The end of civilian car production

At the beginning of February 1942 the last passenger cars intended for civilians were rolling off the assembly lines in Detroit and the other centres of the American motor industry. The largest branch of United States industry, which as recently as 1941 had turned out more than three and a half million cars, stopped making them within a few weeks and began converting to war production. New passenger cars were not to appear in the showrooms again until the autumn of 1945.

It is often said that on 1 February the American car industry halted production and over the next twelve months converted to the manufacture of war materials. This is broadly correct, with one qualification: the ban was not introduced on a single day. Sales of new cars had been frozen as early as 1 January, and production wound down gradually over the first ten days of February. The last Buicks and Nashes were built on 4 February, and the last passenger car of the war period is usually taken to be a Ford Super De Luxe that left the factory on 10 February 1942. Some accounts state that the last lines did not stop until 22 February.

From restrictions to a ban

The motor industry was the obvious first candidate for conversion to war work. It had the country’s largest resources of steel, machine tools, skilled workers and experience of mass production. Before the United States entered the war, however, the government was unwilling to shut down an industry on which several million jobs depended. In 1941 the Office of Production Management was in operation, headed by a former president of General Motors, William Knudsen. From August 1941 it cut allocations of steel, rubber and other raw materials to car manufacturers and scaled down production plans for the 1942 model year. The companies were already building tanks, aero engines and lorries for the army, but they were doing so alongside their normal output rather than instead of it.

The attack on Pearl Harbor changed the scale of the task. When on 6 January 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his State of the Union address, called for 60,000 aircraft and 45,000 tanks in a single year, it became clear that these targets could not be met without the car plants. As early as 1 January the government had frozen the sale and delivery of new passenger cars and light trucks, even to customers who had already bought them. Manufacturers were allowed in January to assemble a limited number of cars from parts already made, after which production for civilians was to cease. On 16 January Roosevelt replaced Knudsen’s office with the War Production Board, headed by Donald Nelson, a former vice-president of the mail-order firm Sears, Roebuck and Company. The new board confirmed the ban and laid down that passenger car production would end at the beginning of February.

The last cars of this period often had bumpers and trim painted in dark colours instead of chromed, since chromium had been declared a strategic material. Collectors today call them “blackout” models. Some half a million new cars remained in dealers’ and factory stocks, and they could not be freely sold.

Rationing tyres and cars

The production ban went hand in hand with rationing, which first applied to tyres. Japan’s conquests in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies had cut the United States off from some 90 per cent of its supplies of natural rubber, and synthetic rubber was not yet produced on a large scale. The Office of Price Administration halted sales of new tyres as early as 11 December 1941, and from 5 January 1942 they were allocated by local rationing boards, staffed by volunteers, only to doctors, the police, fire services, hauliers and other privileged groups.

In February the same boards began considering applications to buy new cars from the frozen stocks. Those entitled to a car were above all doctors, police officers, firemen, clergymen, farmers and certain defence workers. In the spring of 1942 petrol rationing was introduced in the states of the East Coast, and at the end of the year across the whole country. The lowest allowance, marked by an “A” sticker on the windscreen, gave a mere few gallons a week. A speed limit of 35 miles per hour, the so-called Victory Speed, was meant to save both fuel and tyres. The Indianapolis 500 race was suspended for the rest of the war.

Rubber proved the weakest point of the whole programme. In June 1942 Roosevelt called on Americans to hand in old tyres, inner tubes, garden hoses and rubber boots at petrol stations, but the collection yielded little. A committee appointed by the President and chaired by the financier Bernard Baruch concluded in September 1942 that without the rapid construction of synthetic rubber plants the army and the economy would grind to a halt. The real reason for nationwide petrol rationing was thus not a shortage of fuel but a shortage of rubber: less driving meant fewer worn-out tyres.

Converting the factories

Converting the factories took many months. Car assembly lines were unsuited to building aircraft or tanks, and a large proportion of the machine tools had to be retooled or replaced. Around the turn of 1941 and 1942 hundreds of thousands of workers in Detroit were temporarily laid off, and car dealers dismissed their salesmen. The United Auto Workers union demanded that conversion be speeded up and better planned. By the autumn of 1942 the shortage was of labour rather than orders, and thousands of women and migrants from the South were coming into the factories.

Since April 1941 Chrysler had been running the government-funded Detroit Arsenal tank plant in Warren. It produced first M3 Lee tanks and from 1942 the M4 Sherman. By the end of the war 22,234 vehicles had left it, nearly a quarter of all American tanks. The Ford Motor Company, formally headed by Edsel Ford but in practice still run by his father, Henry Ford, was building near Ypsilanti, Michigan, the vast Willow Run plant, which was to turn out complete B-24 Liberator bombers. The plant started up in 1942 amid great difficulties. Among its advisers was Charles Lindbergh, and the first complete Liberator did not come off the line until September. By 1944, however, a bomber was leaving the hall every hour, and by 1945 Willow Run had produced some 8,700 aircraft, almost half of all Liberators.

General Motors, the largest car company in the world, became the country’s largest private military contractor. It built lorries, aero engines, guns and shells, and naval aircraft at its plants on the East Coast. Willys-Overland and Ford together produced more than 600,000 Willys MB and Ford GPW light off-road vehicles, which went down in history as jeeps. Packard built Rolls-Royce Merlin engines under licence, Studebaker built lorries, many of which went to the Red Army under Lend-Lease, and smaller firms made aircraft parts, machine guns, helmets and ammunition.

Place in the war

The end of civilian car production was the most visible sign that the United States was converting its economy to total war. In December 1940 Roosevelt had declared that America would become the “great arsenal of democracy”, and the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941 had allowed him to send arms to Britain, and later to the USSR and China. In 1941, however, the arms industry operated alongside a peacetime economy that was still making money from cars, refrigerators and radio sets. From February 1942 the most highly developed branch of industry was working almost exclusively for the armed forces. In 1942 the production of civilian refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and radio sets was also halted.

The conversion of Detroit, together with the mass construction of Liberty ships, meant that in 1943–1944 American armaments production exceeded the combined output of Germany and Japan. The car plants supplied a large proportion of the tanks, lorries, engines and aircraft with which the Allies fought in North Africa, Italy, France and the Pacific, and tens of thousands of lorries and jeeps reached the Red Army. Civilian car production resumed in July 1945, and the first post-war models were for the most part copies of the 1942 cars.