To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Its work, therefore, anticipated and shaped that of the Ministry of Munitions. Nor were these the only significant innovations that came to be associated with the latter, but in reality had their origins in the War Office. Lloyd George, as minister of munitions, made great play of his recruitment of ‘men of push and go’, of businessmen rather than civil servants. But Lloyd George was less original than he claimed. Initially the War Office was fearful of employing outsiders, and particularly businessmen whose firms stood to profit from any consequent contracts. But it was Kitchener who called in the barrister and scientist Lord Moulton to chair a committee on explosives in November 1914. When the committee found it needed executive powers, Kitchener appointed Moulton head of the explosives supply department. The composition of the armaments output committee confirms the point. Of its six members, only two (Kitchener and von Donop) came from the army. A prime mover in shaping its agenda was Allan M. Smith, secretary of the Engineering Employers’ Federation. The committee’s chairman was George Macaulay Booth, a Liverpool shipowner. Booth had been consulted by Kitchener in December 1914, and at a meeting on 16 March 1915, convened by Kitchener to discuss the labour problem, Booth used the Leicester model to press on the secretary of state the wisdom of spreading munitions contracts to every suitable engineering workshop in the land. It was largely by dint of Smith’s and Booth’s efforts that the regional structure took shape. Co-opted to aid the committee was Sir Percy Girouard who, although a former soldier, was by then the managing director of the Armstrong works at Elswick.286

  In Booth’s hands the armaments output committee would form the embryo of the Ministry of Munitions. But the parentage became confused by Asquith’s announcement on 8 April of another body, the Treasury munitions of war committee, under the chairmanship of Lloyd George. This was the product of the preliminary meeting on 22 March; it continued to exclude Kitchener, but it did embrace von Donop as well as Booth and, in due course, Girouard. The remit of the committee was couched in the widest possible terms, and Lloyd George described its function as that of policy. For the chancellor, the armaments output committee was the executive arm of his committee. In the personal battle between Kitchener and Lloyd George the latter had regained the initiative. In itself, the munitions of war committee achieved little, but in institutional terms it gave the armaments output committee a status which made its subordination to the War Office progressively less sustainable.

  Rumbling away on the margins of the management of munitions were the bigger issues of state control, so central to the comparable debates in Germany, but overshadowed in Britain by the clash of personalities. Kitchener’s resolve to manage the labour question implied the central organization of manpower. On 5 March 1915 a committee set up to deal with labour problems on Clydeside proposed, among other things, that the government should take over the munitions industry. The proposal divided the cabinet, but not along predictable lines. Runciman, the president of the Board of Trade, favoured such ideas, despite his free-trade credentials. Churchill, on the other hand, who had endorsed a proposal for the co-ordination of industry throughout the empire in September 1914, criticized Runciman’s scheme as ‘socialite and anarchic’.287 The cabinet member closest to New Liberalism before the war, Lloyd George, endorsed the sort of corporatism advocated by the unionist business committee, a Conservative backbench group formed in January 1915. Its leader, W. A. S. Hewins, was a tariff reformer, who described ‘putting our economic resources on a war footing’ as a long-held objective of the imperial preference movement.288 Less divisive politically was the model of France, whose national organization of its resources was more immediately related to the onset of war. The potential beneficiaries from a rationalization of existing plant were the big firms. G. H. West, seconded from Armstrong Whitworth to the War Office to advise on shell production, favoured a census of all machinery, and the subsequent allocation of plant from small firms to those that could make better use of it; furthermore, local groups of those involved in arms manufacture should be subordinated to the management of one of the principal existing manufacturers. Thus, capitalism and rationalization would go hand in hand, to the advantage not only of national output but also of Armstrong and its pre-war rivals.

  By April a sort of stalemate had been reached in which no one individual and no one ministry had overall responsibility for munitions production, but in which the principal players—including Lloyd George—seemed content to collude. Kitchener acknowledged the reality on 26 April when he authorized Girouard and Booth to act without further reference to him.289 At the macro-level control of munitions was divided between Kitchener and Lloyd George; at the micro, between Girouard and Booth. The depth of ill-feeling between the former was not reflected in the relationship of the latter, but they did diverge in their solutions to the problem. Girouard preferred the establishment of state factories to Booth’s spreading of contracts. The result was compromise. Britain was divided into two zones, ‘A’ and ‘B’. ‘A’ areas were those within 20 miles of existing arms factories: the policy here was to direct labour to the established plant. ‘B’ areas were those distant from arms works: in these cases contracts would be shared among new firms on the co-operative basis.

