A 3.5-million-square-foot factory with an assembly line more than a mile long that made a 90-degree turn, by legend to stay inside Washtenaw County’s tax line. This episode traces the full life of Willow Run in Michigan, starting with Henry Ford’s 1931 purchase of farmland for Camp Willow Run, a social experiment where teenage sons of World War I veterans lived in tents year-round, ran their own government, and worshipped in a chapel that still holds services today.

When the Liberator Production Pool Program needed B-24 bombers at automotive scale, Ford built Albert Kahn’s giant plant with his own money, then collided with the gap between stamped steel and hand-riveted aluminum. We cover the 1943 congressional criticism, the crews who preferred B-17s, the 42,500-person workforce, the housing crisis that produced the cultural inadequacy theory, segregated federal housing and Hilliard Robinson’s Parkridge Homes, and Mead Bricker’s decentralization that finally delivered a bomber every 63 minutes. Then the plant kept reinventing itself: Kaiser-Frazer cars, the first ruby laser in the old hangars, GM transmissions restarted in nine weeks after the 1953 Livonia fire, M16 rifles during Vietnam, and finally a 2013 demolition that uncovered a secret workers’ break room before the Yankee Air Museum saved the bay doors.

• Why automotive tolerances failed against aerospace engineering requirements
• How a revolving-door workforce and the draft forced Ford to hire women
• The flat-top federal housing cities built to shelter 15,000 workers
• Bricker’s supply-chain overhaul and the 428 planes built in April 1944 alone
• What demolition crews found buried under 70 years of retooling