Arming the Western Front

War, Business and the State in Britain 1900–1920

Roger Lloyd-Jones, M.J. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317178538
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The First World War was above all a war of logistics. Whilst the conflict will forever be remembered for the mud and slaughter of the Western Front, it was a war won on the factory floor as much as the battlefield. Examining the war from an industrial perspective, Arming the Western Front examines how the British between 1900 and 1920 set about mobilising economic and human resources to meet the challenge of 'industrial war'. Beginning with an assessment of the run up to war, the book examines Edwardian business-state relations in terms of armament supply. It then outlines events during the first year of the war, taking a critical view of competing constructs of the war and considering how these influenced decision makers in both the private and public domains. This sets the framework for an examination of the response of business firms to the demand for 'shells more shells', and their varying ability to innovate and manage changing methods of production and organisation. The outcome, a central theme of the book, was a complex and evolving trade-off between the quantity and quality of munitions supply, an issue that became particularly acute during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. This deepened the economic and political tensions between the military, the Ministry of Munitions, and private engineering contractors as the pressure to increase output accelerated markedly in the search for victory on the western front. The Great War created a dual army, one in the field, the other at home producing munitions, and the final section of the book examines the tensions between the two as the country strove for final victory and faced the challenges of the transition to the peace time economy.

1 Introduction

[Britain was] fighting against the best organised community in the world … For too long the British had employed haphazard, leisurely, go-as-you-please methods, which were placing the nation in great peril.

(David Lloyd George, June 1915)¹

We have all heard it so often that it must be impressed upon every man, that this is a war of material above everything else. It is superiority of material and not in men that has enabled the Germans to achieve such measures of success that they have won. I think they realised before the rest how largely the issues of this war would demand upon the quality and quantity of material which the Combatants could command and readily command. We are learning that lesson. We are not always as quick as we ought to be.

(David Lloyd George, November 1915)²

David Lloyd George held all the key offices of government during the Great War: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War and, from December 1916, Prime Minister. He came to recognise that the war was an industrial war, fought by powerful industrialised nations that could mass-produce war goods to supply large armies. The nation that could supply the most material force would, in all probability, prevail. The American Civil War was the first national industrial war, but the Great War was the first industrial war on a world scale. To prosecute industrial war required the mobilisation of economic resources for the mass production of weapons and munitions, which necessarily entailed fundamental changes in the relations between the state (the procurer), business (the provider), labour (the key productive input), and the military (the consumer). In this context, the industrial battlefields of France and Flanders intertwined with the home front that produced the material to sustain a war over four long and bloody years. At the end of 1914 trenches stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss frontier, and the defenders constructed trench systems for defence in depth and ‘linked to each other by communications systems’. Attacking infantry faced the great problem of making advances ‘across … no-man’s-land’, against quick-firing rifles, deadly machine guns and the most murderous weapon of all, ‘enemy artillery’. The great problem was to deliver the firepower to attacking forces to break deeply entrenched positions, and as the war escalated into 1915 and 1916, the military commanders demanded increasing supplies of the industrial weapons of war.³ In turn, this required a mobilisation of the physical and human resources of the home front. Men and women toiled in the workshops of all the combatant powers to produce the munitions required to break the stalemate on the Western Front. The result of industrial warfare was the sacrifice of men to the war machine, the cost counted in the millions of dead that lay fallen on the battlefields of the Western and Eastern Fronts (Table 1.1).

Britain’s main military contribution to the Great War was on the Western Front, which provides the focus of this book, but, as a global and imperial power, British troops also fought in other theatres. The Western Front, however, was ‘ “the decisive front” from the beginning to the end of the war’: ‘on no other front was the human, technological, and logistical effort so massive’. For example, the twin industrial battles at Verdun and on the Somme in 1916, were ‘vast battles of material’ and ‘had no corresponding equivalent on the other fronts of the First World War’.⁴ Our study of arming the Western Front concentrates on Britain’s contribution, and thus a detailed account of the role of the other belligerent nations is beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless, the British were engaged in an Anglo-French coalition on the Western Front, and the contribution of France both to supplies of manpower and war goods was vitally important. This was even more the case when we consider that Germany occupied French territory that contained a considerable amount of France’s industrial capacity, wiping out 64 per cent of pig iron, 58 per cent of steel and 40 per cent of its coal output. While France did benefit from the import of British resources and was a recipient of financial credits, which enabled it to buy goods from the USA, the French made an important contribution to Britain’s military capability, notably in tanks, aircraft and chemical warfare.⁵ Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 5, the British drew knowledge from the French concerning industrial mobilisation, especially the administration of the large-scale production of munitions and the devolving of output to regional munitions committees, which provided a model for the organisation of the Ministry of Munitions in Britain in May 1915.⁶ It was not until 1917 that the British matched and then superseded the French in the production of war goods, and in military terms was no longer the junior partner to their ally on the Western Front.

Table 1.1 Estimated casualties during the Great War: main combatants (millions)

	Killed	Wounded	Prisoners	% forces mobilised
British Empire	1.1	2.0	0.2	35.8
Germany	2.0	4.2	1.2	64.9
France	1.3	4.3	0.5	73.3
Russia	1.7	4.9	2.5	76.3
Austria-Hungary	1.2	3.6	2.2	90.0

Source: Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire, p. 44.

Note: Italian losses were 689,000 killed and 959,000 wounded. American casualties were 58,480 killed, 189,955 wounded and 14,290 taken prisoner.

