On Monday, 17 May, Asquith told his Cabinet that the combination of Fisher's resignation and the shell scandal ‘would, if duly exploited (as they would have been) in the House of Commons at this moment, have had the most disastrous effect on the general political and strategic situation’.4 Two days later, Asquith announced the intention to form the new government. That same day, Lloyd George penned a letter to Asquith indicating that he could not continue as chairman of a powerless Munitions of War Committee without executive authority functioning under the auspices of the War Office. Since Kitchener was too popular to replace at the War Office, the only solution appeared to Lloyd George to be seizing control of munitions production. Having been refused the Treasury by Asquith, Bonar Law was minded to seek the proposed Ministry of Munitions for himself, but was persuaded otherwise after meeting Lloyd George. In theory, Lloyd George was appointed only temporarily to the Ministry of Munitions – as a means of preventing Bonar Law from being appointed – when the new government was constituted on 26 May. He expected to return to the Treasury. Lloyd George's formal appointment by Royal Warrant came on 9 June, with the ministry itself coming into being on 2 July.
The establishment of the Ministry of Munitions meant an end to the old pre-war ways of doing things. It would demonstrate how the power of the state over the lives of ordinary citizens would be greatly increased, even in a liberal democracy. It would prove an extraordinary experiment in state intervention and state welfare, marking a real turning point in attitudes on the part of government and governed. In a modern industrialised war, in which it was now just as important to out-produce as to outfight an opponent, mobilisation meant not just military manpower, but also of all means of production. What drove the creation of a ‘war economy’ above all else was the demand for more and more munitions. Other belligerents were suffering similar shell shortages to those of the British by the spring of 1915, but it took them longer to undertake the same kind of centralisation of munitions production. The French appointed an Under-Secretary of War for Artillery and Munitions within the War Ministry on 18 May 1915, but no Ministry of Armament and War Production appeared until December 1916. Though striving to remedy potential deficiencies in raw materials as early as August 1914, the Germans did not establish the Weapons and Munitions Procurement Office until September 1916, shortly before both it, and a number of other agencies, merged in a new Supreme War Office in November 1916. Lloyd George's Ministry of Munitions, therefore, was a pioneering creation. Yet, ironically, as Chancellor, Lloyd George had announced on 4 August 1914 that, despite the outbreak of war, government policy would be ‘to enable the traders of this country to carry on business as usual’.5
Most had expected the war to be short. It was recognised that some limited government intervention might be needed in food supply, transport, maritime insurance, and the money markets, but for only a few weeks. Little thought had been given to the need to increase munitions production. The Mowatt Committee had calculated future required reserves of ammunition in 1904 on the basis of the experience of the South African War. The lessons drawn from the Russo-Japanese War appeared to be the need to ensure fire economy rather than increase the ammunition available. Each of the British army's standard eighteen-pounder artillery pieces was allocated only 1,000 rounds for active service, with a further 300 rounds in reserve in Britain, and another 500 to be manufactured within the first six months of a war. This represented a stock in hand two and a half times greater than at the start of the South African War in 1899, but it was assumed that there would be no need to fire more than 10 rounds a day per gun. The reality was rather different.
Already by 24 October 1914, with the BEF now fully engaged around Ypres, there was an attempt at shell rationing. Eighteen-pounders were restricted to firing 30 rounds a day. The actual average daily expenditure at Ypres between 21 October and 22 November, however, was 50 rounds per gun, rising to 80 rounds at really critical periods, with some individual batteries recorded as firing 1,200 rounds within 24 hours. Despite all efforts to send out as many shells as possible, the stock of eighteen-pounder shells was still reported as very small, that of 4.5-inch howitzer shells ‘hopeless’, and the amount of 9.2-inch howitzer shells decreasing by the day.6 Moreover, the British army was notably deficient in the heavier calibre artillery that was soon to prove necessary for the siege-like conditions that unfolded on the Western Front.
