Advanced engine design used overhead cams, an aluminum crankcase, liquid cooling
Aerial combat advanced at an astonishing rate during World War I, and though it seems unimaginable today, there were no American-designed aircraft deemed suitable for battle in the skies over Europe. There was a U.S.-designed engine in the fight however: the Liberty V-12 or L-12.
The L-12 engine was America’s greatest technological contribution to the aerial war effort. Its initial assignment was powering the “Liberty Plane”—a version of the British-designed De Haviland/Airco DH-4 bomber produced in the U.S. by Dayton-Wright in Dayton, Ohio; Fisher Body Corporation in Detroit, Michigan; and Standard Aircraft in New Jersey. In addition to powering the DH-4 and a variety of other airplanes, over its long service life the L-12 powered tanks, high-speed watercraft, and land-speed racers.
The L-12 came about because Packard’s head of engineering, Jesse G. Vincent, recognized the need for a standardized line of aircraft engines that could be mass produced during wartime. The government assigned Vincent the task of creating this engine and teamed him up with Elbert J. Hall of the Hall-Scott Motor Company. The two met in Washington, D.C., on May 29 and, with the help of volunteer draftsmen, created detailed drawings and a full report by May 31. This original design was a V-8, but in their report Vincent and Hall outlined how the engine could be configured as a four-, six-, eight-, or 12-cylinder engine.
By July 3, a V-8 prototype assembled by Packard was running, and a V-12 soon followed. Due to its superior horsepower potential, the 1,650-cu.in. V-12 was given the nod for mass production
An I.D. tag shows the L-12’s firing order and reveals that this example at the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum was built by Lincoln on September 25, 1918.
Not only did the Liberty engine mark a great achievement for American aviation, it was responsible for creating a landmark car company: Lincoln. Henry Leland, who founded Cadillac, and his son Wilfred started Lincoln with a $10 million government contract awarded to build Liberty engines. The Lelands left Cadillac to form Lincoln because General Motors President William C. “Billy” Durant was a pacifist and initially rejected the government’s call for GM to build L-12s. (Durant later recanted and Liberty engines were manufactured by GM.) Production numbers seem to vary for output before and after the war but in total Ford, Lincoln, Packard, Marmon, and Buick produced 20,748 L-12 engines.
The Dallas Dig Out is a regular event held three times a year at Dallas Auto Parts, who are a WW2 Jeep, M201 and Dodge specialists. The event is a combination of a military jumble and an open day at the Dallas Facility. For me the open day aspects and any vehicles that may be on display or an sale is reason enough for a visit.
If you’ve got £10,000 this could be yours?Or this one which I believe is a 1945Also comes with a trailer!
There is an impressive range of both spares and artifacts on display which are always worth a look.
Also on display is an excellent cutaway 1942 Willys MB which until recently was on display at an army museum.
A nice way to spend a few hours on a sunny October morning
The Ford Motor Company’s transformation under fire
Family affair: Arrayed outside Willow Run bomber plant are Ford products ranging from B-24 Liberators and gliders to Jeeps, trucks and modified Fordson tractors
The two titans hated each other.
It wasn’t a matter of upbringing or pedigree, either, because at first, Henry Ford had actually admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt, considering his sonorous reassurances to be good for a country mired in self-doubt over the fallout from a decade of reckless extravagance. What he proposed, however, government intervention in the economy and the social contract on an unprecedented scale, turned Ford into a fountainhead of venom for Roosevelt and his policies. The New Deal, in the form of its public works projects and business regulation, infuriated the Michigan farm boy turned mogul. At the same time, Ford’s intransigence and detestation of organized labor would rankle the New York patrician who occupied the White House.
The forces that whipsawed at the two American giants would eventually form the history of the Ford Motor Company in the early and middle 1940s, as it groaned to align itself with the massive World War II production torrent, and with its own future. Those years were a three-act play that would mold Ford into vibrancy, reversing its long skid toward oblivion and forging the business that would outlive its founder.
Team of “Whiz Kids” executives joined sclerotic Ford en masse, reversed its slide
In 1938, Henry Ford turned 75, and he had accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, bestowed on the orders of Adolf Hitler himself. Perhaps he was the only person to express surprise at the uproar that followed, particularly given his own status as a former pacifist dating back to his ill-starred Peace Ship foray that failed to prevent or halt the First World War. Ford the elder had already given his public blessing to the “America First” movement founded by another American icon who would accept a bauble from the Third Reich, Charles A. Lindbergh. Meanwhile, Germany was “annexing” territory across Europe, and would invade Poland outright in late 1939. Ford and Lindbergh then openly opposed U.S. aid to either Britain or France, both of which were clearly in Germany’s sights.
