CHAPTER IV

FROM DUNKIRK TO PEARL HARBOR

(1)

The Emergencies

In the history of war production the eighteen months between the summer of 1940 and the end of 1941—the time when Britain stood alone—were the period of great achievement. Readers need not be reminded how and why the events of the summer of 1940 drew a dividing line across the sequence of the war years. The rigours of a total war, psychological as well as material, came to this country all at once; and under a new and determined Government the country rapidly reformed itself to meet the demands of a life-and-death struggle. It was in the nature of the reformation that war industry should have been stimulated to a very great effort. Both its ambitions and its performances rose to a height which only a few months previously had appeared impossible; and stayed at that height, or very little below it, all through the hard years that followed.

War industry had now to satisfy requirements far greater than before, and what made them great were the immense long-term programmes of rearmament. But, in addition, industry was called upon at this period to meet a succession of immediate demands from the frontlines of battle. The losses of equipment in France, the Battle of Britain, the threat of invasion, the German night-raids, the crisis of the Libyan campaign, the Battle of the Atlantic and, as the period was drawing to an end, the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.: each of these events raised urgent problems of production which for a time absorbed the attention of the public and a great deal of war industry's time and effort.

The emergency needs of the Navy have already been described.¹ In a sense the entire wartime programme of the Navy in the first year of the war was made up of urgent short-term requirements. From this point of view the pressing demands for small vessels for the defence of the Channel against Hitler's invasion forces and for the Battle of the Atlantic presented nothing unusual. Much more sudden and in a sense more pressing were the emergency requirements of the

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R.A.F. with which the Ministry of Aircraft Production had to cope at the outset of its career. The new Ministry, under Lord Beaverbrook, was set up at the same time as the new Government was formed. It was a new expedient, as dramatic as an administrative expedient can be, and was in itself an indication of the store Mr. Churchill and his Government now set by aircraft. The R.A.F. had suffered heavy losses in Flanders and in France: between 17th May and 1st June 458 operational aircraft—more than current production—were lost; and almost as soon as the Battle of France was over, the Battle of Britain began. Aircraft, therefore, had to be provided in much larger numbers and at once; and the new Minister addressed himself to the task with the energy and the élan expected of him. Immediately on the formation of his Ministry he issued urgent appeals to workers and manufacturers for greater exertion, but appeals were by no means his only instrument. In order to speed output he decided to concentrate on the few operational types which were already in quantity production and of which the production could be immediately stepped up. This meant giving a special and exceptional priority to some types and suspending development and production of others. On the 15th May representatives of the Ministry of Aircraft Production agreed that at least until the end of September 1940 all efforts were to be concentrated on the production of Wellingtons, Whitley Vs, Blenheims, Hurricanes and Spitfires.

The aim was to get the maximum number of the five types into the air. Hence the truly overriding force of the priority they now acquired. It covered everything needed for their manufacture, for it not only safeguarded the supply of materials and equipment already earmarked for the five chosen types, but also made it possible to divert from other types the necessary parts, equipments, materials and manufacturing resources. Arrangements were to be made wherever necessary and profitable to transfer labour from other aircraft work to factories engaged on the specified types. Nothing was to stand in the way of such rearrangements, and it was specially pointed out that financial considerations were not to impeded the programme.

Output of the favoured types soon responded to this preferential treatment and to the Minister's revivalist influence. The delivery of new fighters rose from 256 in April to 467 in September²—more than enough to cover the losses—and Fighter Command emerged from the Battle in the autumn with more aircraft than it had possessed at the beginning. The most spectacular,  as well as the most important single incident in the history of war production was thus crowned with success.

The urgent requirements of the Army over and above its long-term

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programme of rearmament were not so conspicuous as the great aircraft crisis of mid-1940 or even as the 'small ship' crisis of the Navy; and they did not at first enjoy the same industrial priority. There was, however, no doubt either about their urgency or about their magnitude. In the first place the Ministry of Supply had to replace the arms and stores lost in France. The stores the British Army left behind were equivalent to the equipment of eight to ten divisions, and included 880 field guns, 310 guns of larger calibre, some 500 anti-aircraft guns, some 850 anti-tank guns, 6,400 anti-tank rifles, 11,000 machine guns, very nearly 700 tanks, nearly 20,000 motorcycles and 45,000 motor cars and lorries, to say nothing of large dumps of ammunition. These losses had to be made good at once. For having shipped to France every possible weapon necessary to maintain in action the expeditionary force, this country found itself in June 1940 standing not only alone but also unarmed. The whole of the army equipment available at home on the morrow of Dunkirk was barely sufficient to equip two divisions: and that at a time when a German invasion appeared imminent and Britain's survival depended on the success and speed with which an adequate home defence could be mounted.

The urgent needs of home defence, however, went further than the rearming of the existing Army formations. The whole nation had to be drawn into garrison duty, and to begin with, the Local Defence Volunteers (the Home Guard of the later phase) had to be supplied with uniforms, infantry weapons and certain other military stores. Fortunately much of this equipment could be drawn from the first-aid shipments of American arms. For, in response to the Prime Minister's appeal, the American Government sent to this country with the greatest dispatch a large consignment of weapons, including over half a million rifles, 22,000 machine guns, 55,000 'tommy' guns, 895 75-mm. guns and supplies of ammunition for these weapons. But, large and important as this shipment was, it did not provide for more than the initial instalment of the home defence requirements. Above all, the demand of  the Home Guard for grenades, Sten guns, Smith guns and clothing had to be met from domestic sources.

The defence of Great Britain also meant a large increase in anti-aircraft weapons and in equipment for air defence, some of which was additional to the current army programmes, and all of which had to be made available with the greatest possible speed. And as the German air attacks by night reached their climax the needs of air defence rose.

Before long heavy requirements of an emergency character began to come in from the new field of battle in the Western Desert. It will be shown further³ that the Desert campaign helped to swell the

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current army programmes, but the influence of the campaign was not confined to current programmes and planned output. As it was nearing it s climax the demand for some types of equipment became so great and so urgent as to create another 'emergency'. The Desert Army's needs of transport appeared insatiable—by the end of 1941 more than 94,000 wheeled vehicles were held in the Middle East: considerably more than the number allowed for under the scale laid down in the current army programme. Even more urgent and burdensome was the Desert Army's 'emergency' demand for tanks and anti-tank guns. From the very outset the war in the Desert developed as a tank campaign, and when in the spring of 1941 Rommel, aided by superior armour, was able to defeat the British vanguard in Cyrenaica and to drive Wavell's Army to Tobruk and beyond, tanks—more tanks and different tanks—became the ordre du jour at home. The tank programme had by then been much enlarged, but what was wanted was not only a greater supply of tanks for the armoured division then in process of formation, but immediate supplies of the largest possible number of tanks good enough to match Rommel's. There was also a crying need for large numbers of anti-tank guns of more advanced design and of larger calibre than the standard 2-pounder equipment.

It is, therefore, no wonder that by the summer of 1941 tank and anti-tank guns had become almost as much emergency requirements as fighter aircraft had been a year earlier, and it was not a mere accident that in June 1941 Lord Beavorbrook was translated to the Ministry of Supply. To Lord Beavorbrook himself the tank was now 'the thing'. He regarded his new appointment as an invitation to perform over tanks the same operation as he had performed over fighters, and he set about the task with his habitual hustle. If, in spite of his endeavours, the Army's demands for tanks still remained unsatisfied and British tank production did not come up to what was needed, this was not due to any lack of attention on the part of the Ministry or any lack of effort on the part of industry.

Towards the end of the period, i.e. in the second half of 1941, another series of urgent and unexpected demands for supplies arose as a result of the German attack on the U.S.S.R. Hitler's involvement in Russia provided an immediate relief to this country and greatly strengthened the chances of victory. There was no hesitation in welcoming Russia's accession to the Allied ranks. Nor was there much doubt in the Prime Minister's mind, or in that of his immediate advisers, of Russia's ability to resist and to inflict heavy damage on the enemy forces. It was therefore taken for granted from the very outset that this country would have to do its utmost to sustain Russia in her military struggles. Steps to prepare for military assistance had been taken even before the actual day of the German invasion of

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Russia. Some supplies were rushed almost at once, and under the 'First Protocol' of October 1941 this country accepted a standing commitment towards Russia. The British share in the Allied supplies to Russia until the following June was to consist of some 1,800 aeroplanes, some 2,250 tanks, 1,800 Bren-gun carriers, a large quantity of machine tools⁴ and other industrial machinery, large quantities of medical supplies, raw materials, principally aluminium, and foodstuffs. Added to the totals of current British programmes these undertakings imposed a heavy burden, made all the heavier by the political and military urgency of maintaining the regular shipments to Russia.

(2)

The Strategic Plan

The instances so far mentioned are not more than examples, but they should be sufficient to show how important were the emergency calls on industry. Yet for all their importance they will not give a true measure of the additional industrial liabilities. Emergency requirements could not be segregated from the rest of war production. As a rule they were met by advancing outstanding orders and by accelerating deliveries, but they often led to order not covered by current Service programmes and thus swelled as well as disturbed the flow of production. Yet they did not represent its main current. War production was still in the main devoted to the building up of Britain's armed strength and was occupied by the long-term programmes of the Services. However insistent the military demand from the fields and the skies of battle, Britain in 1940–41, even more than Britain in 1939, was still primarily engaged in rearmament.

