Freedom's Forge (20 page)

“Richmond,” Kaiser answered.

A week later, Bedford’s top foreman, O. H. McCoon, stood in a driving rain and gazed gloomily on the series of mudflats that was to be the home of the Todd California Shipbuilding Corporation. McCoon ordered one of his men to drive a bulldozer into the marsh to clear a service road. The bulldozer immediately sank out of sight.
⁴³

Such was the beginning of what would become the most famous shipyard in the world, producing the most famous merchant ship in the world—the Liberty ship. Yet even as McCoon and his men pulled out their lost bulldozer, events in Washington were changing the entire tempo of preparation for war.

Bill Knudsen lived in a snug house near Rock Creek while he was in Washington. Two Filipino houseboys took care of his domestic needs, and one of the first things he did when moving in was purchase a piano.

He called the fact that he could play the piano his best-kept secret. It contradicted the image of the tough former Bronx shipyard worker and boxer turned GM executive. Not only could he sight-read tunes from Cole Porter to Chopin, he also played the violin, clarinet, and xylophone.
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People were also amazed to learn Knudsen was an avid
book collector who would stop by a bookstore window and dive in to pick up a rare copy of Edward Gibbon or the philosopher Spinoza.

After breakfast his driver Joe would set off for Constitution Avenue and the office, where Knudsen usually arrived by seven. It was rare to see him home before midnight, although on most Fridays he would catch a plane to Detroit to spend the weekend with Clara and the family.

On Tuesday morning, December 3, he was sitting in his office buried in files and reports when Ed Stettinius leaned in the doorway. There was an emergency lunch called at Stimson’s home, he said. They were to be there at one o’clock.

It was an unusually warm day for December, and both men left their overcoats behind as they set out for Woodley, Stimson’s stately home on the edge of Rock Creek Park. Donald Nelson joined them, and in the dining room they found Stimson, Navy Secretary Knox, and an elderly man in a dark tweed suit. He was Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, and he was, in Stimson’s words, “in a very serious and gloomy state of mind.”
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As Hull spoke, the gloom spread across the room. German sinkings of merchant ships and the bombing of London and industrial centers were slowly pushing Britain to its knees. The British might have ninety days left, Hull said, to hold out alone—and meanwhile Hitler was threatening the Balkans and Egypt. The only way Britain would make it was with more American aid—far more than they had received so far.

“We need to stir up the country,” Stimson explained, “the business people of this country who are still asleep.” The trio of executives agreed at once. Stettinius would talk to his fellow steel executives; Nelson promised to fly off to Chicago to talk to people there. Knudsen would start at the National Association of Manufacturers meeting scheduled before Christmas in New York.
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Then Stimson and Knudsen drove across town to another meeting at Treasury with Morgenthau, Jesse Jones, and their staffs. The new British aid requests were out, as were estimates on Britain’s remaining gold and reserve assets. The numbers covered a large blackboard. They showed that as of June 1, 1941, the British government would owe the United States $3 billion. It was also clear that Britain would be at least a billion short.

“I’m rather shocked at the depth we are getting into,” Stimson said. Knox stared at the blackboard and then said what everyone else was thinking. “We are going to pay for the war from now on, aren’t we?”

Morgenthau threw up his hands. He said, “Well, what are we going to do, are we going to let them place more orders, or not?” Frank Knox murmured, “Got to. No choice about it.” But then someone asked, could American industry meet these incredible numbers—and those for the United States’ own military, as well?
⁴⁷

Bill Knudsen looked up. “We can make it,” he said in his hoarse half whisper, “
if
it can be financed”—that is, by the United States instead of Great Britain. Jesse Jones proposed they bring the whole problem to Congress, and Stimson strongly agreed. No one wanted Britain to starve—but no one dared to suggest loaning Britain the money it needed. They had tried that in the First World War, and it had been a disaster. Something more systematic was needed, something that would allow American factories to fill British orders without the British paying dollars for it. And so the idea of Lend-Lease was born.
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The concept was simple. Its contours had been implicit in the fifty-destroyer deal struck back in September. But its underlying rationale was spelled out in the contract Knudsen and Jesse Jones had hammered out for the Continental Motors deal, which stated that making arms for Britain was important to America’s national defense.

Starting in December, the federal government would place
all
orders for munitions made in the United States. If the Army and Navy needed them, the United States would keep them. If Washington decided that the defense of the country was better served lending them to Great Britain, then “we could either lease or sell the materials, subject to mortgage, to the people on the other side,” as Roosevelt explained in a press conference on the seventeenth. Roosevelt compared the transaction to lending a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire. It’s still our hose, he explained. We are just letting the one who needs it most use it first.

Who would have legal title to the goods once they were delivered? a reporter asked. “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” the president said.
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Washington’s new determination was reflected in two other events.

