The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization During World War II by Terrance Furgerson (review)

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• The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization During World War II by Terrance Furgerson
• Richard Selcer

The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization During World War II. By Terrance Furgerson. ( Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2023. Pp. 403. Illustrations, notes, appendix, index).

The title says it all: This is a book about the North American Aviation (NAA) plant set up in Dallas (actually Grand Prairie) at the beginning of World War II to manufacture a bomber, a fighter, and a trainer for the Army Air Corps. If you are looking for a book on air combat or the capabilities of various World War II aircraft, this is not it. Instead, this is economic and social history with a wealth of statistics gleaned from government records leavened with reporting from Dallas newspapers of the time. The author is an instructor at Collin County College. This is his debut book, which began as a graduate research project at the University of North Texas. It is a worthy first book.

For Fort Worth residents who thought all bombers built in North Texas during World War II came from Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft (Convair), this book is an eye-opener. The Convair plant was larger and built only bombers (the B-24 Liberator and B-32 Dominator). NAA built B-24s, but also the magnificent P-52 Mustang and the AT-6 Texan trainer by the thousands. Furgerson's book thus makes a nice companion work to J'Nell Pate's Arsenal of Defense: Fort Worth's Military Legacy (2011), which has three chapters on Convair.

Furgerson's story begins in 1938 with Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's push for American mobilization for what he recognized as the coming war against Germany. Air power was going to be crucial. The plan for expanding was to build manufacturing plants with government money and turn them over to private enterprises like NAA and Consolidated Aircraft (the forerunner of Consolidated-Vultee). Plants were placed in Fort Worth and Grand Prairie for strategic reasons; they would be harder to attack and/or sabotage than plants on either coast. The rapid buildup that followed did not just create a muscular American air force but also supplied friendly countries in Europe with aircraft to counter the Luftwaffe. Foreign contracts drove production for the first two years. After [End Page 372] the fall of France in 1940, Washington wanted to ramp up production to 50,000 airplanes per year, an incredible number considering the few hundred aircraft then being built. That level of production demanded an unprecedented mobilization of resources and manpower that expanded upon the programs of the New Deal.

Furgerson's is a two-part story driven by decisions in Washington and Dallas. A large part of the story is about finding thousands of workers and training them in the complicated process of aircraft manufacturing. The local population had only a small industrial base before the war, so tens of thousands of workers poured into the area to take the new jobs. Housing and public transportation had to be addressed for the boomtown that Dallas-Grand Prairie became. American society also had to adjust to the entrance of large numbers of women into the industrial work force. Then there was the unionization of that work force. Wartime production could not afford slowdowns or strikes. Industrial life got more complicated during the third year of the war when charges of corruption and inefficiency brought Congress' Truman Committee to town to investigate. Building airplanes was not a simple matter of patriotism and Rosie the Riveter. The progressive policies of the New Deal had to be mated to military need in many unforeseen ways.

NAA shut down its Grand Prairie operation after the war and sold its sprawling plant in two parts, one building to Texas Engineering and Manufacturing Company (TEMCO) and the other to Vought Aircraft. The latter began making fighters for the Navy in 1948, while TEMCO overhauled existing aircraft for foreign governments and the U.S. Air Force. That helped solve the problem of finding new tenants and keeping a highly trained workforce employed. By way of comparison, Fort...