As the US Air Force struggled to expand its airlift capacity during the Korean War, Kaiser-Frazer built C-119 Flying Boxcar cargo planes at Willow Run under license from Fairchild Aircraft, producing an estimated 88 C-119s between 1951 and 1953. Four 1,200-hp Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp engines assembled by Buick Motor Division shook the earth as the newly minted war machines cast aloft on test flights. Sixty-seven feet long, the B-24 had 450,000 parts and 360,000 rivets in
One pundit referred to it as a sprawling mass of industrial ambition. Folklore has it that Henry Ford decreed that the eastern perimeter of the windowless, L-shaped edifice not spill over into Wayne County, home to Detroit and all those rascally Democrats and union organizers. The airfield passed into civilian hands after the war and is now controlled by Wayne County Airport Authority. Willow Run Lodge[19] was a series of dormitories for single people and was built on the land north of Michigan Avenue and south of Geddes Road. On November 3, 1943, employees celebrated as Willow Run turned out its 1,000th finished B-24 bomber. The bomber plant adjacent to the airport produced the famed World War II bombers in a plant built by Henry Ford. UAW Local 898, 8975 Textile Rd, Ypsilanti, MI 48197. wrbpipms@gmail.com. But no project captured the public's imagination like Willow Run, where Ford Motor Company built one B-24 Liberator airplane every 63 minutes. Ford built the factory and sold it to the government, then leased it back for the duration of the war. Visit our updated, This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. With global headquarters located in the Neihu Science Park in Taipei City, LITEON Technology looks toward sustainable and profitable growth as it expanses business in the high-tech industry. Sorensen and his team methodically broke the complex bomber plane into 11 major assemblies, and then further divided these into 69 sub-assemblies. Over the years, GM expanded the bomber plant by roughly half, into a nearly 5,000,000 square feet (460,000m2) GM Powertrain factory and engineering center. The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was taking over the long-range bombing role in the Pacific Theater and no new B-24 units were programmed for deployment in the other combat theaters of Europe, the Mediterranean or in the CBI. But, as 1943 arrived, problems got solved and Willow Run turned a corner. The bugs were eventually worked out of the manufacturing processes, and by 1944, Ford was rolling a Liberator off the Willow Run production line every 63 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. After nearly 60 years at the site, GM ended its Willow Run operations in 2010. Labor shortages made women essential to war industries, and the government actively recruited them to join the workforce. Adjacent to the factory complex, Ford constructed a 1,484-acre airport with six runways and three aircraft hangars. A Bomber An Hour - Strategos, Inc Rosemary was among 200,000 southerners who flocked to southeastern Michigan for factory jobs, including 9,500 employed at Willow Run. Each kit -- consisting of 80 percent of the parts for a finished B-24 -- was shipped via two tractor-trailers. Some 2,500 were parked in an Arizona desert awaiting the day when their aluminum skin and innards would be smelted into ingots for production of coffee percolators, toasters, pots and pans, and myriad other consumer and industrial products to satisfy the ravenous maw of Americas peacetime economy. WOO Network | LinkedIn the end of the assembly line where 8700 b-24s rolled out. There was no sequence or orderly flow of materials, no sense of forward motion, no reliance on machined parts, he said. RACER Trust has been supportive of the campaign, even reconfiguring engineering and demolition plans to save cost for the museum. The first of these apartments were ready for occupancy in August 1943. Before the first employee was hired, the factory stood as a national symbol of Americas fearsome production prowess. Boyshad time for recreation as well as work, each camp had a baseball diamond and the boys participated in a softball league, there was also volleyball and handball, movies were shown, and each camp also hosted harvest dances, inviting nearby high school students to join. The automaker had . New housing, better roads and professional training alleviated Willow Runs employee retention dilemma, but didnt solve it. The housing shortage Sorensen complained about arose from his choice of a sparsely populated rural setting 30 miles west of Detroits labor poolan island in Michigan mud, as one writer viewed it. Construction began April 18, 1941. Quirk Farms was purchased by