CHAPTER 3
The Military; Industry, Supplies and Manufacturing
The demands of the army on industry and technology during the prolonged period of small scale operations were not intense. The Royal Navy took pride of place for effort and expenditure; in particular the conversion of ships from wooden hulls and sails, first to steam for propulsion, then to iron clad hulls, followed by iron then steel hulled vessels each to superseded Nelson’s Navy. For the army the procedure seemed to rely upon the recognition by the army and its suppliers that a worthwhile idea for weapons improvement had become available. It was evolutionary not revolutionary change. Rifled guns not smooth bore; muzzle loaders out, breech loaders in, black powder replaced by cordite and so on. Equipment could then be put on trial to develop handling techniques and tactical methods before the government was encouraged to find the will and the resources to provide the new weapons or other new item. After introduction, supply and demand could be adjusted by using the war emergency reserves and making good excess usage in a later year. But when all is said and done, a gun is a gun. Battlefield movement remained dependent on horse power and the sweaty feet of Tommy Atkins. Railways improved the deployment of men and supplies behind the battle zone and came to dominate military planning in Europe.
The Industrial Revolution and the subsequent progress of industrialisation in Britain had provided the nation with an incomparable manufacturing and communication system that included a merchant shipping service that reached into every navigable corner of the world. Trade on an international scale not rivalled by any other nation and a national credit rating for the Bank of England that was the envy of the world. Each, in some way a factor in the tensions leading to the events we now address.
The manufacturing businesses of the nation included numerous concerns whose speciality was armaments. Vickers, and its rival Armstrong, were pre-eminent in the field, others were close on their heels though, Birmingham Small Arms (BSA) and the Royal Ordnance factories for example, plus unrivalled steel making facilities in South Yorkshire, Wales and the North East; each were important components of the army’s supply chain. The weapons from Britain were able to keep several armies, additional to Britain’s own, supplied with equipment at peacetime rates of usage. There were numerous nooks and crannies throughout the land with nice little earners in their product line that were armament related. With the exception of the ordnance factories the businesses were commercial concerns, they made what a customer was asking for and at a price that allowed a comfortable return on capital. Essentially they established an operating policy that measured supply and fulfilled demand using minimal resources, good sound business economics. Not by any means a suitable preparation for an all out, high intensity, lengthy international war in which one of the protagonists had the clear intention of finishing up as ‘head honcho’ for continental Europe; which another, offshore participant, was equally determined not to allow. 250 years of foreign policy scheming, several wars, a global empire and a place at the top table of international affairs was not to be sunk between the Dogger Bank and the Heligoland Bight of the North Sea on the whim of Wilhelm II.
The demand change that developed following the initial encounter battles of 1914 needed volume; every type of armament and defence item, including the obvious need for weapons and ammunition, other war like stores such as barbed wire, water pipes, shovels and field telephones anything and everything the soldier needs to hold his ground and defeat the sovereigns’ enemies; in quantity and at once. And these needs come after men and animals have been feed, clothed and accommodated. This was not only the war to end wars, it was to be the war in which the moral and physical courage of men dressed as soldiers was to be tested to the limits of experience in the Western world.
In the period since Britain last found the need to deploy her army in continental Europe, the contrasts of technology had sharpened. Breech loading, rifled weapons had become the standard for both infantry and artillery, black powder had been superseded, recoil systems had been introduced for artillery, automatic weapons had been adopted and alternative ammunition types invented. The guns remained guns, it was the range, velocity and destructive effect of shot and shell that changed. The sword had been discarded for the private soldier although officers retained them for a time after the whistle blew for the kick off in 1914, but not for long. Armies moved about by railways when such useful systems were available, otherwise they marched on their booted feet or if they were very lucky, or sufficiently senior, on horseback. Exactly as the armies of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, et al, had progressed on their expeditionary conquests.
The stores needed to sustain the fighting men about their business followed on carts drawn by horses. Motor transport was making spasmodic appearances by 1914. London Transport sent a fleet of their pretty red omnibuses to help out with troop movements, for this reason at the annual Remembrance Sunday service in Whitehall, a representative of London Transport lays a wreath at the cenotaph.5 I wager some Tommy to lighten the mood called out the bus conductor’s refrain “only five standing, move down the gangway please”. As a generality the rate of advance remained the speed at which a trained and equipped soldier could progress on foot, across a piece of ground, usually under fire. The cavalry moved quickly but no role could be found for them in trench warfare. Tanks when they arrived could manage three miles per hour. In short the technology of destruction and defence had moved more quickly than the technology of movement and attack. The British infantry tactics had developed the simple concept of fire and movement, for aggressive or defensive actions, whether on foot or transported. This concept though was unsuitable for trench warfare well supported by artillery. As the conflict progressed tactics were developed to cope with the consequences of a conscripted and, by extension less experienced, army facing and using greatly increased fire power. It is true that these tactical changes were not always welcome or completely successful. Some of the few regulars who remained as senior NCOs and warrant officers as Kitchener’s battalions joined the fight expressed the view with some force that the British Army fought at its best ‘In Line’. Sentiments founded in the experience of past campaigns were not confined to the officer class!
