Ford bet $200 million on one bomber an hour — and 1942 asked, 'Will it Run?'

In January 1940 Washington asked Ford to build wing sections for the B-24 Liberator. Production chief Charles Sorensen flew to Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego and found bombers assembled outdoors on steel fixtures — heat-warped, tailored, impossible to turn out two alike. Challenged, he worked the night at the Coronado Hotel, sketching on hotel notepaper a plant a mile long and a quarter mile wide to finish one bomber an hour — 'Unless you see a thing, you cannot simplify it.' Over breakfast, Edsel Ford approved a $200 million complete-aircraft proposition backed only by the pencil sketch.

The Albert Kahn plant — 975 acres, five million square feet, the biggest single industrial building of its kind — was dedicated in June 1942, and it nearly flopped. Ford's mass production assumed a frozen design; the army's designers kept changing the bomber, and the steel-cast dies made every change painful. The first Ford-built Liberator only rolled off the line in September 1942, and production only began in the final weeks of that year. Critics took to calling the plant 'Will it Run?'; in 1943 a committee authorised by Congress examined the problems and issued a critical report.

By April 1944 Willow Run was finishing one Liberator every 63 minutes, around the clock, with more than 42,000 people at peak. By The Henry Ford's count the plant delivered 8,685 Liberators — 6,792 complete aircraft and 1,893 knock-down kits — and the last one left on 28 June 1945. Charles Sorensen, who told the story in his memoir My Forty Years with Ford, ranked Willow Run 'the biggest challenge of my production career — bigger than any Model T assembly line sequence for Highland Park, more momentous than the layout and construction of the great River Rouge.'