WORKHORSE TO WARHORSE — BIRTH OF THE C‑47
In July 1939, the C‑47 was on the drawing board. When war broke out in Europe, in September 1939, the U.S. Armed Forces realized the technical and numerical inferiority of their equipment, particularly aircraft, and decided to take steps to correct the problem. Douglas was suddenly swamped with orders for the drawing board C‑47. The United States desperately needed cargo planes for the Army and its allies. As a stop gap measure, Douglas engineers had no choice but to modify the DC‑2. They assembled a DC‑2 fuselage to a DC‑3 tail, added more powerful engines and called it the C‑39. The Army ordered 35 of them, and along with the C‑33s, became the nucleus for the Army’s first Air Transport Group.
On Sept. 16, 1940, the Army Air Corps (renamed the U.S. Army Air Force {USAAF} on June 20, 1941) ordered 545 C‑47s and 92 C‑53s for delivery by mid 1941. They also ordered another 200 C‑47s at this time. In September 1941, they ordered another 70 C‑47s and 50 C‑53s. Douglas filled part of this order using production capacity initially planned for the airline orders. The order flooded Santa Monica and magnified the Douglas plant’s inability to meet the sudden wartime production schedule. Since the Santa Monica facility was under full production of the DC‑3 and A‑20 bomber, Douglas opened a plant in Long Beach, California. Before war production had ended, Douglas opened plants in Oklahoma City, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In Early 1942, the massive wartime orders began to pour into the Douglas plants. The USAAF ordered 1,270 C‑47s and another 65 C‑53s. They followed that order in July 1942, with another order for 134 more C‑47s and in September 1942, ordered another 2,000 C‑47As to be built in the new Oklahoma City facility. In December 1942, Douglas received another order for 2,000 C‑47As and C‑47Bs placed against the Long Beach plant. There was a brief lull in C‑47 orders with the next order coming in February 1944.
While the sudden war‑time production needs may have caught the Douglas Santa Monica plant flat‑footed in 1941, Douglas met the challenge head on. In February 1944, General Arnold asked Donald Douglas to manufacture an additional 2,000 C‑47As and C‑47Bs (these were manufactured in the Oklahoma City plant) and in June another order for 1,100 C‑47Bs (again from the Oklahoma City plant). The last order was for 1,469 C‑47Bs and 131 C‑117As in July 1944 from Oklahoma City, but not all of this order was completed. (See page 206 for complete production figures.)
The government helped by putting the Douglas plants on a higher production priority, upgrading them from “Priority 5” to a “Priority 2.” This meant the men worked seven days a week, with only one day off in six months (Easter Sunday), and women in Long Beach and Santa Monica, because of a California law, worked six days a week.
Douglas delivered the 2,000 C‑47s by April 1944, in time for the D‑Day invasion. By this time, the Oklahoma City plant was turning out a record 1.8 C‑47s an hour, besides the other aircraft it was producing. In May 1944, two plants, Oklahoma City and Long Beach, produced 573 completed C‑47s. Working 31 days, the production output was equivalent to 18.5 planes a day. In May 1945, the Long Beach plant alone produced more than 415 C‑47s, in addition to 120 Boeing B‑17 bombers in the same month.
Although the first C‑53s were delivered in late 1941, and the first C‑47s in early 1942, they fell woefully short of the Army’s demand for some time. It was only in early 1944 did the supply of C‑47s and its variants begin to keep pace with the demand.
From outward appearances, the C‑47 was almost the twin sister of the DC‑3, and based on the same engineering design. Beneath the looks, the C‑47 production presented many opportunities for Douglas. C‑47 production required new factory techniques that fit war‑time mass production needs. Douglas engineers made radical, innovative, and daring changes to speed up production and make the transition from airliner to warbird.
The original tubular steel engine mounting rings on the DC‑3 were costly to manufacture. Tubular steel was in great demand, and short supply. Douglas engineers made extensive use of ferrous and non‑ferrous castings and forgings to replace costlier welded assemblies. For example, they developed a steel forging that molded two‑halves of the mounting ring. A machine quickly trimmed, and bolted them together. This one operation saved material and replaced skilled worker operating a welding torch with a semi‑skilled production worker. Forged members were also used in the landing gear assemblies and other labor saving techniques were successfully employed for other parts of the C‑47.
Henry Guerin, who started with Douglas in the early 1920s, was now his wartime factory manager at Santa Monica. Guerin had developed a “Hydropress” process that employed male dies made of metal with a “universal” female die made of rubber. This process cut aluminum alloy sheets, and shaped them in a single operation. The Guerin Process was responsible for turning out aircraft parts at undreamed of speed. This process eventually led to closed wing compartments and leakproof integral fuel tanks, without which long range aircraft like the C‑54 would not have been possible. The Guerin hydropress machinery and methods were also later adopted by the auto industry to meet the wartime production needs.
Other parts of the airplane, fairings, access panels, cowls, and wing fillets once formed by hand, were now consigned to Guerin’s presses or stretch‑formed over dies. The objective was to develop a machine tool or technique to replace a hand tool operation. Rivet machines replaced hand riveting, and combined, the improved production techniques cut manufacturing time by 50 percent.
To meet the war‑time production schedule of C‑47s engineers developed procurement procedures, inspection methods, and technical specifications unheard of just a few years before.
