To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The ministry’s thinking on wartime production was determined by the need to make good existing stocks, to replenish ammunition as it was fired, and to repair or replace damaged or captured artillery pieces. What it had not considered was the possible pressure to augment its overall equipment levels. In 1914 the War Ministry requisitioned from Krupp 108 7.5 cm field guns ordered by Brazil. It appropriated other smaller orders placed by foreign powers, allocating many of them to Turkey.156 But it did not place massive orders over and above its existing contracts. In December daily production of rifles was 2,300, only just above the figure of 1,900 planned for the war’s outbreak, and the result was that the army had received only a sixth of the rifles it needed. The manufacture of small-arms ammunition had not risen beyond its initial target. When five new reserve corps were created in October 1914 their field artillery was organized in four-gun, rather than six-gun, batteries not for tactical reasons but because of shortages of pieces. By the end of 1915 the army had only 5,300 field guns, when it had originally hoped to have 5,588 on mobilization. The stocks of heavy artillery had risen, but through the capture of fortresses such as Antwerp (armed with a total of 2,500 guns, including Krupp 15 cm howitzers), Maubeuge (600 guns), and Longwy (which yielded a further 100 guns and 250,000 rounds), rather than through domestic production. Actual output of heavy artillery did not rise until after 1916. Only in the case of machine-guns (from 2,400 to 8,000—and 1,900 more were captured) and of field howitzers (from 950 to 1,700) was there a significant growth in initial holdings by the end of 1915.157

  Heavy industry, the armaments sector apart, was slow to respond to the opportunities presented by the war between 1914 and 1916. To many the arms business seemed a risky undertaking: entrepreneurs reckoned that investment in the appropriate plant might soon prove redundant, especially given the evidence of the early German victories. And the Treasury’s espousal of liberal economic principles left the issue of industrial conversion to the workings of profit incentives rather than to state direction. Even those firms ready to convert to war production found the task far from straightforward. In peacetime the War Ministry had set stringent specifications. The new contractors found it hard to meet these standards, and the ministry was slow to relax its expectations. In September 1914 AEG contracted to produce 150,000 shells a month, but its first delivery was only 80,000, and many of those did not satisfy the inspectors.158

  The onset of position warfare lowered the levels of technological sophistication required, at least in some respects. The Germans embraced one weapon of eighteenth-century warfare, the hand grenade, because it used muscle power rather than scarce powder as a propellant.159 Siege conditions also enabled the Minenwerfer, a small artillery piece which fired mines at high angles over short ranges (effectively, in other words, a trench mortar), to come into its own. In August 1914 the German army possessed seventy heavy and 110 medium Minenwerfer; by January 1918 total deliveries amounted to 1,322 heavy Minenwerfer, 2,476 medium, and 13,329 light.160 The Minenwerfer was simpler to construct than a field gun—indeed, the slowness in the increase of their output in 1915 encouraged the infantry to improvise their own—and thus foundries without a pre-war background in the arms business could be drawn into their production. Furthermore, the fact that they fired projectiles over short ranges also economized in powder.

  The Minenwerfer was symptomatic of a broader trend—a proliferation in types of artillery and of the shells fired from them. Fifty-three different guns were in use at the front in 1916, and seventy-seven by April 1917.161 Shells diversified according to their precise applications so as to make the best use of explosives: firing at flatter trajectories but with less powder reduced the wear on the gun. Germany produced 200 different sorts of shell in the war, and of these ninety were still in production at the war’s end.162 As a result, twenty-five factories were able to produce complete guns, 463 produced components for gun carriages, and forty-five produced components for gun barrels.163 In late 1916 Hamburg still had fifty-eight firms appropriate to the production of munitions that were not being used. But the accusation that the structure of the war economy, and the workings of the KRA in particular, favoured large firms was not wholly true: of ninety-two firms which had munitions contracts, only fifteen employed more than 100 people.164 Artillery specifications were adapted as much to the capabilities of German industry as they were shaped to the requirements of trench warfare.

