Posted on 03/09/2010 7:50:58 AM PST by shove_it
Ford built at least 8000 B-24 aircraft in WWII. This a collection of 291 B&W photos from the Henry Ford Museum taken at the old Willow Run Airport and Ford Motor Co. in Detroit. During the war automobile manufacturing was suspended so that GM, Ford, etc., could concentrate on the manufacture of military vehicles and aircraft. Ford Motor Company's assembly line was located adjacent to Willow Run.
The government and Boeing company told Henry Ford during the war that he could not build an airplane like a car on an assembly line. He built the freeway to the plant, built the B-24 plant and spit them out one per hour. This is an interesting bit of history that you may enjoy and share with your children and perhaps your grandchildren as this involved the "greatest generation".
Somewhere I read that one of Germany’s big production mistakes was in having their locomotive and industrial crane companies make their tanks. Those outfits weren’t geared for quantity production. We had our tanks made by auto companies who were used to cranking out autos in volume.
seem to remember a usless piece of trivia from my Plebe days....16,167 B-24’s were prodoced during WWII
Of course, by the end of the war their quality decreased greatly.
The photo of that sand pit is at #149.
“The photo of that sand pit is at #149.”
Saw it. Wonder if it is still there today?
Used to know a man, now deceased, who worked in the GM Fairfax plant in Kansas City, building B-25’s. He showed me a bunch of pictures he had. Towards the end of the war, they shut down production of B-25’s to start on something else. The last B-25 off the line was not painted in Army colors. It was left bright, and everybody in the plant took a paint brush and signed it. It was accepted by the Army like that, and flew in combat in the Pacific. Sadly, it was lost in a storm.
“Actually, in almost every area or manufacture and in every product turned out, German quality was superior to that of England and America.”
Not really true. Two prime examples would be shipbuilding and fuel technology.
The Germans could not build a fuel-efficient marine turbine to save their souls. While this was not a factor with small vessels (that could be powered with diesels), it meant their big ships — especially their battleships — were very short-legged. This was combined with another design flaw — all of their large warships had glass jaws. While they were very hard to sink, they quickly lost any ability to continue fighting after receiving only a few hits.
One example would be the Bismarck — to better protect the hull the naval architects ran most of the communications lines above the armored deck. They did this to reduce the number of openings in the armor. Problem is that while it made it harder to penetrate the hull, it made it lots easier to knock out communications. After a few hits, the turrets lost the centralized rangefinding and targeting (which was technically superior to the British) and was force to go to local control — which made it almost impossible to hit anything. So the ship is qucikly reduced to a vessel that cannot fight yet is difficult to sink. Same type of thing happened to the Scharnhorst in its duel with the Duke of York.
Another example of German engineering inferiority was in 100 octane aviation gasoline. The allies achieved 100-octane by upping the hydrocarbons in the gasoline. The Germans did it by adding aromatics (like benezine) to their 87 octane. As a result, German fuel burned hotter. In order to operate at full power with German fuel you had to up the fuel flow to use unburned gasoline to cool the engine. That made German aircraft short-legged.
Allied 100-octane had another plus — it could be leaned out so that aircraft could cruise using an 80-octane equivalent, with a significant improvement in range. that was one of the secrets to the P-51’s long range. The issue is discussed in an article called “Jimmy Doolittle and the 100-Octane War, which appeared in World at War magazine Apr/May 2009.
A final point is that operability is a major factor in engineering quality. Complexity makes it difficult to keep machinary running and a broken-down tank or an airplane grounded for lack of spare parts is about as useful on a WWII battlefield as its WWI counterpart would have been.
Far more of the big German tanks--the Panthers and the TIgers--broke down and were abandoned than were actually knocked out by allied action.It's funny how German engineering is still the same. Great when it's going, a pain to fix when it's not.
Sorensen really drove Willow Run. Henry Ford was still in the grip of his pacifism and, to a lesser extent, his pro-Nazi antisemitism. And he was just old and cranky. When they were laying out the plant at Willow Run, he used to have his driver take him out there and he’d pull out all the stakes that had been driven. Sorenson finally got around him by having the steam shovels standing by, and as soon as an area was staked, they’d start digging.
I read where they had problems with their firearms seizing up on the Russian Front because the oil gummed up the close tolerances, while the Russian "Tommy gun" rattled when shaken but would fire in just about any environment.
A sidebar to the Russian Front bit - after the war, our ordnance people asked the Germans why their machine guns fired 1,000 rounds per minute (the Allies were around 600 rpm). The Germans asked the Americans, "You've never faced a "human wave" attack have you? (It was in the Korean War, when the Chinese came in, that we found out what they meant.)
This thread is the perfect example of why FR is so great. Thanks for you rinput to the discussion.
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