by Hew Strachan
Joffre knew of the German adoption of the Minenwerfer in 1913, and recognized that this was a weapon whose simpler technologies could be more easily mastered by civilian industries. They could also be adapted from existing but otherwise redundant equipment. Black-powder 152 mm mortars made in 1839 were deployed in September 1914. The obsolete 80 mm Bange mountain gun was adapted as a spigot mortar, with the bomb placed over the barrel. Dubbed the lance-mine Goutard, it entered service towards the end of the year. The 58 mm mortar devised by Major Duchêne had a barrel developed from the 105 mm recoil mechanism, shell cases from the obsolete 150 mm mortar, and explosive that was too unstable for artillery proper. Trials at the front in February 1915 proved Duchêne’s improvisation entirely satisfactory in practice, so enhancing French firepower by widening its sources of supply.248
Although the army’s worries focused on artillery, the attention of its critics concentrated on the provision of rifles. The mathematics of the problem were much simpler: the army needed virtually as many rifles as it had men under arms. It had begun the war with 2.8 million Lebel rifles; it had expanded its manpower to 2.5 million; but it had lost 850,000 rifles in the first six months of the war.249 The difficulty in making good the deficit was that the three state factories at St Etienne, Chatellerault, and Tulle had long since ceased production of the Lebel, and only Tulle still possessed the machine tools to resume output. All they could do was increase their output of artillery carbines and of rifles designed for Indo-China. Private industry was not interested in contracting for the Lebel, and in any case protested that it was too busy responding to the needs of the artillery. The Ministry of War fell back on its stocks of the obsolete 1874 Gras rifle. It had 600,000 of these, and up to 200,000 were converted from their original calibre of 11 mm to 8 mm, the calibre of the Lebel. Small parcels of rifles were secured from Japan (50,000) and the United States (30,000), but significant imports, principally American, could not be expected until 1916. In February 1915 the army was still short of 700,000 rifles.
The rifle issue was taken up with vehemence by the senate commission on the army, which resumed its activities with the reconvening of the assembly in Paris in December 1914. On 28 January 1915 the director of artillery met representatives of private industry, who were now cautiously optimistic about developing the manufacture of rifles. The principal obstacles were the high specifications required of machine tools—tolerances were often no greater than a hundredth of a millimetre—and the division of labour to compensate for the loss of skilled workers and to enable serial production. Those firms already producing small arms had greedily accepted contracts, but had not rejected those for shells or fuses; moreover, they soon found that military requirements differed from sporting. And so the backlog of orders cascaded. One small-arms firm, which had promised 1,000 rifles a day in September 1914, delivered 100 in March 1915. A Paris consortium due to begin deliveries in May 1915 did so in June 1916. When Millerand met Renault at the beginning of March 1915 he received the same response as Baquet in January. But the Paris manufacturers agreed that they could contribute more effectively if they concentrated on parts rather than entire rifles. Conversion of the Gras rifle was suspended. Output of the Lebel reached 46,000 by August, and over double that a year later. By then stocks were sufficient to enable production to be throttled back.250
Nothing could have been achieved, in the view of Charles Humbert and other senators, if they had not intervened. They magnified their role by using calculations which exaggerated the possible shortfall in rifles in 1915. Their solution to artillery orders was to increase the flow of orders to firms which had still not delivered on the contracts they had already received. But in this they were being manipulated by the arms dealers themselves, principally Schneider. The effect was to compound the very backlog the parliamentarians were committed to removing. The Senate saw the failure to produce more Lebels sooner, like the shells crisis and then the artillery shortage, as a symptom of the dilatoriness and defensiveness of the Ministry of War. What actually produced delay was the conversion of peacetime industry to wartime needs.
But the senate commission preferred to find its explanations in scapegoats rather than structures.
