To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Chronology, therefore, suggests many parallels between Russia and other countries. One obvious theme is that all the ministries of war deserved more credit for expanding output than their contemporaries were wont to give them. Nonetheless, Russia remains an exception. For, although munitions production reached levels comparable with those of other belligerents, shell shortage went deeper and persisted longer. The complaints from the front continued throughout 1915 and even into the winter of 1915–16: not until the spring of 1916 would abundance in the rear be reflected in abundance at the front.368

  Part of the explanation lies with Stavka. It had grown used to deflecting blame from its own shortcomings on to lack of shell; moreover, it was less adept than the Germans at changing artillery techniques to compensate for inferior stocks. Another major factor was transport. The strain on the railways which hamstrung the mobilization of industry also delayed deliveries to the front. The fact that Stavka was not responsible for supply meant that shells could be sent forward by the ministry while the Front commanders remained oblivious of their arrival: Sukhomlinov claimed that Ruszkii at South-West Front complained of shell shortage when there were never less than 400 wagonloads sitting on his rail network.369 Thirdly, the ‘great retreat’ of 1915, although it shortened the army’s lines of communication, exacerbated the problem of wastage. Abandoned equipment, most notably the guns and shells locked up in the fortresses on the Russo-Polish border, was not regained in any subsequent advance.

  In two areas, however, the continuing shortage of armaments was quite genuinely a production problem. One was small arms, and the other heavy artillery.

  Russia’s most obvious resource was its manpower: the size of its population gave it the potential to create the largest army of any European power. But to maximize that resource it needed rifles. Small-arms production was far more complex and far less easily improvised than that of shells, grenades, or mortars. In July 1914 Russia’s stocks of rifles exceeded those required under its 1912 mobilization plan by 3 per cent—even if its holdings of the ammunition required for them was below the target.370 Although maximum annual production was high at 700,000 rifles, the combination of losses in the field and of the expansion of the army created a requirement for 200,000 rifles a month. Output rose to 865,000 in 1915, and to 1,321,000 in 1916, less than double the pre-war level.371 Units trained with one rifle for five men;372 in the winter of 1915–16 companies shattered in the retreat were reformed with two platoons armed and two not;373 and the rifles themselves included captured models as well as imports from Japan, France, Britain, and Italy.374

  At the opposite end of the armaments scale was the heavy-artillery problem. In 1914 Russia had in the 3-inch gun (or 76 mm), an excellent light field gun. But, like France, it had been unable to decide about heavy artillery. Partly this was due to the animosity between Sukhomlinov and Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, the procurement of heavy guns being GAU’s responsibility. But it was played out against the state’s distrust of the private arms firms, and in particular of their subservience to foreign direction. Sukhomlinov was anxious to promote the Russian-owned factories at Tsaritsyn and Perm, but was accused of lining his own pockets in doing so. The Grand Duke favoured Schneider-Creusot, whose guns were completed at the Putilov works. Field artillery was a high priority in each of the 1910, 1912, and 1913 programmes, but the last, in setting a target of 8,558 guns by 1917, included 2,110 heavy pieces. On completion each corps would have 108 field guns and thirty-six heavy guns. But in 1914 much of what had been acquired was allocated to Russia’s fortresses, and its principal howitzer, the 4.8-inch (or 122 mm) made by Krupp, was a corps, not a divisional, weapon. In any case there were only 534 of them. The heaviest gun, of which the army had 173, was the Schneider-Creusot 6-inch (152 mm).375 In the first two years of the war GAU concentrated on multiplying stocks of existing patterns rather than introducing new equipment. Thus, massive increases in the output of guns and shell obscured an inferiority in the heavier calibres of increasing—and from 1916 acute—significance. In January 1917 the number of heavy guns deployed on the eastern front by Russia was half that allocated to the same theatre by the Central Powers. The sparseness of large-calibre artillery was a defining characteristic of the eastern front, and one not explained by the fact that it was twice the length of the western front: the British had thirteen heavy guns per kilometre, the French ten, and the Russians one.376

  The obstacles to importing weapons to compensate for these shortages were not confined to the problems of ports. Russia had its foreign exchange to consider; its allies had to attend to their own shipping needs; and in 1914–15 all arms firms, not just those of the belligerents, found themselves inundated with orders way beyond their current capacities.

