by Hew Strachan
Nobody had planned for an expansion of the army on the scale undertaken by Kitchener. In 1914 the army had 795,000 rifles in stock. All but 70,000 of these were already in use or had to be issued on mobilization. Its holdings of field guns, including heavy artillery designed for field service (the 60 pounder), amounted to 906 pieces, sufficient to equip the BEF and a further five divisions. But between 4 August and 12 September 1914 478,893 men joined the army: guns were needed not for five but for fifty divisions. Kitchener’s New Armies trained with antiquated weapons if they were lucky and broomsticks if they were not. By November 1914 the first New Army had only 30 per cent of the modern rifles and 11 per cent of the field guns it required. For later formations such equipment levels would seem lavish. Britain’s problem in creating a mass army was not so much manpower as munitions.266
The War Office duly increased its orders to the arms trade. By 21 October 781,000 rifles were under contract for delivery by 1 July 1915. Orders for 878 18-pounders were placed with the Royal Gun Factory, Vickers, and Armstrong, and for 150 4.5-inch howitzers with the Coventry Ordnance Works and the government factories. The arms trade performed as best it could in the circumstances. Firms increased their plant and their working hours to boost output. The government works at Enfield doubled its weekly production of rifles to 3,000 by 14 November; the London Small Arms Company reckoned it could produce 700 rifles a week at the outset, but had raised this to 1,500 by January 1915. Output of 18-pounder shell, planned to reach 162,000 in the first six months of the war, actually totalled 409,000. The total stocks of 18-pounder ammunition available at the outbreak, 654,000 rounds, were made to last until February 1915, and by March 2 million rounds of all calibres had been received at the front.267 Munitions output in August 1914 had been increased 90 per cent by October, 186 per cent by January 1915 and 388 per cent by March.268 The response was sufficiently impressive to argue that the effects of munitions shortage were more severe at home than in France.
Where the crisis was really evident was on paper. Deliveries did not keep pace with contracts, and the arrears accumulated as the army grew and further orders were placed. More men meant that ‘the maxima of one month became the minima of the next’.269 The BEF grew 320 per cent in 1915. The rise in demand, therefore, constantly challenged the increase in production. Moreover, ammunition scales were increased, so deepening the appearance of crisis. In February 1915 the establishment of shells per field gun in France was raised from 1,500 shells to 2,000. After the battles of Aubers Ridge and Festubert stocks of 18–pounder shells dropped from over 800 to 600. Although they rose to 1,000 by the year’s end, and although the number of guns they were designed to serve also rose, shell supply per gun was still only half the established scale. And so the figures highlighted a failure to meet an ever expanding target and obscured a major increase in production in absolute terms.270
Deliveries of rifles were closest to target: by June 1915 rifle production was only 12 per cent in arrears, and 1,153,000 rifles had been issued (excluding a further 410,000 foreign and drill rifles). In other categories of weaponry the problems of rapid conversion were writ large. The output of shell was the most alarming: by 29 May 1915 38,806,046 rounds of all calibres had been ordered but only 1,972,558 delivered. This at least made the implications of the shortfall in the production of field guns less acute: only 800 of 2,338 18–pounders had been received. The criticisms of the army for its failure to use more machine-guns were singularly ill-directed when Vickers had managed to manufacture only 1,022 of the 1,792 due for delivery by July 1915. More contracts for more machine-guns would not have added to the firepower of the army when industry could not cope with its existing orders. Piling contract on top of contract did not in itself create the plant or provide the labour necessary for production.271
