In July 1943, a train was running west through the American summer. Pressed against the glass of a Pullman car, a young German prisoner of war stared at something he could not make sense of. His name was Werner Blank. He was twenty years old.
Three months earlier, he had been driving a supply truck through the freezing mud of the Eastern Front. Now he rode in more comfort than he had known in years: clean sheets, a dining car, porters in white jackets. And outside the window, mile after mile, he saw cars. Hundreds of them, then thousands, parked in long rows outside every factory, lined up in open fields, sitting between the apple trees in orchards, as if the orchards themselves had grown automobiles instead of fruit.
Blank turned to the prisoner beside him and said what every man in that car was thinking: they must be passing through the automobile country. These must be car factories. It was a reasonable guess. It was also completely wrong.
In the summer of 1943, there was not one factory in America building automobiles for civilians. Not a single one. So if those were not car factories outside the window, what were those plants really building? To understand what Werner Blank saw that summer, you have to understand where he had come from.
He had been an apprentice when the war swallowed him. They put him behind the wheel of a supply truck and sent him east into Russia, where the roads were rivers of black mud that swallowed trucks to their axles. He learned what the German army really ran on: not gasoline, but horses, hundreds of thousands of them hauling artillery, dying in the snow while the truck sat frozen for lack of fuel. His ship to Africa was sunk by British aircraft.
He was fished from the sea, sent to England, and loaded onto the Empress of Japan, a liner that skimmed the Atlantic so fast it seemed to fly just above the waves. Then the long train ride began, from Norfolk, Virginia, to a prison camp in Idaho, three thousand miles through the richest country on Earth. And Blank, who had watched the mighty Wehrmacht crawl on horseback, was about to see what real industrial power looked like. The Pullman car was a shock all by itself.
In Germany, prisoners traveled in boxcars, forty men to a wagon, straw on the floor. Here the Americans put their prisoners in sleeping cars with private compartments, porter service, and meals on real china. Some of the men wept. Some were sure it was a trick.
But outside the window waited the real shock. State after state rolled by: Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. And everywhere, the same impossible sight: automobiles in numbers so vast they stopped looking like machines and started looking like a crop the land produced. At first, Blank remembered years later, they thought they were passing automobile plants.
Very soon the prisoners would learn how wrong and how right they were. Here is what the men in that train could not know, because nothing in their lives had prepared them for it. In 1944, America had more than twenty-five million registered passenger cars, roughly one automobile for every five men, women, and children. Now set another number beside it.
In July of 1939, Germany and Austria combined had 1. 49 million registered cars. The entire greater German Reich and the single American state of California alone had 2. 45 million.
One American state owned nearly twice as many automobiles as the whole of Hitler’s empire. The prisoners had grown up where a car was a luxury for the rich. They were riding through a country where even farmers and factory girls drove. No wonder they assumed every giant building must be an automobile plant.
In America, everything ran on cars. What else could those factories possibly be making? The answer begins on a winter day more than a year before Blank’s train ride. February 1942: the last civilian automobile rolls off an American assembly line.
The workers cheer, the photographers take their pictures, and then the line stops. Not for a day, but for the duration of the war. By December, gasoline is rationed nationwide. The great American love affair with the automobile is officially suspended.
But the factories do not close. The workers do not go home. Washington has a different job for them now. Detroit had spent thirty years perfecting something no other nation possessed: the moving assembly line.
A river of steel flowing in one end as raw parts and out the other as finished machines. Thousands a day, built by ordinary men through sheer organization. The Germans had nothing like it. The Russians were still building tanks almost by hand.
American planners asked a simple question. If these lines could build thousands of cars a day, what else could they build? Chrysler’s Jefferson plant retooled for war. Ford’s giant River Rouge complex turned its steel toward new purposes.
Fisher Body stopped making car doors and started making aircraft parts. The same companies, the same workers, the same assembly lines. Only the product changed. And the product was war.
Near Detroit stood the clearest answer to the prisoners’ question. The Detroit Tank Arsenal, built by Chrysler, run by Chrysler men, using Chrysler’s automobile methods, had turned out 22,234 brand-new tanks, plus thousands of rebuilt armored vehicles. Twenty-two thousand tanks from a company that two years earlier had built family sedans. The prisoners had looked out at the factories and thought, car plants.
They were half right. The buildings were the same. The workers were the same. The lines were the same.
But rolling off those lines now were thirty-ton Sherman tanks, more tanks than Germany would build in the entire war. Every factory Blank mistook for a car plant was a weapon plant wearing a car plant’s clothes. And then there was Willow Run. Henry Ford, the man who put America on wheels, built a factory with an assembly line a mile long under a single roof covering sixty-seven acres.
Its mission was something never attempted: build heavy bombers the way Detroit built cars, one every hour. By 1944, Willow Run was rolling out a complete B-24 Liberator every sixty-three minutes, 6,792 finished bombers in total, plus thousands more shipped as kits for assembly overseas. Men who once tightened lug nuts on Model Ts were now riveting wings onto four-engine bombers. When Blank’s train rolled through Michigan and he saw cars parked in fields and orchards, he was looking at the shadow of this transformation.
The cars were the past, sitting idle. The factories behind them were the future, and the future was falling from the sky over Germany. Now set the two pictures side by side. On one side, Blank’s Germany: an army that marched into Russia with six hundred thousand horses.
Its infantry still moving the way Napoleon’s had, on foot, behind animals. A nation that never built the trucks to motorize its army because it had never built the car industry to learn from. On the other side, the country outside Blank’s window: twenty-five million cars standing idle while the factories that built them poured out tanks by the thousand and bombers by the hour. The prisoners thought they were looking at automobile plants.
What they were really looking at was the reason Germany was going to lose the war. Years later, Blank would remember that train ride, the clean sheets, the impossible orchards of automobiles, as the moment he understood the distance between Germany and America was not measured in miles. The Atlantic was the smallest part of it. The real distance was industrial: between a nation that built cars for everyone and a nation that built cars for almost no one, between assembly lines that could turn in months from sedans to Shermans and factories that had never learned to flow at all.
He thought he was passing car factories. He was passing the arsenal of democracy, and he just did not know it yet.