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From B-24s to GM transmissions, versatile Willow Run plant thrives

Date Posted: May 14 2004

YPSILANTI – Formerly the linchpin of Michigan’s deserved reputation as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” where 8,684 B-24 Liberator bombers were built during World War II, the Willow Run assembly plant has over the years been reformatted and re-tooled for the building of a number of automotive products.

The latest transformation of the plant, a $300 million venture by its owner, General Motors, will facilitate production of a new six-speed, rear-wheel automatic transmission. The project will include facility renovation, new machinery, equipment and tooling. Renovation work by general contractor Walbridge-Aldinger and the building trades began last year and will be complete in 2005.

The new Hydramatic transmission will be used in future GM cars and trucks beginning in 2006. The new product will preserve at least 577 jobs at the plant, which employs about 4,000 hourly and 400 salaried employees, GM said in a statement. Walbridge referred questions about current construction activity at the plant to GM personnel, who declined to comment.

The Willow Run plant was designated a State Historic Site in 1980. The concept for the 2.5 million-square-foot plant was started with a simple sketch on some hotel stationary in 1940 by a Ford Motor Co. vice president, at the direction of his boss, Henry Ford. President Franklin Roosevelt had approached captains of industry about the potential for creating new operations or transforming existing facilities for war materiel production. Roosevelt could feel the winds of war blowing and realized that the U.S. was woefully unprepared for making armaments.

“It is a remarkable plant for a number of reasons,” said Wayne State University Professor of History Charles Hyde. “There are so few World War II-era production plants still in service, and I think it’s safe to say that aren’t any plants that have as much lore and history attached to them as Willow Run.”

Douglas Brinkley, a University of New Orleans history professor and author of Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century of Progress, said “other U.S. wartime plants were significant, but what happened at Willow Run was deemed a miracle. The idea that an auto manufacturer could stop making cars and start making planes at the rate they were making them became a perfect symbol of American industrial might. Willow Run became a name to inspire America’s fighting men and women.”

Architect Albert Kahn designed the Willow Run plant for Ford, which was an audacious and ambitious project by any measure. The assembly plant would be the largest in the world at the time, at more than a half-mile long and a quarter-mile wide. A system with 136 conveyors that would deliver parts where they needed to go in the building had to be designed for a complex, four-engine bomber for a company whose only experience was building cars. A road (I-94) had to be constructed for to get workers to the site.

The plant had to be built in a hurry – and it was. Construction started on the plant in April 1941 and was finished in September 1942. The next month, the first B-24 bombers built by Ford – with a mostly female workforce of “Rosie the Riveters” – were rolled off the assembly line and were flown to their destination from the runway.

According to Assembly Magazine, “More B-24s were built than any other combat aircraft in U.S. history. Several other plants churned out the airplane, including facilities in Fort Worth, TX, and San Diego. However, even under optimum conditions, those plants could only build one bomber a day.” The Willow Run plant produced one bomber per hour by the end of 1943.

Aviator Charles Lindbergh, who served as a consultant on the Willow Run project, called the $47 million facility the “Grand Canyon of a mechanized world.”

The B-24’s bombed Germany day and night, halting fuel and armaments production, stopping the delivery of supplies, and eventually helping to win the war in Europe. With action in that theatre over and men and machines shifting to the war with Japan, the last B-24 bomber rolled off the assembly line on June 24, 1945.

After the war, production at Willow Run shifted to automotive manufacturing. The federal government actually owned the plant, and when Ford moved out the space was sold to the Kaiser-Frazer Motors Corp. That long-defunct company produced cars in the plant until it moved out in 1953.

GM, which had leased Willow Run space from Kaiser-Frazer, bought the facility in 1953 after a disastrous fire at the Livonia Transmission Plant. Only three months later, the Willow Run plant had been re-fit and retooled to make GM’s Hydramatic transmissions. GM transmissions have been built at the plant ever since.

“In keeping with our mission of providing the world’s best powertrains, this will be a great product for General Motors,” said Homi Patel, GM vice president and general manager of manufacturing operations for GM Powertrain, in a statement about latest re-tooling at Willow Run. “We’re looking forward to producing this transmission at the Willow Run site where management, union and employees are working together to make it a great success.”