The British Army had developed a stores and supply system for an army posted throughout the world in locations that varied from the pleasant, spacious conditions of South Africa, the hot, varied and unusual conditions of India, as well as the difficult and hostile environments in places such as Sudan and Burma. Supply to such a widespread community of units had, by its very isolation, to be sufficiently flexible to allow local sources to provide essentials where practicable. As an example, feed for the animals used by the army has to be acquired locally unless there is absolutely no alternative. There were various other ways that the army could use local resources for its day to day requirements, but there are limits; replacement for bedding and clothing alright, spades and other basic tools possibly, but not always practicable, weapons, never. Military weapons must be manufactured to standardised tolerances and the last detail of design, supplied only by approved manufacturers to the field army. The supply system created by the army to look after its own approached the outbreak of hostilities better placed than other participants to keep its forces in the field. Not because it was better planned, or of adequate size, but because it had much practice in dealing with the unexpected in unpredicted circumstances and was able to improvise successfully when the enemy was doing his best to get in the way of proceedings.
One of the defects made by bean counters of the treasury is the failure to grasp the idea that the military needs supply lines full of all the goodies needed by the fighting man and the supporting services such as engineers, ordnance and the like. When the enemy is coming over the horizon, delivery in ten days will not suffice; wars are lost when supplies fail. Despite the adverse comments surrounding the supply of ammunition, in particular for the artillery in the early months of the year, the existing arrangements produced a nineteen fold increase, before Lloyd George became the responsible minister! But you wouldn’t realise this was achieved; such is the strength of mythology that now surrounds the events of the Great War.
The British Army also appreciated that an army in the field must be self reliant; there is no corner shop at which the quartermaster can call for bread. Field bakeries have to be provided, likewise laundries, mobile bath units, hospitals, workshops and other essential services; each of these units creating their own demands for food, accommodation, pay, post and the other essentials of daily life. The army knew this simple fact of soldiering, politicians either do not listen or ignore the advice they receive.
This is the point at which the reader needs to take account of some of the most obvious differences between the events of daily peacetime life. The retail services provide for the needs of the nation’s daily life. A British Army on campaign in the twentieth century could not live off the land it occupied by force, as was common in earlier wars. The needs of military operations had reached a degree of complexity that necessitated a dedicated supply train for all its material requirements. The Army Service Corps, (Ally Slopers Cavalry), Royal from November 1918; the corps initial becoming RASC, quickly translated unofficially as (Run Away Someone’s Coming) came of age and delivered the goods despite the dangers. The ASC increased in strength by 2212% between 1914 and 1918. It is not to say that that there were not instances of private enterprise by individuals; some chicken foolish enough to stray could well have improved the diet of Tommy Atkins occasionally. The authorities though did take a dim view and in blatant cases soldiers were punished; Wellington, in the Peninsula a century before, hung some looters, as an example. The situation in France was different to that of many previous campaigns; the British Army was fighting on the territory of an allied country. Plunder was off the agenda, supplies had to be paid for, even the weak French beer cost Tommy some of his pay.
The essential lesson to be absorbed is that the military supply train must deliver to the consumer. The fighting units have to be supplied right to the front line by a system that meets daily and even hourly needs, water for example. The customer is much too busy making mischief against the enemy to collect the goods and will not accept a charge for delivery.
The supply system has to be filled from end to end to deliver requirements consistently. Unfortunately in 1914 there were some pretty awful gaps in the appreciation by politicians, civil servants and soldiers of what we now call logistics. The appreciation of the acquisition system seems to have operated initially on the basis of sending an order from a government organisation and expecting the demand to be fulfilled. The action could of course usually deliver the goods once, perhaps twice before raw material stocks were exhausted. There seems to have been no understanding that stocks of material at whatever stage of the supply train must be balanced down to the last detail. This means if the circumstances demand, tin and rubber from Malaya, coal from Wales and high grade iron ore from Sweden all have to be at the point of manufacture when needed. In this particular war volume demands suddenly expanded by a factor of ten, twenty and sometimes a hundred times, for many of the necessities of war, industry was overwhelmed. Within the first few weeks of the war orders for 3,000 machine guns had to be placed with manufactures in the United States.
