lemay's first super fortress firebombing attack is planned for tokyo on the 9th of march 1945. he sends 334 b-29s armed with 2 000 tons of incendiaries they reach the city under the cover of darkness and unleash hell on the unsuspecting population several hundred b-29s fire bomb tokyo and destroy 16 square miles of tokyo in one raid is also the highest casualties of any single aircraft raid these firebombing raids are horrific it was said that you could still smell burning human flesh with a b-29 landed back at the base but it is only a hint of the destructive power the super fortress has unleashed at 8 a.m on the 6th of august 1945 an atomic bomb is dropped from the bombay of a b-29 over the city of hiroshima two accompanying b-29s record the event who knows what revolution it may affect in the life of the individual in the organization of the world already people are calling this the atomic era some 70 000 people are killed instantly seventy thousand more will die in the coming weeks and months from their injuries or from radiation sickness japan surrenders nine days later the war is over bill nudsen is in germany when he hears of japan's surrender but this was of course never in doubt knudsen had left his post some months before the end of the war his work had already been done under his system the united states had produced 324 700 aircraft 170 airplanes had consistently rolled out of american factories every day since the beginning of 1942. in 1939 the japanese were producing twice the number of aircraft as the americans the germans were producing four times as many by 1945 the americans are out producing both of them by a factor of six the legacy of little run is in a world gone mad the institution of democracy was under a tremendous threat and they turned to the masters of manufacturing in detroit who understood how to mass produce the machinery that would be needed to protect freedom and allow the world to move forward what knudsen had completely understood was that total state control a command economy like nazi germany was not in wartime or any other time the key to productivity in fact the very opposite was true what nutson really does for the united states is to pull off the shackles that american industry had been stuck with since the new deal as the many millions of american veterans return home they find a country transformed it's not only in how much they produce in america um that that symbolizes victory the total economic output for america had doubled wages had risen by 70 so to all intents and purposes the depression and the economic decline that they were suffering when they got involved in the war has been eradicated unemployment is virtually non-existent the factories that have converted themselves to war production convert themselves back and they stay open when ford released their first car model since the war there are lines of people in the street the rebirth of american industry would continue for two decades and propel the united states to become the most powerful country the world had ever seen the world's first superpower [Music] but bill nutson did not live to see any of this in 1947 he died in his family home in detroit only a few miles from the factories that made him you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, american history, boeing, ww2, b-29, american airlines, world war two, germany ww2, allies, pacific war, war with japan, military history

Id: 6at-eJfJOgI

Length: 43min 30sec (2610 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021