Nostalgia Post

Popular Mechanics has been running some cool throwback articles –  here’s one about a plant they call “Hitler’s Headache”. Not because he had it built and it was problematic, but because we intended to, and successfully built, a plant to jump start the war effort.

Make way for Uncle Sam’s giant war baby and Hitler’s latest headache—the Dodge Chicago Plant, Division of Chrysler Corporation. It’s the world’s largest airplane engine factory, and about to move along its assembly lines are some of the world’s most powerful bomber motors.

One building in the immense plant covers some 80 acres of ground, or about 50 city blocks. Nothing like it has ever been constructed. Experienced automotive and aeronautical executives, who are used to doing big things in a big way, are literally flabbergasted by its size, by the thousands of shining machine tools arrayed under a concrete roof that seems as big as the sky.

One plant. More floor space than the Pentagon.

The great bombers for which these engines are designed are the No. 1 U.S. military secret.

I’ll take a B, Alex.

A new and speedy type of construction was used for the buildings, which are of reinforced concrete with a roofing of concrete slabs. Even the building arches are concrete. Sixty portable concrete forms, resembling Helen of Troy’s wooden horse, were used to pour the main building. They moved on wheels as the concrete work progressed along the length of the huge structure. The concrete was hoisted up towers and transported in “buggies.” The amount of lumber in the forms would have built 2,000 four-room bungalows.

I’m not a construction guy but this sounds like early tilt-slab work to me.

After the concrete was poured in one section, vacuum pumps sucked water from the cement so that in three to seven minutes the concrete would support the weight of a man. When the section was set, the form was whisked away to a new position in just eight minutes. The amount of concrete used in the construction would make a solid block 100 feet square and taller than the Empire State Building.

I’m guessing with all that concrete, no one worried about their “carbon footprint.” Maybe more about “winning the war.”

In construction alone, so many records were broken that Chrysler engineers long ago gave up keeping tab on them. The first ground was broken June 4, 1942. In 12 months all the buildings were completed, and in 14 months many were already in production.

This type of construction required only one-half the normal amount of reinforcing steel, saving enough of that precious metal to build 14 destroyers and about 600 M-4 tanks.

But it can be told that this vast plant, enclosed by four miles of fence, will take in raw bars of steel, pigs of aluminum and magnesium at one end and turn out finished motors at the other. It is the only airplane engine plant in the world that will do this. When the engines take their final leave of the testing cells they will be ready for flight.

THAT is vertical manufacturing.

The article goes on with info about the mile-wide parking area, how “only 22 acrews are for assembly work (the rest is primarily casting and machining) – this is a fun read, and personally, I have to say the pride in knowing that our fathers DID that is well worth the read. Read the whole thing.   Popular Mechanics

As a side note – an employer of mine ran a factory complex of who knows how many buildings, 500,000 employees, on 72 acres. This was 10% larger – under one ROOF.

Category: We Remember, WWII