By way of examples only, to highlight the type of problem that can arise when demand is expanded to an unlimited extent, consider the issues of the production of thousands of new rifles, if you are unable to make and assemble simultaneously all the components from stock to firing pin the rifle is useless. The raw wool for uniforms had to be delivered from Australia, tin, bauxite and manganese had to be mined and shipped to the smelters, rubber had to be tapped and treated before forwarding for further processing. The supply train requires high level management skills to operate successfully, as well as sophisticated control and planning systems. The organisation for the change to war conditions needed concentrated effort, talent and above all time, time however was against Britain and her allies.
The Government of Herbert Asquith approached the early stages of the conflict with the motto, ‘Business as Usual’; heaven help the poor soldier.
The pre-eminent trading position and the national wealth and credit rating allowed the government of Britain to turn to overseas sources, the United States of America in particular. This nation did a very good line in personal weapons and was pleased to be able to make a quick buck out of the European situation. The Central Powers, Germany in particular, would have liked access to American goods, the Royal Navy thought otherwise; just another complication to Willie’s plans to put the rest of Europe in its place on the back of a minor political event distorted by the bumbling oligarchy of Austro Hungarian aristocrats, overcome by their own self importance, to justify their arrogant assumptions.
In 1914, as described, Britain knew how to supply a widely dispersed imperial/colonial army at considerable distances from their home base. The supply and equipment of a mass army of untrained recruits on home territory and the provisioning of the BEF, a few miles away on the French/Belgium border was something new. That it was achieved at all from the starting position was remarkable in itself. The other European participants had all wrestled with the problems of supplying a mass army in a full scale, high intensity war for many years with varying degrees of success. The Germans knew what they had to do but forgot to consider how to proceed if the enemy did not accept the inevitability of Teutonic hegemony and give up quickly. The French did some things well, their 75mm. was an excellent gun, the red and horizon blue uniforms of some troops sent to war in 1914 was an unforgivable mistake, as also was the inability of the Serbians – remember them, they were our allies – to supply all their troops with rifles.
The BEF went to France fully supplied and the front line continued to be supported throughout the war. (Rudyard Kipling in The Diary of the Irish Guards (pg 288) records with some asperity that only when hostilities had ceased in November 1918 did the breakfast rations fail to arrive on time.) This meant that the shortfall of accommodation, clothing and equipment had to be borne by the volunteers who had flocked to the colours in the autumn of 1914; Kitchener’s New Armies. It was these men who drilled in their own clothes, lived in leaking tents (all tents leak, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) and put up with numerous other shortages, to say nothing of the quality of the catering. There is a well established summation from this period of soldiers’ opinions of cooks that goes as follows; Orderly Sergeant, “Right listen up, who called the cook a b*****d?” Reply from the ranks, “Who called the b*****d a cook.”
Eventually the enormity of the problems created by the unexpected arrival of a major war thirty miles from the front door step was recognised by government and the Ministry of Munitions was created, and to this key role came the Welsh wizard, David Lloyd George. Given the needs of the time he was a success at the job, he was also a manipulative politician, cunning and spiteful, eventually meddling in military affairs properly to the concern of the General Staff. The CIGS from 1915 (‘Wully’ Robertson who rose through the ranks from cavalry trooper to Field Marshal) told him so and eventually was sacked for his pains. In the post war period LG fell from power and grace and it was commented that from that date forward, he (LG), was unable to make the job of mayor of a small Welsh seaside town in a poor year for candidates, or so it was said.
Given the circumstances however, what was the alternative? Once the conflict began, to withdraw from the alliance because of problems with the supply system was not a tenable political option for one of the world’s leading industrial and commercial powers. From a military standpoint it would be an admission of defeat and disgrace. Again we run into the cul-de-sac of pre 1914 thinking in Britain that ignored the political possibility of a European war; maintaining an army establishment and organisation that had insufficient resources to provide a field army ‘en masse’. The army itself is not without responsibility in that despite the staff work undertaken with the French to provide the BEF, the planning stopped at that point, no one would look into the abyss of all out, long term, high intensity conflict. Perhaps there was sufficient realism amongst the senior generals of the day to appreciate that it ‘would be the end of civilisation as they knew it’, and so it proved to be.
