World War II was in no small part a major arms race. US President Franklin Roosevelt had promised to make 50,000 military aircraft per year, which was more than existed in the entire world at the time. Factories were working as hard as possible as a result to make one B-24 bomber a day- that meant thousands of people putting together a 100,000 part aircraft every single day.
Consider that they had no computers to help them, and most of the people who were used to building such things were off fighting the war. On top of that, consider that a 100,000 part aircraft being built in 24 hours means 4,166 parts being put together every single hour.
Then Charles Soreness VP of production for Ford, produced a gaffe that lead to him needing to produce one such bomber every hour (he had made a snide remark about how bad the aircraft building process was, and boasted he could do better by the morning). Did he do it? Well you wouldn't be reading this article if not.
Soreness spent all night drawing up plans for how to make a bomber in one hour, and the final result was the Willow Run plant, which, as promised, produced one bomber every hour.
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