From this point of view the fundamental difference between the periods before and after Dunkirk was mainly one of spirit, methods and achievement: not one of aim. In the minds of the men responsible for the strategic plans of the spring and autumn of 1939 the first three years of war were a time of preparation. The need for preparations equally protracted also followed from the strategic ideas of 1940 and 1941, even if the character of the preparations was no longer the same. In the summer of 1940 as in the autumn of 1939 the country was still compelled to hold back from active operations while its striking forces were being built up. In the third week of May 1940, when the Chiefs of Staff were asked by the Prime Minister to report on the problems of the defence of Britain, they could not avoid stressing the overwhelming superiority of the enemy on land and in the air—a superiority which forced this country once more into a

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defensive strategy until its deficiencies in men and material could be made up.

This meant a long wait—two years or perhaps more. Thus, when in the last week of August the Chiefs of Staff were for the first time able to survey in detail the military position and prospects, it appeared to them clear that neither the air nor the army programme could come to fruition until 1942, and that in order to achieve the aims in 1942 the first-line expansion during 1941 must be limited. Their view was that to attempt without success to force a decision in 1941 would be to mortgage Britain's capacity to build up Forces of decisive strength by 1942. Nothing, not even America's entry into the war, would justify Britain endeavouring to accelerate her own efforts in 1941 at the risk of impairing her strength in 1942. In the following summer when the principle was stated again, and the dates were put still further ahead, the Chiefs of Staff thought the proper date for an offensive should be somewhere at the turn of 1942 and 1943. The Army and Navy should attain their maximum strengths by about the same time; the equivalent of the existing Air Force 'target' programme would have been completed by the autumn of 1942, but it was intended to continue the expansion of the Air Force after that date in order to make certain of absolute air predominance.

The need for holding back for a number of years was thus as great as ever. At the same time it went further and meant more than mere necessity of waiting. Behind the strategy of preparation lay another and a far broader assumption which was so self-evident that it was seldom put into words and may not even have been consciously considered. In theory the same choice was open to Britain in 1940 (and for the matter to Britain in 1939) as, we are told, presented itself at the outbreak of war to Hitler.⁵ The preparations could be either 'broad' or 'deep'. 'Broad' rearmament would have aimed at a quick military decision and would not have demanded an industrial effort any greater or a waiting period any longer than was necessary to enable the greatest possible number of fighting men to take the field at the earliest possible time. Rearmament in 'depth', on the other hand, assumed that the armed forces and industrial employment would be so balanced as to make sure that the military forces were fully equipped and could be maintained in action for an indefinite time.

But, except in theory, this was not Britain's dilemma. To British statesmen and Service leaders the choice never presented itself. No matter how quickly British armed forces were mobilised the changes of their achieving a quick victory were very small; the chances of their being equipped except through a protracted industrial effort

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appeared smaller still. In theory the only alternative to rearmament in 'depth' was greater help from the United States of American, and it will be shown later⁶ that the necessity of relying upon the United States of America for a further supply of weapons came to be accepted in the closing years of the war. Some such prospect must have been in the minds of some British representatives in Washington—Mr. A. B. Purvis and M. Jean Monnet—and of Sir Arthur Salter, then chairman of the North American Supplies Committee in London, all of whom on the morrow of Dunkirk proclaimed the need for an expansion of American output of weapons sufficient by itself to achieve victory.

Mr. Churchill himself doubtless based his constant hope of victory on the expectation of ever-greater American assistance; and on one memorable occasion made a public appeal to the Americans to give Britain the tools she needed to finish the job.⁷ But neither he nor any of his advisers ever intended a division of labour whereby the United States of American would supply all the 'tools' while this country would do the entire 'job'. Such hope of a division of labour as the men of the Purvis-Monnet school may at one time have entertained was more or less scotched in the course of the negotiations about 'types' at the turn of 1940 and 1941. It will be shown later⁸ that during these negotiations the British Army representatives failed to persuade the Americans to adopt the British type of field and heavy anti-aircraft gun, and remained themselves unconvinced by the American arguments in favour of their own designs. And without pooling of designs there could be no question of Britain by rearmed by America.

For a good time to come supplies from the United States consisted mainly of food, raw materials and machine tools; and the American Government was not to be asked for more than a relatively small proportion of the British requirements of weapons. The exact proportion may have varied from Service to Service; but in the main Britain's plan of preparation was self-sufficient. The size of the armed forces, the magnitude of war industry and the duration of the waiting period, were all fixed on the assumption that Britain would no be capable of passing to the offensive until her Forces had been fully armed with weapons made at home.

In this respect the main strategic plan was the same as in the opening months of war. Where Mr. Churchill's policy of preparation differed from Mr. Chamberlain's was in the spirit which animated it and the manner in which the waiting period was to be employed. Neither country nor its Prime Minister were in a mood

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for sitting down with folded arms while weapons were being forced; and the gathering menace of the German offensive would have made it impossible for this country to indulge in mere waiting even if its Government and people had been willing to do so. At the beginning of June 1940 the Prime Minister pointed out to his advisers that in the defensive state of mind created by the withdrawal from Dunkirk and by the possibility of a German attack, the country might suffer from 'the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative of the enemy' which had ruined the French. As a remedy he recommended repeated small-scale inroads on the Continent—hence the development of the Commandos. But above all, in his own mind, as in the minds of his advisers, the time of preparations was to be given over to a long-range attack against the power of German. The strategy of the attack was bound to be indirect. Now that the French Army was no longer at our side and the continent of Europe was lost, all hopes of decisive operations by land (at any rate in the near future) had to be abandoned, and hopes had to be pinned on the other instruments of war available to this country. In the words of the Chiefs of Staff, Britain's immediate action should be to 'destroy all upon which the German war machine rests—the economy which feeds it, the civilian morale which sustains it, the supplies which nourish it and hopes of victory which give it courage'. All this was to be done by blockade, by air bombardment and by organised risings in the occupied territories.

Military preparations accompanied by acts of attrition were the guiding principles of British strategy throughout the eighteen months that separated the fall of France and the entry of the United States of America into the war. In time greater emphasis came to be placed on the defence of the British positions in the Middle East and on the possibility of defeating Italy. There was also a tendency, already mentioned,⁹ to put off the date of the final offensive to 1943 and beyond. But the general forecast of the course of the war, of the chances of victory and of the means of attack, remained the same throughout the period and were not affected either by the entry of Russia into the war or by the approaching entry of the United States of America.

A plan thus conceived was bound to determine the entire shape of the rearmament programme—its size, its timing and the distribution of its emphasis. The changes were far from radical. In spite of the higher scales, greater urgencies and more clearly defined priorities, the rearmament programmes of the three Services were not reshuffled. In the strategic position and in the economic conditions of 1940 there was little room for a revolutionary transformation in the

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balance of rearmament. It was not until well after the period covered by this chapter—not until 1942 or even later—that Service programmes were recast to suit the logic of changing strategy.

(3)

The Bomber Programmes

The delay in adjusting the R.A.F. programmes was the longest. The Air Force was now as much as ever the chosen instrument. Both in the war of attrition and in the final campaign of victory it was expected to play a part no less pre-eminent than the part it had been allotted in the pre-Dunkirk plans for defence. There was thus every reason why the country should 'go all out' for a vast bomber force. Such were, however, the conditions in the months immediately following Dunkirk that in spite of all the favour which the R.A.F. enjoyed, its supply of bombers could not be secured—indeed could not even be planned—until well into 1942. Even then the plans fell short of their strategic: far shorter than the munitions programmes of the other Services fell of theirs.

The problem of bombers was in essence the same as that of aircraft production as a whole. For delays in their output the general unsettlement of the time, including bombing, and the more chronic difficulties of aircraft production (more about them will be said later) were to blame. To some extent, and to begin with, the disturbances brought about by the events of summer 1940 also had their effect. The success of the mid-1940 spurt had not been bought without disturbing for a while the normal flow of aircraft production. Stocks of materials and components and reserves of production capacity were drawn upon for immediate use, and the whole cycle of production was brought forward in a manner which sacrificed future prospects to current output. The sacrifice was well understood and willingly faced. For with the Battle of France lost and with the German invasion of Britain drawing near the Minister of Aircraft production was justified in thinking—as he did—that the war was going to be decided—as it was —there and then, and that nothing but immediate reinforcement of the R.A.F. could save the country. But the salvation had to be paid for, and a disturbance of production was part of the price.

The disturbance, however, was only a passing one, and could not be blamed, as it sometimes was, for failures of production in later years. Within two months of the priority orders of May 1940 the Ministry was considering again its long-term prospects and reinstating

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into the programme the types suspended in May. By October a programme for two years ahead, the so-called 'Hennessy' scheme (Mr. Hennessy of the Ford Motor Company was at the time Lord Beaverbrook's personal adviser) could be put down on paper. But on paper it was destined to remain. According to the scheme, monthly production was to reach 2,565 aircraft by June 1941 and 2,782 by December 1941,¹⁰ and experience was very soon to show how impossible the figures were. They were based on carefully worked out coefficients of floor space and machining capacity available to the industry, but they assumed a balanced supply of the factors of production—materials, components and labour. Above all they assumed the industry's capacity to utilise its manufacturing resources to the full, including multiple shifts in all stages of production. It is therefore more than doubtful whether the figures in the programme could ever have been reached. The disturbed and dramatic circumstances of 1940 and 1941, including German night bombing and the dispersal of aircraft factories, placed the programme beyond all bounds of possibility. So by the end of the winter the Minister, much as he disliked the necessity (scaling down programmes was anathema to Lord Beaverbrook), had to agree to the reduction of the 'Hennessy' programme, if only by successive stages.

