Ford Motor Company. A parcel of land to the south of Powertrain was set aside for assembly operations that began in 1959, with a Fisher Body plant that built bodies for the Chevrolet models assembled there, including the Corvair and Nova. 1, Specialty Press. Rivet gun operator Rosemary Will from Pulaski County, KY, appeared in a Ford promotional film, personifying thousands of women in the nations defense industry, collectively known as Rosie the Riveter. Explore our Digital Collections and curate your own set of artifacts to share with others. This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. 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. General Motors produced the Chevrolet Corvair at the Willow Run plant As the problems continued into 1943, critics took to calling the plant "Will it Run.". As American involvement in the war seemed more likely, the U.S. government approached Ford Motor Company about making parts and subassemblies for B-24 bombers. [3][41], The B-24M was the last large-scale production variant of the Liberator. In the meantime, visitors to the Yankee Air Museum at the airport can see how the blacksmith made a watch and helped win a war. Sorensen stayed up all night formulating a B-24 assembly process on the backs of Coronado Hotel placemats. Numbers climbed steadily throughout the year. Ford struggled to get Willow Run running at full potential. The airfield passed into civilian hands after the war and is now controlled by Wayne County Airport Authority. Production steadily increased, reaching the magical plane-per-hour pinnacle in mid-1944 while accounting for half of all B-24s assembled that year. Although Willow Run is synonymous with the Liberator bomber, B-24s were not the only planes manufactured at Willow Run. The residents of the Willow Run Camp planted, tended, and harvested field crops and collected maple syrup, selling their products at the farm market on the property. Sixty-seven feet long, the B-24 had 450,000 parts and 360,000 rivets in 550 sizes, and it weighed 18 tons. Dwarfs, whose physical stature had limited prewar employment opportunities, toiled inside wings, fuel cells and other confined spaces. The first Ford-built Liberator rolled off the Willow Run line in September 1942; the first series of Willow Run Liberators was the B-24E. It sat 35 miles west of Detroit, at a site without existing highway or streetcar connections. Ford president Edsel Ford and his team explained the difficulties with design changes. They lived in tents, with a mess hall and a chapel on-site, and sold their produce from a roadside stand built by Ford. Even with people driving 100 miles or renting every spare room between Ann Arbor and Grosse Pointe, the sheer size of Willow Run led inevitably to a housing shortage. Some 12,000 women worked at the Willow Run bomber The Willow Run airport was to produce the B-24 bomber to support the Allied war effort. When Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, only 7,400 employees remained on the Willow Run payroll. from 1959 to 1969. RACER Trust has been supportive of the campaign, even reconfiguring engineering and demolition plans to save cost for the museum. for half of all B-24s assembled that year. During a January 1941 inspection tour of the Consolidated San Diego plant with Edsel Ford, gentlemanly 45-year-old company president and son of cantankerous autocrat Henry Ford, Sorensen belittled the operations deliberate, labor-intensive procedures. Employees Assembling Bomber at Willow Run Plant, March 1943, Employees Assembling Bomber at Willow Run Plant, March 1943 / back. High school graduates worked the line next to 70-year-olds. Perhaps, when peace returned, customers would remember Ford's achievement when it came time to shop for a new car. those hangar doors represent the end of the plant, the end of the assembly line where 8700 b-24s rolled out. The factory prompted the creation of the Washtenaw County Health Department and was a key part of America's "arsenal of . 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. You can select the language displayed on our website. Paper (Fiber product) Rugged and versatile, Liberators served in every theater of the war with 15 Allied air forces, stalking and destroying German U-boats in Atlantic shipping lanes, flying The Hump from India over the Himalayas to bring critical fuel and supplies to the besieged Chinese army, and dropping special agents into France and the Low Countries to organize sabotage operations against Nazi occupiers. [3][41], Ford had switched over to the single-tailed B-24N in May 1945, but the end of the war in Europe in the same month brought a rapid end to Liberator production; the contract with Ford was officially terminated on 31 May 1945 and orders for 5168 unbuilt B-24N-FO bombers were cancelled as well. Also constructed at this time was the Parkridge Community Center. Use this Artifact Card to share this great find with others. Willow Run Airport was built as part of the bomber plant. After the war, Ford sold the chapel to Kaiser-Frazer, who in turn sold it to General Motors as part of the purchase of the Willow Run bomber plant. The standard workweek for all hourly employees was 54 hours, with time-and-a-half pay for each hour over 40. Designed by Consolidated Aircraft of San Diego, California, the B-24 Liberator served in every branch of the armed forces during World War II. 