The war, to Ezra Prentice, was now one of scale. The early, desperate days of furtive projects and hushed acquisitions gave rise to something larger, something measured by thousands of tons of aluminum and tens of thousands of laborers. In the desert-blasted landscape of Southern California, where there were but orange groves just two years before, now stood the pride of his industrial empire: the Prentice Aeronautics Long Beach factory.
Not only was it a factory, but also an entire city all for one purpose: darkening the German and Japanese skies. It was enormous in comparison to the legendary Willow Run factory back in Michigan. While Henry Ford had turned the rationale behind auto manufacturing into using it to build B-24 Liberators, Ezra built his new factory from the ground up from an idea based on one, unimaginable principle inherited from his yet-to-be-acquired learning: the relocating assembly line was only the beginning and never the end of efficiency.
He'd laid it all out to an ideal of modular construction and just-in-time delivery lines that was entirely unknown to the 1940s. In one building wings were going together, in another fuselages, and yet another engine nacelles. Finished, gigantic pieces of this type then came together on a final assembly hangar of truly gargantuan size, where they were assembled at rates and with precision that made older-line builders go white-faced.
The ultimate result was a production miracle. From the great doors of Long Beach factory, an unstinting stream of steel and aluminum streamed out. Every eighteen hours, an all-new B-29 Superfortress, the most elaborate and sophisticated bomber of the war, would roll onto the tarmac. From yet another line, a new P-51 Mustang, with its revolutionary Roll-Royce Merlin engine, into license-production years ahead of schedule as pressured and facilitated by Ezra, would roll out every ninety minutes. He wasn't building planes; he was deluging the enemy with an irresistible and sheer mathematics of mass production.
This industrial tidal wave brought an economic bonanza of similar proportions. In his high-sounding modern office at Rockefeller Center, Ezra reviewed the quarterly statements of Prentice Applied Science. The amounts were astronomical, bordering on the absurd. The cost-plus contracts from an panic-stricken and appreciative government, paying top dollar for his cutting-edge designs and ahead-schedule delivery, had transformed his previously leveraged business into the most profitably lucrative corporation in America. The immense capital he'd invested in his speculative R&D ventures had returned one hundredfold. He now wielded far greater liquid capital and physical industrial assets than the main Rockefeller family trust itself.
This irrevocable, crushing triumph produced a subdued but historic scene. John D. Rockefeller Jr., his weary face creased with tired resignation, sat down with Ezra in his family's private library. For years, Junior warred with Ezra, considering him an imm moral blot upon the Rockefeller name. But he could not disagree with the reality of thousands of bombers soaring on their way to the enemy, bombers built from factories bearing his family's name.
"I don't like your methods, Ezra," Junior said, his voice gentle, all the emotions leached from it. "Your ruthless system of doing business... it isn't our business. But I couldn't, and won't, dissent from the results. You are supplying the nation. You are providing us with the tools to finish this dreadful war." He inclined his head only slightly, just an almost imperceptible movement. "I'll trouble you no further on questions of finance and production. I'll give my time, and the Foundation's time, to work at charity that will be needed to rehabilitate the world once this is accomplished."
It was an unconditional, formal surrender. The industrial and financial future of the Rockefeller name was being handed over to Ezra by Junior, an acknowledgment of the fact that the world had changed and he could no longer understand or control it.
While Ezra was being heralded as an American giant at home, his German counterpart was being ostracized as an outcast. In his gloomy ministry office at the Ministry of Economics, Baron Friedrich von Hauser prepared his own litany of figures to an unofficial committee of senior Nazi leaders and Luftwaffe generals. They were Ezra's statistics of production, laboriously assembled by the overextended and decayed network of spies of the Baron.
"Gentlemen," Von Hauser announced it, his voice strained with a contained, desperate imperative. "We must be realistic. The Prentice plants at California, by themselves, now produce more four-engine, long-range bombers in one month than our entire Reich produces. The Americans are building an avalanche, not an army, and it's coming our way. We cannot afford anymore to try to match them aircraft-for-aircraft. We must divert all resources we can possibly muster from bomber construction to the mass-production of our Me-262 jet fighter for defense interception, as of now!"
His rational, factually grounded warning was met with derision and ideological disgust. The older professional generals were blinded by the belief in the Führer and by disgust at American mongrelism as they conceived it.
"Your figures amount to nothing but defeatist propaganda, Baron," sneered one stout Luftwaffe general, one of those favored by Hermann Göring. "You don't believe in the German pilot's spirit! The Führer's new jet planes will sweep their clumsy flying fortresses from the face of the horizon. Even ten Americans can be defeated by one German!"
Von Hauser looked at the faces of these men, red with arrogance and delusion, and he felt an icy, soul-freezing chill. He was a lonely beacon of sanity in a national madhouse. He could look across an ocean and behold the industrial tsunami rising, an iron and flame tidal wave being forged by the man now his personal enemy, and he could do nothing at all to convince his own leaders that they were going to be drowned.
The comparison of the fortunes of the two men ran directly opposite. Towards the end of the week, Ezra was personally delivered by military mail an autographed, handwritten letter. It was from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the letter, the President thanked him for his "unparalleled and visionary contribution to the arsenal of democracy" and sang the praises of his businesses' ability to "deliver the tools of victory ahead of schedule and beyond all expectation." He was being personally and officially anointed as one of the principal architects of the Allied victory by the leader of the free world.
On the same day, at home in Berlin, Baron von Hauser received his own official communications. A brusque, professional rebuke came from Martin Bormann, a formidable secretary to the Führer. It reminded him to refrain from submitting yet another "pessimistic and demoralizing report doing harm to the willpower of the German nation to oppose." It was an threatening but explicit message. He was to keep his truths to himself, or he would be silenced.
The American architect was being toasted for his vision. The German Cassandra, whose eyes saw with immaculate, chilling clarity what he envisioned, was being asked to blind himself.