Trucks to Russia, chargers to the sky: the wartime outward trade

1939 — 1945

For six years Fort Wayne's biggest customer was the world's war: The outward trade of the war years ran through government contracts, but its destinations were foreign fields. It began before American entry: in 1939, fearful that German bombing would destroy its English factory, Rolls-Royce chose Fort Wayne to build starter motors for British military aircraft, and the British government relocated construction of key fighter-aircraft parts to GE facilities in the United States in the same year, according to the histories of GE's Fort Wayne operations written from them. GE's Taylor Street plant — ground broken 6 December 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor — built the turbosuperchargers that let American bombers and fighters fight at altitude; by 1944 its production exceeded 50,000 units, the highest level of supercharger production of any factory in the country, and those chargers went out in B-17s, B-24s, P-38s and P-47s over every theater of the war. The truck plant sent its product farther, into an ally's hands: International Harvester's company photographs of 1941, preserved by the Wisconsin Historical Society, show factory workers at what the original captions identify as possibly the Fort Wayne Works crating military M-5-6 trucks and loading the crates onto rail cars, with the caption's explanation — "The trucks in the assembly line are military model M-5-6, originally sold to the United States Army. These trucks have been diverted under the Lease-Lend Program to Russia." The plant attribution in the captions is the company's own "possibly," and this history keeps it; the Lend-Lease diversion itself is stated in the caption without hedging, and the M-5-6's service in Soviet hands is a matter of the type's general record. The Military section carries Fort Wayne's war plants as installations; the export record is simply that between 1939 and 1945 a measurable share of Britain's air war and Russia's truck fleet started on Fort Wayne factory floors.

Sources:

1. Carol Young Lindquist, "Electric Works" (Fort Wayne Quest Club paper, 2023), and the News-Sentinel's war-production histories, drawing on Clovis Linkous's history of GE in Fort Wayne — the 1939 Rolls-Royce starter-motor work, the British relocation of fighter parts, the Taylor Street plant and 50,000-plus turbosuperchargers by 1944.
2. International Harvester Company photographs, Wisconsin Historical Society (WHi 59454, WHi 59457, 1941) — M-5-6 trucks crated and loaded on rail cars, "possibly at International Harvester's Ft. Wayne Works," with the original caption's Lend-Lease diversion to Russia.
3. Jim Allen and John Glancy, "IHC At War" (International Scout Encyclopedia lost-chapter series, Octane Press) — the substantial portion of IHC military truck production earmarked for Lend-Lease and the M-5-6 trucks sent to Russia.
4. Military and Inventors & Inventions — the war plants and the turbosupercharger record in full, cross-referenced and not retold here.