The follow on consideration from the issues concerning the arrangements to get the supplies to the right place at the right time comes back fairly and squarely on to the industry of the day. Manufacturing is not of itself a difficult task. After all since early times in man’s progress, people have been acquiring the skills to make goods other people will need and buy. The complications begin when the product being made is successful and the maker has to produce several all at once, all to the same quality standard. The Industrial Revolution solved the problem by creating the factory system. Putting lots of people able to do a small part of a job in one place with some machinery and organising the jobs so that raw material could be fed in at one door and the finished product leave the factory by the opposite door was a logical step. The procedures were analysed and improved over a couple of generations by several prominent industrialists and a group of early ‘management consultants’ known as Scientific Managers, pre-eminent amongst these was the American, F. W. Taylor, whose ideas were to influence Henry Ford; by 1911 Henry had applied the notions to his model ‘T’ motorcar (“Only way to build a car is, 4ft off the ground and keep it moving”). Significantly the most successful early factories based on these ideas were breweries and flour mills.
The snag is that the bigger the factory, the more complicated and expensive the equipment and the more specialised the jobs of the work force, as a consequence the adaptability of the workforce and indeed the organisation is reduced. The factory may be able to increase its production but if the output is not a product needed by the market – in war time situations the armed forces - the product is without purpose, it is a waste of effort to make it. Another issue arises with installations such as furnaces and smelters for iron and steel, production has to operate on a continuous basis twenty four hours each day, producing the refined metal. Such equipment has a fixed output the only way volume is increased to any significant extent is to build more furnaces. This requires a protracted lead time, substantial capital investment and a skilled workforce that will include strong young men!
Industry therefore faced two different requirements: expansion of manufacturing resources to meet greatly expanded consumption of highly specialised products such as, shells, guns, aircraft and so on, this alongside the conversion of existing resources to make general purpose items such as clothing to military (and naval) requirements. The two tasks are not the same although there may be common elements. The expansion by conversion of existing manufacturing resources from consumer goods to armaments is complicated and time consuming. The machine tools, lathes, millers, extruders, drillers, power presses etc. all have to be converted to new set ups, equipped with new tools, patterns and jigs. All these later items made by the elite tradesmen of the day, pattern makers, toolmakers and machine fitters working on one job at a time often using hand tools for the final exacting stages of manufacturing. As an example, the production of just one of the colossal lathes needed for the machining, to exacting tolerances, of gun barrels for the large artillery pieces must have been reckoned as several months. These issues are neatly summarised in a book recently published privately by the Birmingham gun makers, Westley Richards, to celebrate the company’s two hundred years of business life; four times the work force, training of unskilled employees for skilled tasks, buying up patterns and building their own machines to acquire additional capacity and modifying other machines to their own design to increase capacity. And this was a company whose business for the military was the manufacture of small arms! The nation as a whole was on the back foot.
Another conflict of interest now appears round the corner (Murphy again). The most adaptable, dexterous and productive workers are the young men about twenty-five years of age whose eyesight is still keen for such demanding tasks and who are capable of sustaining a high output level each day. And who are the most likely quality candidates as good reliable soldiers? Why young men aged about twenty-five, adaptable and with good eyesight, etcetera.
Now the nation faced a real dilemma, quality volunteers were rushing to join the colours, mainly the army, but the nation needed to expand manufacturing activity with an urgency of which no one had any experience. Yet another circle that had to be squared. Schemes had to be introduced that released skilled men for industrial work either to their original employers or a particular concern producing armaments. Such men retained their status as members of the armed forces and could be recalled to service if it was deemed necessary. The problems inherent in a ‘helter skelter’ expansion of manufacturing facilities including the absorption of an inexperienced, untrained workforce were dramatically demonstrated by the explosion on 21 January 1917 at the Silvertown explosives plant on the Thames Estuary. More than fifty were killed and over one hundred injured, many of them young women recruited specifically for the expansion of explosives production. The damage was so great that no specific cause was identified. My money though would be on careless procedure, short cuts, bad practice by the inexperienced management and workers. There are some substances with which no risks can be taken; high explosives are one of them!
