What exactly did the United States rely on to win World War II?
Today is the final installment of our "Secrets of America's Victory in World War II" series. In the previous two episodes, we told the story of "car tycoon" Clausson building tanks, and "contract foreman" Kaiser building aircraft carriers. And when World War II was coming to an end, they threw themselves into the American air war cause, and participated in the "Super Bomber" project of the United States in different ways.
However, this "super bomber" is not all smooth sailing.
In the late autumn of 1943, Knudsen, who had already served as director of the Wartime Production Administration, began production supervision of the Superfortress B-29 bombers, and he moved to Boeing's B-29 production line at Its Wichita plant in Kansas.
He found that everything in the factory seemed to be in order, the company had a strict "three-shift" production system, the canteen provided a sumptuous meal, and employees worked on the production line almost non-stop.
The serious and rigorous scene in front of him puzzled Knudsen: the Wichita factory, both in terms of submitted data and actual performance, was indeed producing bombers. So why didn't they deliver a single plane to the U.S. military after half a year?
Knudsen arrives at the airport and finds it already piled high with already built B-29 bombers. He called the manager and asked him, why didn't you send these planes to the military? The manager replied sheepishly: "Due to the shortage of rubber, the tail wheels of all the planes here are made of wood." ”
When Knudsen looked further at the planes, he found that some of them did not have engines installed on them at all. The manager further explained to him: "In order to complete the production quota, we first installed these aircraft. We had planned to wait for the supply chain to arrive, and then make up for the missing parts and submit them to the military..."
Clausen replied with a smirk, "Can you planes that can't take off still be counted as airplanes?" They should not have walked out of the workshop at all, let alone counted as your production indicators. ”
At this time, Clausen realized that there was no problem in mass production of tanks, jeeps and ships on the assembly line in the "fast-selling" way. However, once a complex, trendy "behemoth" is to be produced that will take to the skies in the future, things may not be so simple.
So, the B-29 bomber, why is it so difficult to build? Why were Americans in a hurry to push the project forward? This starts four years ago.
Late one night in April 1939, before the European theater of World War II had even broken out. General Henry Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Corps received a secret invitation from Lindbergh, an expert in the design of U.S. air weapons. The duo found a corner of the stands on a baseball field, where Lindbergh said he wanted to talk to Arnold about the future of U.S. military weapons designs.
Lindbergh spoke of the strength of Nazi Germany's Air Force at the time, especially the German bombers. He told Arnold that Marshal Goering was building a fleet of long-range bombers that could travel unimpeded across Europe, and that with these bombers one could drop massive amounts of bombs on any military camp or city, or airdrop fighters and supplies anywhere on the battlefield.
Finally, Lindbergh warned General Arnold that Hitler had enough bombers to destroy any city in Europe, and might even eventually extend to the United States. At that time, in the United States, the Army Air Force only had 1700 trainers and fighters, and there were almost no bombers. At that time, the Luftwaffe had more than 8,500 fighters and bombers, and most of them were advanced models produced within three years.
So, the U.S. military quickly felt the pressure. In June, the U.S. military contacted Boeing and asked them to design another super bomber on Lindbergh's suggestion so that it could balance Nazi Germany's air power in the future.
At that time, Boeing had already helped the U.S. military design the XB-17 Flying Fortress four-engine monoplane bomber. It has a wingspan of 32 meters, can carry 4.5 tons of bomb load, has a range of nearly 3,000 kilometers, and can probably complete patrols on the east and west coasts of the United States. The US military officer asked pointedly, can you design a super bomber that is twice as high as the current bomb load of the "Flying Fortress", the range is also twice as high as that of the "Flying Fortress", and at the same time, in terms of speed and defense equipment, it can not be weaker than the "Flying Fortress"?
Despite the harsh requirements of Party A, Boeing took over the business, after all, at that time, the US military was the most "reliable" buyer. In May 1941, the U.S. military paid a $10 million deposit to Boeing, and a year later, in August 1942, the first prototype B-29 was on the runway.
The aircraft was very well designed, with a streamlined fuselage, large scale wings, and some new designs such as huge Fowler flaps, front three-point landing gear, a pressurized cabin, and a complex central fire control system.
And, although the aircraft's wingspan reached a staggering 42 meters, equivalent to the size of half a football field, it cruised at a speed of 574 kilometers per hour, propelled by four Wright Cyclone R-3350 engines, faster than the "Flying Fortress".
On September 21, 1942, Boeing completed the first flight of the super bomber. By this time, it had received orders for 1,664 air fortresses. But for Boeing, the challenge has only just begun here.
