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(bright guitar music) (bright guitar music) (bright guitar music) - Hello and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Terrance Furgerson, author of "The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization During World War I."

Thank you so much for being here today.

- Well, thank you for having me.

- So, that title is mouthful, but it also tells us where we are, what we are, what we're talking about, but can you just briefly introduce the book to us?

- All right.

The book is the story of an aviation plant that was operated during World War II by the North American Aviation Company in Dallas, Texas.

It was the most prolific aviation factory in the United States during the war.

Most people have not heard of it.

And so the book is an attempt to kind of restore it to its proper place in the historiography of World War II.

And people tend to, when they think of mobilization, they think of like the Kaiser Shipyards or the Ford Willow Run factory up in Michigan.

Those are the textbook samples.

And what I do in this book is argue that this should be the textbook sample.

- [Christine] Sure.

- It was the first plant produced as a war emergency plant in the lead up to World War II.

So, it was kinda like the prototype.

- And how did you come to, if this is not a well known story, how did you come to discover the topic and learn about it?

- Well, I was taking a local history seminar class up at University of North Texas from Dr. Mike Campbell, who recently passed away, who is like a Dean of Texas history.

And I said, "I'm not getting out of this institution without taking a class with Dr.

Campbell."

So I took his local history seminar and you were supposed to produce a story using local records, and you have very limited time to work with.

We had about 10 weeks.

So you couldn't do anything really grandiose.

And so, I just had the question.

Said, "Well, I knew there was a plant that made airplanes in World War II in Dallas, and other than that, I didn't really know anything."

So I thought, well, I'm gonna go see what I can find out.

What I found out is no one had done anything on this plant.

(Christine chuckling) And the records were, I mean, I found some primary sources, but there was no, like, history.

So, the deeper I dug, the more I realized that, you know, this was a story waiting to be told.

- So, I take it, this took a little more than 10 weeks to write.

- Yeah, it turned into like, the research took about eight years, then the writing took about two more years.

So, it kinda snowballed.

- Well, you mentioned in the book that it was kind of hard to find some of these primary sources and to do that research.

Can you talk about that research process and how you went digging to discover the history?

- Well, one problem is the North American Aviation Company doesn't actually exist anymore.

Like a lot of the aviation industry, there's been mergers and consolidations.

And so, I was not able to locate, like a corporate archive.

North American later merged with Rockwall, Rockwell, sorry.

I teach in Rockwall.

(Christine chuckling) Became North American Rockwell, and that was absorbed.

And right now, North American Aviation's intellectual rights are with Boeing, but in the process of all these various mergers and changers, I don't know that there's any corporate archives.

If there are, I couldn't find them.

So I found was bits and pieces scattered all over the country.

Boeing had some at their archives.

There were bits and pieces around Dallas in various spots, local libraries.

And then the plant was actually overseen by the national government.

So, I went to College Park, Maryland to the National Archives and checked the plans, the records of Defense Plant Corporation.

So, bit by bit, I just accumulated a large pile of data and at some point it was time to start writing something.

So I kinda just went for what I had, and I like to tell people, it was like going to the pantry.

You wanna cook dinner.

You go to the pantry and say, Well, what ingredients have I got?

So I go for my big pile stuff and a lot of it's of no use for what I wanna do.

And then others are like... And so we craft a narrative, which is what historians do.

The little secret historians won't tell you is the entire narrative is just made up.

We selectively pick the parts that build the story and discard the parts, your dead ends.

- Sure, because there's just so much happening all at once, you can't tell four stories.

- Right.

- You gotta tell one story, and this is the one you've chosen.

The title says it's the World War II, but you had just hinted to the fact that this, well, this is, yes, so mostly a World War II story, it begins before that.

So can you kinda set the scene of where this started, when the idea for the plant or the need for the plant began well before the war began?

- Yes.

Well, when I wrote the original seminar paper for the seminar class, I started in May of 1940, which is when Franklin Roosevelt calls for American production of 50,000 aircraft.

When I actually started to expand it into a book, I realized I needed to go further back than that, that Roosevelt just didn't wake up one morning and said, "I'd like 50,000 airplanes."

And so the beginning that seemed to be around about the time of the Munich crisis, going back prior to that, which was, you know, spring of 1938, I'm sorry, the annexation Austria is spring of 1938, going back a little further then, I could find nothing relevant that he was seemed to be putting a lot of attention on airplanes, okay?

When the Munich crisis hits in the fall of 1938, it's when Roosevelt really seems to start thinking really seriously about airplanes.