The issue here comes back to consumption as the army fights harder and expands to fulfil its role in the war time emergency, then the amount of ‘war like’ stores grows without reference to any predetermined political ideas, the demand must be measured by the amount of equipment needed to overcome the enemy and win the battle and the war. To the armchair expert the opportunity to put the issues to rights in retrospect is too good to miss; it is not they, however, who had to deal with the hierarchy of demands and priorities as the economy was shifted onto a war footing. Consider the situation in respect of the development of the Artillery, the key to eventual victory; in 1914 the BEF held on charge 486 guns and howitzers, by October 1918 this had raised to more than 6,700 an increase of almost fourteen times the initial holding of such weapons. This concentration of guns enabled the Commander, Royal Artillery (CRA) a usage of shells amounting to 12,000 tons in twenty-four hours. The final total of guns in service at the end of hostilities takes no account of the introduction of new versions of the weapons, loss through battle damage or indeed the necessity to repair and overhaul the weapons as the bores and breech mechanism wear through heavy usage. All the components of the increased equipment had to be manufactured, all the replacement items had to be added to the manufacturing load, together with optical sights, gun carriages and ammunition limbers. Such an expansion took a massive effort and commitment of time as well as resources and whilst this was being organised the army did the best it could with what was available.
Note: Anthony Bird in his account of the two day engagement at Le Cateau reminds us that the hard fought action cost the artillery thirtyeight guns lost: the manufacturing output of the British armament industry in the three months, August to November 1914 amounted to fifteen field guns and thirty one field howitzers.
Then we have to consider the expansion of resources by building new factories on green field sites to make more of the armaments needed by the soldiers. Starting from the ground works, foundations and drains, brickwork, wood and steel work, roadways, conveyors, machines, toilets, boilers, and so ad infinitum. It all takes time, organisation and effort that in the short term provided nothing for the fighting man. Rome was not built in a day, neither were the new factories!
To illustrate the point in respect of the increase in the use of existing resources there are below details of the amount of additional traffic generated for the Great Western Railway during the years 1914–18 as a guide. Resources for these additional trains would have to be found by working all the rolling stock, engines and staff of the railways more intensively. The special trains detailed* are additional to the usual railway service whose traffic volume did not diminish! In reality the number of passengers carried in 1916 was greater than the immediate pre war year of 1913.
| Year | Troop Trains | Admiralty Coal | Munitions, Guns, Stores.. | Totals |
| 1914 | 3,376 | 309 | 1,460 | 5,145 |
| 1915 | 9,077 | 1,729 | 5,478 | 16,284 |
| 1916 | 7,904 | 2,454 | 8,941 | 19,299 |
| 1917 | 6,681 | 3,421 | 13,201 | 23,303 |
| 1918 | 6,577 | 5,763 | 12,232 | 24,572 |
| Totals | 33,615 | 13,676 | 41,312 | 88,603 |
Great Western Railway, Additional traffic.
* Source, History of the G. W. R, Vol. 2, 1863—1921. E. T. MacDermot, revised by C. R. Clinker.
All this before we even get to consider the need for explosives. Germany had, as a nation, become during the second half of the nineteenth century, pre-eminent in the branch of science known as ‘organic chemistry’; essentially the science of the useful and widely available element carbon. This predominant position of academic and industrial life seems to have no rational explanation, in much the same way that there seems to be no obvious reason for the number of acclaimed German composers of classical music. Nevertheless the Germans were superb industrial chemists. One quick glance at the list of reactions named after German researchers is enough to prove the point. So what? Well you need to understand organic chemistry very well to make the substances that go BANG inside a gun, shell, bullet, etc. Britain was not as good in this vital branch of science and business and was forced to improvise, import and eventually expand its industrial competence to catch up, but of course slowly. One unfortunate effect of this process was that later in the war (1917) a ship carrying several thousand tons of explosives blew up in the harbour of Halifax, Nova Scotia, devastating the town, killing many and providing the world with its very first example of a manmade multi kiloton explosion, fortunately without the problem of radioactive fallout of subsequent bigger bangs.
Once again we find ourselves up against the maxim; we make war as we must, not as we would. Theorists should note that the task set in 1914 was not within the scope of pre 1914 political appreciations. The ships of the Royal Navy, so dear to the nation, were ineffective as a means of dealing with the offensive campaigns of the German Army on landmass of continental Europe. Only by blockading tactics and maintaining open sea ways to the UK could the navy influence events, when all the time the enemy was knocking at the door of the democracies who had challenged the Germanic hegemony of Europe. Or, more accurately, the Allied nations had sent their soldiers, officers and men to withstand the assault on the gates of freedom and correct the view of the Kaiser, his Chancellor and assorted Generals.
That awkward question keeps returning, what was the alternative? Once war began only the Central Powers could return the position to the ‘status quo ante’ without defeat being forced upon aggrieved and invaded nations such as France and Belgium. Even Britain in all probability would have had its wings clipped and forced to concede naval limitations and overseas colonial territory to a triumphant German Kaiser.