The fact that Kitchener, as secretary of state for war, recognized this essential truth has formed the basis for a reversal of his status in the history of British munitions production. In the hands of Lloyd George and his acolytes, the War Office’s management of munitions supply in 1914–15 was the embodiment of conservatism. It failed to prepare big enough orders, and it restricted its dealings to an established circle of arms producers. When the government issued contracts in excess of the capacity of the arms firms, it left those firms to subcontract without itself checking on the ability of the subcontractors to meet their delivery dates or to satisfy the army’s inspection standards. But, Kitchener’s advocates point out, delegation made administrative sense. The War Office was stripped of personnel by the need to staff the BEE. Restricting the management problems to a small group of known private firms made the task of the officer responsible, the master general of the ordnance, a realistic one. Moreover, it worked. By 31 December 1915 shell deliveries totalled 16,460,501, 88 per cent of which had arrived in the last six months. But 13,746,433 rounds were on the War Office’s account and only 2,714,468 on that of the Ministry of Munitions. Although the Ministry of Munitions was created under Lloyd George’s aegis at the end of May 1915, none of its products was received until late October, and War Office orders were still being received well into 1916. The growth in output achieved in the course of 1915 was a consequence, not of the establishment of a dedicated ministry halfway through that year but of the steady conversion and expansion of war industry since August 1914.272
However, as with the war ministries in Germany and France, the British War Office was frequently its own worst enemy. Kitchener’s resistance to outside advice could manifest itself as insouciance. Most notoriously, he informed Asquith that growing public anxiety concerning the army’s shell supply was misplaced. The basis for this advice, which formed the thrust of a speech by Asquith on 20 April 1915, was an assurance given to Kitchener by Sir John French.273 But it also reflected Kitchener’s own intention, that his New Armies should not be committed to the continent until 1917, by which time war industry would be well into its stride.274
A telling and much cited instance of War Office conservatism was its reaction to the Stokes mortar. The tactical value in trench warfare of the Minenwerfer and its French equivalents did not escape the British. The Royal Gun Factory produced its first mortars in December. Simultaneously, Wilfred Stokes, chairman of Ransomes and Rapier, an East Anglian engineering company producing locks and cranes and totally unconnected with the arms trade, devised a 3-inch mortar of the simplest construction. It was little more than ‘an educated drain-pipe’, without wheels and divisible into man-portable loads. Its bomb was detonated by a firing pin as it fell to the bottom of the tube, and it could fire quickly enough to have three rounds in the air simultaneously. Made in six compartments, the bomb exploded at unequal intervals, bouncing around the enemy trench. The Board of Ordnance rejected the Stokes mortar twice, in January and March 1915. Not only had the War Office failed to recognize its tactical effectiveness, it had also failed to appreciate its significance for industrial conversion. Stokes rightly stressed that his tube and its bomb could be produced by firms that were not capable of producing high-explosive shell. The establishment of an engineer munitions branch to deal with weaponry for trench warfare might have advanced Stokes’s case, if the master general of the ordnance had not concluded that weapons using explosive propellants should be handled by the directorate of artillery. Not until June 1915, when it was transferred to the Ministry of Munitions as its trench warfare department, was the engineer munitions branch given responsibility for mortars. In August 1915 the directorate of artillery approved the Stokes mortar, and in September the War Office ordered 200. But Lloyd George took the credit: in the same month the Ministry of Munitions ordered 1,000. A total of 11,421 were manufactured in the war, and it became the prototype for all modern mortars.275
Kitchener’s biggest vulnerability, therefore, was his protection of Major-General Sir Stanley von Donop, the master general of the ordnance. Christopher Addison, who became Lloyd George’s parliamentary private secretary at the Ministry of Munitions, said of von Donop, he w
as either ‘incompetent or a traitor. I am inclined to the latter view.’276 The master general’s Teutonic name did nothing to remove such aspersions. But the problem was also organizational. The office, historically significant but castrated in 1855, had been enhanced after the Boer War in recognition of the importance of munitions supply in modern war. But its powers were still insufficient. On the one hand Kitchener recruited men oblivious of equipment considerations; on the other, the army contracts department negotiated with firms while remaining independent of the master general. Not until January 1915 was the contracts department subordinated to the master general, and until then von Donop’s task was little more than the assessment of demands.277