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. [48] On October 26, 2013, RACER Trust and the Yankee Air Museum again reached a third, and final, deadline extension agreement that gave Yankee until May 1, 2014, to raise the $8 million estimated as necessary to secure, enclose and preserve a portion of the original Willow Run plant for the Yankee Air Museum. Sorensen could not guarantee that precision parts built by Ford would fit in airplanes built by Consolidated under those conditions. Starting with 2,600 acres of Henry Ford's bare farmland, ground was broken on the 3.5 million sq.-ft. facility in April of 1941, and the first B-24 Liberator four-engine bomber flew off the giant Willow Run airfield in September of 1942. Another large dormitory project, containing 1,960 rooms and known as West Lodge, was also ready for tenants at that time. Their shopping list included 12,000 of these aerial battleships to attack Germanys heartland, hammering military installations, bridges, factories, rail yards, fuel storage tanks and communications centers. With the pressures of wartime production schedules -- and the sense that victory itself depended on their efforts -- Willow Run's employees needed occasional relief from their burdens. The airport is now home to cargo airlines, charter flights and corporate jets. Many fled after their first day, traumatized by the smell, constant clanging and motion of machinery, and overpowering size of the place. Willow Run ran two nine-hour shifts. Eighty years ago this month, workers began clearing land near a small creek in Ypsilanti Township to make way for the largest factory in the world, the Willow Run Bomber Plant. Working with architect Albert Kahn, Ford officials envisioned a massive factory with bombers built on a moving line, just like Ford's automobiles. Thursday May 4th, 2023. Long car rides from Detroit over lumpy roads and in overcrowded buses discouraged thousands of employees who left for jobs closer to home. Charles Sorensen, seen here earlier in his career, traveled to Consolidated's San Diego plant with Ford president Edsel Ford. The Willow Run Expressway also connected with the Detroit Industrial Expressway, built at the same time. Click the drop-down menu below and make your selection. Equities Group Holdings offered to buy the former Powertrain plant from the RACER Trust. Reality proved otherwise. Since the 2010 closure of Willow Run Transmission, the factory complex has been managed by the RACER Trust, which controls the properties of the former General Motors. [26] The housing complex remained in use until 2016 as public housing when it was demolished and rebuilt with new modern units. In November 2016, RACER Trust sold Willow Run to an entity created by the State of Michigan, which leases the property to the American Center for Mobility (AMC).[9]. Dies and machine tools were tossed out and redesigned, wasting precious time and millions of dollars. After nearly a year of work, the cost to keep the plant shuttered and standing is $7 million annually. Lewis, charged with dismantling the facility, has found it's taken more detective work than he thought to shut the plant down. Willow Run stepped up outsourcing of parts production and subassemblies to almost 1,000 Ford factories and independent suppliers while focusing on building B-24s in more predictable designs that minimized shutdowns. Inspection of more than a thousand separate tubing pieces composing the fuel, hydraulic, de-icing and other systems in a bomber is a highly important job. More than 18,000 were built. Yankee was originally granted until August 2013 (deadline was later extended) to raise the funds needed to purchase and separate a portion of the approximately 5,000,000 sq. Labor shortages made women essential to war industries, and the government actively recruited them to join the workforce. GMAD required 16 years to completely absorb Fisher Body's operations, and Fisher would manufacture bodies at Willow Run Assembly until the 1970s; vehicles would roll off the line there until 1992. [3][4], By autumn 1943, the top leadership role at Willow Run had passed from Charles Sorensen to Mead L. Simply moving workers to and from the plant was a major logistical challenge. The Fisher Body division also operated at Willow Run Assembly until its operations were assumed by the GM Assembly Division in the 1970s. Not given to understatement, he proclaimed that the one-level superstructure would be the most enormous room in the history of man.. While assembly workers formed the heart of Willow Run's workforce, there were numerous administrative, clerical and support staff members too. [1][35], After their manufacture, the next step in the process was the delivery of the aircraft to the operational squadrons. Willow Run Airport has remained