14 Feb VKF Ball Bearing Works

For me, this was an excellent visual of how ball bearings work. (Author PlusMinus)

On March 6, 1944, the day of the first large-scale daylight bombing of Berlin, the assigned target for the Liberty Lady B-17 of the 306th BG was the VKF Ball Bearing Works at Erkner, an eastern suburb of Berlin, about seven miles from the city center.

VKF stands for (in German)  Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken AG. It was a subsidiary of the Swedish company SKF or Svenska Kullagerfabriken AB.

SKF was founded in 1907 by Sven Wingquist, the inventor of the double-row self-aligning ball bearing. He created a better ball bearing! The first factory was built in Göteborg, Sweden. By 1908 branch offices opened in Germany and France; the next year a subsidiary in New York, then soon after, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and Russia. The company had sales agents all over the world.

With the exception of the depression years business was good. By the 2nd half of the 1930’s however, business was booming!

Why was business so good?  Their product, ball bearings, were critical to the manufacture of the most important war materials, such as planes, vehicles, tanks, guns, submarine engines. The bearings reduced friction and wear in the machinery that was being produced at breakneck speed.

You can read “SKF’s history book”at the company website. “…German rearmament campaign under Adolf Hitler was a major stimulus to Swedish business and industry, making the late 1930’s a very positive time for Swedish industry in general for the SKF in particular.”  Sweden was Germany’s largest trading partner.

Being a neutral country Sweden was allowed to continue trade with Germany as well as the Allied countries. As the war progressed and when it became clear that the Allies would prevail, more and more pressure was put on Sweden to decrease their exports of ball bearings.

OSS (Office of Strategic Services) agents had infiltrated the SKF plant in Göteborg and were monitoring shipments to Germany, so OSS Stockholm had a good idea of how much was being exported.

Although in B/W and taken on a later date, this is what the crew would have seen from the bombardier’s seat in their B-17. (The 8th Air Force Historical Society)

Another huge problem was that the ball bearing manufacturing plants in Germany, in particular at Schweinfurt and at Erkner, were prime bombing targets.  I have read that the Eighth Air Force wanted these factories to be referred to as VKF Ball Bearing works and not SKF so it wouldn’t appear that they were bombing a Swedish company.

Postwar analyses concluded that the damage to these plants was significant but all in all the Germans were still able to get the ball bearings they needed until the end of the war.

So this is where the Liberty Lady was headed on March 6th.  After participating in what has been described as the largest air battle ever waged they fought their way almost to Erkner when the Lady was crippled by antiaircraft fire.

It would be my Dad’s first and last trip to Berlin.

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