The first clash between von Donop and Lloyd George flared in October 1914, when the chancellor of the exchequer discovered that the master general of the ordnance had not told the arms firms that the Treasury had made £20 million available to increase plant. Von Donop was still observing the cost controls and auditing procedures appropriate to peacetime orders; Lloyd George was not. As a result, a cabinet committee on munitions was formed. Its first three meetings, between 12 and 21 October, were concerned with the supply of guns, powder, and rifles. Its solution to these problems was to add to the number of orders: contracts for guns were raised from 878 to 1,608. But, beyond urging the armaments firms to increase their plant and the War Office to widen their range of contractors, the committee had no formula to expedite the process of industrial conversion. Its work, therefore, heightened the difference between demand and supply, fuelling a sense of crisis rather than resolving it. After October it did not meet again until December, and by January it was moribund.278
However, the demise of the committee was not entirely self-generated. It also owed something to the reluctance of Kitchener to co-operate. The more Lloyd George chivvied, the more the secretary of state for war was anxious to show that his own ministry could cope without external intervention. Part of the confusion in attributing credit for industrial mobilization in Britain arises precisely from the duplication of initiatives which followed. Furthermore, it is clear that, although Lloyd George was the cabinet’s spokesman, he was not necessarily the originator of its policies.279 The role of the chancellor was above all rhetorical: he created a public awareness of the need for full mobilization. Kitchener’s devices were more discreet. The central theme around which these issues were played out was not resources (as in Germany) or plant, but labour.
The trade-off between the creation of a voluntarily enlisted mass army and the manpower needs of industry did not become acute until 1915. By the middle of that year mining had lost 21.8 per cent of its workforce, iron and steel 18.8 per cent, engineering 19.5 per cent, electrical engineering 23.7 per cent, shipbuilding 16.5 per cent, small-arms manufacturers 16 per cent, and chemicals and explosives 23.8 per cent.280 But within the arms industry specifically, the loss of skilled labour—although in aggregate terms small in number—had an effect much earlier. In December it was the principal explanation by the arms firms for their failure to meet existing contracts. Armstrong needed 4,150 skilled workers, and Vickers 1,676. By June 1915 the two government factories and sixteen private firms engaged on munitions work were short of 14,000 skilled workers.281 Plant lay idle as a result: in July four-fifths of munition-making equipment was employed for a single shift only, and even in December 750 presses and other machines were not being used. The numbers employed in the iron and steel industry only reached their pre-war totals after July 1916.282
Vickers had already led the way in pioneering two responses to the problem. In September 1914 they suggested that skilled workers engaged in arms production should be given badges, to show the importance of their jobs and to quarantine them from the social and moral pressures to enlist. The cabinet approved the idea of ‘badging’ in December, and it was adopted by the Admiralty in the same month. The dilemma confronting the army was greater: it needed more men in the army and it needed more munitions. The War Office did not endorse ‘badging’ until March 1915. However, in January it began, albeit tentatively, to release skilled men who had already enlisted, and in May it produced its first list of exempted occupations.
The second solution was the ‘dilution’ of labour, the substitution of skilled jobs by unskilled. In November 1914 the trades unions and the management of the Vickers works at Crayford agreed that unskilled workers could be used on fully automatic machines. But Vickers was unable to get an extension of the agreement to its other works, and the negotiation of any relaxation in restrictive practices fell prey to union leaders’ fears that they would forfeit their members’ support. Kitchener refused to intervene, and in January the Board of Trade appointed Sir George Askwith as chairman of a committee on production. Askwith’s remit embraced a wide range of manufacturing industries, of which the most important was shipbuilding. However, the only substantive outcome was the so-called shells and fuses agreement of 5 March, thrashed out between the Engineering Employers’ Federation and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. The two bodies accepted the principle of dilution, but only for the duration of the war and only in the production of munitions.