First of all, it is not difficult to rely on technicians to create a successful testing machine by hand. However, how to use workers and machines in factories to mass-produce thousands of "super fortresses" that meet the requirements?
This brings us to Boeing's dilemma, the aircraft in the design process, more attention to performance than cost and ease of manufacturing. At that time, Boeing's entire production capacity was already supplying the U.S. military with B-17 bombers, and there was no way to free up the production line to make this "new guy", so it had to build a new factory and hire other subcontractors to help produce parts.
How to distribute these complicated tasks is such a huge hot potato that even Clausen's wartime production committee does not know how to start. The resulting production plan was particularly complex, including four major factories and hundreds of parts subcontractors, and was billed as the largest project in the history of American aviation, and even the History of Industry, and even the Manhattan Project cost less than it.
The main B-29 assembly plant at the time was the Wichita plant in Kansas, which we mentioned at the beginning, where Knuthsen had visited. This is Boeing's new plant specifically planned for the B-29, but with more than 40,000 parts and more than a million rivets on a "supercast fortress", no one in history has ever been able to say clearly how to design and plan the assembly and production line of such a factory.
Finally, Boeing planned a complex production process in Wichita, including six production lines, three short assembly lines and a final assembly warehouse, this multi-line production assembly method marked another revolution in American manufacturing, and Boeing quickly moved, and by August 1942, the Wichita plant was ready to start operations.
It seems that the problem has been solved, but if everything goes as expected, there will not be a year later when Clausson inspects the hot Wichita factory and finds that there is no qualified aircraft.
The next problem encountered is that the design requirements of the B-29 are too high, and it is difficult for workers to complete the assembly work, not to mention, and there are often quality problems. Some people joke that the "bug" on the B-29 was more than the number of bugs in the world's largest insect museum.
The B-29, in particular, features the Wright R-3350 engine, a twin-row star engine with 18 huge cylinders that, if it works properly, can provide enough power.
However, in order to quickly put it into use, the engineers omitted the necessary testing links at that time, so that many of the engine's design flaws were not exposed in time, but were reflected later, including insufficient cooling, insufficient lubrication, poor reliability of the reducer, unreasonable oil-gas mixing ratio, and so on.
This led to the B-29's engine failures one after another during the subsequent test flight, until it caused a tragedy, completely interrupting the delivery process of the "SuperCastle".
On January 18, 1943, Boeing test pilot Eddie Allen piloted the prototype for testing, but 17 minutes after liftoff, the engine suddenly caught fire. Allen tried to put out the fire for the engine and then let the plane land, but he noticed that the wings of the plane were on fire again.
At that time, the plane dragged thick black smoke to the ground, spilling a long string of burning metal fragments from the air. In the process of barely trying to land, the plane hit the high-voltage power line again, and the flames burned bigger and bigger, directly engulfing the cockpit. Allen tried to force the plane down in the swamp, but because half of the wings had been burned, the plane lost its balance and crashed into a food factory on the side of the road.
The accident resulted in the death of test pilot Allen and all crew members on the spot, as well as the death of 19 civilians in the food factory. In the process of extinguishing the fire, a firefighter also died heroically.
People have accused that it must be Wright's engine, caused this terrible accident, but the results of the air disaster investigation showed that the first fire was the wing rather than the engine, the cause of the fire, is that the instrument tube on the leading edge of the wing was affected by the high temperature of the exhaust system caused an open fire, and finally burned through the wing, ignited the fuel tank, so that the "super air fortress" became a "super flame incendiary bomb".
The crash directly brought the "super bomber" project to a halt, and the top level of the US military and Boeing Company were uncertain whether they could continue to support this complex and dangerous cause in the future. Even President Roosevelt hinted that if this continues, it may be time to end the secret superfortress project.
But General Arnold, who was persuaded by Lindbergh four years ago, wanted to save the project. Because, the people of the Army Corps of Engineers revealed to him a "superweapon" research and development plan that was enough to guarantee winning the war.
This "superweapon" refers, of course, to the atomic bomb. Although the development of the atomic bomb was still in the secret stage in 1943, the Army Engineering Corps had to confirm in advance whether it could guarantee a "super bomber" that was large enough and fast enough to help them complete the "super weapon" throwing work.
General Arnold recalled: "The Men of the Corps warned me that if the B-29 was not well prepared, then we would have to ask the British to borrow a Lancaster bomber. And I firmly say that there will be an American plane to carry that bomb, the B-29 bomber, and it will be ready when the time comes. ”
Therefore, he repeatedly suggested to Roosevelt that this "super air fortress" is still meaningful, not to mention whether in the future can wait until the day when the "super weapon" explodes, at least it can be sent to the Chinese battlefield to bomb the Japanese mainland, and can also rely on this big guy to stabilize the anti-Japanese determination of the "Jiang Guangtou". He also contacted Knudsen and asked him to investigate what went wrong in the production of the B-29 and what could be remedied.