  Standardization was therefore sacrificed. A massive expansion in orders was accompanied by a multiplication of types. Thus, a double strain was put on Germany’s procurement organization. On the outbreak of war over forty different agencies had responsibilities for procurement. The individual states and the individual services were only a part of the structure: within the army each branch—artillery, pioneers, communications, infantry—had its inspectorates responsible for the acquisition of its own equipment.165 Before 1914 the War Ministry had developed an innovative approach to new technology; it recognized that sophisticated machinery could substitute for manpower as a force multiplier. But this approach was most deeply embedded in the lower echelons, and many of the ministry’s technical specialists left their posts for service at the front.166

  At the interface between the War Ministry and the general staff stood the Feuerwerkern, literally ‘fire workers’, who were responsible for the testing, development, production, and inspection of munitions. In 1901 they had been detached from the siege artillery and placed under the command of the Ordnance Department, the Feldzeugmeisterei, itself subordinate to the War Ministry. The Feuerwerkern served at artillery depots, in munitions factories, and on testing commissions; they were responsible for the research, development, production, and inspection of all forms of shell. But, as technical specialists, they lacked authority in an army which put weight on field command and officer status. The Feuerwerker was frustrated by holding an intermediate appointment, not unlike that of the Deckoffizier in the navy. Promoted through the ranks, he would be in his mid-forties by the time he reached the equivalent of captain, and even then was subordinate for disciplinary purposes to artillery officers who were his juniors. The nature of his expertise alerted him to the relationship between technology and tactical innovation, but it was not an awareness vouchsafed to the general staff. Franke, the Feldzeugmeister in 1914, said that he had not once been called to a meeting to address the issue of the army’s ammunition supply in the event of war.167

  The consequences of treating its technical advisers as part of a peacetime establishment for home service went beyond personal disgruntlement (although this continued throughout the war), and even beyond the failure to relate operations to new technology. The army tripled in size on mobilization but the establishment of Feuerwerkern did not. Their technical school, closed on the outbreak of war, only reopened in March 1918. Efforts to recall retired Feuerwerkern were not likely to prove successful: they were too old on retirement to constitute an effective reserve, and innovation rapidly rendered their expertise obsolete. As the German armies advanced into Belgium, they did so without an establishment of Feuerwerkern at their headquarters. Captured munitions stocks were destroyed for lack of technical advice. As the war stabilized, dumps in the field were left in the hands of reservists who did not know what they were looking after, who sometimes issued shells of the wrong calibre, and who lost ammunition (and lives) through negligence or ignorance. The guns themselves were not properly cleaned or maintained. These problems were exacerbated as the types of ordnance and the shells they fired proliferated, thus increasing the requirement for specialist knowledge. They were never fully overcome: in April 1917 one German battery on the Aisne fired 27,000 rounds of blank ammunition, as it had been issued with the wrong charges. From 1915 Feuerwerkern were allocated to jobs in the field and, even if too few to micro-manage such situations, they could at least combat shell shortage through the introduction of better systems for reporting and distribution. But the corollary of efficiency gains at the front was a loss of
inspectors at the rear just as new firms were entering production. Their frustrations were not eased as they dealt with gunners firing shells whose manufacturing defects they themselves could have prevented if they had been given the power of ubiquity.