The U.S. ambassador to France came back and reported that one reason why the French and the British had caved at Munich to Adolf Hitler was fear of the Luftwaffe.

And the Ambassador to France comes back and tells Roosevelt, you know, the French were scared of, basically that this French were scared of the German Air Force.

And Roosevelt starts thinking, what, you know, where are we right now and what can we do?

So several things happened.

American aviation industry executives had gone to Europe to kinda scope out what was going on there.

And Roosevelt also turned his trusted advisor, Harry Hopkins, who was in charge of WPA, and said, "You better send someone out to the West coast and check out the airplane capacity."

And the United States airplane manufacturing was heavily centered on the West coast.

There was a little bit on the East Coast as well.

And they go out there and they look around and figure out that we're capable of building probably, geez, I think it was 7 or 8,000 airplanes a year.

If war breaks out, that's not gonna be enough.

And so they kinda start the ball rolling into thinking about expansion, okay?

Now the problem is, private industry can't afford to build these plants on speculation.

We're still at the tail end of the Great Depression.

If they borrow a bunch of money to build a plant and then war unfortunately doesn't arrive, now they've got a useless plant and a huge debt.

So the national government is gonna finance this, okay?

A lot of this.

So the early expansion was covered by the British and the French ordering airplanes after the outbreak of war in 1939.

But that can only go so far.

- [Christine] Sure.

- So the United States government, using the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was a Herbert Hoover agency, had been designed to help businesses by producing loans or offering loans, was their ability to spend money was expanded into the defense industry.

A group was called chartered, called the Defense Plant Corporation, specifically to set up defense plants.

And they're the people actually pay for the North American operation in Dallas.

- So they decide we need to build this new plant.

How did Dallas get on their radar as a potential?

I know they weren't the only potential spot.

- Right.

There was actually during the startup phase when we were thinking, where could we put these plants, there were several parameters.

The aviation industry was concentrated as I said on the West coast and some on the East coast.

They basically would be vulnerable to attack by enemy aircraft carriers.

And of course, we know now that the Germans had no aircraft carriers- - Yes, yes.

- that the Japanese did.

And so they wanted to disperse the industry and get it further inland.

So there's actually a list of parameters you need.

You need, first of all, land.

Obviously, that's pretty easy to get, but you need local infrastructure.

So an airplane plant takes a lot of electricity, right?

I mean, you could just build it out in the middle of Montana, it'd be impervious to attack, but where is the electricity?

And you need people to operate it.

So they need electricity.

They need transportation infrastructure, railroads.

You know, they need an available local workforce, okay?

And you're gonna need an airport to fly airplanes out of as they're built.

Of course you could build the airport, but if you've got one, that's already existed.

And so Dallas fulfilled all those requirements.

There was a generating station located near the plant site.

There was an airfield located near the plant site.

There was a road, highway that led right to the plant site and a railroad that went right to the plant site.

So really, all the pieces were there.

And there were also a lot of Dallas dignitaries and political people.

- Yeah, the vice president of the United States was John Nance Garner, and then Sam Rayburn.

Rayburn at the time was a majority speaker.

So Texas had friends in high places.

Now I didn't find anything, you know, smoking guns like a letter say that they had a influence in this, but it doesn't take a large stretch of imagination to imagine that, you know, the vice president might have, you know, dropped a dime.

- Sure.

(chuckles) But when it's already attractive location, that personal pull can help.

- Yeah.

It fulfilled all the other requirements.

- Yes.

- In fact, two companies were interested in the site.

So, you know, it, it consolidated, was also interested in the plant side.

- So they meet all the requirements and now we have to build this just giant factory, basically.

But that's also is gonna have its challenges and they needed to do it quickly because they need to start producing aircraft.

So how do you go from nothing to giant working factory?

Like what kind of logistics have to happen?

- Yeah.

Well, let's see.

The Defense Plant, they already were working on getting the approval before the Defense Plant Corporation was even created.

This was working its way for legislation, but email, not emails, letters, showing my age, (Christine chuckling) letters were flying between the War Department and North American Aviation about this.

The decision was made.

Originally the plant was assigned to consolidate it, was interested in it.

They were building patrol boats for, I'm sorry, patrol aircraft for the Navy.

And they had a new airplane called the B-24, but it was still in its infancy.

And so consolidated one of the site, but North American Aviation was also interested in the site.

And so a little bit of a, you know, tug and pull came at it.

And the end, the Government gave it to North American.

North American was building trainers.

And if you're gonna expand the Air Force or the Army Air Force at the time, if you're gonna build 50,000 airplanes, the first thing you're gonna need is pilots.

And so the first plane you need is trainers.