Indeed, for at least another year, the M.A.P. programmes was a record of ambition gradually reduced to conform with the inexorable facts of industry and administration. Under each successive programme—and during the year beginning October 1940 there were several—the expectations of aircraft in the immediate future were brought lower.¹¹ True enough, the total of aircraft to be produced under each programme remained the same or was even increased. But to make this possible the planners in the Ministry added to the expected output in the distant future the numbers that had to be cut from immediate expectations. To use a contemporary expression, they 'lifted a tail of the production curve'. As time advanced the tail got higher and longer, and the prospects of peak production at 2,500 a months and above were receding ever further into the future.

From every point of view and above all that of Britain's offensive strategy the prospect was not good enough. What made it worse still was that the ambitions of the Ministry of Aircraft Production had to be cut most in relation to heavy bomber. The new 'heavies' had figured very prominently in the programmes of 1938 and 1939 and were then expected to fly by the summer of 1940. But so

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great were the difficulties of development and of initial production that in spite of continuous prodding by the Ministry the new bombers obstinately refused to appear. The early stages of the Stirling both at Austin's and Short's were very 'sticky'; the development of the Manchester, though quicker off the mark, was dependent on the Vulture engine, and by the middle of 1941 the Vulture was showing that lack of promise which was eventually to bring about its demise. The Halifax proved at that time to be the only reliable heavy bomber about to be produced in respectable numbers, but even the Halifax was threatened with further and further delays.

Yet all the while the industry was continually pressed by the Minister of Aircraft Production, and M.A.P. itself was under continuous and heavy pressure from the Air Council and the Prime Minister. The pressure was brought to a head by the Prime Minister's instructions of the 7th September1941 requesting a drastic increase in bomber production. Britain's entire attack on Germany hinged upon bombers, yet the supply of bombers was insufficient. In order to achieve a first-line strength of 4,000 medium and heavy bombers, the R.A.F. required 22,000 to be made between July 1941 and July 1943; of these 5,500 might be expected from American production. The latest forecast showed that of the remaining 16,500 only 11,000 would be obtained from British factories. This in the Prime Minister's view was very unsatisfactory, and he was therefore forced to give instructions for a plan to be prepared for the expansion of the effort to produce a total of 14,500 in that period instead of 11,000.

The forecast of 11,000 to which the Prime Minister referred may have been that of the programme of the 3rd July or else that of the subsequent programme which was to be made public on the 11th September.¹² But whatever their origin the figures meant 3,500 additional bombers in less than two years, and the demand was obviously very difficult to meet. The Ministry of Aircraft Production did nothing to hide the difficulties. It pointed out that the current programmes had absorbed a vast amount of tools and labour, that continuous shifts had turned out to be impossible to work, that housing and transport were difficult, that certain types of fabricated alloys were short. The best it could do was to meet the Prime Minister's request half-way: to accept his figures but to dilute their composition and to prolong the period of delivery. The dilution was to be achieved by enlarging the output of the Wellington—a tried old stager which was at that time the type most amenable to quantity production. The extension of the date meant that another nine to eleven months were then added to the final date at which the Prime

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Minister's 14,500 was to be reached. By 31st July 1943, the Prime Minister's terminal date, only 1,074 additional bombers instead of the Prime Minister's 3,500 could be promised.

Yet even these promises turned out to be excessive and in December they had to be cut again.¹³ The planned additions to the output of heavy bomber in 1942 were scaled down below those of the 'September' programme. Additional output was scheduled to come in 1943, but even in that year the monthly additions over the July programme were to reach only fifty in June and about 100 in December compared with the 157 originally planned for that month. The additions to the medium bombers were to begin a few months earlier and to rise to a peak of 300 per months by September 1943 compared with the peak of 280 to be reached by the end of May 1943 under the 'September' programme.

In 1942 came further downward adjustments accompanied by the 'lifting of the tail'. These later adjustments, however, and the circumstances in which they were carried out differed in many respects from those of 1940 and 1941 and will be more conveniently told in the next chapter.

With plans of aircraft construction failing to fit the strategy of air offensive an even greater value attached to American deliveries. The Ministry of Aircraft Production from the very beginning put high hopes on American deliveries of complete aircraft and did much to stimulate their production on Britain's account. As time went on the American contribution began to play an increasing part in the aircraft programmes. The Middle Eastern theatre was to a growing extent dependent upon American fighters and bombers. By September 1941 more than 600 American aircraft of all types had been shipped to the Middle East. American Catalinas, B.24.s (Liberators) and Hudsons also formed an important part of Coastal Command. The figures already quoted show to what extent the chances of the bomber offensive had come to depend on American supplies. Yet even than America;s entry into the war in December 1941 made a great difference. More about this will be said later.¹⁴

(4)

The Irreducible Army

In spite of the secondary place which the prevailing strategic doctrine assigned to the Army, its establishment and demands for munitions were great enough to absorb a large part—much more

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than one-third—of the resources engaged in war production. It will be shown presently that strict quantitative limits and a clearly defined timetable governed the expansion of the field forces. Thanks to these limits and to this timetable the Government found it possible in the last two years of the war to wind up a great deal of the industrial effort devoted to the Army. But in the years which immediately followed Dunkirk, the War Office and the Ministry of Supply were more conscious of the Army's high and expanding needs than of its time-limits and of its restricted size.

The accepted strategic principles were bound to impose close limits on the Army's size. In the discussions which immediately followed Dunkirk, ardent spirits in and out of the War Office might occasionally speculate in terms of a great land army to match the Germany Army strength; a figure as high as 100 divisions was sometimes mentioned. But the dangers of the British military position and the limited potentialities of British economy put all such ideas out of court. In their first general survey of post-Dunkirk projects—that of August 1940—the Chiefs of Staff declared themselves against producing an army on the continental scale or running a major campaign on the western front against the German Army in its present state. Apart from defending the country from invasion the main contribution of the Army to victory would come at the end of the war, when some field forces might be called upon to clinch the victory. In the meantime the Army had to confine itself to tasks of secondary importance and to home defence.

This view came in the end to be embodied in Mr. Churchill's famous directive of 6th March 1941. Harking back to his own advocacy of a larger number of divisions,¹⁵ he now admitted that when in the autumn of 1939 the War Cabinet approved the formation of a full army of fifty-five divisions, it was not realised that a division as contemplated by the War Office, with its share of corps, army, headquarters and lines of communication formations, would require 42,000 men exclusive of all training establishments and of all garrisons, depots or troops not included in the field army.¹⁶ His main argument, however, was strategic and economic. In the conditions of 1939 it could be assumed that the bulk of the Army would stand in line with the French under conditions comparable to those of the last war. But there was no question now of advancing in force against the German armies on the mainland of Europe. The bulk of the Army had to stay home and defend the island. Apart from resisting invasion, it would be impossible for the Army to play a primary role in the defeat of the enemy. That task could only be done

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by the staying power of the Navy, and, above all, by the effect of air predominance.#

The strategic limits thus set were, however, much narrower in theory than they turned out to be in practice. The size of the Army may have been fixed at fifty-five divisions: the figure which Mr. Chamberlain's Government had in the last months of its existence chosen as the final target of Army expansion. The identity of the two programmes, however, was merely one of form. In the autumn and winter of 1939 the fifty-five divisions were not more than a general indication of the Army's final aims, and did not as yet determine the current plans of the Ministry of Supply. In the summer of 1940 the fifty-five divisions became the firm basis of all planning. By one of its earliest decisions Mr. Churchill's Government laid down as the general aim for the War Office and Ministry of Supply the formation of thirty-six divisions by Z + 21, i.e. by 31st May 1941, and of the rest of the fifty-five divisions by Z + 27, i.e. by 30th November 1941.

Moreover, it soon became clear that however modest the role of the Army in strategic theory, its full demands for stores would overflow the limits of the fifty-five division programme. As the War Office pointed out in its comments on the Prime Minister's directive, the responsibilities of the Army, however 'secondary' in accepted strategic doctrine, required a very large establishment—in fact a larger establishment than anything contemplated before Dunkirk.

The needs of the final operation, i.e. the landing on the

Continent, as assessed in 1940 were neither great nor definite. At that time it appeared that for some year at least a large-scale invasion of the Continent would not be possible. Long after the events of 1940 plans for army landings on the Continent continued to be case on a very modest scale, and on the very eve of America's entry into the war Mr. Churchill still found it necessary to explain to the Russians that although Britain had every intention of intervening on the Continent—in the spring of 1942 if that could be done—all ideas of twenty or thirty British divisions being sent against the Germans on the Continent were without foundation in reality. In his directive he had spoken of a striking force of eight to ten divisions, mostly armoured, and this was also the estimate most commonly contained in the papers of the Chiefs of Staff.

The 'victory contingent' was thus conceived on modest lines, and had the army programmes been wholly or even mainly devoted to it the War Office demands for men and weapons would not have been very large. Future plans and ambitions in this respect were deliberately played down so as not to swell the Army's share of national resources. Swollen it nevertheless was. In the conditions of 1940 and 1941 the other commitments of the Army absorbed men and

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arms in quantities far greater than those which in theory were necessary to equip the small landing army of the future. In the first place, home defence was bound to absorb a large and ever-growing volume of resources. By March 1941, the date of Mr. Churchill's directive, there were, in addition to the regular divisions of the 'field forces', nearly 490,000 men in the Air Defence of Great Britain, in anti-aircraft defence of merchant ships and in the defence of factories and vulnerable points; there were a further 158,000 men in garrisons and defended port abroad.