  One—if hardly the only—cause of the Feuerwerker’s travails was the confusion between the respective provinces of the War Ministry and the general staff. Tensions between the two had been worsened by the increases of 1912 and 1913. The Prussian War Ministry, assailed in the Reichstag by south Germans and socialists, felt undervalued by the general staff, and was increasingly convinced that its chief was dominated by, in the words of Franz Wandel, ‘unruly and ambitious heads’.168 After 14 September 1914 Falkenhayn, as Prussia’s war minister, was also de facto chief of the general staff. The daily demands of the latter office tended to take priority over the longer-term considerations of the former. It was often not clear in which capacity Falkenhayn acted. In the autumn of 1914 he used Max Bauer to liaise directly with the armaments industry on munitions production. Before the war Bauer had worked with Krupp on the development of the 42 cm gun required to deal with the Liège fortifications. That was a task generated by the general staff’s adaptation of the war plan, and Bauer saw himself as a representative of the interests of OHL. He railed against the War Ministry for its bureaucratic ways and its slowness to widen the network of firms with which it placed orders. By July 1915 he had created an independent section within the general staff, thus heightening departmental sensitivities.169 Falkenhayn was relieved of the Ministry of War in January 1915, but the step did little to clarify the division of its responsibilities from those of the general staff. His successor, Adolf Wild von Hohenborn, had been his deputy; the experience did not stimulate his appetite for the task. As early as 1912 Wild had resolved that he would not become war minister ‘at any price’, and when patriotic duty left him no option his response was not to rise to the challenge but to tell his wife ‘it’s too much’.170 He remained in thrall to Falkenhayn, and infuriated the commanders at the eastern front by preferring to spend his time at OHL rather than in Berlin.171

  Thus, in the post-war historiography, dominated by Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and the preoccupations of the third OHL after 1916, the War Ministry was easy meat. Failures in productivity were attributed to its methods of management. Wandel, who had been deemed physically unfit to command a division in 1913, was nonetheless recalled to be Wild’s deputy. Like Wild, he preferred the ambience of general headquarters to Berlin, and he saw it as no part of the ministry’s job to be on close terms with industrialists or to acquire specialist knowledge.172 The ministry was, therefore, not its own best advocate. Its response to the central question of powder production was to split the difference between what was needed and what could be manufactured. Powder production, therefore, lagged behind both the demands of the front and the ministry’s own projections. The effect was to turn comparative success into apparent failure. Germany’s monthly powder production in August 1914 was only 1,240 tonnes, when the ministry’s own calculations suggested that 7,000 were required—a total only just exceeded for the four months to the year’s end. An interim target of 3,500 tonnes per month was raised to 4,500 tonnes in December 1914, a month in which actual production reached 2,170 tonnes. By the time output had reached 4,750 tonnes (in October 1915), the goal had been raised again (in February 1915) to 6,000 tonnes. A revised figure of 8,000 tonnes, established in December 1915, was attained in April 1917, and one of 10,000 tonnes, adopted in July 1916, in October 1917. The effect of the targets was to create an impression of ministerial inefficiency when, in reality, the expansion of production was continuous. The figure of 8,000 tonnes was achieved only a month behind schedule, and from March 1918 production was exceeding expectations. The growth in powder production set the pace of gun production, but here too there was relative success. Germany’s monthly output of field guns was 100 in December 1914, 270 in the summer of 1915, and 480 at the year’s end. By then 3,500 new field guns had been manufactured since the war’s commencement. Krupp’s figures make it clear that 1915, not 1916, saw the most significant increases in output. The proportion of the firm’s Essen works devoted to war material rose to 79 per cent of turnover in 1914–15 (as opposed to 54 per cent before the war), and reached what became a plateau of 82 per cent in 1915–16. Actual output of new guns of all calibres doubled in the second year of the war, 1 August 1915 to 31 July 1916, to 2,481; it fell back to 2,276 in the following year. Germany’s overall stocks remained low, not so much because of inadequate output but because of damage and destruction at the front. Every month, over the war as a whole, an average of 3,000 guns of all calibres required some form of repair. In the first year of the war Krupp mended more guns than it made new ones, 1,535 compared to 1,264. In 1915 improvised shell production was responsible for as much damage as enemy fire: 2,300 field guns and 900 light howitzers were destroyed through premature explosions. The 6th army reckoned to lose 20 per cent of its guns every day in a major battle, and attributed only 2 to 4 per cent of those losses to enemy action. Germany’s artillery was lost three and a half times over during the course of the war.173