Other calculations were equally misplaced. By 24 September, the French had only fifteen days’ supply of shells left based on the current expenditure in Flanders. French industry had produced 10,000–12,000 shells a day initially but the requirement was now judged to be 80,000–100,000 shells. Similarly, by September 1914, the Russian military headquarters, Stavka, was demanding the delivery of 1.5 million shells a month, or three times the pre-war estimate, a total soon amended to 3.5 million shells per month. Having entered the war with a large stock of some 4 million field-artillery shells in August 1914, the Germans, too, had fewer than 500,000 left by September.
The South African War had demonstrated that the output of Britain's state ordnance factories was inadequate, but the Murray Committee in 1907 had concluded that the private sector could supply any increased wartime needs. The number of firms envisaged as contributing in the event of war was small, and there was little incentive for those firms outside the charmed circle of preferred manufacturers to invest in new plant and equipment without any certainty of future government orders. Had the war been fought along the lines of pre-war assumptions, all might have been well, but the demands for shells in France, the increase in ammunition scales, and the need to equip Kitchener's ‘New Armies’ of volunteers including their expanded artillery support – over 1.1 million men had enlisted by December 1914 – outstripped all capacity. Shortfalls were the product of the extraordinary additional orders placed with private firms by the government without regard for capacity, rather than of unrealistic expectations on the part of industry itself. In a sense, the shortage was an artificial one, generated by a combination of slow deliveries, accumulating arrears and further orders. Many contractors both at home and abroad simply failed to meet promised targets. British manufacture had to be supplemented by orders placed in Canada, the United States and Japan. Shortfall in weapons-production targets by June 1915 ranged from 12 per cent in rifles to 55 per cent in machine guns and 92 per cent in high- explosive shells. By May 1915, of 29.9 million rounds of eighteen-pounder artillery ammunition ordered since August 1914, only 1.4 million rounds had been delivered.
The man ultimately responsible for munitions procurement was Kitchener. In August 1914 this great imperial proconsular figure had been on home leave from Egypt, where he wielded political and military authority as British Agent and Consul General. Having established his reputation by reconquering the Sudan between 1896 and 1898, Kitchener had been summoned to act as chief of staff to Field Marshal Lord Roberts in South Africa in December 1899. He succeeded Roberts in the South African command, and was then commander-in-chief in India, taking up his Egyptian appointment in 1911. The War Office had been vacant since March 1914 with Asquith temporarily exercising a watching brief. The opportunity to secure Kitchener's services was too good to miss and, on 5 August, he became the first serving soldier ever to act as Secretary of State for War.
Kitchener was a better strategist than is sometimes suggested: unlike most, he certainly expected hostilities to last at least three years. It was his intention to commit his ‘New Armies’ increasingly to the fray so that ‘our Army should reach its full strength at the beginning of the third year of the War, just when France is getting into rather low water and Germany is beginning to feel the pinch’. As he also expressed it to MPs in June 1916, that would give Britain maximum strength ‘at the conclusive period of the war’.7 Subsequently, Kitchener recognised that the abiding responsibilities of coalition warfare made it impossible to stand aside from commitment to the struggle in France and Flanders, remarking of the British offensive at Loos i
n September 1915, ‘unfortunately we had to make war as we must, and not as we should like to’.8 That he was a great magnet for recruiting is undeniable, his appeal forever encapsulated by the arresting stare and pointing finger on Alfred Leete's iconic poster, first issued on 5 September 1914.
