Porch Notes
A B-24 Bomber Rolled Out of a Michigan Plant Every Single Hour
History and culture
During World War II, the U.S. needed bombers faster than anyone thought possible. Henry Ford’s right-hand man, Charles Sorensen, made an outrageous boast: Ford could build a giant four-engine B-24 “Liberator” bomber on an assembly line, just like cars — one every hour. Veteran aircraft makers thought he was nuts.
He wasn’t. At the enormous Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti Township, built in 1941 and designed by famed architect Albert Kahn, Ford did exactly that. The factory stretched more than a mile and was, at the time, the largest factory under one roof in the world. The numbers tell the story: per The Henry Ford, “That April [1944], employees in two nine-hour shifts, working six days a week, produced 453 airplanes in 468 hours — a production rate equal to one finished B-24 Liberator every 63 minutes.” Close enough to Sorensen’s one-an-hour brag to make it real. Before the plant closed in 1945, Willow Run produced 8,685 B-24 bombers.
To pull it off, Ford hired tens of thousands of workers — including many women, since so many men had been drafted. One of them, Rose Will Monroe, a widow from Kentucky working as a riveter, was tapped to appear in wartime films promoting the war effort. She became a real-life face of “Rosie the Riveter,” that flexed-bicep icon of American grit. (She was one of several women credited as inspiration for the character, not the sole “original.”) Each B-24 had more than 300,000 rivets, so the Rosies had plenty to do.
Where to see it
The Yankee Air Museum near Belleville/Ypsilanti occupies part of the original Willow Run plant and tells this story — and even keeps flyable WWII aircraft. The museum reclaimed the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of Rosie the Riveters.