And I think one reason this plant is not as remembered is trainers aren't as flashy as fighters and bombers.

People don't make movies about, you know, trainers, okay?

But if you're gonna build a giant air force, that's the first thing you need.

And they're not gonna become as obsolete as quickly as say a bomber.

If you'd start building bombers day one and you're still getting in lessons from the war in Europe, you realize, well, we filled a bunch of obsolete airplanes.

So they started off building trainers.

The plant, they broke ground in September of 1940 and the plant became operational April 9th, I believe it was in 1941.

It was about nine months, about the same length of time as a a human baby.

- Wow.

Yes, you mentioned that in the book.

It was pregnancy.

(chuckles) - I was looking for a way to put it into perspective.

And this plant, I think it was like 900 feet by 900 feet.

It was the largest air conditioned plant in the world they said, because it was air conditioned, because, A, it's Texas and it's hot, but the real reason is there's no windows 'cause it's a blackout plant.

It's supposed to be more resistant to (indistinct).

And it is built with no windows and the doors are, you know, have walls out in front.

It's designed to be bomb-resistant.

And so it was air conditioned and it was a huge room.

And it was designed specifically around the production process.

- Sure, sure.

Now something like this coming to Dallas, I'm sure was a great win for the people of Dallas.

But it also presents challenges.

You need to staff it, which great, people need jobs.

We're coming outta The Depression.

But like you mentioned with pilots, how do you train people quickly to make airplanes?

- Yes.

- It's also a complicated thing to do.

- There is no airplane industry in Dallas.

The biggest industry in Dallas is Ford Motor Company, has a plant down on what's now Interstate 30.

But that's a small number of people.

Dallas was mostly a marketing hub for, you know, like the cotton industry and the oil industry, okay?

So there weren't a whole lot of trained machinists walking around Dallas.

They probably would've, you know, hired up what they could really quickly.

What they did while they were building the plant is they started a pilot plant down on Commerce Street.

The building is still there, it's Lofts now.

And they ran a cadre of people through it and trained them.

And then you use that cadre to train the next group.

And by the time a plant opens in April of '41, they have a couple thousand trained people who know how to build the parts.

And then the plant goes into operation.

They just move everybody over to the big plant and off they go.

So as soon as the plant's done, they're- - You've got the ready-made workforce.

- Yeah.

The workforce is there, yeah.

- This also presented though, you mentioned a couple times in the book, some growing pains for Dallas 'cause you mentioned- - Yes.

- transportation and infrastructure, which is great for getting the planes out, but also people need to get to the jobs and need roads.

They need housing.

- Right.

- You know, there isn't enough maybe built, and then, we'll, I mean, to skip ahead, there is a war that comes and then there's gonna be rationing.

All, you know, all this comes into play for the workforce.

- Right.

I think it was a two-lane highway that leads to the road and to the plant where there's only a, you know, 2 or 3,000 people working.

That's not as big of a problem.

But as the plant expands, this is inadequate.

And then housing, they want people to be able to live close enough the plant to walk.

And this becomes really more important when the war hits and gas and, you know, rationing and stuff.

So if they're like building housing around the plant, and the plant, although it's often associated with Grand Prairie, it's technically in Dallas, but it's across the street from Grand Prairie, which was just a wide spot in the road.

And now all of a sudden there's thousands of people moving in.

Well, they've got update schools and roads and water and sewage, all these little things that you don't think about.

- Right, you're just thinking about building airplanes, but it takes a village, to use the phrase, to get that done.

Well, let's skip ahead to... Oh no, I do wanna cover the open house 'cause there was a big open house when it opened- - Yeah.

- and you kinda opened the book with this story of people streaming in to get a look at- - Yeah, it's like a big event, like "Let's get in the car and go see this big building."

(Christine chuckling) It seems kinda odd to us, but Dallas isn't really an industrial city.

And so yeah, literally thousands and thousands of people, way more than expected.

They had to extend the hours of a plant.

Just came to see this plant where we're gonna build airplanes.

It created a huge traffic jam.

Dignitaries came in from all over the country.

Their speeches, this was broadcast on the Mutual radio networks.

I mean, this was like a nationwide story.

You'd think it would be a Dallas story, but I mean, it was broadcast in New York and California, like, "Live from Dallas," and sometimes it was on recorded delay, little bits of speeches.

The governor was there.

The head of North American Aviation, James Howard "Dutch" Kindelberger was there.

Was it William Dodson from the... Gosh, he had a couple different titles over the course of war.

I mean, there's a lot of dignitaries come to this deal.

It's major event.

- Yeah.

