To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  A quarter of Canada’s 1916 ouput constituted shell for heavy artillery, and this proportion increased in 1917; in 1918 it was over 40 per cent of the whole. Canada was therefore able to follow the shifting emphases of gun programmes A, B, and C. Moreover, in its case the penalty of distance, a slowness in responding to changing specifications, was minimized by the comparative shortness of the Atlantic route. Both Australia and India, being much further away, found themselves unable to keep pace and, having geared themselves up to increase field-gun shell production, were stood down again as the emphasis swung to heavy artillery in the early summer of 1916.

  Determined to be self-sufficient in its entire military effort, Australia had established state factories for the production of small arms and cordite before 1914. India too was geared up to the armament of its own army, and in 1914 had the capacity to manufacture 6,000 shells and 13,000 fuses a week. By taking up the slack on mobilization, India more than quadrupled its output of most munitions between October 1914 and March 1915, and sent both shell and cordite to Britain. The May 1915 shells crisis had its repercussions in the empire. Australia, which had expressed its determination to produce its own 18-pounder guns and shells in September 1914, renewed its efforts, and created a federal munitions committee in June. India increased its shell production by incorporating the workshops of the Railway Board. By September it had twenty-five factories producing shells, and reckoned it could be manufacturing 40,000 4.5–inch, 40,000 13-pounder, and 10,000 18-pounder shells each month by the year’s end. In July 1916 it actually exceeded those targets, with a monthly output of 130,000. But the Ministry of Munitions now turned off the tap. Bent on enhancing Britain’s own output, it had been reluctant to divert scarce expertise to either India or Australia to aid them in the development of plant or to inspect their output. Britain’s own conversion was now largely complete. Furthermore, high-explosive shell, which was technically easier to produce, could not be shipped filled because of the attendant dangers. Australia produced only 15,000 18–pounder shells and ceased production at the end of June 1916. In April India was asked to shift to manufacture of 18-pounder shrapnel, reflecting the recovery of the BEF’s demand for this type of shell. But India needed all its shrapnel for the Indian Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia. In July 1916 the Ministry of Munitions told India that no more high-explosive shells were wanted. When it changed its mind in December, the organization had been broken up and the shell steel used for other purposes.321

  Britain was therefore cutting back on some sorts of munitions production just as the battle of the Somme opened: shell abundance had resurfaced. The problems of industrial mobilization could not be solved as simply as Lloyd George’s inclination for improvisation and grandiose targets suggested: munitions production had to be sensitive enough to respond to tactical evolution and technological innovation, without simultaneously losing system and certainty. The Ministry of Munitions would only shake down under Lloyd George’s successors. When he moved to the War Office, after the death of Kitchener in June 1916, he took many of his ‘men of push and go’ with him. E. S. Montagu assumed responsibility for a ministry shattered by his predecessor’s self-interest. And when Churchill arrived in the office in July 1917 he found that the proliferation of departments had gone so far that fifty were directly responsible to himself.322 Britain was the first of the belligerents to establish a ministry specifically to tackle the problems of industrial mobilization, but it did not thereby resolve all the attendant problems at a stroke. Innovation did not always equate with efficiency.

  Britain was an industrialized society; its major eastern ally, Russia, was not. In 1913 Russia’s gross domestic product per head of the population was a third of Britain’s and a half of France’s. But there is no neat correlation between economic backwardness and Russia’s more protracted experience of shell shortage. In the first place, Russia’s size meant that its gross domestic product when aggregated was greater than that of any other European power, including both Britain and Germany. Secondly, the travails of the latter two powers illustrate the point that economic strength did not automatically transmute into military effectiveness. Political decisions and managerial efficiency were vital elements in the mobilization of war economies. France committed to munitions production resources almost as great as did Britain, although its gross domestic product was a third less. By such steps an economically weaker power could compensate sufficiently to ensure that backwardness did not necessarily betoken military inferiority. But Russia did not do this. Its total financial outlay was about a third that of the other powers, and its actual output about a quarter of France’s. The Russian effort, therefore, fell below that of the other countries not only absolutely but also in relation to its own resources.323

