Warren's tank plant: the Arsenal of Democracy

During World War II, metro Detroit earned the nickname “the Arsenal of Democracy” for turning its car factories over to building weapons — and one of the most important war plants was right in Warren. The Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant was the first factory in America ever built just to mass-produce tanks. It went up astonishingly fast in the winter of 1940–41, designed by Albert Kahn (the architect behind many of Detroit’s great factories), with walls thick enough to survive a bombing. The U.S. government owned it and Chrysler ran it. The very first tank rolled out in April 1941 — before the building was even finished — in a ceremony broadcast across the country, where the 30-ton machine smashed through telephone poles and a little wooden house to show what it could do. By the end of the war the plant had built more than 22,000 tanks, about a quarter of all the tanks the entire country produced, including the famous M4 Sherman. It kept turning out tanks (later the M60 and the M1 Abrams) for another 50 years. Tank-building there ended in the 1990s, but the site lives on as the home of the U.S. Army’s tank-and-vehicle command — the only active-duty military base in Michigan.