Willow Run: One Bomber Every Sixty-Three Minutes

If you want to understand how the United States won the Second World War, look at what was built on this field outside Ypsilanti.

In nineteen forty-one, Henry Ford converted one thousand eight hundred seventy-eight acres of his personal farmland into the largest aircraft factory on earth. The facility was named Willow Run, after the creek that once ran through the property. Ford's production genius Charles Sorensen, the same man who had engineered the Model T assembly line in nineteen thirteen, laid out the plant using a one-to-ninety-eight-scale model, placing machines and workstations with the same precision Ford had applied to making cars. The building's main assembly bay was more than a mile long. Two nine-hour shifts ran around the clock.

The aircraft rolling off those lines was the B-twenty-four Liberator, the most-produced American heavy bomber of the war. At peak production in nineteen forty-four, a completed Liberator left the plant every sixty-three minutes. By the time the last one rolled out on June twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-five, Ford had delivered eight thousand six hundred eighty-five bombers. Forty-two thousand workers kept the line moving, including tens of thousands of women who became the real-world models for the Rosie the Riveter archetype. An adjacent six-runway airport allowed the finished planes to fly directly out under their own power at a rate of twenty takeoffs per hour.

After the war, the plant was sold to Kaiser-Frazer, which made civilian automobiles here until the early nineteen fifties. The facility later housed General Motors transmission production. A portion of the original structure was saved from demolition by preservationists and now houses the Michigan Flight Museum, formerly the Yankee Air Museum, where the story of Willow Run as the Arsenal of Democracy is kept alive.