Willow Run and the Arsenal of Democracy

In December of nineteen forty, Franklin Roosevelt gave the speech that named what Detroit was about to become. He called the United States the arsenal of democracy, a supplier of weapons and machinery to the Allied nations fighting fascism in Europe. He did not know yet how complete the transformation would be.

The Willow Run plant, built by Ford on farmland in Ypsilanti Township west of Detroit, opened in nineteen forty-two. It was a single building nearly a mile long, designed by Charles Sorensen, Ford's production chief, around the idea that a B-twenty-four Liberator bomber could be assembled on a moving line the same way a Model A had been. The plant had one problem that Sorensen had not anticipated. According to legend, the moving line made a ninety-degree turn at the county line so Ford would pay taxes in only one county. The turn disrupted production for months before engineers redesigned the workflow around it.

At peak production in the summer of nineteen forty-four, a completed B-twenty-four rolled off the Willow Run line every sixty-three minutes. The plant built nearly seven thousand bombers during the war. No comparable manufacturing achievement had occurred before in human history.

Roughly half the forty-two thousand workers at peak capacity were women. They came from Detroit, from Kentucky, from Tennessee, from rural Michigan. They had not generally held industrial jobs before the war. They were trained on the line by Ford supervisors and by each other. The most famous image associated with women war workers, the poster known as Rosie the Riveter, was not painted at Willow Run, but the women who worked there were doing exactly what Rosie was depicted doing, and they were doing it in volume.

The plant closed after the war. Generations of suburban Detroit residents went to see the space where the bombers were made. A portion of it has been preserved as a museum, though most of the plant was torn down in twenty thirteen and twenty fourteen.