Vanished by Wil S. Hylton Read Free Book Online Page A

production at Willow Run doubled, then doubled again. In January 1943, the plant produced 31 B-24s. In February, it was 75. In March, 104 and rising.
    To keep the plant humming, Ford hired workers in unprecedented number. When there weren’t enough local men, they recruited throughout the region, and when the region came up short, they offered moving incentives to men as far away as California and the Deep South, building dormitories to house them and a shopping mall to serve them. When there still weren’t enough men, the plant began hiring women, and at the same wage. Soon, there were twelve thousand salaried women on the line,and the plant’s output continued surging: to 400 planes a month, then 500, then 650.
    Pilots and crews would arrive at the factory, wait for a plane to come off the line, and then climb aboard and fly the eighteen-ton behemoth off to war. The most famous pilot in the world stopped by from time to time. Charles Lindbergh had, like Henry Ford, opposed American involvement in the European war, and he was regarded in many circles as a Nazi sympathizer. He had resigned his own rank in the Air Corps to protest US intervention, but in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, he had been calling for an assault on the “ Asiatic intruder .”
    Unmatched as a pilot, Lindbergh toured American airfields and manufacturing plants to offer advice on everything from airplane design to combat tactics. “ The Willow Run factory is a stupendous thing ,” he wrote in his journal after a visit to the plant. “It is a sort of Grand Canyon of a mechanized world.” As for the lumbering B-24, Lindbergh was less enamored. “I am not overly impressed with the qualities of this bomber,” he wrote. “When I flew it for a few minutes in the air, I found the controls to be the stiffest and heaviest I have ever handled. Also, I think the gun installations are inadequate and the armor plate poorly installed. I would certainly hate to be in a bomber of this type if a few pursuit planes caught up with it.”
    Yet as the war with Japan raged on, production of the B-24 would outpace not only the B-17, but all other planes. No other multi-engine aircraft had ever been manufactured in such numbers, nor has any since. Though assembly of the Liberator ended with the war, in just five years of high-intensity production, more than 18,000 models were built . By comparison, fewer than 13,000 B-17s were manufactured, and fewer than 4,000 B-29s. In forty years of production, only about 1,500 Boeing 747s have been assembled.
    A 1945 advertisement for Ford boasted of Willow Run: “Raw material went in one end, planes came out the other.” A newsreel crowed,“ Relentless. Unceasing. On time . As methodical as a great river fed by its tributaries.”
    By the dawn of 1944, it was a river rushing toward the Pacific, and tiny islands like Palau.
    —
    W ITH SO MANY BOMBERS coming off the production line, the Army needed more men to fly them, and engineers in Nevada set about revamping a sleepy airfield in Tonopah into a massive B-24 training school. With $3 million in new runways, roads, barracks, and hangars, it would be the job of Tonopah to manufacture airmen as quickly as Willow Run produced planes.
    They arrived in Tonopah from all across the country, having finished specialty programs like the navigation school at Selman Field, Louisiana, or the gunnery school in Laredo, Texas. But it was in Tonopah that a cluster of ten random men became a crew, bringing their skills together for the first time. Day after day, they roared across the Nevada desert in training. They learned to fly close, in a box formation called “javelin-down,” while spitting bullets from the guns in their nose, tail, waist, ball, and top turrets. After a day of flight, they would find their way back to base by triangulating from the nearby mountains, or by following a lone radio signal, or by charting the night stars.
    For many of the men, those stars were the only