  Russia’s average annual growth rate before the war was 3.25 per cent; one calculation suggests that for 1914 itself it was 14 per cent.324 Between 1908 and 1913 the value of consumer goods produced in Russia rose 32.8 per cent and of textiles 46 per cent. But most spectacular was the performance of heavy industry. The output of capital goods manufactured over the same period increased 84 per cent as a whole, and in the metal industries 88.9 per cent.325

  Both defence spending and arms production formed key elements in this growth. The successive rearmament programmes of 1908, 1910, and 1912 produced an average annual increase in expenditure on the two services of just under 6 per cent. In 1900 14.6 per cent of the manufactures of the Putilov works were defence-related, in 1912 45.8 per cent.326 The output of iron and steel climbed from 2.42 million tons in 1908 to 4.04 million in 1913: of the latter, 1.6 million tons, or two-fifths of the total, were allocated to government orders.327

  In general terms, therefore, Russia’s arms industries supported its claim to great-power status in 1914. More specifically, its stocks of shell and its output of guns were both comparable with those elsewhere. But three features were evident in the management of Russia’s war industries which would hinder the maximization of its potential.

  First, production costs were comparatively high. The cost per ton of building a warship in Russia in 1908–9 was £85 as opposed to £80 in Germany and £71 in Britain.328 If this had been a reflection of high levels of investment in new plant it would have represented reasonable capital investment. But Russia achieved its growth more through increasing its labour force than through the replacement of men by machines. Between 1908 and 1913 the total number of those employed in Russia’s defence industries rose by 40 per cent, from 86,000 to over 120,000. Output per worker was constant. Furthermore, the majority were young males, the very category most liable for military service in the event of hostilities. Wages were low but labour costs were high because on-the-job training was poor and employee turnover frequent. Pre-industrial work practices persisted. Skills, in an industrial sector which made particular demands on them, were at a premium.329

  Russia’s second major difficulty was the fact that the relationship between the state and the private arms sector was adversarial rather than symbiotic. The government preferred to order arms from its own enterprises rather than from those in other forms of ownership. It was fearful of a private sector monopoly sufficiently powerful to drive up prices. Not until 1913 was the official position in relation to the formation of syndicates moderated—a belated recognition that Russia was losing in international competitiveness as a result of a lack of internal organization. Iron and steel firms, in their turn, protested at what they saw as unfair government subsidies for state-run businesses, and pointed out that through their ability to import cheaper raw materials from overseas they could frequently undercut state enterprises committed to the use of domestically produced materials. Most telling of all was the private sector’s argument that its associations with foreign companies—pre-eminently Schneider and Vickers—made it technologically far more innovative.330

  After 1910 the pace of rearmament gave the government no choice but to concede. Orders were placed with private firms. But—and this was
the third structural defect—the consequent growth in the private arms trade took place disproportionately in shipbuilding. Russia was effectively creating two Dreadnought fleets from scratch, one for the Baltic and one for the Black Sea. The workforce in private shipyards tripled between 1908 and 1913, and in the latter year private yards accounted for three-fifths of all workers in naval construction.331 Thus, Russia’s capacities were better developed in relation to its fleet than to its army. The navy’s budget grew by 18.6 per cent between 1911 and 1914, but the army’s only by 6 per cent. Plant for the production of rifles languished, underused: in 1912 the three state armourers could have manufactured 525,000 rifles, but actual output was 47,000. In Russia it was not the private sector but the state that was seeking other markets for land weapons.332

  When the war broke out the navy proved all but redundant. While the distortions generated by navalism in pre-war arms procurement bore comparison with Britain, the actual consequences had more in common with Germany. Russia was effectively blockaded. The German fleet, although overshadowed in the North Sea, enjoyed a superiority in the Baltic which cut Petrograd’s main outlet to the world. To the south, Turkey’s entry to the war sealed off the Black Sea. The overland connections to European markets lay through the territories of the Central Powers. The consequences for war-related industries looked dire. In 1913 almost half of Russia’s imports came from Germany.333 Principal among them was industrial machinery, 70 per cent of which was received from overseas.334

  Four alternative trading routes were available. The first lay through Sweden and Finland. But Sweden was pro-German, and the British were fearful that goods transshipped via Stockholm might be destined for their enemies rather than their allies. Thus, the Russians complained, the British blockade was operating against them as much as against the Germans.