Precisely tooled steel jigs, replaced jigs made of wood. New test procedures, anti‑fungus treatments, lacquers, primers, aqueous cleaners, paint for various ferrous and non ferrous metals, and organic protective paints were among dozens of new items needed.
Douglas engineers accomplished these objectives in time to produce in quantity and quality not only thousands of C‑47s, but dozens of other bomber, and fighter types, in quantities that exceeded 29,000 aircraft.
To achieve this massive output Douglas relied heavily on subcontractors, among them a future partner, the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation. In 1940, in its second year of operation, McDonnell received its first C‑47 subcontract for 576 sets of empennage assemblies and spares. Other contracts followed, and by the end of the war McDonnell had manufactured over 10,000 empennage assemblies for the C‑47.7
The stability characteristics and general flight performance of the C‑47 were comparable to the conventional DC‑3 airliner. However, the C‑47 was designed to transport heavy cargo and had a lower performance curve than the DC‑3, although engines that are more powerful were installed.
The C‑47 outwardly resembled the DC‑3 in every detail, except two: The addition of a navigator’s dome (astrodome) above and just behind the cockpit, and the other more distinguishing feature, the “barn door” on the left side of the aircraft. There were subtle differences too, like six inches added to the wing center section, cutting nine inches off the length and reducing the fuel capacity of 882 gallons to 805 gallons. For ferry flights of the C‑47, the interior could hold eight 100‑gallon tanks and later models could carry nine tanks. The cylindrical plastic and rubberized tanks were held in wooden cradles.
THE RECORD
By the end of the war, the C‑47 had carried 22 million tons of goods, and flown 67 million passenger‑miles. The airliner’s DC‑3s under the Air Transport Command logged on the average, 15‑19 hours a day in the air.
Douglas built 10,629 DC‑3/C‑47s. This lusty breed joined the rest of the Douglas clan which became so prolific that at one point, on the average, a Douglas‑built plane took off or landed somewhere around the world every six seconds, every minute, twenty‑four hours a day, Sundays and holidays included. Surely Donald Douglas had created an airborne empire on which the sun never set.
The profound effect of the DC‑3 was the result of a combination of need, world economics, and one man, Donald Douglas, whose engineering and management ability pulled together the forces and created the most successful airplane ever to fly. Arthur Raymond, chief engineer on the DC‑3 project said fifty‑two years after the birth of the DC‑3, “I think any qualified company could have come up with much the same design. Of course, we were first, and I think we did it better than anyone else. We were all excited by what we were doing, and we had a good time. But never in our wildest dreams did we imagine what the next half-century would bring. Ten thousand DC‑3s? Are you crazy?”
IN SUMMARY
There have been many attempts to record accurately, the production figures for the DC‑3/C‑47 and the variants. There was the problem of misnumbered aircraft serial numbers, some historians counted remanufactured aircraft twice, and the problem of Army “acceptances” of aircraft from the Long Beach and Oklahoma City facilities. From McDonnell Douglas records there were 10,632 machines built. Santa Monica manufactured 527 machines through December 1941 (including 38 DSTs). All of the prewar DST/DC‑3 airliners were built in Santa Monica. That plant produced an additional 439 machines through July 1943, and the total number of military machines made in Santa Monica was 382. The 382 military variants coming out of the Santa Monica shop included: 159 C‑53Ds, 219 C‑53s, 2 R4Ds, and the single C‑41 and C‑41A. Another 149 were requisitioned off the assembly line and went directly into the Army. (Twenty‑two Santa Monica Army models were transferred to the Navy, but the Navy also requisitioned 12 DC‑3s from the factory on its own.) This made 531 DC‑3s delivered to the military as new airplanes, leaving 435 delivered to the airlines and other owners. (The Army requisitioned 94 more DC‑3s after they had entered civilian service, including the Douglas‑owned company ship, which became a special C‑53.) Six hundred twenty‑five of the 966 Santa Monica DC‑3s, or 64.6 percent, went into the U.S. Armed Forces. The total production for Santa Monica was 966 DC‑3s. In spite of the big military bite into the Santa Monica production, the DC‑3 is still a record holder. No civilian transport before or since has been built in such numbers in the short period of six years, 1936‑1941.
The Long Beach factory was strictly for military orders producing a total of 4,285 C‑47s and variants, all but 66 of the 4,285 were built under Army contracts. Many of these were supplied to foreign countries under Lend Lease or were transferred directly to the Navy after being built with Army designations and serial numbers. Sixty‑six were original Navy R4D‑1s; the others were all C‑47s through C‑47Bs.
Military orders placed with the Oklahoma City plant totaled 6,928, but only 5,381 were actually delivered, the balance being canceled at the end of the war. The 5,381 included 28 completed as civilian DC‑3Ds.
The total military versions of the DC‑3 (C‑47 et al) were 10,291, or 96.79 percent of production. Douglas records also show that of the 10,632 machines built, three were built as spares, and this figure also does not include the post war DC‑3C, DC‑3D and DC‑3S (Super DC‑3), which were remanufactured airframes and in the case of the Super DC‑3 assigned new construction numbers. The final tally of DC‑3s manufactured in the United States is 10,629 (plus three as spares) for 10,632. An additional 487 Japanese DC‑3s were manufactured by the Showa Company and according to one reliable source, 6,157 Russian Li‑2s were manufactured bringing the grand total for the type to 17,273.