On the eve of the Great War, Britain and Germany were at similar levels of industrial development, and they each possessed the capability of bringing to the battlefield an ever-increasing accumulation of war goods and the means of delivering them to lethal effect. As Gary Sheffield has pointed out, ‘[b]reech-loading rifles, machine-guns, and artillery pieces made the battlefield a more lethal place than ever before’.⁷ Industrialisation had diffused across continental Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, but it had done so at differential rates. From the 1880s onwards the German economy grew at a rate twice as fast as that of Great Britain, while Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy were all latecomers to the industrialisation process, embarking on their drives from the 1890s. French economic growth stalled in the late nineteenth century and then picked up rapidly in ‘the golden age’ of expansion in the decade before 1914. European industrialisation expanded the international economy and was part of the historical process of globalisation, but the expansion of world trade and commerce coexisted with rising tariffs and imperial expansion. Growing economic competition and imperial rivalry do not themselves explain the causes of the Great War, but in conjunction they raised international tensions, which opened the possibility that diplomatic initiatives for the resolution of conflicts would not be sufficient. Consequently, one or more of the Great Powers would consider a military solution in the future.⁸ The industrialisation of the Great Powers in the nineteenth century institutionalised modern technological warfare. Artillery was the key weapon of destruction in the Great War and the most deadly means of killing enemy troops was the artillery shell.⁹

During the war, artillery guns and ammunition increased enormously in quantity and scale, intensifying the capability of the belligerents to kill and maim. During the ‘victory battles’ of the summer of 1918 the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) fired 24.2 million shells. Over the duration of the war, the BEF expended an almost unimaginable figure of 167.6 million shells, weighing 4.1 million tons. By the time of the Battle of Amiens in early August 1918 the British had also accumulated a vast store of heavy artillery and ammunition, now combined with infantry, tanks and aircraft. As Lloyd George, the Minister of Munitions recognised in November 1915, ‘this is a war of material above everything else’.¹⁰

A major concern of this book is the capability of the British to organise and manage the production of artillery guns and shells, and the array of components that went into their production. By 1916 the authorities also faced the challenge of raising the output of the weapons of mechanical warfare: the aircraft and the tank. The increasing availability of war goods raised the pressure on military leaders to use them to even deadlier effect and on political leaders at home to sustain the morale and compliance of their domestic population to ensure that the industrial war economy would continue to pump out the required firepower. The killing fields of the Western Front were not just a laboratory for testing out military strategies and new weapon technologies, but also a marketplace that displayed an insatiable appetite for the war goods manufactured by the industrial economies of the belligerents. Yet, as Lloyd George recognised in November 1915, the war had been a matter of experimentation, and the lessons of industrial warfare, involving the integration of the military and domestic fronts, had taken a long time to materialise. British industrial mobilisation was a slow and ad hoc affair, and this relates partly to Britain’s preparations for war and partly to perceptions of the type of war the country might be involved in – issues that are examined in Chapters 2 and 3. Here, we assess Britain’s preparations for war, which requires a consideration of not only military factors, but also political economy. Thus, we base our analysis on the relations between economic, political and military factors, and this methodology informs our general understanding of Britain’s role in arming the Western Front throughout the book. During the Edwardian period Britain’s imperial and maritime power faced new and threatening challenges, and consequently the relations between the strength of industry, the defence of the realm and the Empire raised major political questions. Retaining Britain’s role as a world imperial power and its global networks of trade, commerce and finance¹¹ taxed the minds of contemporaries. There was growing anxiety over Germany’s rapid industrialisation, and combined with its aggressive naval expansion and large standing army this raised the potential for Germany to wage war.

Economic performance and national and international power are inextricably linked; policies to promote growth and policies to promote power are intertwined. For example, constructive imperialists, followers of the charismatic ultra-imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, were acutely aware of the relationship between power and industrial growth. Constructive imperialists championed the relationship between Empire and Britain’s power and status in the world and they fervently believed that war was rational and ‘part of the national pursuit of security by nations’, backed up by economic protection of the nation’s industrial assets. Consequently, maintaining a large navy and the industry to support it was the direct responsibility of the state.¹² Liberal imperialists, such as H.H. Asquith (Prime Minister, 1908 to 1916), R.B. Haldane (Secretary of State for War, 1906–10) and Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary, 1906–16) remained committed to free trade, but they, too, drew a parallel between Britain’s industrial and maritime power and the challenge of retaining its status as a great power in the new century.

What troubled and excited the interest of the political elite before the war was the growing reliance of the country on the import of strategic materials and semi-manufactured goods. On the eve of war, about 43 per cent of steel castings and 10 per cent of steel plates were imported mainly from Germany.¹³ Britain’s relative performance in new technological sectors from the 1880s was disappointing, and this understandably added to the fears of contemporaries who witnessed Germany’s mounting industrial and military power. It should be emphasised, however, that Britain’s technological lag in modern sectors, was not comprehensive, and Edgerton argues that before 1914 the British state ‘pioneered a distinct modern militarism’ based...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The road to war: the Edwardian economy, military preparedness and war planning
• 3 The pre-war procurement system: the War Office, the Admiralty and the private armaments producers
• 4 Business as usual and the challenges of war
• 5 The rise of the engineer’s war and the origins of the Ministry of Munitions
• 6 The Ministry of Munitions and industrial warfare
• 7 Producing for the industrial battlefield: the Ministry of Munitions and the Somme
• 8 Oh, what a costly war!: managing and paying for industrial warfare
• 9 Coping with crisis: the war economy in 1917
• 10 The intractable problem of manpower: the Western Front and the home front in transition
• 11 The transition to a peace economy and the challenge of reconstruction, 1918–1920
• 12 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index