And so it happened that we mentioned at the beginning: Knudsen came to the Wichita factory and found that the B-29 super bomber had been built here that could not fly.
However, the Wichita factory was a relatively smooth part of his investigation. When Knudsen arrived at the Bell Bomber Factory in Marietta, Georgia, he found that at least the Wichita factory could build airplanes, and here the workers had no idea what they were producing.
The crux of the Bell factory was that the bell company's headquarters were two thousand kilometers away, and they had no understanding of the situation of the factory, and relied on telephones and telegrams to give orders; and in georgia, a poor and remote place, there were no reliable workers and no experienced masters to lead.
The factory had 40,000 workers at the time, all "red necks" from the southern United States. These people have not seen the plane, before entering the factory, many people have not touched the aluminum thing, and now the director of the factory, but to expect them to learn the technology of stamping aluminum sheet in situ without guidance, the difficulty can be imagined.
As the wartime director, Knudsen immediately adjusted the management of the factory, then re-recruited a number of employees, and vigorously reorganized the staff training work of the factory. Soon, the factory's workers took on a new look, and workers finally learned how to cut aluminum sheets, lay cables and rivet workpieces.
There is also a story here that Knudsen observed that there was a particularly hard-working employee in the factory, an old lady, who communicated with her and found that her name was Helen Longstreet, the widow of an American general, who was 80 years old at the time, but still in good spirits, driving a sports car to work every day. Her foreman told Knudsen that the old lady had never been late, that she had been extraordinarily sharp in every job, and that it seemed that she really liked her job.
In this way, under Knudsen's rectification, several factories producing B-29 super bombers can be operated normally. In 1943, after a Truman Commission investigation found evidence that Wright Aviation had sold defective R-3350 engines to the U.S. military, Wright's executives were radically replaced, and the R-3350 production line was assigned to other more reliable subcontractors under the organization of Cnusson and the Wartime Production Authority.
Previously, the Chrysler Group, which helped the U.S. military produce M3 and M4 tanks, "took over" this big order, and later, the Dodge factory in Chicago became the main producer of R-3350 engines, and by September 1944, they had built hundreds of R-3350 engines, and also modified the size of the fairing flaps to alleviate the problem of overheating.
In the process of testing the B-29, the pilots also touched the "prevent the engine from overheating" tips: after takeoff, do not rush to climb immediately, but first continue to accelerate at low altitude, let enough cold air enter the engine and then climb, and when the speed is fast enough, close the fairing exhaust valve to reduce wind resistance. In this way, the temperature inside the engine can be controlled to a certain extent.
So despite the "innate deficiency" design flaws of the aircraft engine itself, at least by 1944, the engine was barely working, and the B-29 bomber also entered the mass production stage. Now the question is thrown to the U.S. military, how will these big and expensive "super bombers" be put into battle when the "super weapons" promised by the Ordnance Corps are not in place?
This brings us back to the protagonist of our previous story, Kaiser, the "contractor foreman" who built the Liberty Ship and the Light Aircraft Carrier.
In fact, Kaiser originally wanted to build a "super bomber". He was working with a rich man named Howard Hughes. The planned model, with eight engines, can carry ammunition weights of up to 100 tons of "giant bombers". At that time, the aircraft had entered the stage of prototype manufacturing, and people even thought of its nickname, called "Spruce Goose".
However, the production plan of the Spruce Goose was premature, and a period of misguided experience allowed him to quickly get out of his plan to produce bombers, but from another point of view, it helped the B-29 to be put into use in advance.
As the saying goes, people are afraid of being famous pigs are afraid of being strong, Kaiser used assembly lines to build ships, and was touted as the big red man of the United States, but from the winter of 1943, the original stable freewheeler concentrated a number of quality problems, so that Kaiser instantly became the target of public criticism.
At that time, the liberty ship inexplicably had a steel plate cracking accident, first the deck, and later spread to the hull, and even the hull directly split in half. One sailor vividly described his personal experience of the accident: "After hearing the crisp cracking sound, the cracks on the ship were like the silk of a woman's stockings, out of control. ”
Congress immediately investigated the matter, and public opinion directly pointed the finger at Kaiser's "shipbuilding speed". However, it was later discovered that not only Kaiser's Liberty, but also the ships produced by other shipyards at the same time also had such accidents, and even more problematic, so the accusations against Kaiser were also silenced. It was not until after World War II that people learned that the original steel of the hull had a problem, and once the sea became cold, there would be a phenomenon of "embrittlement", and Kaiser at that time was completely wronged.