Army requirements were also piling up as a result of changing tactical conceptions. There was a marked tendency for certain types of army weapons to grow out of all proportion to the army programmes as a whole. Thus throughout 1940 and 1941 additional requirements continued to come from the new and special formations, such as the Commandos and the Airborne Divisions, to say nothing of the unfolding programme of action in the territories occupied by the enemy. But the most prolific sources of new demands were the armoured formations. The emphasis on armour appears to grow from programme to programme. In the summer of 1940 Mr. Churchill laid it down that the Army should, to begin with, contain not less than seven armoured divisions, and the programme of August 1940 was based on the assumption that the equivalent of about ten armoured divisions would be formed. By the beginning of 1941 the official programme of fifty-five divisions came to be conceived as one of forty-eight infantry divisions plus the equivalent of twelve armoured divisions. In the spring of that year the proportion of the armoured units was raised again, to the equivalent of some sixteen armoured divisions. By the end of July the long-term plans grew to comprise the equivalent of about eighteen armoured divisions.

The actual expansion of armoured formations did not, of course, keep pace with the plans. Moreover, the plans, however ambitious, did not require a corresponding increase in the total Army establishment or in the total requirements of war-stores, for the personnel of the armoured divisions was about twenty percent less than that of an infantry division with a corresponding economy of clothing, hutments, infantry weapons and transport. But it did necessitate a great rise in the demand for tanks—a rise which has already been mentioned and will be discussed again.¹⁷

Even more expansive turned out to be the needs of the Middle East. Acting in a mood of characteristic confidence and courage, the Government may have sent to Egypt reinforcements greater than those which in the summer of 1940 cautious men thought the country could safely spare. Nevertheless, the total forces engaged in Wavell's first campaign were not so heavy as to upset the strategic plan, and

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had the fighting continued on the same scale and remained equally successful, they could probably have been maintained—as the Government hoped they would be—without undue strain on the Army establishment or on its supply of munitions. But as it turned out, the needs of the campaign grew with every turn of military fortune. They were heavy enough at the time of Mr. Churchill's directive. In the spring of 1941 there were twelve divisions in the Middle East, of which three were from the United Kingdom. In Mr. Churchill's view three or four divisions were the most that could be sent from home and maintained in the Middle East. The main reinforcements would have to come from the other parts of the Empire, with later on munitions from the United States. Yet, by October 1941 the 'Army of the Nile' had swollen to sixteen divisions, of which six were from the United Kingdom, and it was intended to reinforce the Middle East with two more British divisions from the United Kingdom. And although by then the Middle East theatre was in appreciable measure supplied from North America (some thirty percent of its wheeled transport and some twenty percent of its tanks had come from there), and the bulk of the equipment was still drawn from home.

Thus in the conditions of 1940 and 1941 the Army and its demands on war industry were bound to be greater than strict logic of the long-term strategy might appear to require. No wonder the formal statement of the War Office requirements under the post-Dunkirk programmes presented a great addition on earlier demands—how great will best be shown by comparing them with the War Office requirements as stated in April 1940.

War Office requirements under the pre-Dunkirk and post-Dunkirk programmes

TABLE 13		Units
	Requirements as stated
Number of divisions for which required Date by which delivery was to be completed	36 Z + 24 (31 Aug. 1941)	55 Z + 27 (30 Nov. 1941)
Tanks: medium, light and infantry	7,096	10,444
Carriers	11,647	14,568
Wheeled vehicles and motor cycles	376,299	575,008
Field, medium and anti-aircraft guns, including conversions: equipments	12,677	22,676
2-pdr. tank and anti-tank guns	13,561	20,670

Further additions were to come before long. Under a written arrangements between the War Office and the Ministry of Supply the

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former undertook to provide every six months a revised set of requirements covering two full years ahead. In accordance with this arrangement revised programmes were submitted to the Ministry in the late spring of 1941 and these were followed by another revised programme in the autumn and winter of 1941–42.¹⁸ At each of these stages the estimates for a number of stores (both cumulative total and the monthly rates of supply at peak) were raised. As has already been suggested there were spectacular increases in the requirements of armoured fighting vehicles and of anti-tank guns to suit the expanding plans of armoured divisions. The number of cruiser and infantry tanks required by the end of November 1941 (Z+27), as estimated in August 1940, was 10,444. As estimated in May 1941 the requirements to the end of that year (Z+28) had risen to 17,501 and cumulative requirements to cover the 1942 programme to 19,700. In December 1941 it was estimated that requirements during 1942 and 1943 would be as high as 36,720.

War Office requirements of cruiser and infantry tanks

TABLE 14				Units
Date of estimate	August 1940	May 1941		December 1941–January 1942
Date by which delivery was to be completed	30th Nov. 1941 (Z + 27)	31st Dec. 1941 (Z + 28)	31st Dec. 1942 (Z + 40)	Total demand 1st Oct. 1941 to end 1943
Cruiser tanks	6,023	13,176	14,100	21,665
Infantry tanks	4,421	4,325	5,600	6,055
Provision for Russia and other Allies				9,000
TOTAL	10,444	17,501	19,700	36,720

The demands for other armoured fighting vehicles and for anti-tank guns were to match. A glance at Table 15 will also show that the War Office requirements for some other types of equipment were growing at very nearly the same rate.¹⁹ But highest of all were the demands for ammunition, and it was on the figures of ammunition that the discussion of army programmes was largely to centre.

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War Office requirements of certain war-stores, August 1940–December 1941

TABLE 15					Units
Date of estimate	Aug. 1940	May 1941		Dec.1941–Jan.1942
Date by which delivery was to be completed	30th Nov. 1941 (Z+27)	31st Dec. 1941 (Z+28)	31st Dec. 1942 (Z+40)	Between 1st Oct. 1941 and 31st Dec. 1942	During 194320
Column 1	2	3	4	5	6
Tanks: medium, light and infantry	10,444	18,601	21,705	21,36721	7,27021
Carriers	14,568	28,500	35,550	57,10022	20,52022
Armoured and scout cars	5,132	7,300	9,250	10,000	3,500
Wheeled vehicles and motor cycles	575,008	567,145	688,970	498,300	169,316
Anti-aircraft guns: equipments	15,177	15,250	…	12,500	990
Medium artillery, including conversions: equipments	1,397	870	1,070	1,090	110
25 pdr.: equipments	6,102	5,900	6,800	3,800	900
2 pdr.: tank and anti-tank guns	20,670	19,400	25,100	5,650	650
Other tank and anti-tank guns	459	11,100	21,910	13,820	3,650

(… not available)

One of the main reasons why the requirements of ammunition in the army programmes were so high that the wartime programmes were not so exclusively devoted to 'initial' equipment as the narrow sense of the term might suggest. The anti-aircraft artillery was from the very first days of the Battle of Britain engaged in air warfare and was expending its ammunition and wearing out its gun. War-stores were also being expended in the Middle East in great and ever-growing quantities. But from the purely quantitative point of view even more important were the provisions for 'wastage' which were comprised in the 'initial' equipment of field divisions. The latter included large quantities of ammunition and other stores for immediate reserves and for stores in transit, and also reserves large enough to cover all operational wastage in the period between the outbreak of fighting and the complete deployment of war production.

However modestly estimated these various provisions for maintenance were bound to add up to a great deal; and it so happened that

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the estimates were far from being modest. The expenditure rates for a number of stores like transport and clothing were very high, but the highest of all and the most burdensome were wastage requirements for bullets and shells. The War Office requirements for the maintenance of field guns including tank and anti-tank guns but excluding anti-aircraft guns, at the rate of 1,850 per month, or 22,200 per annum, were equivalent to the 'capital' equipment of some twenty-five divisions. Not counting the very high demands of the R.A.F. and the Navy, the requirements of small arms ammunition at November 1941 (Z + 27) stood at 277 million rounds per month. According to the Ministry of Supply forecast, in order to fulfil the requirements of gun ammunition, as stated in August 1940, 64 million shells would have to be provided for field guns by June 1941, and a monthly rate of 8 million rounds per month would have to be reached by December 1941. If maintained in 1942 this requirement would have necessitated an output of nearly 100 million shells in a year, or about twenty-five percent more than the total British output of gun ammunition for the B.E.F. in 1916, and some thirty-five percent more than in 1918.

These requirements were obviously impracticable. In the opinion of the Ministry of Supply they prejudiced the changes of the entire programme. Not only did the total requirements over the entire Z + 27 period (i.e. to 30th November 1941) represent a vast industrial task, but they were also so spaced out that for a year, or possibly two, the Ministry could not possibly avoid a large deficit; and the accumulated deficit of the earlier years would make it all but impossible to meet the final requirements in full. As early as the 7th August 1940 the Director General of Programmes in the Ministry of Supply had to warn his Minister that there would be substantial deficiencies on the Z + 24 programme, that further deficiencies were also very likely, and that unless some of the items in the War Office lists—and more especially ammunition scales—were cut, the Ministry's task would turn out to be impossible.

No sooner, therefore, were the 'August' programmes passed to the Ministry of Supply than the question of ammunition had to be examined more or less ab initio. The issues then raised are sufficiently important and went sufficiently far back into the history of war production to deserve a slight digression. The occasion for the first doubts about the ammunition programme occurred during the discussions of the Army plans in the autumn of 1939. The argument was Mr. Churchill's and was mainly tactical and strategic. It will be remembered that at that time the chief objection to a larger army rested on grounds of supply.²³ It was, therefore, inevitable that Mr.

