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This time Ford did not wait for the declaration of war. Making cars had become routine; all the problems were licked. As an automaker he was an old hand, getting kind of tired of it. Mass-producing tanks and bombers was new and exciting. The gigantic engineering and production problems took him back to his bicycle-shop days, when mass production was just a bright gleam in his eye. His "1,000 airplanes a day" was neither an idle boast nor a positive promise; it was just good American cockiness—the kind it took to make the first million Model Ts.
Henry Ford is a man to whom the vast River Rouge plant, his rubber plantations in Brazil, the new plant to work ores from his Michigan magnesium deposits, are familiar and immediate. "We got a bad start on rubber," he says, "because I didn't go down there myself. . . . Now it is going all right." A visitor once asked him how he managed to keep track of every operation at River Rouge. "I don't think I could," he said, "if I hadn't seen it all built up one thing at a time."
Now Henry Ford had a chance to apply this hands-and-eyes knowledge to the greatest industrial problem of the time. He jumped at the chance.
Model "A." One sure way to make H.F. say "No" is to tell him he ought to do something. The Army & Navy never did. A Navy man simply asked Ford one day if he could take a few sailors into his trade school. Ford asked how many mechanics the Navy needed, promptly spent $1,000,000 of his own money to build a school. Now his school trains 1,200 Navy mechanics at a time.
Ford was always three jumps ahead of old OPM's red-tapeworm. While OPM was conferring and writing interoffice memos, Ford was proving his old theory of one-man control. He had no stockholders; he was more interested in making things than making money; all he had to do, to get a new plant built, was call in Production Boss Charles E. Sorensen and say: "All right, Charlie, let's go ahead."
Ford and Charlie Sorensen started making Pratt & Whitney airplane engines before they even had an order. When the Government finally asked Ford to put up a Pratt & Whitney plant, he figured that OPM had set its sights too low, left one end of the building open for extensions. Without any nod from Washington, he turned an engineer loose on a V12 liquid-cooled engine of his own. He started putting up Willow Run on the sole basis of a relatively small order for sub-assemblies.
"We ought to make the whole plane, and that way there can be no buck-passing if it isn't right," Ford told Sorensen. "Go ahead and start the plant . . . but leave it so we can expand it quickly to handle the whole job. They are going to need a lot more bombers than they think." He had thousands of men at work long before the Government told him to shoot the works.