However, Kaiser received a lot of criticism and accusations in this matter, and people began to distrust his products. And this unexpected encounter also made him realize that innovation and fame come at a price. In the event of an accident, the first to bear the brunt of the responsibility must be the most "dazzling" part.
So, Kaiser quickly abandoned the Spruce Goose plan. He "pulled out of the aircraft manufacturing industry, but not completely," investing in a metal processing plant with the intention of providing enough magnesium for the B-29 bombers under development.
At that time, magnesium was regarded as the "miracle metal" in the aircraft manufacturing industry, and it was found that magnesium was lighter than aluminum, tougher than steel, and abundant reserves at that time. However, at that time, the production of magnesium was monopolized by a company called "Dow Chemical Company" in the form of patents, and The Dow Company's production capacity was too small to meet the needs of the US military.
Kaiser saw an opportunity here, and he was ready to bypass Dow's patent and work on a new way to extract magnesium. He got a way to make magnesium from an Australian, but it didn't last long, he only listened to the skin, and just began to build the factory, and the Australian was arrested and investigated on the charge of "Tongde".
However, Kaiser used his tenacity to shake up the magnesium plant, but because of technical problems, his magnesium plant often had explosion accidents, many workers died in explosions, and even Knudsen and his "wartime production committee" criticized Kaiser's factory as a "failed" investment.
Kaiser's engineers, however, saw a new turning point from their failures: Since magnesium is a reactive metal that burns easily, why don't we just make it into a weapon?
Therefore, they made incendiary bombs from the waste "magnesium dust paste" from the production process of the magnesium factory. This "magnesium dust paste" contains a large amount of magnesium and asphalt, which is not only highly flammable and explosive, but also continues to stick to the target after the fire and burns stably, unable to get rid of it.
The U.S. Chemical Warfare Unit conducted an experiment by throwing "magnesium dust paste" from the Kaiser plant onto a simulated building, and then hired firefighters to try to extinguish the fire, but found that the fire could not be extinguished at all.
This made the U.S. military very happy, and they immediately ordered Kaiser that from now on, your factory should stop producing magnesium blocks and concentrate on producing this "waste material". Later, DuPont and Standard Oil, which specialize in producing chemicals, also moved into Kaiser's factory to help him optimize the technology for producing these "waste materials."
In just over a year, Kaiser produced 410,000 tons of "magnesium dust paste", which were made into M-74 incendiary bombs and brought to the Asia-Pacific battlefield.
At first, the Americans bombed B-29s and incendiary bombs against "high-value targets" such as military factories and military bases, but in these bombing operations, the unreliable B-29s fell many but did not blow up many Japanese. According to statistics, before March 10, 1945, the total death toll of all U.S. air raids in Tokyo was only 1,292.
However, a man named Curtis Lee Mei took over the 21st Bombing Command, and he brutally and effectively changed the bombing strategy of the US military, followed by the barbecue time known as "Tokyo Barbecue".
Li Mei decided to change the high-altitude bomb-dropping to low-altitude bombing, and allowed the bomber to freely choose the bombing target after arriving at the target location, without having to stare at the pre-set "high-value military facilities". Moreover, Li Mei also deliberately chose the target of the incendiary bombing in the old town of Tokyo.
Although there are no military facilities here, it is only a living area for Japanese civilians, but most of the houses here are old wooden houses, and incendiary bombs can play the maximum effect.
The bombing plan against civilians made many members of the US military feel that it was "complete murder", but Li Mei's idea was very firm. On the one hand, these civilians have many "handicraft workshops" in their homes, and many Japanese people who have been brainwashed by the emperor and militarism make military supplies for the Japanese army in their homes.
On the other hand, according to the battle plan at that time, the US military was expected to land on the Japanese mainland in 1946, and this landing war would probably be very cruel, perhaps causing 10 million US officers and soldiers to suffer casualties. Li Mei's goal was to make this landing offensive unnecessary through his own team of B-29 bombers.
Soon, Li Mei's battle plan began to be implemented, the first bombing plan was scheduled for the early morning of March 10, along with the frontmost pathfinding bomber, a large burning "X" type was dropped with bombs on the ground in Tokyo, and more than two hundred B-29s dropped 1665 tons of incendiary bombs in three hours. When the planes returned, their "bellies" were blackened by smoke and, according to crew members, there was a smell of "roast meat" everywhere.