automobile pioneer Henry Ford in 1931. Paperwork was handled, necessary specific B-24 life support equipment was issued and some technical training for supporting the aircraft accomplished. The main building went up in sections, with workers using plywood partitions to seal off finished portions from those still under construction. The twin-finned, high-winged B-24 with its dual bomb bays and tricycle landing gear debuted in 1939 as a repurposed land model of Consolidateds bulky flying boats. In 1968, General Motors began reorganizing its body and assembly operations into the GM Assembly Division (GMAD). Production. Willow Run bomber plant. Inspection of more than a thousand For this reason, a series of Air Technical Service Command modification centers were established for the incorporation of these required theater changes into new Liberators following their manufacture and assignments. Charles Sorensen boasted that Ford would produce B-24s at the rate of one each hour. GMs Chevrolet Division assembled rear-engine Corvairs in a converted warehouse on the grounds during a 10-year run beginning in 1959. You can select the language displayed on our website. He may have been right. Winston Churchill called his specially outfitted B-24 the Commando. >> the willow run plant is in the process right now of being demolished. Ford would eventually sell its land to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation's Defense Plant Corporation in July 1944, shortly after the Ford farms were transferred to the company's ownership. Sorensen blamed delays on doing business with the government, treading through a maze of conflicting priorities and regulations, rancorous labor relations and wildcat strikes, housing shortages and erratic delivery of essential materials. This young employee at the giant Willow Run plant uses her tiny flashlight to discover any internal defects in the tubing. GM used the building to store files until an undetermined time, where it was sold to the Cherry Hill Baptist Church. [21][22], In February 1943, the first dormitory (Willow Run Lodge) opened, consisted of fifteen buildings containing 1,900 rooms, some single- and others double-occupancy, with room for 3,000 people. General Motors took over and produced transmissions until 2010, when the company declared bankruptcy and moved out. Dwarfs, whose physical stature had limited prewar employment opportunities, toiled inside wings, fuel cells and other confined spaces. Remote assembly proved problematic, however, and by October 1941 Ford received permission to produce complete Liberators. [15] Ford Motor was to have first option on the plant after war production ended, an option it ultimately chose not to exercise, although a rumor in Drew Pearson's syndicated column had Ford planning a postwar use as a tractor factory,[16] but that never came to pass. The war's focus was shifting from Europe to Japan, where more-advanced B-29 bombers were needed. Working with architect Albert Kahn, Ford officials envisioned a massive factory with bombers built on a moving line, just like Ford's automobiles. This made the farmers dislike the plant and its employees because the farmers viewed Willow Run and its employees as attempting to change the established community. Between them, there was a shelter for more than 15,000 people, roughly the number of people living in Ypsilanti at the time. Instead, upstart automaker Kaiser-Frazer Corporation moved into the factory. Ford Motor would not only build the bombers, it would supply the airfield as well; the farm at Willow Run was an ideal location for the airfield's runways, being under the personal ownership of Henry Ford (thus solving any land acquisition problem) and sited between the main roads and rail lines connecting Detroit with Ann Arbor and points to the west. Photographic print. Willow Run's problems came under a microscope in April 1942 and again in February 1943, when Senator Harry S. Truman visited the plant. The plant was originally designed to be able to continue to operate if parts of it were ever bombedwhich resulted in dedicated water, compressed air and gas lines to different areas of the building.". Ford Motor Company had reinvented the concept with the Model T's moving assembly line. In response, the federal government built Willow Run Lodge, an on-site dormitory complex that could accommodate 3,000 single women and men; and Willow Run Village, with 2,500 family housing units. The others, completed in the 1930s, were located in Dearborn, Michigan (site of the Fords' Fair Lane estate); Sudbury, Massachusetts; two in Richmond Hill, Georgia (the Fords' winter home); Macon, Michigan; and Willow Run. The Yankee Air Museum was able to gain control of approximately 