  Compromise was also in evidence in von Donop’s report to the munitions of war committee on 13 April. The master general outlined the programme for the next four months. It was shaped neither by anticipated demand nor by likely supply, but by balancing the two. At the end of 1914 Sir John French had pitched the required output of 18-pounder ammunition at fifty rounds per gun per day. This was excessive: the French advised Kitchener that twenty-five would be enough, but the War Office adopted twenty as their target and seventeen as their minimum. On the supply side, von Donop almost halved the quantity of shell promised by the contractors, from 420,000 to 215,000. In this fashion his estimates of production and consumption all but matched. But his calculations in achieving this satisfactory outcome proved ill-conceived on both sides of the equation. On demand, it is not clear that his requirement for 18-pounders incorporated the growth in that period from two armies to six (although that for 4.5-inch howitzers certainly did). On supply, contractors delivered half of what von Donop hoped for, and therefore a quarter of what they had promised.

  Von Donop did all that Lloyd George’s munitions of war committee asked him to do. A balance sheet after his fall concluded that he had ‘started [the war] with 27 large contracts; those developed into 279, and those again with subcontractors into 3,000’.290 But his supply-side calculations and measured approach were driven from the field on 14 May 1915. Sir John French and The Times, for long an advocate of a Ministry of Munitions, attributed the setback at Aubers Ridge on 9 May specifically to a lack of 18-pounder high-explosive shell. So armed, the British would have been able to level the German parapets, as the French (once again the models) had done. The subsequent furore obscured the fact that the real focus of the report of Repington, The Times correspondent, was on the need for heavy artillery, not more shells for field guns; the latter would never break down deep defences.291 But it was the shells issue which rekindled Lloyd George’s attack on Kitchener. Moreover, it was the shell shortage which revealed Asquith’s public assurances at Newcastle the previous month as a sham. The fall of the Liberal government which followed was not precipitated solely by the issue of munitions, nor was the division between French and Kitchener solely over the technical issues. But the effects of both were to complete the restructuring of the management of Britain’s war industries. At first Asquith was not persuaded of the need for a new government department, but he was convinced that his government’s credibility needed Kitchener. The king pointed out that Kitchener’s continuation at the War Office could only be sustained politically if he was relieved of responsibility for production. On 9 June 1915 the Ministry of Munitions was created, and Lloyd George was appointed to head it.

  Lloyd George’s move from the Treasury made sense, given his instincts in war, which were those o
f expenditure rather than economy. ‘The munitions conception’, one Treasury official reported to McKenna in October 1915, ‘is “all of everything”.’292 Lloyd George’s own credo was: ‘Take Kitchener’s maximum; square it, multiply that by two; and when you are in sight of that double it again for good luck.’293 Much of this was said for effect, but there were practical consequences: his critics argued that the multiplication of orders drove up prices rather than output. Sir G. Gibbs gave Kitchener sage advice: the munitions issue was ‘not a question of the allocation of contracts, but of the organization of production’.294

  Lloyd George’s principal contribution to the management of the war economy, therefore, was to shift from supply to demand as its key determinant. In June he accepted Sir John French’s suggestion of a ration of twenty-five rounds per field gun per day, and in 1916 he moved to the original target of fifty— although this did indeed prove excessive. On 19 June 1915 he asked Major-General J. P. Du Cane: ‘Given an army of 1,000,000 men what would your requirements be in guns and ammunition in order to deliver a decisive and sustained attack to enable you to break through the German lines?’ Du Cane’s reply formed the basis of Lloyd George’s programme. The contractors’ current capabilities were not consulted.295

  The detail of what Lloyd George did was almost entirely derived from others. Much came from the War Office via the armaments output committee. Much, too, was culled from the example of France. Albert Thomas established a close relationship with Lloyd George. Thus, while in Paris the French Ministry of War was earning the brickbats of the senate commission on the army, in London it was winning the plaudits of its British allies.

  Lloyd George borrowed ideas but then took them much further. Most striking in this respect was the recruitment of businessmen to the new ministry; within three months he had enlisted over ninety. Negatively, this was a product of necessity: there were not enough civil servants to do the job.296 Positively, it reflected Lloyd George’s distrust of experts: Sir Percy Girouard, the first director-general of munitions supply in the new department, was an early casualty on these grounds.297 What he wanted was managers—and not cautious men, but improvisers who would respond to crises. His recruits, who included Samuel Hardman Lever, Eric Geddes, and William Beveridge, came from the City and from the distillers Johnny Walker, as well as from the obviously relevant industries of coal, shipbuilding, machine tools, and armaments. Among the most important was Kitchener’s protégé, George Macaulay Booth.

  Booth, initially in conjunction with Girouard, developed the organization of the new ministry. He confronted two obstacles, both of which meant that the structure was shifting and uncertain. The first, predictably, was Kitchener, and the second, less predictably, was Lloyd George.

  Kitchener himself was entirely supportive in his personal dealings with the new ministry, but his demeanour—at least at the outset—may have been the product of a misapprehension. He seems to have believed that the Ministry of Munitions remained under the War Office’s purview. The various agencies involved in munitions production were only gradually transferred from one to the other. Shells made under the auspices of the ministry were sent to Woolwich to be filled in the ordnance factories, which were still under the aegis of the War Office. In mid-August the latter were said to turn out 100,000 shells per week fewer than did the former. The ordnance factories were transferred to the Ministry of Munitions in the same month, but the process of inspection remained centralized at Woolwich.298 The research-and-development functions of the Board of Ordnance were not transferred until November. Until then, too, the War Office remained the conduit for discussions on munitions with the India Office.