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Churchill's criticism should have been primarily directed against the War Office estimates of supply needs. In a note he submitted to the Military Coordination Committee of the War Cabinet on the 9th February 1940 he questioned the War Office assumption that an army of fifty-five divisions would require 66,000 guns and would 'consume' in the field some 25,000 guns. He observed that such a prodigious output of artillery would exceed the output of field, medium and heavy artillery in the whole of the First World War. At the peak of production in that war Britain was stated to have produced 8,500 guns of all calibres. How forlorn then must be the position of the German Army which aimed at having 240 divisions by August 1941. Under the War Office hypothesis, the Germans would have to produce some 290,000 guns of all calibres and maintain a supply of 108,000 guns per year. But Mr. Churchill's chief criticism was directed against the wastage rates of ammunition. The War Office, he said, derived its figures from the rates of fire of the new guns, which had greatly increased. But what had not increased was the means of conveying the ammunition from the rear to the guns, and this, Mr. Churchill proceeded, remained the limiting factor. The War Office, therefore, was not justified in assuming a greater expenditure of ammunition merely because of the greater rapidity of fire. The greater rapidity of discharge enabled a more intense burst of fire to be achieved for a short period. Economy of ammunition in accordance with the tactical and administrative conditions would have to be enforced now as formerly.²⁴

These and similar arguments were on that occasion urged very strongly. If in the end the fifty-five division plan was not at that time put into operation, it was largely because Mr. Churchill's arguments were not fully accepted. In August 1940, however, the issue was revived. A memorandum submitted by the Minister of Supply, Mr. Herbert Morrison, to the War Cabinet on 29th August 1940 officially reopened the discussions which were to continue all through the late autumn and winter. The discussions brought out most of the old arguments as well as a few new ones. The output of guns developed relatively slowly, and ammunition was being piled up for non-existing guns; the problems of storage and transport of ammunition scales put the rest of the army programme in jeopardy. This time the argument won the day. By the last week of February reduced rates were worked out. These and further reductions resulting from the Prime Minister's directive of 6th March 1941²⁵ were embodied in the

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War Office requirements as communicated to the Minister of Supply in May 1941. How great the reductions were in comparison not only with the requirements of August 1940 but also with those of the pre-Dunkirk era will be seen from Table 16.

War Office requirements of principal types of ammunition, as communicated to the Ministry of Supply in April 1940, August 1940 and May 1941

TABLE 16			Thousand rounds
Type of ammunition	April 194026	August 194027	May 194128
FIELD AND MEDIUM
25-pdr. H.E.	18,865	48,684	14,100
25-pdr. A.P.	564	1,608	600
25-pdr. Smoke and Gas	1,412	11,400	4,300
18-pdr. H.E. and Smoke	1,947	2,724	150
18-pdr. A.P.	56	72	170
4.5-inch gun H.E.	1,511	3,456	580
5.5-inch gun Howitzer H.E.	1,286	3,876	680
6-inch Howitzer H.E.	2,467	2,640	700
ANTI-AIRCRAFT
40-mm. H.E.	3,360	6,000	7,570
3.7-inch H.E. and Shrapnel	3,638	4,632	6,086
4.5-inch H.E. and Shrapnel	230	432	1,052

In fact the only requirements of ammunition to increase were those for anti-tank and anti-aircraft types—a reflection of the emergency calls already described and of the growing emphasis on anti-aircraft and armoured formations. The reductions in gun ammunition were matched by other reductions, especially in reserves of guns and barrels and 'general stores' such as clothing, bedding, etc., but it was chiefly through the reduction in ammunition that the Ministry of Supply could contemplate the rising requirements for a number of weapons with some hope of fulfilling them. This should not be taken to mean that, even with the ammunition requirements reduced, the programmes for Z + 27 were capable of being fulfilled at their appointed date. The discussions within the Ministry of Supply and the information which that Ministry gave to the War Office and the Defence Committee (Supply) still reflected the general impression that the field forces would take longer to equip than the timetables of 1940 allowed. But what mattered was that the activities of the Ministry

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of Supply could now be planned on the assumption that sooner or later the programmes would be fulfilled and that sooner or later a peak point would be reached beyond which its operations might begin to contract. The assumption which always underlay War Office plans was that its requirements would come down as soon as the stores necessary to equip the entire complement of divisions had been delivered. The end of November 1941 (Z + 27) was the terminal date named in the summer of 1940; the subsequent additions to the programmes and the difficulties of industrial mobilisation put the date much later. But until the outbreak of hostilities in the Far East the Ministry of Supply could hope that the peak of its activities would be reached and the equipment of the Army be completed some time in 1942.

Thus, for all the fundamental changes in Britain's military position after Dunkirk, the general aims of war production and even the separate supply plans for the three Services did not undergo a radical transformation. The programmes of re-equipment expanded expanded, but for the time being spectacular changes in individual Service programmes were ruled out by the economic and strategic position of the country. The continuity of the naval 'emergency' programmes was to be expected and was indeed planned for.²⁹ But the records of the other Services were almost equally continuous. The R.A.F.'s rank as the favoured arm was higher than ever before and stood the way of any possible plans to expand the field forces beyond their essential minimum. Yet even the most essential minimum equipment of the Army turned out to be so large as to make it impossible to increase the Air Force as far as strategic plans demanded. And although industrial activity was now much greater than before, some of the increase resulted from earlier preparations; and for the rest, the growing scale of industrial activity reflected not so much the changed aims of the planners as the more rigorous execution of their plans.

(5)

The New Administration

After Dunkirk the execution of the Service demands altered more radically than the scale and structure of the demands themselves. What changed was the behaviour of the country: the spirit in which the people shouldered the burdens of the war and the resolution which the Government imposed them. This may not be a subject to which a study of munitions can do justice. In an industrial and administrative

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study of this kind the spirit of the times must remain in the background and be taken more or less for granted. The behaviour of the Government on the other hand is an essential part of this history, even when the changes in government were also largely those of attitude and behaviour and were not solely concerned with administrative and institutional forms.

Administrative changes were bound to follow the great emergency of 1940 and the accession of the new Government.³⁰ In the administration of war production the earliest as well as the most conspicuous innovation was the formation on the 17th May of the Ministry of Aircraft Production.³¹ The separate ministry symbolised the urgency which was now attached to the output of aircraft, but from a purely practical point of view its birth need not necessarily have been accompanied by an radical operation. In the course of the preceding ten months, the production department of the Air Ministry in Harrogate under Sir Wilfrid Freeman as the Air Member for Development and Production (A.M.D.P.)³² and Sir Charles Craven as the recently appointed Civil Member for Development and Production (C.D.M.P.) had grown to rival in both size and authority the Ministry of Supply. It could easily be elevated to the rank of a fully-fledged ministry and be translated to London without great changes in its machinery. It is therefore not surprising that after the transfer the layout of the new Ministry remained for a time little different from what it had been in Harrogate.

If before long the Ministry appeared to break both with the men and the methods of Harrogate, this was not due to any lack of performance or administrative order in the production branches of the Air Ministry. On the contrary, the output of aircraft on the early months of 1940 was rising very fast and was ahead of programme: the first and very nearly the only period in the development of the war industry when this happened. The subsequent history of aircraft production also showed that the methods and attitudes of the planners and the industrial administrators active in the Air Ministry during that period were not deficient in either initiative or forethought. They did not however conform to what the new Minister of Aircraft Production thought was necessary in the exceptional circumstances of the summer of 1940. He did not believe that people he described generically as 'air marshals' were suited by temperament or training to the running of aircraft production. His intention was to make his department into a fast-growing enterprise run by men who knew how to make their enterprise grow fast. Another predilection of the Minister was for administrative methods more spontaneous and

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informal than the established practices of government departments. The latter spelt routine, paper work or, in general, 'organisation' was 'the enemy of improvisation'. So even if organised hierarchy and orderly procedure were allowed to continue at the lower level of the official pyramid, the Ministry at the top was to an increasing extent run by an informal group of the Ministry at the top was an increasing extent run by an informal group of the Minister's personal advisers drawn from business. By degrees the group with Mr. Hennessy of Ford's at its head superseded both the A.M.D.P. and the C.M.D.P. In the autumn Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman returned to the Air Staff and was, in part, replaced by Sir Henry Tizard; Sir Charles Craven returned to Vickers-Armstrongs and was not formally replaced. The Permanent Secretary was left alone in the Minister's entourage to represent the properties of a department of state. On paper the field of his official duties may have been narrow—consisting mainly of establishments and finance including contracts—but his authority was high, and his influence sufficiently great to enable him to preserve continuity in the affairs of the new Ministry as a whole.

The régime reflect the personality of the Minister and the critical urgency of the tasks he had to face in the summer of 1940. The urgency was more or less over by the winter 1940–41, but it was not until the summer of 1941, when Lord Beaverbrook was translated to the Ministry of Supply and Colonel Moore-Brabazon, as he then was, became the Ministry of Aircraft Production, that the administration of the department could be sorted out, redefined and brought into line again with the methods of the other ministries. A number of Lord Beaverbrook's personal advisers left M.A.P.; Sir Charles Craven was persuaded to return as Controller General. Under him a network of directorates of production, under five directors general and deputy directors general, took shape. The Secretariat, under the Permanent Secretary, supplied the common administrative services of the Ministry as a whole, and its functions had by this time come to embrace such diverse tasks as labour, construction, regional services and aircraft distribution. And at the very top of the Ministry, the Aircraft Supply Council, comprising the Minister, the Parliamentary Secretary and the four or five heads of departments, established itself as the principal deliberative organ of the Ministry. Except for gradual changes in later years this was in principle to remain the structure of the Ministry for the rest of the war years.

