The Postcard
A Regent Series postcard that was published by the Regent Publishing Co. Ltd. of London NW. The artwork was by Reg Maurice.
The card was posted in Hythe using a ½d. stamp on Tuesday the 4th. September 1917 to:
Miss G. Burrell,
23, Park Street,
Ashford,
Kent.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"West Hythe.
Dear G.,
Just a line to say that I
arrived home quite safe.
I hope your head is
better.
I hope you will like the
card, it's the best I
could do.
All are going out
Saturday to Sunday.
Come, do come.
Please write & say if you
are coming Saturday.
Love to all.
Yours sincerely,
L. J."
A Night Raid on London
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 4th. September 1917, the Luftstreitkräfte (German Air Force) launched a second night raid against the United Kingdom, sending 11 Gotha bombers to raid London.
Only five bombers made it to London, where 18 Sopwith Camel aircraft were scrambled to intercept.
Although neither side met up, the attempted raid proved that Sopwith Camel airplanes could operate well at night.
Henry Ford II
The day also marked the birth in Detroit, Michigan of Henry Ford II, sometimes known as "Hank the Deuce", who was the eldest son of Edsel Ford and grandson of Henry Ford.
Henry Ford II was an American auto executive, and CEO of the Ford Motor Company from 1945 to 1979. Under the leadership of Henry Ford II, Ford Motor Company became a publicly traded corporation in 1956. From 1943 to 1950, he also served as president of the Ford Foundation.
Henry Ford II - the Early Years
Henry Ford II was born to Eleanor Clay Ford and Edsel Ford. He, brothers Benson and William, and sister Josephine, grew up amid affluence. He graduated from The Hotchkiss School in 1936.
He attended Yale University, where he served on the business staff of The Yale Record, the campus humor magazine, but left in 1940 before graduation. During this time, he became a member of the Zeta Psi fraternity.
Henry Ford II's Career
When his father Edsel, president of Ford, died of cancer in May 1943, Henry Ford II was serving in the Navy, and unable to inherit the presidency of the family-owned business.
The elderly and ailing Henry Ford I, company founder, re-assumed the presidency, though mentally inconsistent, suspicious, and considered no longer fit for the presidency position by most of the company's directors.
For the previous 20 years, although he had long been without any official executive title, the elder Ford always had de facto control over the company; the board and the management had never seriously defied him, and this moment was not different. The directors elected him, and he served until the end of the war. During this period, the company began to decline, losing over $10 million a month (equivalent to $193,000,000 in 2021.
The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered a government acquisition of the company to ensure continued war production, but the idea never progressed to execution.
Henry Ford II left the Navy in July 1943 and joined the company's management a few weeks later. After two years, he assumed presidency of the business on the 21st. September 1945.
Since it had been assumed that Edsel Ford would continue in his capacity as president of the company for much longer than turned out to be the case, Henry Ford II had received little preparation for the position, and he inherited the company during a chaotic period; its European factories had suffered a great deal of damage during the war, and domestic sales were also in decline.
Henry Ford II immediately adopted an aggressive management style. One of his first acts as company president was to place John Bugas in charge of company management, dismissing much of his grandfather's inner circle, especially Harry Bennett.
Bennett was chief of the Ford Service Department, whom the elder Ford had hired in 1921 to oversee security at the vast Ford Rouge Plant complex, and nearly two decades later had become a lightening rod in efforts to prevent unionization of the Ford labor force, by violent means if necessary.
Next, acknowledging his inexperience, Henry II hired several seasoned executives to support him. He hired former General Motors executives Ernest Breech and Lewis Crusoe away from the Bendix Corporation. Breech was to serve in the coming years as the young Ford's business mentor, and the Breech–Crusoe team would form the core of Ford's business expertise, offering much-needed experience.
Additionally, Ford hired ten young up-and-comers, known as the "Whiz Kids". These ten, gleaned from an Army Air Forces statistical team, Ford envisioned as giving the company the ability to innovate and stay current.