  The power most obviously poised to exploit this opportunity was the United States. Competition between allies would not only enable American companies to raise prices but also to juggle and vary delivery dates. The need for the Entente to co-operate in its purchasing was immediately recognized, and found reflection in the French and British decision to establish the Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement (CIR) in August 1914. Russia joined the Commission the following month. However, the CIR did not thereby become the exclusive overseas purchasing authority which logic suggested. Many Russians believed it was corrupt, and saw no reason to channel their orders for American arms through an allied organization. Others were under the impression—thanks largely to the grandiose image of Vickers, established in the pre-war years—that Britain was awash with weaponry which only its miserliness was failing to release. Indirectly, here was another distortion generated by the naval arms race. The fact that neither the engineering nor the artillery department of the War Ministry was represented on the CIR was taken to justify independent ordering. The situation was improved with the creation in January 1915 of a Russian government committee in London, charged with arranging all Russian purchasing in Britain. Its head, General Timchenko-Ruban, could speak for the engineering department of the War Ministry, and the membership of his committee overlapped with that of the CIR.377 The dispatch of the GAU representatives to Britain also helped. Nonetheless, the domestic friction between the Ministry of War and Stavka continued to create an ambiguity about policy in regard to overseas purchasing which perplexed Russia’s allies and opened the door to middlemen anxious to exploit the opportunity for profits. Thus, in March 1915 Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich declared that GAU’s policy was to import the plant in order to enable Russia to boost domestic production: this quelled Sukhomlinov’s fear, justified particularly in relation to small arms, that a multiplicity of foreign imports would diversify the number of calibres in use.378 But in May Stavka espoused the opposite approach. Grand Duke Nicholas appointed Kitchener the agent of the Russian government in the ordering of shells, small-arms ammunition, machine-guns, and rifles.379

  British frustration with the consequences of bureaucratic competition in Russia should not be allowed to obscure the duplication that was also at work in Britain itself. Kitchener received his mandate from Grand Duke Nicholas just as the Ministry of Munitions was being called into life. But he construed his responsibility to be a consequence of his personal intervention with Stavka, and—rather than hand the business over to the new ministry—created a Russian purchasing committee within the War Office. Because British productive capacity was fully absorbed with the needs of its own army, the principal task of the Russian purchasing committee was to channel orders to the United States. This was exactly the job now being done for the British army by the Ministry of Munitions.

  The War Office had entered into its first contract for American-made munitions in October 1914, and by the time J. P. Morgan was appointed the government’s agent in January it reckoned that it had already placed the bulk of its orders. It anticipated that at most a further £10 million in contracts would be required. But by mid-May deals to six times that value had been struck. Rumblings concerning Morgan’s role related not just to the fa
t commissions landing in the firm’s lap. They were also provoked by the continuing competition of other nations, by the tendency of brokers to play off the War Office against Morgan’s, and by the delays in actual deliveries.

  In June 1915 Lloyd George sent D. A. Thomas to investigate whether Morgan’s were adequately representing British interests. Thomas quashed some misconceptions: he reported that Morgan’s were so zealous on Britain’s behalf that they were making themselves unpopular with American firms, and were so embarrassed by the size of their profits that they were prepared to revise the basis on which their commission was calculated. The real issues lay elsewhere. One was that of standards. Morgan’s were reluctant to place contracts with unproven businesses. Therefore established companies were overloaded with orders while other plant languished underused. Another was exchange. An independent Russian purchasing committee was established in New York in May 1915, but its London analogue was Timchenko-Ruban’s Russian government committee, not the War Office’s Russian purchasing committee. All three bodies were operating outside Morgan’s framework, effectively causing Russian to bid against Russian, and ally against ally. The Ministry of Munitions was not only adjudicating between the Russians and the British, but was also in competition with the War Office. The Russians continued to block centralized purchasing into 1916, but the exchange-rate crisis in July and August 1915 at least rationalized Britain’s own buying. On 5 September 1915 the British experts in North America were combined into a British Munitions Board. This was entrusted with the investigation of new firms and with following up their progress on contracts. In December 1915 E. W. Moir was appointed to head the board, which henceforth became known as the ‘Moir organization’.380 Relations between Moir and Morgan were not easy, but in conjunction they at least provided a reasonable structure. Certainly, Britain’s approach was more coherent than France’s.

  On 12 September 1914 France ordered 29,000 rifles, valued at $1,537,000, from the United States. Its first contract for shells followed a month later. By April 1915 the artillery mission in the United States had entered into 318 contracts. But the artillery mission was only the most important of a range of independent bodies, each operating under the Ministry of War but each purchasing particular commodities without liaison with the other. By April 1915 113 Frenchmen, many of them unable to speak English or without commercial experience, were representing the French army’s need for remounts, powder, engineering equipment, clothing, food, medical supplies, and aeroplanes. In theory, France’s appointment of Morgan’s in May limited the role of the missions, to technical advice and inspection. The trouble was that some American firms persisted, as a consequence of their dislike of Morgan’s, in pursuing independent contacts with the French missions, and Ribot remained willing to condone this. Not until June 1916 did France emulate the British example and create a single purchasing mission under Colonel Vignal, previously the military attaché to the French ambassador. By then the size of the missions had swollen yet further (their personnel numbered 209 in November 1916), and the two principal agencies—artillery and remounts—had become so powerful that Vignal struggled to assert his authority.381