active as a cargo and general aviation airfield. For those unable to endure a long commute, the federal government constructed housing on nearby farmland purchased from Henry Ford. Rosemary was among 200,000 southerners who flocked to southeastern Michigan for factory jobs, including 9,500 employed at Willow Run. After the war, these residences served students attending the nearby University of Michigan on the G.I. FDRs goal exceeded the total of all planes built in the U.S. since the Wright brothers 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, NC, and he challenged the aviation industry to match that number in succeeding years. [7] The 175,000-square-foot (16,300m2) portion of the original bomber plant that Yankee seeks to preserve is less than 5% of the massive facility, comprises the end of the former B-24 assembly line at the far eastern edge of the property, and contains the two iconic bay doors from which the finished Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers exited the plant during World War II. The company came back to the government with a counter proposal: it wouldn't just build parts for the B-24, it would build complete airplanes using the automaker's highly refined techniques. In 2009, General Motors announced that it would shut down all operations at the GM Powertrain plant and engineering center in the coming year.[6]. you can see the two big hangar doors behind me. But, as 1943 arrived, problems got solved and Willow Run turned a corner. restore a piece of the building, about 175,000 square feet. we intend to restore a piece of the building, about 175,000 square feet. Frank B. Woodford, 'Willow Run Poses Problems,' New York Times, 19 April 1942, E10; Glenn H. Cummings, 'Biggest War Plant,' Wall Street Journal, 26 May 1942, 1; 'Ford Stand Stirs War Housing Issue,' New York Times, 28 June 1942, 25; Agnes E. Meyer, 'Detroit's Willow Run Area Is A Housing Nightmare ,' The Willow Run bomber plant, the world's largest factory and one of America's most-publicized plants, is on the outskirts of Ypsilanti, . [3][4] The Birmingham Air Depot's primary mission was modifying Liberators from Willow Run. 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. From the Collections of The Henry Ford. [3][4] Even then it would take nearly a year before finished Liberators left the factory. Here is his description of the visit and how he conceived the Willow Run bomber plant that eventually manufactured 8,800 of these aircraft. Skeptics scoffed at the idea that Ford Motor Co. could mass-produce Handcrafted versions were pressed into service in England, but the San Diego company lacked resources and methods for high-volume production of the largest, most complex airplane ever designed. The first of these apartments were ready for occupancy in August 1943. By mid-1944, the Willow Run assembly plant was producing one B-24 per houraccounting for half of all B-24s assembled that year. The resulting housing complexes were built in several different groups. "Decommissioning the plant is not an easy task. It's hard to imagine a factory that large churning out a complete heavy bomber every 55 minutes, but these workers accomplished exactly that. Ford proved them wrong, not easily nor entirely, during a 2.5-year production run in a 3.5-million-square-foot factory built over Willow Run Creek near Ypsilanti, MI. Ford proved that even the most complicated military machines could be built using the techniques it pioneered with the Model T. At war's end, Ford Motor Company chose not to exercise its option to buy the Willow Run plant. 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. 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. In 2013, the Museum was able to purchase 144,000 square feet of the Plant. The center includes a proving ground where smart cars react instantly to all manner of potentially dangerous and problematic situations. It's all narrated with a fantastic mid-Atlantic accent that perfectly fits the . Kaiser also built two C-123 Provider airframes at Willow Run, which were scrapped before delivery, as a procurement scandal involving the company put an end to any chance for future Air Force contracts. Managing the utilities and slowly shutting them off has been Lewis' biggest challenge, as the building is hard-pressed to give up its secrets. The remaining four hours were used to restock parts and change tooling. Five main contractors hurried the project along, and parts of the plant began production in September 1941. With the weight reduction and more powerful engines, it also had a much longer range than earlier models. GM first built transmissions at the plant, and later automobiles including Chevrolet's Corvair and Nova models. It also required the installation of two turntables to turn airplane fuselages 90 degrees near the end of the assembly line. Media coverage hyped by Ford and military publicists wove extravagant tales of a mammoth industrial citadel where 100,000 dedicated workers would produce hundreds of Liberators each week to roar across the oceans and obliterate enemy sources and seats of power.