Two of them, Arjay Miller and Robert McNamara, went on to serve as presidents of Ford themselves. A third member, J. Edward Lundy, served in key financial roles for several decades, and helped to establish Ford Finance's position as a major worldwide financial operation.
As a team, the "Whiz Kids" are best remembered as the design team for the 1949 Ford, which they took from concept to production in nineteen months, and which re-established Ford as a formidable automotive company. It was reported that 100,000 orders for this car were taken the day it was introduced to the market.
Henry Ford II became president and CEO of Ford Motor Company in 1945. In 1956, under his leadership, the company became a publicly traded corporation and dedicated its new world headquarters building. During his term as CEO of Ford, he resided in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
During the early 1960's Ford engaged in lengthy negotiations with Enzo Ferrari to buy Ferrari, with a view to expanding Ford's presence in motorsport in general and at the Le Mans 24 Hours in particular.
However negotiations collapsed due to disputes regarding control over Ferrari's Scuderia Ferrari racing division. The collapse of the deal led him to inaugurate the Ford GT40 project, intended to end Ferrari's dominance at Le Mans (the Italian marque won the race six consecutive times from 1960 to 1965).
In 1966, after two difficult years in 1964 and 1965, the GT40 Mark II's locked out the podium at both the Daytona 24 Hours and the Sebring 12 Hours before taking the first of four consecutive wins at Le Mans.
In the late 1960's, Henry Ford II became personally involved in the development of the Lincoln Continental Mark III. He made design decisions that overrode Focus groups and Ford engineers alike. Ford ultimately selected both the final exterior and interior designs.
The result was a Ford Motor Company flagship that single-handedly made Lincoln profitable and spawned a three-decade market rivalry between the Lincoln Mark series and Cadillac's Eldorado series. The success of the Mark III has been considered to be the high point of Ford's career.
During this time, Ford also reformed the company's European operations, merging the previously separate (and competing) British and German subsidiaries into a single Ford of Europe with a common product line and merged manufacturing operations. During the 1970's, Ford of Europe expanded substantially, with new factories in Saarlouis and Valencia, the latter becoming one of Ford's biggest plants outside the US.
In 1973–74, as it became clear that the U.S. automobile market would begin to favor smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, Ford's then-President Lee Iacocca was interested in buying engines from Honda as a way to minimize the cost of developing a small Ford car for the North American market, such as a modified version of Ford of Europe's Ford Fiesta.
The plan was rejected by Henry Ford II, who stated:
"No car with my name on the hood
is going to have a Jap engine inside."
Strictly speaking, it was already too late for that, as the Ford Motor Company had been selling a Mazda compact pickup truck as the Ford Courier since late 1971. Ford nevertheless did not like the idea of flagship North American passenger car models moving in that direction.
Ford Motor Company did go on to adapt to the era in which Japanese, German, and American participation in a globalized automobile industry became tightly integrated. For example, Ford's relationship with Mazda was well developed even before the end of Henry Ford II's period of influence.
However, in Iacocca's view, the company lagged several years behind GM and Chrysler, due to Henry Ford II's influence, before others led it forward despite his resistance.
Henry Ford II's management style caused the company's fortunes to fluctuate in more ways than one. For example, he allowed the offering of public stock in 1956, which raised $650 million for the company (equivalent to $6.5 billion in 2021), but the "experimental car" program instituted during his tenure, the failed Edsel, cost the company almost half that.
Likewise, Henry Ford II hired the creative Lee Iacocca, who was fundamental to the success of the Ford Mustang, in 1964, but fired Iacocca due to personal disputes in 1978.
Speaking about the break in their relationship, Iacocca quoted Ford as saying:
"Sometimes you just
don't like somebody."
Iacocca later retorted:
"If a guy is over 25 percent a jerk,
he's in trouble. And Henry was
95 percent."
The Death of Henry Ford II
Henry Ford II formally retired from all positions at Ford Motor Company on the 1st. October 1982, upon reaching the company's mandatory retirement age of 65.
However he remained the ultimate source of authority at Ford until his death at the age of 70 in Detroit on the 29th. September 1987.