  Arguably, this network of competing authorities ought to have produced a surfeit of deliveries, albeit at inflated prices. In fact, what happened was the reverse. The arms industry of the United States was not in a position to meet the demands made of it in 1914. A French Senate report reckoned that there were about 15,000 businesses in the United States producing arms and munitions, but most of these were engaged in the manufacture of small-arms. The United States had only one major producer of shells (Bethlehem Steel) and only one of powder.382 These firms accepted more orders than their plant was capable of delivering. By the end of 1915 the United States had supplied Britain with 189 field guns and 3.5 million shells. Its most important contribution— 17.5 million rounds of small-arms ammunition in 1914 and 178 million rounds in 1915383—reflected its real strength. But the small-arms business in particular had been sustained by private trade. The belligerent governments—particularly, but not only, Russia—were reluctant to modify their expectations in the light of firms’ capacities. They even compounded the problem by altering specifications in mid-contract. In June 1916, of 1 million rifles ordered by Britain, only 480 had been both delivered and accepted.384 Of 1.8 million rifles ordered by Russia from Westinghouse, 216,000 had been delivered by February 1917, together with 27,000 of 300,000 due from Winchester and 180,000 of 1.5 million from Remington.385

  Russia’s response to late delivery was to postpone the placing of further foreign orders until existing contracts were fulfilled.386 France, reflecting its loss of raw materials as well as the belief that the maintenance of standards was easier with domestic manufacturers, adopted a different approach.

  The demand which the United States could satisfy much more readily than that for instant armaments was the need for materials from which munitions could be fabricated. Over the period 2 August 1914 to 30 June 1915 American exports of munitions to France were valued at over $15 million, but they represented only 13 per cent of France’s US purchases for the purposes of the war. French policy in 1914–15 was to boost domestic arms production, so using the war to buttress French wages and French profits, but to do so with imported steel, copper, cotton, benzol, toluene, and picric acid.387

  Another approach, and one adopted by France in placing orders for weapons in Spain and Italy, was to seek alternative markets. For Russia, Vladivostok made the Far East an obvious source of armaments, and one, moreover, which would minimize demands on Entente shipping. China was believed to have imported over 150,000 German Mauser rifles during the revolution, many of them still unpaid for. Britain graciously decided that Russia should have first call on these. But by October 1915 the total available had dwindled to 26,000, and in the event it was the British who got 10,919 of them; not a single rifle reached Russia.388 The Japanese were opposed to the withdrawal of China’s rifles, the arming of the warlords being a means to encourage the country’s disintegration. The British, therefore, promoted direct trading between Russia and Japan. In August 1915 Grey pointed out to the Japanese that, by arming Russia so that it could defeat Germany, they would prompt the Russians to remain a European power rather than an Asiatic one—an outcome which would, of course, serve Britain’s interests as well as Japan’s. Japan replied that it had already supplied Russia with 430,000 rifles and 500 heavy guns and ammunition in the first year of the war. Certainly, Russia had turned to Japan from the outset, but whether it got as much satisfaction from its orders as the Japanese claimed is doubtful: the British military attaché in Russia reckoned only 200,000 rifles were delivered (of 1 million ordered), and made no reference to heavy guns.389

  American deliveries of finished armaments did not really come on stream until the second half of 1916. Having delivered 480 rifles to Britain by early June, the Americans handed over 200,000 by September.390 Total supplies for the year included 398 field guns, 20.9 million shells (a sixfold increase on the previous year), and 554 million rounds of small-arms ammunition. Although deliveries of guns and rifles rose again in 1917, shell and small-arms ammunition supplies fell back to their 1915 levels.391

  The explanations for this decline are fourfold. First, British domestic production was still rising, and in so doing was gradually lessening Britain’s dependence on American finished goods. Secondly, by opting, as the French had done, for raw materials Britain could save on foreign exchange. Thirdly, America was arming itself in 1917. Fourthly, and most importantly, the combination of U–boat warfare and declining Entente tonnage was forcing a careful weighing of shipping priorities.

  The effect of these pressures on France worked somewhat differently. Being to a large extent reliant on British shipping, its preference for the importation of materials—which were more bulky than finished goods—was more costly in shipping charges and therefore in foreign exchange. The manufacture of 1 tonne of gunpowder required 12 tonnes of raw material
s.392 It therefore became relatively cheaper, as well as more economical in shipping, to buy finished goods abroad. Imports fell by weight but rose by price. In 1916 French imports weighed 44 million tonnes, but in 1917 they fell back to 34.5 million, close to their levels in 1914 and 1915. However, the total cost of these imports leapt from 20,640 million francs in 1916 to 27,554 million in 1917. Much of this jump was attributable to imports of manufactured goods, which rose in value by 2,863 million francs, whereas those of industrial raw materials rose by 2,123 million francs. Having imported 267,000 quintals of explosives in 1916, the French brought in 763,000 in 1917.393 Thus France’s imports of munitions from the United States in 1917 climbed from 37,853 tonnes in 1916 to 98,505 tonnes.394

  Resolving their allies’ needs in relation to munitions production—and particularly the Russians’ demand for rifles and heavy artillery—made strategic sense for Britain. Opponents of conscription in 1915 argued that British munitions output would be better applied arming the manpower of Russia than the workforce of Britain.395 Even when this argument had been lost, an active eastern front remained an essential element of a successful western front: the more the Russians could be enabled to engage the Germans, the easier would be the lot of the French and the British. Therefore both Kitchener, as secretary of state for war, and Lloyd George, as minister for munitions, were united on broad principles.