We would think, I mean, nowadays I would think a factory opening is not that big of a deal- - That big of a deal.

- to the people of Dallas in 1940, '41, it was huge.

It was everything.

- It was massive.

Yeah.

- So they open in April.

It seems like they get production going, you know, they're making airplanes.

And then of course December 7th- - [Terrance] Hits.

- Everything changes for all Americans, but I imagine for the people of Dallas at this factory, things changed probably pretty rapidly.

- Right.

The plant was supposed to hit maximum production, if I recall sometime about mid 1942.

It starts off slow.

There's a learning curve.

And as the people become more familiar and the process gets streamlined, they're anticipating max production I think about halfway through '42.

When Pearl Harbor hits, of course everything changes very rapidly.

And the biggest change almost immediately is in January of '42, Kindelberger signs a contract, a letter of intent to build the B-24 Liberator bomber, which is a much larger plane than a T-6 trainer.

It's a four-engine bomber.

North Americans never built the B-24, but this is what the government wants.

The government establishes a production pool of there's five factories building the B-24 Liberator.

It'll be the most produced aircraft, American aircraft of World War II with some 18,000 plus copies, right?

And North American gets a contract to build these.

They (indistinct) built 'em, all right?

And so the plant, the existing plan was built to build the T-6 trainer was set up accordingly.

I guess you could have built another plant in yet another location, but there's problems with that.

And so they build a second complete airplane factory about 900 feet from the existing factory.

The existing plant becomes known as the A plant.

The second plant is the B plant.

And it's designed around building B-24s.

But it takes about a year to build the plant.

And it's all apparently very hush, hush.

Whereas the original plant, there was all kinds of publicity.

- Sure.

- This plant, I couldn't find anything.

This is like- - Yeah.

- one day it just, this plant just appears, at which point (Christine chuckling) they have to announce it 'cause it's kinda hard to hide 1,000-foot long building.

And the plan's built to specifically to build the Liberator, but it gets delayed.

There's delays in getting materials and, you know, transformers and work and just all the things that everything's war now and everybody thinks their project is most important.

And so the B plant is running behind schedule and this eventually becomes a problem.

- Can you talk about the war's effect on the workforce?

I imagine you're needing a lot of men and later women to run this, but then the men are getting called off and then some of the women you mentioned even join the auxiliary bridge if they're able to.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So what effect did the active war have on the workforce?

- Well, this was interesting 'cause one of the things I learned while do researching this that I didn't know, I'm, you know, history major, but I just learn new stuff, right, is that they actually stopped taking volunteers in the military.

It was disrupting production.

Like people would leave plants.

They'd say, "You know, you have valuable skills.

You know, you're building airplanes, you're driving a train.

We really need you at home."

So first, a lot of people leave a plant or get drafted, you know, and it leaves holes and they had to fill these.

So later in the war, and it might've been late '42 if I recall, I'm drawing a mental blank on that, they actually stopped taking volunteers and all the labor was put under control of the War Manpower Commission.

So they were in charge of filling positions in the industry and in the military.

So, I mean, we think of World War II hitting, everybody rushes down to recruiting office.

And apparently- - Sure.

- that happens for a while, and then there's a stop put to that.

And apparently they go to an all-draft situation where they can pick and choose.

"Okay, no, we need you to stay here building aircraft or airplanes- - Sure.

- or ships, or tanks, or driving trains.

And of course they do.

As it happened in World War I, a lot of women start stepping up.

Now the problem is there's not a lot of trained women machinists.

And honestly, the plants have stripped the supply of trained men machinists.

So what happens is, in order to mass produce, they have to break the jobs down into progressively smaller sections.

So maybe prior to the war, you know, maybe you had a smaller workforce and people were more trained and more versatile and they could, you know, work over a, you know, bench A, and maybe they could move to bench C as needed.

But when you're doing it like this way, you've got people who are trained to do like one thing.

You know, their job is to put, you know, part A on.

You know, maybe they put the generator on the engine and bolt it in.

That's all I know how to do.

So if there's a part supply problem or something's late arriving, you sometimes have people standing around in a government-paid-for plant not working.

And this looks really bad when politicians come in.

And this later, like I said, turns into a big problem.

Women at this particular plant, I think they peaked at around about a third of a workforce.

So they're certainly important.

Some plants I think were a little higher.

I think it's kind of grown to almost a mythology now, the Rosie the Riveter- - Sure.

- the women made everything!

- That image is very strong and powerful.

- Yes, and it is, and I'm not disparaging the rural women because that's really- - of course.

- I mean, you include some pictures of them in the book.

- Yeah.

It's a third of the workforce.