The output of munitions, therefore, became the peg on which the Third Republic hung its fears of military domination. The effect of the German invasion and of the government’s evacuation of Paris had been to elevate the political power of the army to the point where one of its critics could describe it as a ministry within itself. The military coup which had haunted the government since 1871 seemed to have been effected by indirect means. But neither Viviani’s cabinet nor the senate commission could easily reassert itself, given the continuance of the immediate danger and the obfuscation and secrecy of Joffre’s GQG. They therefore focused their attacks on the hinge of the civil-military relationship, the Ministry of War. Millerand became the butt of his own government as much as of its opposition. But Millerand’s defences included the danger that his fall would also entail the collapse of the ministry as a whole. Thus, Viviani had to cast about for another answer to the commission’s attacks than simply resorting to the obvious remedy of removing Millerand.251
His answer, on 18 May 1915, was to appoint Albert Thomas as undersecretary of state at the Ministry of War, with particular responsibility for artillery and munitions. A month later General Baquet was removed from his post. Thomas was a socialist. Many of Millerand’s critics saw him as their ally within the War Ministry.252 Both descriptions were only partly true. Thomas was a reformer rather than a revolutionary, a pragmatist rather than a theorist. He was also a great admirer of Millerand, and his involvement in munitions production dated back to October 1914 and the initiative of the latter, rather than to May 1915 and his appointment by Viviani.253
Thomas’s appointment did not, there fore, mark a radical change in course. It did, however, coincide with major increases in output, and he therefore benefited by association. Thomas’s role was to give shape and method to war industry. The conversion in 1914–15 was improvised and confused: expedience had of necessity triumphed over system. Senator Charles Humbert reckoned that there were over 900 contracts awaiting signature, and that skilled labour was still being taken from industry for military service.254 Thomas’s answer to this was not collectivism or the requisitioning of factories. He numbered industrialists and members of the Comité des Forges among his friends. His aim was to secure their co-operation. Profits were controlled, but they were preserved. The role of the state, in Thomas’s eyes, was to intervene in order to co-ordinate and to arbitrate, to maximize output through a sensible division of resources and of labour.255 Raw materials were distributed, not through the state but through the development of monopolies organized within specific industries. The regular meetings between the service chiefs and the heads of industry, initiated by Millerand in Bordeaux, were continued and developed under Thomas.256
Thus, workers’ rights took second place to war needs. Thomas supported employers in their call for more hands, but his goal was an organized economy. He embraced the principles of Taylorism, of scientific management through the division and dilution of labour. Typical of this philosophy was the ‘loi Dalbiez’, first introduced on 17 August 1915 and amended in October. Designed to winkle out the shirker, its initial purpose was to put into uniform those who had no particular skills. It therefore set limits to the number of exemptions in each industry, thus threatening to constrain rather than promote production. However, thanks largely to Millerand, its revised form did as much to ensure its corollary, a secure supply of skilled workers for industry. The total numbers working in arms production and its related industries swelled from 313,000 in May 1915 to 425,000 in December, and 880,000 in June 1916. The law created a powerful instrument against the obstructionism of a general staff desperate for soldiers, and retained the rights of the state over the individual in time of war. It established the notion of a ‘military worker’, a man released from military service bec
ause of his skills, whose right to shift his place of employment was dependent on the Ministry of War and the imperatives of war production.257 In theory, such workers enjoyed the wages and privileges appropriate to their jobs; in fact, they lost the right to strike and found their wages depressed by their employers. Thus, for his socialist critics, Thomas gave with one hand—creating workers’ committees within the ministry—but took with the other.
The withdrawal of labour for the army was only one of the obstacles which the state had erected in the path of war industry. The other was the moratorium. Manufacturers fulfilling state contracts were permitted to use any working capital they had deposited in the bank, but they could not negotiate fresh loans. A decree of 16 August 1914 permitted the state to pay advances to its contractors, but only to cover raw materials and wages. There was no allowance for plant. Furthermore, the amount of cash that could be withdrawn from the bank was modified by the value of the advance. The conversion of civilian industries to war production was thus vitiated by lack of funding.
A decree of 15 July 1915 enabled the state to advance money for plant. However, the implications were not fully considered. Thomas’s policy was to control profits through fixing prices. But it was patently absurd for the state to pay the same prices for goods manufactured in existing factories and for goods from plant financed through a state advance. By asking for interest on its advances, and later for securities as well, the state cut out the more flagrant routes to profiteering. During the late summer and early autumn of 1915 it also refined other methods for funding conversion. At one extreme the Ministry of War could provide all—the plant, the labour, and the orders: in these circumstances the role of business was to do no more than contribute the management. At the other, the state could increase the price paid for the product so that it included an element for capital depreciation: on 22 September 1915 the ministry’s artillery and munitions committee took the view that the ministry would in this way become the ultimate owner of any premises. The middle path was for the ministry to provide a direct subsidy for an undertaking. This lessened the risk to be borne by a reluctant businessman, while at the same time reducing the cost to the state of the final product.258
This last device widened the circle of firms involved in the arms business. Small firms, which had been slow to convert to war production, now did so. But the general thrust of the development under Thomas was seen to be towards the growth of monopolies, not their reduction. Small workshops were consolidated under one head. Large factories replaced small. In 1921, as in 1911, 99 per cent of French businesses employed fewer than 100 workers; but in arms production this was true of only just over 25 per cent of firms.259 For his critics, Thomas’s actions were at odds with his philosophy: his management of the war economy was strengthening capitalism rather than replacing it. The provision for direct state ownership was not acted on—or at least not immediately. Like Rathenau, Thomas—albeit approaching from a different political direction— pursued compromise in the interests of immediate effectiveness. It was a solution, as in Germany, that proved equal to the demands of 1915. But in 1916 the need for munitions would be cranked up once more. The improvisation of shell production lay within the competence of all large, well-equipped engineering firms. But heavy artillery required massive equipment capable of operating to exact specifications. France had still not attended to these needs, and it was to these that Joffre drew attention in a lengthy list on 30 May 1916.