Nevertheless, Ford declared in 1940, when the Reich had goose-stepped through France and Benelux, and its bombs were shattering residential blocks in Britain, that his workers were prepared to “swing into production of a thousand airplanes of standard design a day,” as Robert Lacey recounted in Ford: The Men and the Machine. Lacey believed that Ford became miffed at his onetime executive William S. “Big Bill” Knudsen, who had departed for the presidency of General Motors and was now commissioned as an Army general, in charge of Washington’s war-production effort, whom he apparently believed had steered an unfair percentage of governmental booty toward GM. For the record, Ford would ultimately rank third in wartime production, behind GM and Curtiss-Wright, the aircraft giant. Following Ford’s boast, Knudsen sent a relatively simple pursuit plane for Dearborn to evaluate, and the old man agreed to send his only son, Edsel, the company’s president, increasingly sickened by the intrigues of Ford’s tough guy, Harry Bennett, to meet with Knudsen and discuss a possible production plan.
At that point, Winston Churchill had approached Roosevelt with an urgent request for 6,000 license-built Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engines, which he believed could tip the Battle of Britain irrevocably against Germany. Knudsen agreed, and believed Ford, the birthplace of the modern American industrial-production miracle, was right for the job. Edsel Ford and the old man’s production maven, Charles E. Sorensen, were eager to jump on the Merlin job. Then Lord Beaverbrook, Knudsen’s British counterpart, publicly proclaimed that Ford’s help would be invaluable to the United Kingdom’s war effort. That was all Ford needed to hear. He undercut his son by refusing to allow the Merlin engines to be built, enraging Knudsen over rejection of his goodwill gesture toward Ford and holding Edsel up to public humiliation. Within three years, Edsel would be dead and Sorensen out the door, nudged not too gently by Bennett.
Pearl Harbor, however, galvanized Ford as a defense contractor. The company’s everlasting fame would manifest itself in the form of the Willow Run plant, a production leviathan that, when opened in early 1942, dwarfed even Ford’s fabled River Rouge works. It was, by far, the world’s biggest industrial building under one roof, sprawling across some 2.5 million square feet, its frontal face 3,200 feet across. The legendary industrial architect Albert Kahn, father of the Rouge and Highland Park, had outdone himself with an edifice for the ages (after the war, Kaiser-Frazer would begin automobile production at Willow Run). Its signature product would be one of the war’s most famous bombers, the four-engine B-24 Liberator, which was designed by Consolidated Aircraft Corp. in San Diego, but built by Ford, since the Liberator’s creators could never hope to build it in the numbers that Washington demanded. The Liberator would eventually be mentioned just after the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-29 Superfortress; its fame would be forged during lethal operations such as the massed bombing raids on the Nazi oil fields at Ploesti, Romania.
Willow Run managed to get into full production well past 1942, after overcoming some daunting logistical barriers, not the least of which was that the bulk of its workforce lived in Detroit–a good hour away. The plant was actually located in Washtenaw County, Michigan, then a collection of farming communities with no local workforce of their own. Edsel Ford and Sorenson were still at their posts, however defanged their roles may have been, and Henry Ford suffered a major, debilitating stroke in 1941. At the time Willow Run was moving toward reality, with the Liberator force hanging in the balance, the person with the most power at the Ford Motor Company was arguably the conspiratorial Harry Bennett.
No less a Ford sycophant than Lindbergh would memorably call Willow Run “a sort of Grand Canyon of a mechanized world.” Henry Ford had loudly proclaimed that Willow Run would turn bins of parts into a flying aircraft at the rate of one an hour, though by late 1942 had built a total of 56 Liberators, less than half Consolidated’s production of 169 the previous year. Editorial writers, however, blazed with praise for Ford’s plant. It didn’t help that a War Department spokesman fed unrealistic expectations by declaring in May 1942 that Willow Run had begun full bomber production when, in fact, the opposite was true. Neither did Sorenson’s subsequent claim that Willow Run constituted an open invitation for Hitler to commit suicide. Once news of Willow Run’s slower-than-bragged-about startup broke in earnest, most of the blame was shifted to Edsel Ford, who was by then dying of complications from ulcers. While Edsel went on to create a reliable Willow Run P.R. apparatus, the damage was done, and he died in May 1943 at age 49, by which time Sorensen was being actively hounded out of Dearborn. Thus ended Act One.