On December 1, Joe Kennedy left as ambassador to Britain. Defeatist,
anti-Semite, the prophet of doom and gloom, Kennedy was replaced by John Winant, businessman, liberal Republican, former governor of New Hampshire, and firm backer of aid to Britain. For the British it was like lifting the window to let in the fresh air. Winant’s arrival at Windsor Castle, where King George VI personally greeted him at the train station, signaled that the United States was in this war to stay.
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The other was the creation of the Office of Production Management to replace the NDAC. Advice and encouragement would no longer do the job. A new body was needed that could make decisions and issue directives, with a single head in charge of mobilizing American industry for the war effort. Stimson, Knox, and Henry Morgenthau all agreed on who that person should be: Bill Knudsen.

When they met at the White House on December 20, so did the president. Roosevelt, however, added one stipulation. There should be
two
heads, not one, he said: one to lead American business, the other to lead labor—which also happened to be a major part of his political base. Roosevelt named Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Garment Workers, and now on the NDAC. Despite a feeling of foreboding, Stimson and Knox bowed to the president’s wish.
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The next day, the secretaries broke the news to Knudsen in Stimson’s office. “I told Knudsen that he was to be the chief figure,” Stimson wrote afterward in his diary, and that he “had won his position during the last six months by his outstanding work here in the Advisory Council [
sic
].” He and Knox affirmed that they would stand behind him and could be called upon whenever he needed them. He thanked them and returned to his office across the street.
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He was a little stunned—and not a little bemused by the idea of sharing leadership with a man with whom he had continually crossed swords over labor shortages and strikes. Hillman, born in Lithuania, was an immigrant like himself. Rumpled and relaxed, he was, like Knudsen, deceptively self-deprecating. “Sorry, my best suit has to go to the cleaners,” he would say apologetically to the other committee members, pointing to soup stains on his lapels, “but I wore it anyway.” Otherwise they had little in common. But at least Knudsen could bring his own team, along with Stettinius and Don Nelson, with him—plus a new
man, Chicago newspaper publisher Merrill Meigs, to head aircraft production. He was also relieved, because at long last preparation for war would have the force of law behind it.

“When I think of the seriousness of the whole world situation,” he had told the assembled guests at the NAM banquet the week before, “where the Americas are the only spot where freedom and law still have a foothold … I think that the best and only thing the United States can do and must do is prepare swiftly and well to protect ourselves.” It was time to put the defense buildup on a wartime basis, even though America was still at peace.

“It is our responsibility to see that this is done in record time,” he said, looking over the representatives of the carmakers, the machine tool makers, the steel and rubber and copper and chemical industries, “and now show the world that we can do the things we have been so wishfully forecasting the last six months.”
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Four days after Christmas, on the night of December 29, 1940, a resonant voice familiar to all Americans came onto radios across the country.

“My friends, this is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security.”

Like millions of other Americans, Bill Knudsen sat in the living room of his Rock Creek house and listened to his president.

“Not since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock,” Roosevelt said, “has our American civilization been in such danger as now.” The Nazi empire was bent on creating a new global order based on racial superiority and domination, one with “no liberty, no religion, no hope.” Under such an order, America would survive, if it survived at all, at the point of a gun.

But by aiding those “in the front line of democracy’s battle” and halting the Axis advance, Roosevelt told the American people, “there is far less chance of the United States getting into the war…. The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do the fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.”

The means to do it are already here, the president said. “American
industrial genius, unmatched throughout the world in the solution of production problems, has been called upon to bring its resources and its talents into action.” The makers of sewing machines and cash registers and lawn mowers, he said, are now making fuses and telescope mounts and shells and tanks.

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself.”
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Knudsen must have smiled. The phrase “arsenal of democracy” was his.
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It was already happening. Some 50,000 planes, 130,000 engines, 380 Navy ships, 9,200 tanks, and 17,000 heavy guns, plus rifles, helmets, and clothing for an army of 1.4 million men, were being made or under contract to be made. Plant facilities to arm another 2 million, and get a two-ocean navy of 800 ships out to sea, were on their way, as well. Knudsen had calculated all this would require some 18 billion man-hours of mind-bending, back-straining labor—and he sensed that was still a long way from being enough.
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“I call upon our people with absolute confidence,” the president said in closing, “that our common cause will greatly succeed.”

It was three nights before the New Year. Eight days earlier the papers had carried the news that a bankrupt and burned-out F. Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist who had symbolized the Jazz Age and its excesses, had died of a heart attack.

The party really was over. America was about to find a new generation of heroes.

One of them would be Henry Kaiser.

Richmond shipyards, October 1941.
Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

THE EXPERTS PREDICTED
it would take Bedford, McCoon, and their teams six months to build up enough solid ground before they could begin work on the shipyard. It took Kaiser’s men exactly three weeks.
¹
Truck after truck brought up 300,000 cubic yards of rock and gravel around the clock. In more or less continuous rain, gangs of workmen sank 24,000 iron piles for the shipways and piers, even before Kaiser’s architect Morris Wortman had completed the final blueprints. “There was a race,” Clay Bedford later remembered, “between the Kaiser
draftsmen and the field people as to whether we could build it first or the engineers and architects could draw it first.”