144,900 square feet of the plant,[54] and plans to develop a permanent home for the museum. Davis, Larry, (1987), B-24 Liberator in Action - Aircraft No. [1] Construction of the Willow Run Bomber Plant began in 1940[2] and was completed in 1942. . [3][4] Willow Run's Liberator assembly line ran until May 1945, building almost half of all the Liberators produced. Using lumber from hundreds of trees cut down to clear the site, contractors built temporary dormitories for single men and women, trailer parks, and prefabricated flat-top housing for families that, by the end of 1943, could house 15,000 employees. South Lyon, Mich., resident Emma Rancour, who got a job at the Willow Run bomber plant at age 19 in 1943, was in awe of the plant's sheer size. Out of sheer necessity, Willow Runs 42,500-member
Charles Sorensen, seen here earlier in his career, traveled to Consolidated's San Diego plant with Ford president Edsel Ford. [10] Ford, a keen exponent of the virtues of country living, used it as farmland for a "social engineering" experiment that brought inner-city boys to the Willow Run Camp to learn about farming, nature, and the rural way of life. The campaign to save a portion of Willow Run for the Yankee Air Museum was called SaveTheBomberPlant.org, and is centered on a fundraising website by the same name. Despite how smoothly the plant ran, putting out a bomber an hour still wasn't an easy feat. Willow Run, also known as Air Force Plant 31, was a manufacturing complex in Michigan, United States, located between Ypsilanti Township and Belleville, built by the Ford Motor Company to manufacture aircraft, especially the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. [48], By the May 1, 2014, deadline, the Yankee Air Museum had raised over $7 million of its original $8 million fundraising goal, which was enough to enable the building's owners to move forward with signing a Purchase Agreement with Yankee, with the actual purchase expected to be finalized in late summer or fall of 2014. most enormous room in the history of man.. That hulking plant was idled in the early 1990s, putting about 4,000 people out of work. Henry Ford and the World Wars - Military History of the Upper Great Lakes Willow Run - B-24 Brief history | Chevy Tri Five Forum The Willow Run Plant had many initial startup problems, due primarily to the fact that Ford employees were used to automobile mass production and found it difficult to adapt these techniques to aircraft . By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. we intend to save that. Willow Run Airport was built as part of the bomber plant. Willow Run Lodge, Housing for Willow Run Bomber Plant Workers, 1945 The first two extensions were to October 1, 2013, and then to November 1, 2013. Expectations were crushed and the sarcastic appellation Willit Run gained wide circulation. the yankee air museum into it and show people what the history . Lloyd, Alwyn T. (1993), Liberator: America's Global Bomber, Pictorial Histories Publishing Co, Inc. O'Leary, Michael, (2003), Consolidated B-24 Liberator (Osprey Production Line to Frontline 4), Osprey Publishing, Weber, Austin. Production for the B-24H at Willow Run was 1,780. They lived in tents, with a mess hall and a chapel on-site, and sold their produce from a roadside stand built by Ford. Skeptics dismissed mass production of a plane this enormous and advanced as a carmakers fantasy that would crash and burn when repeated design changes disrupted assembly lines and junked expensive tooling. [46] The campaign attracted national, and even international, attention from media outlets that include many major news dailies in the US as well as National Public Radio, The History Channel magazine, National Geographic TV, The Guardian and the Daily Mail, the latter two of the UK. As he spoke, the country had fewer than 3,000 warplanes in its arsenal, most obsolete. It was constructed in 1941 by the Ford Motor Company for the mass production of the B-24 Liberator military aircraft. Meanwhile, Ford was savaged in the Detroit press because it took too long. Ford production chief Charles Sorensen, driving force behind the B-24 program, possessed a crusaders faith and fervor in the primacy and benefits of mass production, and had the bona fides to back it up. [7], For a period of time before the eventual demolition of Willow Run Assembly, portions were used as a warehouse, about a quarter of which was leased by GM as a facility for parts distribution.[45]. Despite intensive design efforts led by Ford production executive Charles E. Sorensen,[30] the opening of the plant still saw some mismanagement and bungling, and quality was uneven for some time.
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