America Needed Engines for the B-29 Superfortress — So Dodge Built the Largest Factory on Earth

#ww2 #militaryhistory #b29 In 1942 the US Army Air Forces had a problem: it had ordered more than a thousand B-29 Superfortresses before the bomber had ever flown, and the 2,200 hp engine that four of them would have to lift still overheated, swallowed its own valves and caught fire. The answer was to hand Chrysler an empty field outside Chicago and $173 million, and tell a car company to mass-produce an engine nobody had finished designing. This is the story of the Dodge-Chicago plant: how Albert Kahn's concrete arch roof put 82 acres under one roof while saving 9,200 tons of steel, why the Wright R-3350 kept burning through the wing spars it was bolted to, how the Truman Committee caught Wright Aeronautical falsifying engine tests at Lockland while the car company quietly took over 90% of the programme, and why Popular Mechanics called the result "Hitler's Headache." Dodge-Chicago built 18,413 R-3350 engines between January 1944 and September 1945, 4,622 more than Wright Aeronautical's own plants. Preston Tucker then leased the building and completed 51 cars in it. Ford City Mall, the shopping centre the factory eventually became, was closed by order of a Cook County judge at noon on June 22, 2026. #ww2 #b29 #militaryhistory