  The most obvious manifestation of the War Ministry’s success was that shell shortage figured only rarely as a constraint on operations in 1915. Between August and December 1914 total consumption of field gun, light and heavy field howitzer, 10 cm gun, and mortar ammunition was 260 per cent of output. But in December 1914 monthly shell production for field artillery reached 1.2 million rounds and for light howitzers 414,000, almost a sevenfold increase on August. By the end of 1915, when output of field-gun shells had reached 2.1 million per month and of light howitzer ammunition 800,000, only 73 per cent of the year’s production had been fired—and this despite the fact that in the autumn battles field guns had been firing 349 rounds a day and light howitzers 325. Falkenhayn himself declared that there were no problems after the spring of 1915, and this situation persisted until June 1916.174

  However, the achievement of this short-term objective should not be allowed to gainsay the existence of longer-term structural problems within the war industries and their management. The War Ministry persisted in seeing the production of munitions in isolation from the German economy as a whole. By 1915 Germany’s net national product had fallen to 79 per cent of its 1913 total. It continued to fall, and so did aggregate industrial production, which declined from 81 per cent of its 1914 total in 1915 to 77 per cent in 1916. Within heavy industry, coal production in 1915 was 78 per cent of its 1913 total, iron and steel 68 per cent, and non-ferrous metals 72 per cent. Germany was, of course, an exporter both of coal and of iron and steel before the war, and in 1914 it had lost many of its export markets. Thus, the implications of the fall should not be exaggerated. Outputs in all three categories would rise again in 1916 and 1917—although only that of non-ferrous metals would exceed its 1913 figure.175

  The ultimate constraint on increased productivity was the labour supply. But explanations for the initial problems of 1914–15 are more specific. In 1914 the war industries lost more workers in reserved occupations than did the civil industries. In the chemical sector, mobilization deprived Bosch of 52 per cent of its workforce and Bayer of almost 50 per cent. In 1915 the situation began to be rectified, and the total number in reserved occupations in civil industries was halved, but not until 1917 would those in war production exceed the pre–1914 total.176 The pressures within, and from, war industry caused the commanding generals in certain districts to plan for the militarization of the labour supply. In October 1914 a scheme was bruited in Allenstein to make war-related work compulsory for the entire population, and regulations to limit the mobility of workers, as competition between firms drove up wages, were introduced in Würzburg in March 1915.177 Falkenhayn proposed to incorporate such steps in a co-ordinated plan for all Germany in June 1915, but he was dissuaded by Wandel, who preferred to rely on voluntarism and patriotism. Wandel argued, moreover, that skilled workers in suff
icient numbers had already been released from the army back to industry.178

  One calculation suggests that between 30 and 40 per cent of skilled workers were called up in 1914.179 Even if Wandel was right, and the army had returned many of these workers by 1915, military service continued to reduce the skills base of Germany’s workforce. Industrial training was forfeit to short-term necessity, and by 1916 the numbers of apprentices in Berlin had fallen from 25,000 to 7,800.180 This loss of skills has been adduced as one explanation for the fact that while output fell, the number of workers in key industries rose.181 But the implication in such an argument is an acceptance of conservatism in relation to the management of labour. The point has, after all, been developed in precisely opposite terms for Britain; there the status of the skilled worker, largely protected in the war, is seen as a restraint on the introduction of new methods of production and so a block on increased output.

  The essential point in Germany is that labour shortages in 1914 were not sufficiently acute to demand new practices. Germany, after all, conscripted far fewer of its urban workers than did France. Moreover, the short-term effect of mobilization was to create unemployment, as firms which lost a sizeable proportion of their labour to the services or which manufactured goods for which demand tumbled felt it was uneconomic to continue. In December 1914 unemployment in Germany was three times higher than usual for the time of year.182 War industries proved more prodigal in their use of labour, not less. At Daimler, the leading manufacturer of aero engines for the War Ministry, the number of workers per machine rose from 1.8 to 2.4 over the war as a whole. What is striking, therefore, is the failure of Daimler to change their production processes in order to maximize output per machine. The guaranteeing of profits and of manpower by the state made for conservatism in the production methods employed.183