Being a magnificent poster was not quite the same as being a good war minister. Lloyd George likened Kitchener to ‘one of those revolving lighthouses which radiate momentary gleams of revealing light far out into the surrounding gloom and then suddenly relapse into complete darkness’. More succinctly, the Conservative MP Leo Amery characterised him as ‘a great improviser, but also a great disorganiser’.9 Not having served in the home army since 1883, Kitchener knew little of any pre-war military arrangements. Grown increasingly autocratic in his overseas assignments, Kitchener had previously clashed with the British High Commissioner for South Africa, Lord Milner, and with the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon. On both occasions, he had won the political argument. In Asquith's Cabinet, too, most deferred readily to Kitchener's professional judgement. Lloyd George suggested that his colleagues were intimidated by Kitchener's overwhelming presence: he was, after all, 6 feet 2 inches tall, solidly built, and had enormous prestige with the public. Taciturn, secretive and constitutionally unable to delegate, Kitchener felt no need to explain any of his decisions to the politicians. In a sense he had a point for, as he remarked in September 1915, the Cabinet was ‘so leaky. . . If they will only all divorce their wives I will tell them everything.’ According to Beaverbrook, he added on another occasion that, in the case of Lloyd George, it was more a matter of a minister telling other men's wives.10
Within the War Office, the Master General of the Ordnance, Sir Stanley von Donop, had made arrangements as early as 24 August 1914 for more munitions work to be placed with civilian subcontractors to the usual suppliers. There was at least some recognition that firms new to munitions production could hardly be expected to do more than manufacture simpler components. There was also an understandable caution with regard to the safety of munitions manufactured by untried firms. Generally, however, the War Office was slow to communicate with industry. Raw materials, machine tools and suitably skilled labour were also into short supply. Due to the failure to control the enlistment of skilled manpower into the armed forces, small-arms factories had lost 16 per cent of their employees by December 1914, and chemical and explosive works had lost 23 per cent.
Lloyd George had interested himself in munitions production from the start, and it would appear that, like Kitchener, he appreciated at an early stage that the war would not be over in the shorter term. He had criticised von Donop in October 1914 for still observing the peacetime cost controls he had already abolished, leading to the creation of the Cabinet Munitions Committee. Lloyd George never quite understood that civilian firms could not immediately acquire the knowledge necessary to produce shells, and was unjustly critical of Kitchener and von Donop's supposed incompetence. His own policy as Chancellor, of abandoning competitive tenders for munitions and simply encouraging manufacturers to lay down new plant by advancing cash for purchases, only led to increased inflation. As difficulties mounted, however, he did see that the question of labour distribution required urgent attention. On 22 February 1915, therefore, as part of a wider Cabinet paper on the conduct of the war, he took the opportunity of a worrying strike by skilled workers on Clydeside to urge that the government take upon itself full powers to appropriate all civil-engineering plants capable of manufacturing munitions, and to assume responsibility for compulsory arbitration in any labour dispute. Lloyd George pressed for the passing of a Defence of the Realm (Amendment No. 2) Act in March 1915, which gave the government the requisite powers over engineering: firms could now be forced to take government work if they had the necessary plant to do so. Lloyd George also advanced his campaign for government control of the liquor trade, having suggested melodramatically – and improbably – in February that drink was doing as much damage to the war effort as German submarines. State purchase of the trade was not implemented, but licensing laws were generally tightened, and licensed premises were taken over where they were close to munitions factories at Enfield Lock, Carlisle and Gretna.
The Shells and Fuses Agreement was also negotiated in March to introduce ‘dilution’, whereby a reorganisation of working practices enabled the unskilled to undertake part of the work previously fully carried out by skilled men: an eighteen-pounder shell, for example, contained 78 different components. Dilution, therefore, was not the same as substitution of the unskilled for the skilled. As it happened, on the initiative of the armaments firm of Vickers, a dilution agreement had been negotiated in November 1914 between unions and the Engineering Employers Federation. The agreement in March, therefore, brought the government into the partnership. Later that month, too, the so-called Treasury Agreements were reached with thirty-five unions to prevent workers taking advantage of their strengthened position: these agreements outlawed strikes, introduced more flexible working practices, permitted dilution on war work, and referred industrial disputes to official arbitration. Under the first agreement, employers promised not to use dilution as a means of reducing employment or wages after the war and, by the second, promised restraint of business profits.
