When William Knudsen, president of General Motors (the world’s largest corporation), visited London to check on his company’s interests there, he found the population “scared stiff.” “Airplanes! Airplanes! Airplanes!” Knudsen reported back to his colleagues in the United States. “That is all they think about, and bombs go with them.” In the United Kingdom, children were being evacuated from cities. Gas masks were being handed out by the thousands. “It was really bad,” Knudsen said. “They were just hysterical.”
In 1940