Next, B-29 bombers cruised arbitrarily over Japan, dropping a batch of incendiary bombs on Japan's industrial cities. At this time, Li Mei's "barbecue plan" also became slightly more humane: before each bomb was dropped, the pathfinder bomber would not directly take the incendiary bomb on the ground to "draw a fork", but first dropped a large number of leaflets, telling the Japanese civilians that we were going to bomb you, and you should run away.
So by August 1945, when the United States actually decided to drop the atomic bomb, Li Mei found that they could no longer find any bombing targets. Finally, after two B-29 bombers each dropped two five-ton "superweapons," the Japanese government finally declared its surrender, and the war was over.
Many would argue that the two atomic bombs were the decisive factor in the fact that the United States could get the Japanese to surrender without landing on Japanese territory.
But what we need to see is that without Knudson overhauling the B-29 bomb line and giving the atomic bomb a way to drop it, or without Kaiser accidentally creating a "magnesium dust paste" that verified the viability of B-29 and bombing operations, perhaps the course of the war would not have gone as smoothly as we look today.
Moreover, without wartime manufacturing, which would provide a steady stream of equipment and supplies for the Allied camp, I am afraid that the outcome of many key battles would have changed.
Of course, history has no assumptions and ifs, and what we should do is to learn from the facts of history. In modern warfare, when the country is faced with a sudden large-scale war, an indispensable condition is a strong and advanced industrial production and manufacturing pattern.
Therefore, we can further think about whether the United States won World War II by manufacturing, but is the direction of manufacturing development in the United States the only way to win the war?
In fact, in our story throughout the three episodes, there is always a dark line in these factories in the United States, that is, labor contradictions. The year before the war when Cnussen took over as president of GM was also the year GM was hit hardest by the Federation of Auto Workers, demonstrators threw stones and bricks at his factory, shutting down for four months.
It was only after the outbreak of World War II that many workers' movements were forcibly suppressed and covered up by the United States due to the "national troubles" of the United States and the sufficient oil and water of arms orders. And when World War II ended, after a short period of post-war economic growth, these backlogs of contradictions immediately erupted, and the shadow of the impact of the time can be seen today.
After the United States came out of the wartime production state, some enterprises gradually developed into the so-called "military-industrial complex", which tied the United States to the road of hegemonism.
Of course, there are other problems, such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream", which today is alienated into "black life"; the left-wing trend of thought at that time, today, alienated into "white left". If seriously excavated, many of today's social problems in the United States are hidden dangers planted during World War II.
And why did the United States embark on such a "alienation" path? The fundamental reason here is that the entire society of the United States, through the sweetness tasted in World War II, has embarked on a path of "path dependence".
"Path dependence" is actually similar to waiting for the rabbit, and regards the accidental successful experience as the inevitable reason for his own success. In order to maintain their own state of "continuous success", you can only fall into the cycle of the past, to find ways to do something, just to find the "feeling of the past".
For example, the military-industrial complex, when there is a war, can get orders, no war, the order will be reduced, and in order to promote themselves to always get orders, they need to find ways to find the opportunity of "war", from the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War on Terrorism, the Iraq War, the China threat theory... In our view, it is essentially the same, that is, to find the urgent feeling of "being threatened" in the war at that time.
And How can China avoid repeating the "path dependence" mistakes of the United States? Simply put, finding the path that suits you is the most important. China's manufacturing development path was developed in the wave of reform and opening up, and we have developed into today's industrial system through peace and friendship, rather than war and threats. If we can adhere to this path, continue to do our own good, and walk out of our own great rejuvenation in a mutually beneficial and win-win way, then even if our country will face a sudden large-scale war in the future, we can also win the final victory through our own successful path.
Well, this series we are all over here, the next issue we will launch a new series of content, you don't forget a key drop, we will not see the next issue.
bibliography:
Arthur Herman: "Fight for Business"
Chen Huawen: "An Industrial Army Without Military Uniforms"
Guo Shanshan: "The Industrial Contest Behind the Great War"
Zheng Yuchuan: The Mystery of America Winning World War II: Entrepreneurship
Chen Huawen: "Dissecting a New Perspective on America's Victory in World War II"
Wang Dunshi and Zhao Jiguang: "The Impact of the Adjustment of US Military Strategy on the Development of Its Strategic Bombers after World War II"
Wu Jun: Research on Military Technology Progress and The Development of Aviation Weapons and Equipment during World War II
Gui Xinyi: "The Reality of the First U.S. Bombing of Tokyo and Its Causes and Consequences"