  The problem with Lloyd George was that he shared at least one attribute with Kitchener—both were unsystematic. The Welshman appointed Girouard as director-general of munitions but then sacked him without fully replacing him. Neither Girouard nor Lloyd George himself favoured the creation of a board of munitions. Thus, each department within the ministry went its own way, a trend encouraged by the appointment of captains of industry accustomed to running their own affairs. Lloyd George’s tendency to say one thing to one person but something else to another did not help. Booth’s answer was to meet his fellow departmental heads over lunch; he would also write down what Lloyd George told him to do, read it back to him, and then get him to sign it.299

  The ministry was divided into four principal departments—a secretariat (under Beveridge), explosives (Lord Moulton), engineer munitions (Brigadier-General L. C. Jackson), and munitions supply (Girouard, at least at first). The latter, developed from the armaments output committee, had three sections—artillery production (Geddes), artillery ammunition (G. H. West), and organization and labour (Booth). In July Geddes’s section was divided, so that Geddes retained responsibility for rifles and machine-guns, and artillery formed a new section under Charles Ellis. The subdivision and musical chairs of the munitions supply department continued throughout the next twelve months: by 1 July 1916 it contained ten sections. Trench warfare supply was not, however, one of them. Acquired by the ministry on 23 June 1915, it was responsible for the new weapons generated by the conditions of the western front—grenades, gas, flamethrowers, and mortars. Like explosives supply, it constituted a separate supply department of its own; unlike munitions supply, it contained its own research-and-development capability.

  The real organizational strength of the ministry lay not at the centre but in the localities. The ministry was not primarily a producer of weapons; it was a co-ordinator and facilitator. Its first task, carried through in the second half of June, was to conduct a national survey of engineering resources. This having been completed, the country, as France had been, was divided into regions—at first ten and later twelve. Each region had an area office which provided specifications for weapons and helped with labour supply and the allocation of raw materials. The ministry rejected the War Office’s preference for subcontracting in favour of direct contracts. The arms firms, as principal contractors, had proved unable to enforce delivery dates or to prevent small firms from bidding up prices through the competition for their services. The issue of the contracts was put in the hands of local boards of management, subordinate to the areas, and formed of businessmen who were deemed to know local capabilities and who served without pay. The boards of management could opt for one of three different structures. The first was to establish national shell factories directly under the board: this was a scheme pioneered by Kitchener at the end of April 1915, and by December there were seventy-three such factories. They mostly produced shell for field guns: fifteen out of forty-seven boards went down this route. The second structure was the cooperative scheme developed by Booth, and appropriate to areas where the concentration of processes in a single factory was impossible: eighteen opted for this solution. The third was a mixture of both methods.

  Through the national shell factories the ministry expanded the scope of state production. The manufacture of heavy-artillery shells was entrusted to national projectile factories, fifteen of which were built in 1915 and 1916, and these were placed under the management of the major arms firms. The shells produced in this way were filled in national filling factories, run on lines similar to those for the national shell factories. The effect was to reassert the power of the state in controlling prices, a function effectively forfeited by the contraction of the ordnance workshops before 1914. It also made the state the principal purchaser of a whole range of commodities—metals, coke, dyes, and gas among them—which enabled it to regulate costs through central buying.300

  The state’s relationship with the employers was not an antagonistic one. The national factories were attached to and integrated with existing plant. The ministry enlisted the co-operation of businessmen both directly and indirectly. Certainly, the construction of new government-owned workshops symbolized the much more assertive line taken by the state in Britain than was the case in either Germany or France in 1915. But a principal motivation was not the c
urbing of capitalism but the taming of the trades unions. National factories appealed to the minister of munitions because, as new institutions, they could become models of best practice, both technically and managerially, for emulation elsewhere in British industry. Above all, they were not so bound by restrictive practices as the older workshops. Significantly, the Munitions of War act of 2 July 1915 was, despite its grandiose title, concerned almost exclusively with the regulation of labour. It built on the shells and fuses agreement and the Treasury agreement to establish compulsory arbitration, the prohibition of strikes, and the curtailment of the freedom to change jobs. Admittedly, the loss of workers’ rights was confined to the munitions industry, and those workers were rewarded with ‘badges’ effectively exempting them from military service. Moreover, these measures, by being clearly related to the duration of the war only, implicitly gave long-term protection to past practices. But trades unionists could legitimately argue that the state’s intervention in the munitions industry bore harder on them than on employers. Lloyd George paid lip service to controls on profits, but they were only applied to certain enterprises and were set at low levels: indeed, it could be said that Lloyd George, like Thomas in France, used the power of the government to institutionalize the notion of excessive profit-taking by arms firms in wartime.