The War Years
When war became an almost certainty Tucker didn't have a large scale manufacturing operation, he was ordered to license his patents on the turret to other manufacturers. This wasn't all that unusual, given the circumstances of the war and the amount of material needed. Packard, for example, built Rolls Royce designed engines (along with their own), Ford and Willy's both built Jeeps, to name but a small number of instances. Tucker, however, felt that some of the companies weren't paying the amount of royalties due him and filed several lawsuits in an attempt to recoup the money he was owed.
During the war, Tucker contracted with the Federal government to build a plane known as the "Pea Shooter." I believe that it was this Boeing designed plane. As to what happened during the development process of the plane, that's not completely clear. What is known is that government inspectors were less than satisfied with Tucker's progress on the plane and pulled the contract (after paying Tucker hundreds of thousands of dollars). Tucker also worked with Andrew Jackson Higgins building PT boats until the two of them had a falling out and Tucker left.
It's not known when Tucker came up with his idea of building the ultimate safety car, but we know that as Harry Miller lay dying in 1943, the two of them were discussing the engine to put in the car and Harry told Tucker, “Whatever you do, make it big!”
As the war raged on, Americans did everything they could to keep their cars running, while government restrictions were placed on the amount of driving one could do, when they could gas up their cars, and how fast they could drive them. In magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, articles began appearing telling Americans how they could modify their cars to save gas and what kind of things they could do to keep them running. (In some places, people responded to gas rationing by converting their cars to run on wood!)
By the time government restrictions were removed on the manufacture of cars for civilian use on July 1st, 1945, half the cars in the US were ten years old or older. Americans weren't merely hungry for new cars, they were starving for them.
Of course, when production restarted, it wasn't simply matter of flipping a few switches to get the assembly lines going again. Even so, Ford was the first to start, resuming production on July 3rd. Hudson was next, but they didn't begin until the end of August. Nash restarted their lines in September, Packard and GM both started their lines in October. GM found it's lines shutdown in November due to a 113 day strike, and Chrysler started after GM, running at reduced capacity, in hopes of avoiding a strike.