The other production departments escaped most of the administrative experiences of the M.A.P. They all had to undertake duties of industrial administration new and strange to the Civil Service; to tackle emergencies which required hustle and improvisation; and to choose recruits from among businessmen and dons. Yet compared with M.A.P. they took their new men and new methods in smaller

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and perhaps more agreeable doses and thus escaped some of M.A.P.'s internal unsettlement.

The dosage of the Admiralty was indeed so small as to leave the organisation and method of the department almost unchanged. Naval construction between the two wars had been sufficient to keep in being a fully organised production department under the Third Sea Lord (the Controller of the Navy). The war and even Dunkirk did not bring with them an increase in naval construction great enough to require an expansion comparable with that of M.A.P. or the Ministry of Supply. The department therefore continued to be run more or less as before. Its main body at Bath was separated from Whitehall by a distance of more than a hundred miles, but it continued to be an integral part of the Admiralty organisation. Its various branches were often headed by naval officers; its high Civil Service members continued to look after matters of finance, contracts, secretariat and establishments; its recruits from outside were not as a rule given posts of great responsibility. The only exception was the newly-founded branch in charge of merchant shipbuilding and repair, whose head, Sir James Lithgow, and whose second-in-command, Sir Amos Ayre, were leaders of the British shipbuilding and ship-repairing industry, and whose higher personnel mostly came from the same source. To this extent, the department bore some resemblance to many branches of M.A.P.; yet the resemblance was largely superficial. Its production problems and the habits of its experts did not favour that post-haste improvisation which was so marked a feature of M.A.P. in the early stages of its development.

The administrative problems of the Ministry of Supply were equally difficult, for the Ministry was called upon to expand the production of an infinite variety of stores at rates which, measured by employment and expense, were little different from those of M.A.P. Yet its administrative record was unspectacular and to the uninformed might even appear uneventful.

Under Mr. Morrison³³ the department came up against a number of problems inherent in the original conception of the Ministry of Supply, but for none of these problems was a radical solution found or indeed sought. The most ambitious of the new appointments was perhaps that of Sir Walter Layton (later Lord Layton) as Director General of Programmes, with a seat on the Supply Council and in charge of the Statistics Branch. The Supply Council set up in September 1939 acted as a regular conference of departmental heads of the Ministry, but it was not destined to continue as the main directing committee within the Ministry. Before long it proved too cumbrous and even, in a sense, too representative a body to provide

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a convenient place for regular discussion of the Ministry's problems, and its business largely passed into the hands of a much small Executive Committee which was set up in March 1941.

In July 1941 the advent of Lord Beaverbrook as Minister led to a more general reshuffle at the top.³⁴ Research and development of weapons were taken out of the competence of the production divisions and brought together under a centralised department, and placed under Mr. Oliver Lucas as Controller General of Research and Development. To match this appointment and perhaps to compensate for it the Director General of Munitions Production was raised to the position of Controller General with a general oversight over all the production divisions, including some not previously under his control. The appointment which was perhaps most characteristic of the Minister was that of Mr. (later Sir William) Rootes, head of the motor-car firm, as chairman of the 'Minister's Council' which consisted of the personal advisers of the Minister. the Supply Council, as hitherto understood, was put into suspense though not formally abolished.

More enduring than some of these personal and institutional innovations were the changes in the functions and the organisation of the Secretariat. Its principal duties in the early stages of the Ministry's history were little different from those which commonly fell to the secretariat branches in the Service and supply departments, i.e. establishments, finance and contracts, parliamentary business. On the other hand, the structure of the Secretariat and the distribution of duties within it was bound to be more complicated than elsewhere. Some of its functions were discharged by secretarial departments common to the Ministry as a whole and subject directly to the Permanent Secretary. Others were discharged by two autonomous branches of the Secretariat corresponding to the two-fold division of the Ministry: the secretariat of the Raw Materials Department and that of 'Supply', i.e. of the division responsible for the procurement of war-stores. Both branches were bound to grow in the early years of the war, but it was in the 'Supply' branch of the Secretariat that some of the most significant developments occurred. The original nucleus of the branch was the small secretarial branch ('M.P.C.'), which had been attached to the Director General of Munitions Production in the War Office and had migrated with him to the Ministry of Supply. Early in the life of the Ministry this branch had multiplied into a group of secretarial bodies each of which was attached to a director on the production side of the Ministry in the same way as the 'M.P.C.' was attached to the Director-General of Munitions Production. This general system of 'bedding-out' civil servants helped to coordinate

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the activities of production directorates better than any formal machinery could have done. By May 1941 the branch had assumed responsibility for priorities, overseas activities and labour supply. But nothing was more characteristic of its growing importance than the functions it assumed in negotiating Service requirements: a development about which more will be said later.³⁵

The changes in the central administration of war production at the War Cabinet offices were more general, though there too the significant changes resulted from the personal outlook of the Prime Minister. One of the most important institutional innovations was the replacement of the Ministerial Priority Committee by the Production Council. The entire system of committees was rearranged.³⁶ Originally under the Ministerial Priority Committee there had been two separate sub-committees for production and for materials;³⁷ the two were now renamed the Joint Materials and Production Priority Committee. Two other new committees concerned with war production inherited their functions from their predecessors: the Manpower Committee and the Works and Building Priority Committee. Later two other committees appeared in the field: the Industrial Capacity Committee which was set up in July 1940 and the ad hoc Manpower Requirements Committee set up in August to examine labour requirements.

In the course of the subsequent six months the machinery of the Production Committee and its committees acquitted itself with varying degrees of success.The Industrial Capacity Committee succeeded in reorganising the Area Boards and did some useful work in considering and sometimes allocating surplus production capacity, in investigating the potential resources of industry and establishing principles for the best use of capacity which was being set free for war production by the Limitation of Supplies Orders. The ad hoc Manpower Requirements Committee with Sir William Beveridge as chairman worked out the first approximation to a manpower budget, and, generally speaking, functioned as an investigating satellite of the Manpower Committee. The Joint Production and Materials Priority Committee succeeded in a relatively short time in establishing a workable system for the allocation of raw materials between departments, about which more will be said presently.³⁸ The highest expectations, however, had been placed on the main ministerial committee, the Production Council, and it was that committee which drew upon itself most of the public interest.

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The interest was apt to be kept alive by criticism in Parliament and the Press. Viewed in historical perspective some of the criticism might appear unjustifiable. The Council proved to be slow and unwieldy, but it was not wholly ineffective or inefficient. During its six months' existence it met thirteen times and was responsible for initiating the reorganisation of the Area Boards and for launching the Manpower Requirements Committee and its very important inquiries, and it will be shown further³⁹ that it played its part in the gradual transformation of the priority system which was taking place at the time. Yet to public opinion, even to so well-informed an opinion as that of the House of Commons and its Select Committees, the Production Council was bound to seem inadequate. At a time when war industry was still in the process of deployment and the needs of the Services were not yet full satisfied a certain amount of public impatience was inevitable. And it was only too natural that the administrative feature to be singled out for criticism should have been the body nominally at the head of the machinery of war production. It was said to be incapable of stimulating and coordinating the activities of the three supply departments,⁴⁰ and it did not seem to function as an initiating and directing body. To all appearances the Council did not act at all unless departments made formal complaints, and its decisions about priorities and 'bottlenecks' invariably came as a result of applications by departments.

Various proposals to give the Council greater power and authority were made from time to time. In the summer of 1940 its secretary put forward a plan whereby all the common services of the three production departments would be brought together under a new Department of Raw Materials and Priorities somewhat on the lines of the pre-war blue-prints. A similar proposal was made by the Select Committee on National Expenditure in August.⁴¹ In December Mr. Churchill himself, in answer to criticism in Parliament and the Press, drew up a scheme for the reform of the War Cabinet machinery which was later debated at length in Parliament⁴² and carried in to effect in the new year. A Production Executive, a small and more compact body than the Production Council, took the latter's place. It consisted of the three Supply Ministers and the President of the Board of Trade with the Minister of Labour as chairman, and the underlying idea was that the whole business of production and supply would now be

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gripped at the top by a compact directing body consisting of ministers who would themselves be responsible for the necessary executive action. Under the Production Executive there was established a number of sub-committees which were largely the same as those which had taken shape under the Production Council, dealing respectively with materials,⁴³ industrial capacity, labour, works and buildings, and transport. The whole of this organisation was linked with the highest direction of economic policy through the Lord President (Sir John Anderson).

The reorganisation did not however meet the main points of public demand, for it did not establish a central department or a Ministry of War Production. Against these demands, it could still be argued that a super-department would merely duplicate departmental machinery, but the real reason was that Mr. Churchill did not think that the gap which the critics deplored in fact existed. Where supply problems were merely part of general economic policy, the Lord President's Committee and above all Sir John Anderson himself could be relied upon to lay down general principles and to reconcile departmental differences; and this they did with great and ever-growing efficiency. Where supply impinged upon the main conduct of the war on questions of military policy, the coordinating and directing precepts came from the Defence Committee (Supply) or, to be more exact, from the Prime Minister in his capacity as Defence Minister. Indeed the Prime Minister's main argument against a Minister of Production was that it would merely duplicate what he thought was one of his essential functions as Prime Minister and as Minister of Defence.

