I had never heard of William Knudsen, He was never CEO of General Motors.
Career[edit] Knudsen was working for the John R. Keim Company of Buffalo, New York when the Ford Motor Company bought it in 1911 for its steel-stamping experience and tooling.[1] Knudsen worked for Ford from 1911[2] to 1921,[3] a decade that saw the formative development of the modern assembly line and true mass production.[4] Working first for the Ford Motor Company and later for General Motors, Knudsen became an expert on mass production and a skilled manager. Knudsen was president of the Chevrolet Division of General Motors from 1924[5] to 1937, and was president of General Motors from 1937[5] to 1940.
In 1940, President Roosevelt asked Knudsen to come to Washington to help with war production. Knudsen was appointed as Chairman of the Office of Production Management and member of the National Defense Advisory Commission.
In January 1942, Knudsen was commissioned a Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army, the only civilian ever to join the Army at such a high initial rank.[6] and appointed as Director of Production, Office of the Under Secretary of War. In this capacity, he worked as a consultant and a troubleshooter for the War Department.
In both of these positions, Knudsen used his extensive experience in manufacturing and industry respect to facilitate the largest production job in history. In response to the demand for war material, production of machine tools tripled. Total aircraft produced for the US military in 1939 was less than 3,000 planes. By the end of the war, America produced over 300,000 planes. Production of both cargo and Navy ships also increased astronomically. Knudsen's influence not only smoothed government procurement procedures, but also led companies that had never produced military hardware to enter the market. America outproduced its enemies. As Knudsen said, "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible.
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Today's Featured Article - An Old-Time Tractor Demonstration - by Kim Pratt. Sam was born in rural Kansas in 1926. His dad was a hard-working farmer and the children worked hard everyday to help ends meet. In the rural area he grew up in, the highlight of the week was Saturday when many people took a break from their work to go to town. It was on one such Saturday in the early 1940's when Sam was 16 years old that he ended up in Dennison, Kansas to watch a demonstration of a new tractor being put on by a local dealer. It was an Allis-Chalmers tractor dealership,
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