By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
With her sleeves rolled up, red polka-dotted scarf around her hair, and bright red lipstick, Wendy Zielen smiled and flexed her bicep for the cameras.
Then she shared the story of “Willow Run Rosie’s – A Labor of Love,” about the women who manned the B-24 assembly lines in Michigan during World War II. Zielen, a volunteer from the Michigan Flight Museum, was the guest at the March tea held at the Wood County Museum.
When WWII started in 1939, U.S. military aircraft numbered just 1,700, with no bombers. That ranked the U.S. as the 18th strongest air force in the world – behind Romania. Then in 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, the race was on to build aircraft for the U.S. military.
So President Franklin D. Roosevelt approached an inventor known as an industrial pioneer for revolutionizing auto production, Henry Ford, about devising a plan for producing mass quantities of planes. But Ford, who had a well-documented admiration for Adolph Hitler, was not interested, Zielen said.
However, Ford’s son, Edsel, believed his family could and should meet the challenge.
“He pushed his father to build Willow Run,” Zielen said. “Edsel twisted his dad’s arm.”
Once Henry Ford got on board, he made the bold promise that the Willow Run plant in Michigan would build one B-24 bomber every hour. Prior to that, it was taking a month to complete one bomber.
Equipped with two assembly lines, the plant constructed some of the biggest planes in the world – with unlikely production line workers – the women left behind when their husbands, sons and brothers went to war.
The Willow Run plant itself was a phenomenon. Built on a former soybean field, the factory was the largest industrial building in the world, Zielen said. It was 3,200 feet long and 1,277 feet wide – that’s a quarter mile wide and well over a half mile long. There were two assembly lines to maximize efficiency and ensure that if one line had to be shut down, production would continue.
“It was the largest building under one roof,” Zielen said, with as many as 42,000 people working at the plant each day.
In June of 1942, the first completed B-24, nicknamed the Liberator bomber, came off the line.
It soon became obvious that more workers were needed, and that many of the workers accustomed to automobile assembly lines lacked experience with the perfection required for aircraft.
Concerns initially led the Willow Run plant to be nicknamed the “Will It Run?” plant.
“The labor demands were tremendous,” Zielen said. “The guys were gone. If they couldn’t get women, they weren’t going to make airplanes.”
But women responded to the call. By 1943, women were nearly 40% of the workforce at Willow Run.
“All over the country, women were going to work,” she said.
And it wasn’t easy work. Zielen passed around a weighty rivet gun that had been used at the Willow Run plant, and talked about the strength needed to put rivets solidly into the metal.
The women worked shifts lasting more than nine hours, six days a week, for wages of $1 an hour. They were given salt tablets, “so they didn’t have to run to the restrooms” during their shifts, Zielen added.
Before WWII, it was commonly believed that women were too emotionally fragile to work in factory environments, she said. But Rosie the Riveters all over the U.S. were proving that theory to be wrong.
The workforce allowed Ford to surpass his promise – with a new bomber coming off the assembly lines every 55 minutes. Before long, the Allies had gained air superiority in the war.
In fact, it was realized at Willow Run that the women excelled at finding problems along the assembly lines. “Women were outstanding inspectors,” Zielen said.
Women, she added, felt a great responsibility to make sure the men flying the bombers had the best chance of making it home safely. Female test pilots were used to make sure the planes were ready for war.
The “Liberator” bombers’ long range abilities made them the best aircraft to bomb enemy industrial facilities that were critical to winning the war, Zielen. She quoted American historian Stephen Ambrose as saying, “It would be an exaggeration to say that the B-24 won the war for the Allies. But don’t ask how they would have won the war without it.”
By the end of the war, 80,000 had worked at Willow Run, and almost 40% had been women (32,000.) A total of 8,865 bombers had been built in the U.S. – with more than half of them constructed at the Michigan plant.
And women had secured their place in history and proved their value in the workplace. The classic image of “Rosie the Riveter” was popularized across the nation. Posters of her rolled up sleeves and headscarf told of their gumption, and music was written to sing their glory.
“Everybody in this country knew that song,” Zielen said.
The image of “Rosie” continues to be used today as a symbol of strength and empowerment of women, she said. The bright red lipstick was added to the posters during WWII because it was reported that Hitler hated red lipstick.
Unlike women in Germany and Japan, who were forbidden to work in industries, nearly one-third of all U.S. factory workers were women by 1943.
“And I ask you – who won the war?” Zielen said with a smile.
