Grand Blanc built more than 18,000 tanks for World War II

In 1941 the cornfields south of Flint started filling with concrete. General Motors’ Fisher Body division was throwing up a plant for one purpose — building tanks — and by 1942 the line in Grand Blanc was rolling them out. Over the next three years the arsenal turned out 18,413 tanks and tank destroyers, a stretch of wartime production most people drive past today without a clue.

The bread and butter was the M4 Sherman, the medium tank that carried American crews across North Africa, Italy, and France. But Grand Blanc made more than Shermans. It built the M10 tank destroyer — one early contract called for 1,800 of them, and the plant ended up making thousands. Late in the war it switched to the heavy M26 Pershing, the tank brought in to stand up to German armor, and shipped those out too. Fisher Body across all its plants was the third-largest maker of tank components in the country.

The workforce that did it looked different from a peacetime auto plant. With men overseas, women filled the line in huge numbers — by late 1943 they made up nearly a third of GM’s wartime workforce, running presses and welding hulls that had been a man’s job two years earlier.

What’s remarkable is that the place never went quiet. When the war ended the plant didn’t close or rot — it went back to civilian work. Today the same footprint operates as the Grand Blanc Metal Center, stamping body panels and steel parts for GM vehicles. The tanks are long gone, but the building that armored a war is still pressing metal, eighty-some years on, on the same ground where the corn used to be.