GM FYI Blog

By Stephen Skojec

GM is proud to have been an important part of the American effort during World War II. As we remember our American independence today and the soldiers who have fought to defend it, we also owe a debt of gratitude to the men and women back at home who helped to make victory possible.

In 1940 the United States of America maintained a cautious distance from the conflicts emerging in Europe and the Pacific, but also kept a watchful eye on events as they unfolded.

In May of 1940, William S. Knudsen, then president of GM, received a call from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “We need you down here,” said FDR. Knudsen was asked to head up the National Defense Advisory Committee, and later would chair a new government body, The Office of Production Management. The office was created by Roosevelt to “increase, accelerate, and regulate the production and supply of materials, articles and equipment and the provision of emergency plant facilities and services required for the national defense” and “to insure effective coordination of those activities of the several departments, corporations, and other agencies of the government which are directly concerned therewith.”

As head of the largest auto manufacturer in the world, Knudsen’s understanding of the business of manufacturing would be needed in gearing up the American capacity for war. “Big Bill” Knudsen accepted the offer, leaving behind his job at GM to head up the new office for a dollar a year. “It was the least I could do,” he said, for the opportunities that had come his way in the 41 years since arriving in America from Denmark in 1900.

The office was officially established by executive order on January 7, 1941 — exactly 11 months before the United States would be drawn into the war by the attacks on Pearl Harbor in the early morning of December 7, 1941.

These unprecedented attacks were condemned by FDR as “a date which will live in infamy.”

Shortly thereafter, the American war machine was revving into high gear, and it would take every ounce of available material to create the materiel needed to conduct the massive operations of a global theater of war. By January of 1942, the government banned the sale of all non-essential cars and light trucks. More than half a million vehicles already in dealerships were rationed, and GM moved quickly to announce that it would buy back any new cars still in inventory at the request of dealers in the hopes that distribution of these vehicles would be conducted equally across the country. When raw material rationing was eased, fuel rationing still kept automobile sales low. In the calendar year of 1942, only 16,601 Buicks were built in the United States.

Buick would play a bigger role than automobile manufacturing in 1942. Knudsen asked Buick president Harlow Curtice to take on the production of Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines. Curtice eagerly agreed, and began immediately to set plans in motion to turn automotive manufacturing plants into aircraft engine production facilities. Curtice and his production team met with the War Department in Washington, then traveled to Hartford, Conn., to visit the Pratt & Whitney plant. Within a week of Knudsen’s original request, Buick was working out plans to build an entirely new plant to make the engines.

Curtice had to find a large enough site to handle the constantly increasing demands from the government for more engines, which grew rapidly from a few hundred to several thousand per month. He settled on a 120-acre parcel in Melrose Park, Ill. On March 17, 1942, construction began on the new plant. On September 17, just six months later, the plant was ready for business — complete with shatterproof glass windows and government-mandated night-blacking metal shades to hide the plant in case of a night air raid.

Buick’s Plant 11, one of the largest automotive engine manufacturing facilities in the world, was also converted to war production in 1942. Entire assembly lines were ripped out, equipment was put in storage, and new floors put in. Buick didn’t waste any time getting the job done.

Across GM, the story was similar. The vast experience GM had with mass production was converted toward preparing the various mechanisms of war. Buick produced Pratt & Whitney Engines, the T-70 Tank Destroyer (later known as the M-18 Hellcat) and invented a new 75 MM shell casing made of a carbon-steel and manganese alloy to replace the copper jackets when copper became scarce.

During the course of the war, Buick produced:

• 424,000 steel cartridge cases

• 19,428 tank powertrains
• 9,719,000 20MM shell bodies
• 2,507 Hellcat Tank Destroyers

Five plants in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic (Baltimore, Bloomfield, Linden, Tarrytown and Trenton) were merged into an ad hoc GM division called “Eastern Aircraft.” Facing tremendous engineering challenges, Eastern Aircraft stepped to the plate to meet the Navy’s increasing demand for TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, as well as FM-2 Wildcat fighters to combat Japan’s Mitsubishi A6M2 ‘Zero’ fighter, an agile powerhouse of a plane that dominated the early part of the air war and participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Eastern Aircraft produced more than three-quarters of the Wildcats and Avengers delivered during the war.

GM’s various divisions produced a wide variety of vehicles and equipment for the war effort, and the women of GM’s workforce were among those who inspired the iconic Rosie the Riveter. By the time production was done, the men and women of GM had produced:

• Nearly 2 million machine guns

• 1 million M1 Carbine rifles
• 13,000 fighter planes and bombers
• 38,000 Tanks and Armored Vehicles
• 20,000 Aircraft Engines
• 25,000 Amphibious Vehicles

Information for this post came from several sources with a great deal from The Buick : A Complete History (An Automobile Quarterly Magnificent Marque). For more information, search “General Motors history” at your favorite bookstore or online seller.

Happy Independence Day.