  The other three options were maritime, but nonetheless possessed of draw-backs. Vladivostok was ice-free but was on the Pacific coast and 5,600 kilometres from the front: every two trains running to the port and back required 120 engines.335 Archangel was much closer, but being on the White Sea was only open for half the year. Here too railway connections were unsatisfactory: the link to the main network was narrow gauge. Murmansk was closest to Britain and remained free of ice throughout the year, but had no rail connection to the interior.

  By forcing commerce to deviate from its customary pathways, the blockade of Russia therefore highlighted the inadequacies of the empire’s internal communications. The pre-war take-off in Russia’s armaments industries had been accomplished at the expense of the further development of its railways. The annual average addition to the nation’s track between 1909 and 1913 was a third that of the years 1899 to 1903. Orders for locomotives and rolling stock declined after 1908. On the outbreak of war not only was Russia’s railway density low, but also three-quarters of what there was remained single track. The network was short of 2,000 locomotives and 80,000 wagons.336 The war served to exacerbate these trends. Munitions production continued to take precedence over railway production. Freight levels rose while the availability of rolling stock fell.

  From the outset the railways were unable to meet the demands imposed on them by the mobilization of industry. Petrograd had imported coal from Britain via the Baltic. The closure of that route forced the city to turn to the Donetz Basin in the south. Although the output of Donetz coal fell by a third between June and August 1914, this proved immaterial. Production in the latter month still totalled 80 million puds, when in June the railways could shift 75.5 million puds and in July only 44.3 million. In 1915 the Donetz Basin produced 181.2 million puds more coal than in 1913, and in April 8,132 wagonloads were dispatched, as opposed to 4,500 in January. But in the last quarter of the year one-third of the coal produced could not be transported. In October Petrograd received 49 per cent of the coal assigned to it and Moscow 40 per cent.337 In December the factories of Petrograd were close to exhausting their fuel stocks, only twenty-nine wagonloads of coal having arrived from the Donetz Basin since September. The Putilov works closed some workshops. The situation did not improve in 1916. In June Alekseev told the Tsar that ‘Petrograd’s private defence industries . . . are receiving at best some 50 to 60 per cent of the necessary materials’. By the year’s end many war industries were forced to halt production for a week or longer; seventy-nine plants were idle.338

  The fact that Russia’s supplies of raw materials and Russia’s industrial centres were so far apart was not the only source of strain on either coal supply or railway communication. Loss of territory also played its part. The overrunning of Poland in 1915 resulted in the forfeiture of one-fifth of Russia’s coal production, one-tenth of its iron ore, and two-thirds of its chemicals, as well as of the industrial centres of Lodz, Warsaw, Radom, and Lublin.339 In July the German advance in the north-west, towards Vilna and Riga, prompted the evacuation of 166 enterprises eastwards. Priority was given to machine tools, but dismantling plant proved easier than shifting and re-erecting it. One train arrived in the Caucasus, 2,000 kilometres away from its destination. More frequently, goods remained loaded on wagons, their terminus uncertain and their use as temporary storage deemed preferable to leaving machinery out in the open to rust.340

  Thus, like France, Russia lost resources through defeat, but unlike France found it hard to compensate through imports. Both comparisons are matters of degree. Russia lost a smaller proportion of its total, and the loss came later. It remained well endowed with many raw materials vital to munitions production, including copper and manganese, as well as coal and iron.

