The Willow Run Airport History, B-24 Bomber Plant and Airport Construction

"I FEAR all we have done is to awaken a sleeping Giant."

What the Admiral did not know was that his giant, was already awake and building the largest industrial factory in the world with a production line more than a mile long at Willow Run, where Henry Ford would employ 40,000 people to Mass produce the twenty ton, four engine, B-24 "Liberator" bomber at the unbelievable rate of one every hour.

The B-24 would be flown by the Mighty Eighth Air Force to defeat Hitler in his war against England which, in just a few short days after Pearl Harbor, would be declared by America’s President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to be America’s war as well.

In Sheer magnitude and complexity, Sorensen’s production of the B-24 Liberator bomber at Willow Run would represent the greatest achievement of the industrial age in war or peace.

In the South Pacific, Sorensen’s B-24s would be used by General MacArthur, for his island hoping battles to open way for the atomic bomb to be dropped on Yamamoto’s own Japan and bring about an end to the war that, he himself, had started at Pearl Harbor.

On December 3, just four days before Admiral Yamamoto<’s airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor, he could not have known that already finished paving the last of six concrete runways totaling 40,6447 feet on a 1,434 acre airport which required seventy five miles of drain tile, up to four feet in diameter, that he had started on July 22; And, that on December 11^th he would produce his first B-24 bomber part in a still unfinished factory.

Sorensen continued building his 3,503,016 sq. ft. factory, and increased production until he achieved his goal of making the B-24s at the rate of one an hour, which the Eighth Air Force later discover was the same rate Hitler was shooting them out of the skies over Europe.

Sorenson’s production goal at Willow Run was enormous, its achievement prodigious. His task was to increase production output from a craft production rate of a bomber every thirteen days to a mass production rate of a bomber an hour. And, in two days less than a year from ground breaking, he had produced the First Center Wing Section for the airplane in a still unfinished factory. By April 1944, he was producing four hundred and sixty-two bombers at the rate of one every 59.34 minutes.

The enormous accomplishment of Sorensen and the men and women from Willow Run can only be fully appreciated when one realizes that in 1941, before Ford entered the aircraft industry it required 201,826 man-hours to manufacture a single B-24 bomber. In March 1944, Sorensen’s Willow Run Procedures of mass production had reduced those man-hours to only 17,357.

Without his vision to build Willow Run, and his ability to manufacture the B-24 at the rate of one an hour, the Allied Forces would not have had sufficient long range heavy bombers for their massive raids over Europe; and, to reopen the Atlantic Ocean, where Hitler’s submarines had taken control of the international waters and shipping lanes, destroying 750,000 tons of shipping during the first three weeks of March 1942.

Lack of long range heavy bombers had already brought about many early defeats in the Philippines. Including the "Bataan Death March," and without Sorensen’s vision and industrial expertise Hitler could easily have won World War II.

Every time I have written about Willow Run there has hovered in my mind the image of Charles E. Sorensen whose fate was so grandly conceived that he was destined to significantly change the course of twentieth century history.