- Yeah.

- But it's not the entire workforce.

You still need- - Sure.

- some heavy muscle to lift the heavy things or to teach, you know- - Sure.

- women how to run drill presses and laves and stuff.

But I originally, you know, envisioned a chapter about women in the book.

But in the end, I was running up into deadlines and I said, "Well, you know what, someone else has already read that book."

- Sure, but it's certainly woven into the narrative.

And then there was also, it's a factory.

So we think about production, but there are still administrative tests.

There's secretaries.

- Oh yeah.

Yeah, secretaries.

- There's foreman.

There's all kinds of other jobs that aren't necessarily- - Payroll.

This is a pre-computer age - Riveting things, yes.

- And I did a little this in the book.

It's kind of monotonous, but I wanted to show that I had the records.

I mean, how many typewriters does it take to run an airplane factory?

How many time clocks do you need?

And I found, because the plant was owned by the government, all of it, there's a complete inventory.

I mean, how many air guns are there?

How many file cabinets and stuff?

You know, nowadays, it would probably be like 10 or 12 people with some computers.

- Sure.

- And we're talking workforce, probably hundreds just doing administrative.

- Sure, 'cause there's a lot of paper.

You say it's government operation.

There's a lot of paperwork- - Yeah.

- and documentation.

You also briefly touched on the book, I guess towards the end, there was some talk of needing more people.

So the possibly of integration or finding African American workers to help do some of these jobs.

- Yeah.

That was one of the deals.

Of course, sadly, this is a Jim Crow era in Dallas.

And I did not find a lot of documentation about the Black workforce.

There were some at the plant, but they didn't show up in the plant newspaper.

They didn't seem to make the pictures.

They finally established a second production facility, a satellite facility located near downtown Dallas where they did subcontract, you know, sub assemblies.

And that was a largely Black workforce there.

And I found practically nothing on them.

So that's kind of a forgotten part of the story.

So there's work to be done there.

Now the question is- - Sure.

- are there any records when the, you know, 'cause if the archival records from North American don't exist, that's gonna make it hard to find this.

but, you know, a really thorough, you know, researcher who wants to dig into it, there's probably something out there somewhere.

- Sure.

I just think the idea of local history, which is where this all started, if I can kinda zoom out a minute, local history is so important.

And I would hope the people of Dallas and Grand Prairie and even Fort Worth would wanna read this to really learn about what came before.

You know, kind of, it has kind of helped build Dallas up to be later probably what it was.

So it's important to look at local history everywhere, but you've done a great service, I think, for the area of Dallas in discovering and digging this up and bringing it to the forefront here.

- [Terrance] Thank you.

- Unfortunately, we're running a little low on time here.

So on our final, just two minutes, what would you hope people take away from this book and this story?

- My goal here partially was to restore a lost Dallas history.

When the war ends, the plant is shut down immediately.

There's no work to be done and North American leaves.

And now, the government's stuck with an empty aircraft factory.

They eventually convinced the Chance Vought Corporation to relocate to this plant.

They needed new, more modern digs, and Chance Vought will locate to the old North American plant.

And I think that's one reason this is a forgotten story, is I think in the corporate memory of Dallas, it's the Vought plant.

Then Vought later becomes part of Ling-Temco-Vought and it operates at the plant basically until the end of the Cold War.

So I think Dallas sites, when they look at this plant, it's the LTV plant or the Vought plant, and it's like they have forgotten this part of the story.

- Sure.

- There's not even a historical marker at the site.

- [Christine] Wow.

- So I wanted to kind of restore this to Dallas' memory, like this is something we did that we should be proud of.

The other part is the whole arsenal of democracy story is so big and so overwhelming, and there's very serious academic books bad about it that are very, very thick that it's like overwhelming.

And so I thought, well, maybe we could create a story, but it's just like, here's how one plant came into being.

But if someone was curious, maybe they could read this, and then to kind of extrapolate out, well, this is what's going on in Dallas and it's also going on in Fort Worth and other locations.

And so it was kind of like this is a representative sample and if you read this, maybe you could wrap your head around the whole arsenal of democracy project without reading, you know, a massive 700-page page tome.

- Sure, sure.

This is kind of our case study on how- - It's a case study.

There you go.

- But it's a testament to kind of the marvel of what Americans and America can do when it wants to do it quickly.

So thank you so much for being here and for talking about this book.

We are out of time.

The book again is "The Dallas Story."

Thank you so much for joining us.

I'm Christine Brown.

We'll see you again soon.

- [Terrance] Thank you.

(relaxing guitar music) (relaxing guitar music)

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