Miraculously, the first jeep that Ford constructed-GP No.1 Pygmy-still exists it’s on display at the U.S. Because the vehicles by both had to use interchangeable parts, they were very similar. The first two went on to make some 660,000 “blitz buggies”-Willys built 376,397 and Ford, 282,352. Three companies built prototypes: Willys-Overland, Ford and Bantam. The vehicle had to conquer all kinds of terrain, and it had to be able to carry a 625-pound load. In 1940, the Army asked car companies to come up with a design for a lightweight (2,175 pounds or less), four-wheel-drive vehicle that could be mass-produced and essentially take the place of what horses had been in warfare for centuries. Jeeps have been called the grandfather of all SUVs. The Washington Post called Willow Run “the greatest single manufacturing plant the world had ever seen,” while The Wall Street Journal called it “the production miracle of the war.”Ī Bantam jeep negotiates rough terrain. Its goal was to apply auto-making mass-production principles to 300-plus mph, 56,000-pound (when fully loaded) bombers. Ford had never built a four-engine bomber, and aviation experts insisted it could not be done.Ĭonstruction on the Willow Run Bomber Plant began that spring and it soon became the largest factory under one roof in the world. In the spring of 1941, months before Pearl Harbor but well after the war had begun in Europe, Edsel Ford (Henry Ford’s only son) and Charlie Sorensen, the company’s foremost production guru, began mobilizing the most ambitious industrial project in history up to that time: a factory that could turn out the biggest, most destructive bomber in the American arsenal, the B-24 Liberator, at a rate of one per hour. By 1945, Ford was churning out B-24 Liberators at the rate of one per hour. Production line at the Ford Willow Run bomber plant.
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