The argument agreed with facts more closely than public debate could reveal. Mr. Churchill was indeed performing many of the functions which the critics thought were not being performed, or were being performed badly. The Defence Committee of the War Cabinet, over which he presided and which he dominated, and no settled constitution and no hard and fast membership; but its 'supply' meetings often dealt with requirements of the Services and the quantities and qualities of weapons demanded by them; and it stimulated, instigated and criticised the plans and performances of the supply departments. This activity, being largely Mr. Churchill's, was irregular in procedure and sometimes unexpected in its results, but it was anything but laggard and, on matters of weapon policy, was more often right than wrong. Even his critics had to admit that Mr. Churchill knew a good weapon when he saw one, but unlike most experts he could appreciate the points of a weapon he had never seen.

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These personal qualities of the Prime Minister were responsible for one or two expensive adventures into unusual types of equipment; but they were also responsible for some of the highly successful instruments of war which were such a marked feature of the British war effort—the Mulberry among them. On questions of design, scales of equipment and current output Mr. Churchill never lacked advice, and was seldom wanting in information. Above all, he could always call upon the services of an organisation capable of carrying out independent exploration and investigation on his behalf.

That organisation functioned as a part of the secretariat at 10 Downing Street and was managed for the Prime Minister by Lord Cherwell, who in December 1942 was appointed Paymaster-General. From every point of view it was highly unorthodox. It had grown out of the statistical service which in the first eight months of the war Lord Cherwell (Professor F. A. Lindemann as he then was) had run in the Admiralty for the benefit of the First Lord. When full deployed in association with the War Cabinet Secretariat, it consisted of a group of young men from the universities trained either as economists or scientists, who appeared to enjoy a roving commission over the entire field of war government and administration. Being what they were and doing what they did, Lord Cherwell and his 'boys' could not help becoming unpopular; in one or two fields their activities may also have turned out somewhat unremunerative. Yet, taken as a whole, their work meant a great accession to the Prime Minister's knowledge and grasp of what was going on in the departments and to his command over relevant facts and considerations. They may thereby have duplicated some of the work done by the other economic and scientific agencies of central government; they mat sometimes have disturbed the orderly sequence of stages by which official advice normally comes to prime ministers. But paraphrase a contemporary verdict, they helped to infuse logic into the Prime Minister's logistics. They certain reinforced it with technical and statistical argument. To this extent they could claim some credit for the miracle of Britain's Government in the war: a Government which was largely personal and yet free from the intellectual limitations of an autocracy.

It was the energy and ubiquity of Mr. Churchill's activities rather than his failure to appreciate the uses of coordination that prevented the formation of a Ministry of Production until the entry of the United States into the war. For the rest, the working of the War Cabinet machinery and the part the Prime Minister played in it exemplify the truism that the changes after Dunkirk affected the spirit of war policies more than their form; and the truism applies with equal relevance to other features of the administrative machinery in charge of war production. The proof of the new administrative

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set-up was not to much in its design as in its functioning. Whereas the hierarchy of departments and committees differed little from that of old, many of the men and most of the measures were new. And newest of all was the general trend of policy. Rapidly, by a series of inevitable stages, the Government called into being a fully-fledged war economy wherein every interest, private or public, present or future, was utterly subordinated to the demands of the war. The change was one of attitude, buts its practical effects were unmistakeable. What with the new outlook of ministers and the accumulating experience of officials, the business of industrial mobilisation could now proceed more swiftly and with far greater efficiency than had been possible in the first six months of the war.

(6)

The Mobilisation of Labour

The field in which new attitudes and administrative devices were felt most was that of labour supplies. The political atmosphere had at last become favourable to comprehensive labour policies. Not only was the mood of the working people different, but the official representatives of labour, the Labour Party and the trade unions, were no longer in the position of anxious observers of a suspect Cabinet. Above all, the new Minister of Labour, Mr. Bevin, could be relied upon to win for the problem of labour, as well for the Minister of Labour, a due share in the councils of the war. He fully realised that the military position and the spirit of the country dictated a radical and forceful labour policy; but his experience as a labour leader also taught him the dangers of precipitate action in the handling of working men; and the habits of his departmental officials were not such as to lead him into drastic action before he was ready for it. He therefore applied to the labour problems of the day that mixture of legislative audacity and administrative circumspection which was to be the hallmark of his régime. The Orders which he caused to be passed were more than sufficient to give the fullest possible advertisement to the authority he now possessed;⁴⁴ but in its daily routine his department made a sparing and unwilling use of the new powers and for along time merely kept them in reserve.

In any case the labour situation was not yet so acute as to compel the Minister to draw on his entire reserve of powers. The problems with which the Ministry of Labour had to deal during this period did not at first differ fundamentally from labour problems of the first six

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months of the war, and were still very largely those of skilled labour. Indeed until the end of 1940 the Ministry of Labour appeared to be less troubled by shortages in the general supply of labour than by lingering problems of local unemployment. The number of unemployed men stood near the half-million mark between July and November 1940 but rapidly dropped in the first half of 1941. By June 1941 there were only 158,000 men out of work,⁴⁵ but small as this figure was it happened to be made up of large local pockets of workless.

The pockets were partly due to the natural dislocation of civilian industry and partly caused by the Board of Trade restrictions on industries producing for the home market. Greatly as the production of munitions expanded in the summer months of 1940, it had not expanded far enough to absorb all the local unemployment. What is more, contracts and war factories were not being entirely confined to areas where the Ministry of Labour believed supplies of general labour to be most plentiful. Supply departments found it sometimes difficult to obey the Ministry of Labour's directives on location, for labour supply was not the only consideration they had to take into account in placing contracts or in sanctioning extensions.⁴⁶ The preferred their own lists of approved tenderers based on detailed knowledge of the manufacturing capacity, the technical qualifications and the industrial efficiency of individual firms. Their reluctance was all the more difficult to combat for the inevitable imperfections in Ministry of Labour forecasts. On several occasions in 1941 the Ministry of Supply was still able to find labour in areas in which according to the Ministry of Labour classification, labour was or could soon be expected to be short.

Generally speaking, labour was still not very hard to find. Some shortages of unskilled workers were bound to appear from place to place and from time to time, and they were becoming more frequent in the course of 1941. But until quite late in that year they were mostly local and relatively easy to remedy. Aircraft production as yet suffered very little from lack of unskilled labour. In the shipbuilding industries only Barrow and Merseyside complained of many unskilled vacancies in the spring of 1941. The Ministry of Supply alone could justifiably complain of shortages of unskilled labour in the winter 1940–41. It was responsible for several occupations of an unpleasant nature, such as iron ore mines, for which recruits were not forthcoming. Some of the heavier metal industries, like drop forging and non-ferrous metal plants, were concentrated in the Midlands where there was no reserve of unemployed labour, and where workers who had been with difficulty transferred from other

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areas were apt to drift away to more attractive work in the many engineering and aircraft factories in the neighbourhood. Above all, the Ministry of Supply had to cope with the special problem of women for filling factories. Although at this time there was no shortage of women labour in the country as a while, the filling factories were bound to present a problem of employment at the very outset owing to the nature of their work and their location away from inhabited places. The difficulties were from the beginning reflected in the high rate of labour turnover. At Chorley well over half the number who began work there left before production had been full started, and quite early in the summer of 1941 officials complained that they were 'expending great energy in trying to fill a leaking tub'. Of the women sent by the employment agencies at Preston and Blackburn to filling factories in November 1940 only half accepted employment. By the beginning of 1941 the shortage of ammunition threatened by insufficient labour in the filling factories had become so serious as to draw the attention of the Prime Minister. By the summer of 1941, however, the supplies had greatly improved. The reduction of hours following the introduction of three shifts, better travel facilities, canteens and hostels, as well as further releases from civilian industry greatly eased the situation.

In general, the shortages of unskilled labour which were occurring in 1941 could still be overcome by a variety of local and ad hoc expedients, and such more general measures as were considered and passed at the time were largely preparatory. As part of the preparation the Government set afoot the Beveridge inquiry into labour supplies.⁴⁷ By the summer of 1940 the figures which were then available, those of Wolfe's report,⁴⁸ had become out of date. But the figures which the Beveridge report made available in December 1940, though much more conservative, foretold great shortages of unskilled labour. Not only were the demands of war industry bound to become higher within a year or so, but the demands of the Services also threatened to produce within the same period a famine in men of military age. The famine could only be met by withdrawing men from munitions industries and by recruiting women into munitions and essential civil industries. According to Beveridge's estimates employment in munitions industries was to be increased within a year by 800,000 from the 1,450,000 employed in august 1940. In addition, to meet these requirements, about thirty-five percent of the male labour employed in non-munitions occupations would have to be transferred to munitions industries within two years. Some of the vacancies thus caused would have to be filled by women (the number was estimated

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at 750,000) and over one million additional women would also be required in munitions factories by August 1941.

The figures were thus very large, and the stringency they prophesied very great. Special preparations had, therefore, to be made to meet it. Limitation of Supplies Orders were from now on to be used not only to conserve raw materials but also to release labour and were soon to develop into the Concentration of Industry scheme.⁴⁹ More important still was the Registration for Employment Order which came into force in March 1941.⁵⁰ The Order as applied to men outside military age was not expected to achieve more than to mop up the few remaining reserve of male labour. Its chief object was the mobilisation of women.