  What made Russia’s experience of industrial mobilization different from that of France, and from those of the more advanced economies, was the pace and pattern of its industrialization before the war. The latter’s quickening tempo and its bias towards heavy industry meant that it outstripped any increase in the capacity of Russia’s indigenous extractive processes. In the quinquennium 1909–13 Russia imported annually 316 million puds of coal, 12 million puds of chemical products, and nearly 3 million puds each of iron and lead. Imports as a whole rose 45 per cent over 1904–8.341 In these circumstances the underlying economic trends of the war were less different from what had gone before than was the case elsewhere. First, armaments production already enjoyed a disproportionately high profile in the economy as a whole. Secondly, the pressure to maximize domestic resources for the purposes of heavy industry (and so save on foreign exchange) was not new. And thirdly, the constraints on the development of the war economy were, as the case of the railways so graphically illustrated, as much symptoms of belated industrialization in general as of the difficulties of conversion to wartime production. Russia’s allies frequently complained that their aid, whether financial or material, was being adapted to the industrial advance of the empire as a whole rather than to the needs of the war in particular. They were not wrong: by 1916 Russia’s national income had grown by 21.5 per cent on that of 1913, and its industrial output by 17 per cent.342

  In other countries industrial mobilization was a matter of conversion, of adapting peacetime industries to wartime needs. In Russia the war forced the pace of industrialization in general, drawing labour not from businesses that the war made redundant but from the land. By the autumn of 1915 one male factory worker in seven in Petrograd had lived in the city for less than a year: the city’s workforce grew by a fifth in each year of the war, and Moscow’s grew by a tenth.343 Between 1913 and 1917 employment in the metal industry rose by 61 per cent, and in coal mining by 66 per cent.344 The role of the war in promoting industrialization in general is graphically illustrated by the phenomenal growth in the proportion of the industrial working class engaged in war production, from 24 per cent in 1914 to 76 per cent in 1917: in the more industrialized nations war workers remained a minority in the industrial working class as a whole.345 The fact that what Russia was undergoing was something with wider implications is demonstrated by the building trade. Elsewhere construction was a casualty of the war
: Britain built, on average, 72,000 new houses a year before the war but only 17,000 in 1916. But in Russia during the war the workforce in the building industry increased by a third.346

  The migration of labour from country to town confirmed the continuity of two pre-war patterns. First, Russia used manpower rather than plant to expand production. Secondly, output per worker, already low relative to other states before the war, declined during it.

  The expansion of the industrial workforce was accomplished by the incorporation of women, children, and prisoners of war. At the same time skilled men departed for the front. Men constituted 50 per cent of the workforce in Moscow in 1914, and 82.7 per cent of that of the metal industry; in 1917 these figures were 37 per cent and 69.7 per cent. The working day was lengthened and more days were worked, but yields still fell. In the Donetz Basin the annual output of coal per head of the workforce declined from 9,054 puds in 1914 to 7,451 puds in 1916, and of iron from 21,590 puds to 12,543.347

  In aggregate, Russia’s production of key commodities fell despite both the continuing growth of the economy and the addition to the industrial workforce. Fundamental, because of its impact on other industries, was the fall in coal output from 2,213.8 million puds in 1913 to 1,946.6 million in 1915. Thus, even had the railways been able to move the coal that was produced, shortages would have persisted. As it was, lack of coal meant that some locomotives were fired by wood or peat, thus reducing their carrying capacity. In December 1915 forty blast furnaces in the Urals were idle for lack of fuel. Russia mined 562.4 million puds of iron ore in 1913 but only 331.4 million in 1915. The output of pig iron, which ran at 282.9 million puds in 1913, tumbled to 225.2 million in 1915. This was a result not only of the lack of coal (charcoal was used instead) but also of the loss of Poland. The story in non-ferrous metals was no different. The Urals produced 300 puds of platinum in 1913 but 215 in 1915. Copper output fell from over 2 million puds to 1,587 million in 1915.