4

Ramping Up

Eight months had passed since dynamite had broken ground on rich Scarboro farmland for the future GECO munitions plant. By the end of September 1941, almost 100 percent of the munitions plant was complete. There were 170 buildings up and running, almost forty more shops than staff originally planned.1

However, while the Hamilton brothers, with the help of their dedicated team of engineers and management staff, had erected a huge, sprawling complex of munitions workshops and ancillary buildings, transforming the plant into a lean, mean, fuse-filling machine was another matter entirely.

In a summation written at the end of the war, Major Flexman, plant manager, stated that management was clear about the intent of “Project 24” from its outset: “Scarboro was conceived, constructed, organized, and operated for but one purpose — PRODUCTION — and to that end every department of The General Engineering Company (Canada) Limited made direct or indirect contribution. The success or failure of the project would depend upon the quality and quantity of its output and the ability to deliver the goods when they were required.”2 Major Flexman felt other achievements, while they may have been noteworthy, would be “incidental or secondary” to the plant’s primary purpose.3 Even safety — “important and desirable as it might be” — could not, and would not take precedence over production of top-notch ammunition at a time when countless lives might be sacrificed for lack of dependable shells, grenades, bullets, and bombs.4 “Costs could not be measured in dollars in a period when the survival of an empire was at stake,” Flexman stated. “The comfort and convenience of employees would not be placed ahead of the needs of the men in the armed forces.”5 Quality production and output were always the first concern — that, and safety.

In hindsight, with GECO’s incredible record in both production and safety — over 256 million munitions shipped without one fatal accident — its simple production decree seems straightforward, perhaps even simplistic.6 Boiled down, GECO wanted to get the job done as quickly as possible, hopefully without blowing anyone up.

Talk Is Cheap: Bring on the High Explosives

Once production got underway, GECO planned to fill eleven natures.7 Of these, four were to be filled on the H.E. side — Fuse 119, Fuse 152, Fuse 251, and Gaine 11 — while the G.P. side would fill Fuse 199, three Primers (Nos. 1, 11, and 12), Tube Vent Percussion 0.5”, another Tube, and Tracer-Igniter No. 12.8

However, with any new undertaking comes the odd glitch. Factoring in the sheer size of an operation like GECO with its aggressive production schedule; the difficulty of keeping over twenty-one thousand employees9 motivated, healthy, safe, and happy; and the pressure to supply the Allied forces with millions of filled munitions, it was a wonder management resolved every glitch, hitch, and snag so well. In fact, to expect new enterprises such as GECO to ramp up production without, as Major Flexman wrote, “…running into all kinds of grief and difficulties” would be unreasonable and perhaps deadly.10

Glitches, Hitches, and Snags

No matter how extensive the training or how thoughtful the foresight, nothing could replace real-time experience.

Wartime industry was new in Canada, a national enterprise that had to be put together not only brick by brick, but department by department. There was no precedent to go back to, to study, or learn from, other than the lessons learned from the British in the Great War two decades earlier.

Bob and Phil Hamilton recognized fully that they needed gifted and capable departmental heads who would drive GECO into production as soon as enough buildings were finished. The Hamilton brothers sought men and women of high calibre. Despite thousands of outstanding personnel already in war administration work from whom they could choose, Bob and Phil selected upstanding men and women from wide-ranging occupations and professions, with diverse backgrounds.11 They were not of the mind that “birds of a feather flock together,” but rather “opposites attract.”

Bob and Phil did not know in July 1941 whether the Canadian government would ultimately keep them as joint managers of the GECO plant at Scarboro. At that point, they had only been hired to oversee Scarboro’s design, construction, and staffing. They were concerned that if they were moved on to the next big thing — which was quite possible given GECO already had overseen the building of an R.C.A.F flying school, a gunnery school, and a large ordnance complex in London — the administrative staff they hired might be transferred to other plants once production started. Hence, they secured assurance from Allied War Supplies Corporation that they would honour employment arrangements made with key administrative officials when GECO’s management was finally decided.12 It was only after this assurance was given that Bob and Phil commenced hiring.

Securing talented personnel was not easy. Canadian wartime industries had had over a year to mobilize men for war production, employing thousands of competent men and women. Ottawa and the armed forces had absorbed thousands of men with administrative experience and ability for overseas duty. The success or failure of the entire GECO enterprise at Scarboro was contingent on the calibre of this select group of men and women. Everyone recognized that any administrative routine had to grow gradually since there was no background of arsenal experience on which to draw, and problems to be solved had had little existence in peacetime.

Once the plant was up and running, there were other problems, too. Scarboro was not self-sufficient, but was both aided and hindered by outside factors beyond company control.13 GECO was dependent on supplies from a great number of other wartime factories going through their own growing pains. Fuse-filling workshops declared clean and ready for production sat idle because empties or other vital components had not arrived.14 When materials did arrive, sometimes they were defective or unusable, or sometimes they broke upon filling, which further retarded production.15 Another significant delay occurred when pre-assembled empties arrived at the plant.16 The shells for Fuse 251, one of GECO’s most commonly filled munitions, had to be broken down into their individual pieces before they could be filled; then they had to be re-assembled after filling.17 This breaking down process hampered production, adding many, many operator hours to filling schedules.18

Then there was “proofing” — testing the dependability and accuracy of filled munitions. Caps and detonators were produced and tested first, then primers and fuses, then assembled shells, and so on. As GECO ramped up production, proofing developed into a frustratingly long, time-consuming, and cumbersome process.