The mobilisation of women was a drastic act of total war—more drastic than anything done in the war of 1914–18 or anything that even Hitler could contemplate. It was, therefore, not surprising to find the Ministry of Labour approaching it with the greatest caution. Until July 1941 the Ministry applied the Order only to women not already occupied in industry, and in doing so proceeded slowly and haltingly for fear that anything indiscriminate and swift might alienate public opinion. But by the early summer of 1941 it was seen that the number of 'unoccupied' women was very small; meanwhile demands for women for essential civil industries and for war production were increasing. The Ministry of Labour concluded that greater firmness and expedition were needed. More 'age groups' of women were called up for registration, and arrangements were made with certain industries to release young women for more essential work.⁵¹ Even so, the total number of women transferred to war work or to vital civilian industries between the middle of April and November 1941 was rather less than 200,000. The control of the transfer of women became easier when in early 1942 as a result of the Employment of Women (Control of Employment) Order⁵² women between the ages and twenty and thirty could obtain employment only through employment exchanges.

Before that, the Ministry of Labour could in justification of its hesitancy argue that the general problems of labour was not yet sufficiently acute .To repeat, the main problem, as well as the main preoccupation, of the Ministry was still that of skilled workers; and the problems was now much more acute than it had been before Dunkirk. Towards the end of 1940 and in the early months of 1941

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new factories and expansions planned before Dunkirk were approaching their full rates of production. And most of them were now threatened with hold-ups through shortages of skilled labour.⁵³

The full force of the Ministry of Supply demand for skilled labour came early in 1941, but there had already been serious difficulties in the R.O.F.s and among private contractors in the closing months of 1940. In the shipbuilding industry the supply of electricians, turners and fitters was becoming difficult at the end of 1940, and what made difficulties still worse was the continued drain on workmen in these trades from shipbuilding to other branches of the munitions industry. In the last six months of 1940 Cammell, Laird and Company, Birkenhead, had to record that far from increasing their skilled cadres they had lost 140 men, mostly electricians, to Napiers, Rootes and other firms.

The shortages intensified the evils of poaching and excessive turnover which were already in evidence in the first months of the war. To combat them the Ministry of Labour issued in June 1940 the Undertakings (Restriction on Engagement) Order⁵⁴ under which all new engagements in building, civil engineering and general engineering had to be made through employment exchanges or recognised employment agencies, so as to prevent poaching by 'advertisement'. But the Order could not prevent men from dismissing themselves. It was, for instance, alleged in July 1940 that the number of people who left B.T.H. magneto factory each week was sometimes two-thirds as great as the number of people engaged. In the autumn of a new problem arose with the German bombing, for a number of important firms situated in vulnerable areas found that some of their skilled men moved themselves and their families to places of greater safety. The Ministry of Labour tried to use against them its powers of direction, but was not very successful. There were difficulties in tracing the workers, and in addition neither the divisional controllers nor the representatives of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, who had been given power to act for the Government, had the 'heart' to use compulsion against men who evacuated themselves. The Ministry of Labour, therefore, tried to find some means of keeping skilled workers in their jobs which would avoid the defects and unpopularity of the leaving certificate system of the previous war. The Essential Work Order of 5th March 1941⁵⁵ was the result, and the procedure under the Order whereby the National Service Officer, and not the employer, was the judge of whether a man could leave, removed one source of workers' opposition. The necessary quid pro quo

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for workers was found in the proposal that the employer receiving protection should be directed to keep all his workers subject to a week's notice to the employment exchange. Moreover, in accordance with the Ministry's general reluctance to force men to return to job where earnings were low or conditions unpleasant, the Essential Work Order was not to be applied to any establishment where conditions were unsatisfactory.

Keeping skilled workers in munitions jobs was, however, not the only labour problem the industry and the Government had to face. To overcome the shortage it was also necessary to transfer to munitions industry the skilled labour engaged in occupations not absolutely essential to home or export trades. When in August 1940 the registration of engineering labour was introduced⁵⁶ it revealed that there were 50,000 men formerly occupied in engineering and now engaged in other work, and 100,000 maintenance engineers in industries other than engineering. The Beveridge Committee estimated in November 1940 that 20,000 of each group could be transferred to munitions production, but it is difficult to say how many of them in fact moved into munitions industry in the course of the following year. The total figure of all labour—not just skilled—in the motor vehicle, aircraft and general engineering industries employed on work for the home and export markets fell between June 1940 and September 1941 from 254,000 to 152,000, and most of this reduction can be taken as an addition to the munitions industries. The transfer from other industries, however, was more difficult to trace and to measure, and the general impression was that there was not enough of it. Moreover, the transfers which were taking place did little to correct the uneven distribution of skilled labour between different areas. Disparities in local supplies were getting if anything worse. This in 1940–41 there was a permanent shortage of toolmakers and setters in the new factories and particularly in the engine 'shadow' factories in the North-West, while the Coventry and Birmingham districts remained the greatest potential source of skilled labour for transfer.

A demand for organised or even compulsory transfer was, therefore, bound to arise. But here again the Ministry, confronted as it was by a number of stubborn problems, proceeded with great circumspection. There was first of all the problem of travelling and lodging allowances which had to be paid by the Ministry. Even with these allowances there was the obstacle of differences in earnings. Thus the rates of earnings and shipbuilding were low relatively to other engineering and metal-working industries. In the iron and steel industries the highly-paid skilled workers from tin-plate mills, where work was contracting, were now being offered much lower earning in drop forging plants. Within the aircraft industry the earnings for

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a forty-seven hour week in October 1940 were £5 10s. 9d. at de Havilland's in the Home Counties, £5 0s. 10d. at Napiers in the Home counties, and £4 2s. 6d. at Napiers in the North-West. It was not until June 1941 that the knot could be cut by an agreement between the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Engineering Employers' Federation whereby employers agreed to make up the difference in basic rates of earnings of workers transferred to areas where lower rates prevailed.

By that time the Ministry had tackled also the problem of compulsion. It had fought shy of compulsory measures throughout 1940 and early 1941. It would not use compulsion against the unemployed on the ground that it would be unjust to subject the unemployed to treatment from which their more fortunate fellows in employment were spared. In general the Ministry tried not to provoke opposition from the men. It would do nothing to force the unemployed electricians in London to go to Tyneside as they would have had to accept lower rates of pay and might make trouble. The threat so often employed in the war 1914–18, that of revoking reservation, could not now be used very freely as the Services were anxious that the call-up should not be regarded as a penalty. In the spring of 1941 the Schedule of Reserved Occupations was amended so as to take into account the factories in which men were working as well as their occupations.⁵⁷ This made it possible to raise the reservation ages for the Army with the minimum of harm to munitions production. But although this measure also made it easier to apply the threat of military service it was very seldom thus used. Generally speaking, compulsion continued to be treated as an ultimate sanction—not to be invoked except in a few extreme cases.

To the problem of transfers between occupations and areas was added the purely administrative problem of allocating new labour among individual contractors. At the beginning of its career the Producation Council assumed that priorities for labour would follow general priorities. The great industrial disturbances of midsummer 1940 following upon the production drive at M.A.P. and the overriding priorities which aircraft production enjoyed brought out the defects of the priority system in relation to labour. A number of vital branches of the munitions industry, e.g. machine tools, were threatened with a dangerous hold-up, whereas firms with overriding priorities were found 'hoarding' skilled labour which they had acquired. At the end of September 1940 the War Cabinet decided in favour of the allocation principle. Priority lists were to remain but they were to be used simply as a guide to allocation. On 15th October the Prime Minister laid down that where M.A.P.'s demand for labour equalled the total supply of labour of that type, a special

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allocation must be made for the minimum essential needs of other departments. From this time on priority no longer gave an exclusive right to all labour available, and in spite of lingering opposition from M.A.P. labour was as far as possible distributed with due regard to the indications of priority received.

The other problems to be tackled were those of dilution and upgrading. In November 1940 the Beveridge Committee had estimated that it was possible to dilute the skilled ranks in engineering and allied industries in the proportion of 1 in 4 by September 1941. The Committee was here thinking more of breaking down and de-skilling the work than of upgrading the men. Even so, by December, the hope that dilution to this extent could be achieved was seen to be over-optimistic. The ease of dilution varied with the job and with the type of factory: for in new factories the layout and plant made possible a greater degree of dilution. In the summer of 1940 the Ministry of Labour departed from its previous attitude and was willing to accept the responsibility for pressing dilution; but progress was sometimes obstructed by opposition from both men and employers, and not all the supply departments appeared able to exercise the necessary pressure on their contractors. Considerable dilution took place in 1940–41 of shipwrights and electricians on Admiralty work, although little progress was made in the dilution of platers and riveters, which remained a stubborn problem throughout the war. Some of the new factories, such as the new Royal Ordnance Factories, were economical in skilled labour from the very outset, but many engineering and aircraft factories still employed a high proportion of skilled labour in 1941. Throughout war industry variations in the proportion of skill in different firms persisted till the very end of the period. To a large extent they were inevitable for in no two firms were technical processes and the managerial practices the same. But they were to some extent also due to the failure to press dilution as far as possible. The position lightened itself by degrees in late 1941 and 1942.

(7)

Priority and Allocation

Important changes also took place in the flow of raw materials and in the way by which they reached war industry.⁵⁸ Supplies were getting short or were about to get short, even though some of the shortages were so to speak local and 'particular' and were in the

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nature of 'bottlenecks' reflecting a changed balance of requirements more than general insufficiency of supplies. Of the special shortages the most acute and the most troublesome occurred in the provision of drop forgings. The demand for drop forgings was bound to grow with the rising production of aircraft and guns, and the threat of stringency had hung over the munition industry since 1938, but the situation did not become critical until the summer of 1940. The 'crisis' was one of planning and distribution as well as one of supply. Orders had been allowed to accumulate far in excess of existing output, and by early July 1940 there was an accumul