President Dwight Eisenhower called the Jeep “one of three decisive weapons the U.S. had during WWII,” and General George Marshall called it “America’s greatest contribution to modern warfare.” The Ford GPW had predecessors in its 1923 4×2 Reconnaissance Car, the Bantam Reconnaissance Car of the American Austin Company, and the Willys MB. Ford’s prototype, the “Pygmy” was approved in 1940. It used a modified Model N tractor motor. The “G” in GPW stood for “Government” contract, the “P” indicated an 80in wheelbase, and the “W” referred to the design and engine licensed from Toledo, Ohio-based Willys-Overland Motors. The original origin of the “Jeep” nickname is debated to this day.”
Opening titles (0:07). Dedication: “This film is respectfully dedicated to the officers and men of the United States Army in the name of American Industry…” (0:27).
A trio of Ford 4×4 Reconnaissance Cars or GPW “Jeeps” exit a Ford River Rouge Plant garage in single file. Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company delivers the initial order of 1,500 U.S. Army cars to then-Brigadier General Charles H. Bonesteel III, speaking into a WXYZ radio microphone (0:45).
Under a Jeep’s hood, “the final nuts are turned,” putting the finishing touches on a new “scout car” (W-2017422) in a staged photo-op. The front fenders, wheels, grill, and headlights are seen in closeup (1:12).
Edsel Ford and General Bonesteel climb aboard. Ford smiles behind the wheel and reads a prepared statement (1:24).
Ford shifts the GPW into gear and drives ahead (2:09).
A Ford GPW drives wildly across a snowy Michigan winter landscape, bouncing over hills at high speed. Industrial buildings in the background (2:22).
The three vehicles race past an assembled crowd of onlookers, jumping over a bump in the off-road terrain to demonstrate liftoff. The trio drives straight at the camera head-on from two angles (2:37). In a closer view, the 45 horsepower Jeeps skid into a sharp curve and climb muddy hills with ease (3:01).
Ford and General Bonesteel watch approvingly in closeup (4:02). The GPWs drive over weeds and branches up steep hills (4:08). The Jeeps continue proving themselves, circling around warmly dressed officials in the foreground (4:37). A closeup reveals chained tires. The Jeep, driven by a man in aviator’s goggles, brakes, then drives down a steep hill, seemingly unharmed (4:54). A Jeep carrying two passengers bounces up and down a hill in a loop, dodging barren trees (5:15).
A driver and General Bonesteel behind the windshield. Edsel Ford holds onto his hat in the rear seat. The Jeep proceeds more cautiously, and General Bonesteel grips a canvas side panel (5:55). A GPW splashes through a narrow canal filled with water, spraying streams from either front wheel well (6:35).
Another car with two passengers and its hood flipped open, blocking the windshield. Water splashes over the exposed engine. Steam rises, yet the Jeep continues driving on (6:51). More Jeeps “rolling off the assembly line” of the River Rouge Plant. A wider shot reveals the outline of the Rouge plant, and other early 1940s Ford vehicles parked outside. Jeeps drive over railroad tracks (7:10). A seemingly endless stream of Ford GPWs drive forth from a gated service road (7:21). “The End” (7:33).
The thrilling history of Ford on the Rhine, beginning with Henry Fords visit in Octotober 1931 and the human stories of the first generation of his german workers during the founding years, the Nazi era, WWII until the 1970s. Featured eye witnesses: Agathe Herr, Ford´s first female lorry driver during the war and the mechanic Fritz Theilen, half a century on Fords payroll, he had to work hand in hand with foreign slave labours and was a well known saboteur of Ford´s military production. A documentary by the Cologne based journalist Hermann Rheindorf. Soon also in spanish and arab here on YT. 100 min. long version available in german only. https://youtu.be/_DZAw8F26OU: requests: archiv@koelnprogramm.de
The summer/autumn “dig out” swap meet at local vintage Jeep dealer Dallas Auto Parts, quite a few pitches selling Jeep and vintage militaria. The most interesting aspect was the Jeep aspect of the Dallas setup
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Dallas sell complete Jeeps and also just about any part you would need to maintain or restore a vintage Jeep, from oils and grease to entire body kits.
Really interesting take on the effects of WWII on Hot Rodding, some thought that it held things back, others well…. read Jive-Bombers article here
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