In 1916 France would no longer enjoy one advantage which had accrued to it in 1914. Because at the outset of the war it was the senior military partner in the Entente, it could reasonably expect Britain to act as its economic prop. Its drive to boost its munitions output could be built in part on raw materials imported from its ally. In 1913 France had bought 11 million tonnes of coal from Britain. In 1915 it acquired 18.9 million tonnes. In January 1916 France’s orders for British iron were running at 115,000 tons per month. Through these imports France was both compensating for its lost territories and budgeting for further industrial expansion. The fact that Britain could supply them is, in its turn, witness to the comparative slowness of British industrial conversion. But in 1916, as its war industries gathered pace and as it fielded a major army, Britain had to hold back on the export of raw materials to its ally. France was told it could only have 40,000 tonnes of iron a month, and its imports of British coal stabilized at 18.17 million tonnes for the year.260
Britain’s industrial mobilization was not constrained by a lack of raw materials. Its exports of iron and steel had already fallen from 5 million tons in 1913 to 3.9 million in 1914. Under the impact of the prohibitions of 1916 they dwindled to 2.3 million tons in 1917. At the same time imports of ferrous material rose, approaching a million tons in 1915. Thus, total steel production grew year on year, from 7.6 million tons in 1913 to almost 9 million in 1916.261
The slowness of Britain’s industrial mobilization appears paradoxical for another reason. In 1914 it spent more on defence per head of its population than any country in the world. Furthermore, because Britain’s per capita income was higher than that of its rivals, the burden of military spending was low in relation to net national product. It therefore had both the highest level of defence spending in absolute terms and the greatest capacity for further expansion.262 Most of this money was disbursed domestically, and 70 per cent of it was channelled towards private manufacturers. Furthermore, its leading arms producers, pre-eminently Vickers but also Armstrong Whitworth, had firmly established themselves in export markets. On the face of it, Vickers enabled Britain to respond to industrial mobilization more effectively than did Krupp enable Germany or Schneider-Creusot France.
In reality the outlook was less positive, for three reasons. First, the British armaments sector was less internally competitive than appearances suggested. Armstrong was in decline; many of the other firms in the business, like Maxim-Nordenfeld or William Beardmore, were wholly or partly owned by Vickers. Secondly, much of Vickers’s overseas business was conducted through subsidiary companies established abroad: thus, its success in Sweden, Spain, Austria-Hungary, France, Italy, Russia, Japan, and Turkey was represented—at least in part—in plant available to those nations and not, as was the case with Krupp in Germany, to Britain. Thirdly, Britain was a sea-power. Vickers was able to secure orders for warships because of the Royal Navy, just as Krupp could sell its guns on the back of the reputation of the German army. ‘The old-fashioned little British Army, Kitchener told the president of the Board of Trade in August 1914, ‘was such an infinitely small proportion of the world’s demand that looking after its equipment was not much more difficult than buying a straw hat at Harrods.’263 British industry was not adapted to the maintenance of a large army for protracted land operations.
Indeed, it could almost be argued that the greater the focus on naval building the greater were the obstacles to Britain in the race to convert its industry to wartime production. Fleets were more expensive in terms of capital equipment than armies. Therefore the export of warships and of naval ordnance was a much bigger money-spinner than that of field artillery or rifles. To concentrate on naval armaments was sound business sense. Between 1900 and 1914 British exporters secured 63.2 per cent of seven overseas markets; France got 9.4 per cent and Germany 7.6 per cent. But Britain’s reinforcement of its commercial gain worked against the achievement of a balance in capabilities. Furthermore, the principal strategic function of large fleets was not war but deterrence. They were adapted to the maintenance of stability and order in international relations. Navalism was costly but—crudely put—it concentrated on equipment, not projectiles, on gun turrets and armour plate rather than on shells and mines. It was therefore not about the creation of large numbers of expendable units for the fighting of a major war.264
The British government’s policy in the event of war was simply to increase the flow of orders to private firms. In the 1890s the private arms companies had received 45 per cent of the amount spent an
nually on munitions; during the Boer War they got 75 per cent. But British arms firms, no more than other businesses in Britain or other arms firms elsewhere, could not afford to keep plant idle. The flood of orders in 1899 had resulted in a backlog of between one and two years in the deliveries of field guns by May 1901. Then, in 1902 orders evaporated and productive capacity languished. In 1905 the War Office divided a major order for new field guns between Vickers, Armstrong, and—in a deliberate bid to promote competition—the Coventry Ordnance Works. But the army turned to outside competition precisely because of the transitory nature of the demand. Its long-term policy, affirmed in a report on government factories in 1907, was to keep the Royal Arsenal fully employed in peacetime. Eighty per cent of the army’s orders for guns and shells between 1909 and 1914 were placed with the Royal Ordnance Factories. The government workshops were therefore restricted to regular work, but were left without spare capacity for wartime expansion. The effect was to increase the government’s reliance on private industry in an emergency, but without any effort to provide a low of business sufficient to maintain the latter’s plant in the interim. In 1908–9 the trade received only 44 per cent of government munitions orders. Although work increased after 1909, it was stimulated by the naval competition with Germany, and army orders constituted only a tiny fraction of the 70 per cent of government munitions orders passed to private industry by 1914. Vickers received no army contracts in 1911, and were asked for a mere twenty-two field guns in 1913–14.265