Dilution could work within the armaments business because precision engineering and machine tools working to tolerances of a hundredth of an inch enabled their manufacture to be broken up into a large number of distinct operations. The Lee-Enfield rifle had 131 distinct parts, and the barrel alone involved eighty-five separate machining operations. Standardization was ensured by the use of 1,250 gauges. Thus, the ratio of skilled to unskilled labour could fall. Kynochs, who at their peak produced 25 million small-arms rounds a day, expanded their labour force from 2,051 in 1913 to 15,435 by 1916, but their skilled workers fell to 250. As a post-war propagandist trumpeted: ‘Working within fine limits on a great manufacturing scale by hundreds of thousands of unskilled hands supervised by a sprinkling of skilled is one of the chief discoveries of the war.’283
By March 1915 a second aspect of the labour problem was looming in the government’s calculations. This was the right to strike. The threat to the completion of contracts through strike action grew as unemployment receded and workers felt themselves caught in a spiral of rising prices and falling real wages. The effect was to give a twist to the government’s amendment to the Defence of the Realm act. Under the original act, passed in August 1914, the government had appropriated to itself the right to requisition the means of munitions production. The amendment to the act, adopted in March 1915, was a reflection of the slowness with which other engineering firms had switched to war production. It was designed to enable the government compulsorily to direct firms from private manufacturing to government work. But its formulation and introduction coincided with strikes on Clydeside. Grafted onto the bill, therefore, were clauses prohibiting strikes, insisting on compulsory arbitration, and restricting the freedom of movement ‘of any workmen or class of workmen whose services may be required’. Such an affront to trade-unionism required a sop. The corollary to the loss of rights inflicted on employees was a limitation of the profits enjoyed by employers.
The amendment to the Defence of the Realm act acquired these wider ramifications for labour and for war profits because it coincided with Lloyd George’s efforts to give bite to Askwith’s work of the previous month. On 17 March he convened a conference at the Treasury to which he invited trade-union leaders. The proposals of Askwith’s committee embracing dilution, compulsory arbitration, and suspension of the right to strike were accepted on the 19th—or at least so Lloyd George averred. In reality, proof would await practice. Those trades-union leaders present said no more than that they would recommend the committee’s suggestions to their memberships; the Amalgamated Society of Engineers came to a separate deal; and the Miners’ Federation was never party to the agreement.
Through leaving the issue of labour relations to the Board of Trade’s committee of production Kitchener found that, within two months, the initiative in munitions production was passing from
the War Office to the cabinet, and specifically to the Treasury. The marginalization of the War Office became clear on 22 March, when Asquith appointed a committee to plan the formation of a new committee on munitions. It was to be subordinate to the cabinet and not to the War Office, and it was to have the power to place contracts. Lloyd George attended; Kitchener was not invited. The secretary of state for war protested and then threatened to resign if the new committee was given executive powers. On 31 March he endeavoured to regain the ground he had lost by establishing a specifically War Office body, the armaments output committee.284
The remit of the committee, according to the official announcement of its formation, was to take steps to provide additional labour for war production. Kitchener’s first priority was to ensure the full utilization of existing plant through the replacement of the workers lost by Vickers and their ilk. But behind this apparently narrow definition of the committee’s responsibilities lay a broader agenda. On the one hand it was to exploit the amendment to the Defence of the Realm act by diverting labour from other industries, and on the other it was to spread munitions contracts to a wider range of firms through the establishment of co-operative groups. The latter built on steps already taken in conjunction with the Board of Trade to establish local organizations for production. Many businesses could not produce complete items but could manufacture parts. For example, thirty-seven firms were asked to tender for the production of shell on 19 October 1914; only six were able to do so, but 129 offered to supply individual components or undertake particular processes.285 In January the Board of Trade and the Engineering Employers’ Federation began to argue that rather than develop arms production through the existing major firms, both by encouraging them to subcontract and by diverting labour from other work to munitions production, it would be more advantageous to offer direct contracts to minor firms. These businesses would act as co-operatives, pooling their resources on a regional basis. The first such group was formed in Leicester in January. The armaments output committee developed both of the principles embodied in these initiatives—the regional structure (borrowed in its turn from France) and direct contracts. By May 2,500 firms would be operating under War Office contract.