Despite the vital need to test the quality of munitions in Canada with actual weapons, the Allied forces needed the guns more.19 Therefore, early proofing was done on semi-assembled rounds that had to be shipped by air to the United Kingdom; after the testing, the results were then cabled back. Only then could the ammunition continue on its journey down the line to its next steps in filling, and another round of proofing.20 This exasperating process was repeated until final shipment. A delay in “sentencing” — the acceptance or rejection — of any one component along its assembly held up the complete round.21 This early production glitch had the potential to hold up hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition because samples of some small stage in the process were working their way to England or awaiting their sentencing.22 And if the samples didn’t pass? Those hundreds of thousands of lethal rounds sat and waited until they did.

Churchill’s plea for international assistance could not be answered until GECO was up and running. The problems that confronted GECO’s fledging Tooling Department were many, and none had straightforward solutions. For example, filling Time Fuse 199 was a high priority, but before it went into full production, tools had to arrive and glitches unforeseen in the days of the “Gunpowder Plot” had to be resolved. Machines and tools, never designed for wartime, had to be found and adapted. Ingenuity and the art of improvisation of men proficient in all things mechanical were called for, so that harmless workaday tools could be converted into instruments of war. Management wrote of the acute shortage: “Less than half a dozen men in Canada had any knowledge or experience of the technique associated with this special industry, and these men, experts on loan to the Canadian government from British arsenals, had no knowledge of Canadian conditions, customs, or industrial practices.”23 The climate in Canada — the “Great White North” — necessitated changes to materials and tool design, and sometimes warranted deviations from British specifications in fuse-filling practice.

Not only was inexperience a problem, because GECO was a government-owned enterprise, there were many persnickety fingers in the pot. Allied War Supplies Corp., the Department of Munitions and Supply, Federal Treasury officials, the Inspection Board of the United Kingdom and Canada, and the British Admiralty Technical Mission, to name just a few, had specific requirements that changed often.24 Independent government inspectors (G.I.s) sought and ensured the quality of all empties and filled fuses at GECO. Government inspectors expected perfection, and rightly so. If the Allies had hit the Bismarck with a dud, that battle might have ended very differently. These inspectors had the first and last word on every aspect of fuse-filling. In fact, they held the power to stop all production.25

Lieutenant-Colonel H. Read, a British authority on ammunition, wrote: “It must be borne in mind that inspection does not make anything wrong, it only finds things wrong. It must be realized that inspection involves far more than the mere interception and rejection of faulty items. A good inspector should be the guide, philosopher and friend to production and by timely advice and instruction as to what exactly is required and in many cases how it can best be achieved, is able to effect a great economy in material and effort.”26

Read went on to say that units filled and accepted for service “represented a vital part in a complete round of ammo for use on land, or sea, or in the air, in defensive or offensive action.”27

Personnel from the Inspection Board were held in the “highest esteem” and GECO understood clearly that they were “bound by the limitation of a system in which there was little elasticity.”28 Nonetheless, the conflict between independent inspection personnel and the production team, including workshop supervisors and operators, was, at times, volatile.

The Girls Behind the Boys Behind the Guns

Despite growing pains, GECO rolled out dozens of fuse-filling workshops throughout the month of September, starting production on several different components. The complex was built in record-breaking time — just 236 days — a feat that would be entered into the annals of Canadian war history.29 The extraordinary record is an everlasting credit to the thousands of men and women who worked so tirelessly through the winter, spring, and summer of 1941 with a united and steadfast goal: to get the biggest and finest munitions factory in Canada’s history into meaningful production as quickly as humanly possible. By the end of September 1941, management declared that “practically all filling buildings were completed.”30 Bob and Phil Hamilton had remarkably surpassed even their own aggressive objectives of being in production by July 1941 and erecting 130 buildings by September.31

GECO would fill more than one million ammunition units each month throughout the war, its workers filled with an unconquerable spirit, arming the Allied forces fighting for the world’s freedom with top-quality munitions. GECO’s Bill Taylor of Building No. 126, engineering, said, “Scarboro was built in a hurry — and well built.”32

The story at Scarboro had started with two humble, loyal Canadians — Bob Hamilton and his brother, Phil — along with a small company of equally patriotic men, buoyed by pride of personal achievement and determination that only true “fuse-filled achievement” could satisfy the “ammunition needs of a nation and world at war.”33

Three GECO fuse-fillers examine fuses. Courtesy of Archives of Ontario.

With the bombing at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day, the world, more than ever, needed war plants, including munitions enterprises like GECO, if the fight for freedom had any hope of succeeding.