Believing yet more was needed, Lloyd George persuaded Asquith to establish the Munitions of War Committee (also called the Treasury Committee) on 23 March – chaired by himself – to take any steps necessary to improve munitions supply, but only in cooperation with the War Office and Admiralty. The War Office could veto decisions made by the Munitions of War Committee, and Asquith did briefly contemplate creating an entirely new office for Lloyd George as ‘Director of War Contracts’ or ‘something of the kind’.11 Kitchener wanted men directed to existing manufacturers rather than work spread wider through civil industry. In March he established his own Armaments Output Committee chaired by the Liverpool shipowner George Booth to bring more civilian labour into the existing munitions plants. This led to Lloyd George's frustration and his seizure of the chance offered by the shells scandal to move against Kitchener. In many ways, the work of Booth's committee anticipated the policy of the Ministry of Munitions. It was also orders placed by the War Office, rather than by the Ministry of Munitions, that sustained the war effort until the spring of 1916. The shells resulting from the first orders placed by the ministry did not arrive at the front until October 1915, and were often substandard. By May 1915, every three days the War Office was already receiving the amount of ammunition that would have taken a year to produce under peacetime conditions. By December 1915, the production of small-arms ammunition had increased tenfold and, compared to the 871,700 shells of all kinds produced in 1914, 23.6 million had been produced in 1915, a twenty-seven-fold increase. Thus, Lloyd George was able to take the credit in many cases for improvements already undertaken.
The blue eyes, long hair, almost hypnotic charm and indiscreet conversation won Lloyd George admirers but, in many other quarters, he was equally distrusted. Many found such an intensely political animal unscrupulous, Margot Asquith writing that Lloyd George ‘couldn't see a belt without hitting below it’.12 Certainly, as long ago as 1885 he had written to his future wife, ‘My supreme idea is to get on. To this idea, I shall sacrifice everything – except, I trust, honesty. I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheel of my Juggernaut if it obstructs the way.’13 The now ardent enthusiast for a greater war effort had been a fierce opponent of the war in South Africa, and a leading ‘Pro-Boer’. In reality, there was some ambiguity in his actual views towards both pacifism and imperialism, nor did he wish to be regarded solely as steeped in radical Welsh Nonconformism. Yet, the radicalism was always close to the surface. As Chancellor he had provoked constitutional crisis with the ‘People's Budget’ of 1909, and his oratory had been equally inflammatory in passing the National Insurance Act in 1911. Lloyd George simply had little truck with tradition or convention, the latter especially evident in his
many sexual indiscretions, and in his casual indifference to financial proprieties. He had come close to political disaster through his involvement in the Marconi scandal in 1912, buying shares in an American subsidiary of the Marconi company in the knowledge that it was about to receive a lucrative British government contract. That same year, with his wife and four surviving children safely ensconced back in Wales, he also took up his long-standing relationship with his secretary, Frances Stevenson.
As the press baron George Riddell noted, the supremely self-confident Lloyd George was ‘always ready to examine, scrap or revise established theories and practices’. Prone to espousing grandiose schemes, however, he was not interested in detail, being keener on picking others’ brains than reading his ministerial papers. He disliked routine, and was wholly unsystematic in his working methods. As Riddell also suggested, ‘he has a flair for spotting what is wrong and suggesting a remedy, but he never thinks out the details of attempts to put his scheme into operation’.14
In foreign policy, as in other areas of his politics, Lloyd George's personal position had changed by 1914, as he had applied his agile mind to the realities of the situation. Quite what stance he would take was uncertain so far as his colleagues were concerned. After all, he had opposed Churchill's naval-building programme. There is no doubt he hoped that war might be avoided but, once convinced of the dangers posed by German ambition, the 52-year-old Lloyd George applied himself to the waging of the war with all the zeal of the religious convert. He was certainly not in awe of Kitchener. Indeed, he clashed with him over the issue of a proposed Welsh Army Corps, which attracted Kitchener's suspicion for the overt politicisation involved in officer appointments by the so-called Welsh National Executive Committee.
The outbreak of the war preserved Lloyd George's political position. At virtually every turn of his career, he had acquired new enemies. With little interest in social connections for the sheer sake of them, Lloyd George did not tend to accumulate close friends. Even when he did so, his abiding concentration on the work of the moment often resulted in him severing contacts with those who no longer served his immediate purpose. Cordially hated by most Unionists, he had nonetheless flirted with the idea of a coalition government in 1910 in the interests of ‘national efficiency’. Now, he was also under pressure from among his Liberal colleagues.
The Making of the First World War Page 10