CHAPTER V

FROM PEARL HARBOR TO VICTORY IN EUROPE:
1. THE OFFENSIVE STRATEGY

(1)

Introductory: The Two Summits

In Mr. Churchill's famous phrase the year 1942 saw 'the end of the beginning'.¹ The time of preparation was nearly over, and the country could begin to plan how to deploy the Forces it had gathered and equipped in the preceding three years. That a moment like this would come some time in 1942 had always been foreseen, though the precise date may for a long time have remained indefinite. The strategic and industrial hypothesis underlying the successive Service programmes of 1939, 1940 and 1941 implied a turning point in the conduct of the war soon after the end of 1941. The armed forces could be then be expected to reach their planned strength and to receive the final instalment of their 'capital equipment'. The terminal point of the Army plans could not, of course, be reached in December 1941 as required by the strict timetable of the 1940 requirements for Z+27;² but, in spite of all the postponements, the War Office and the Ministry of Supply continued to act on the assumption that the equipment of the field forces would be more or less completed by the end of the year. Similarly, the first comprehensive wartime programme of aircraft construction (the 'Harrogate' programme of September 1939),³ and the programmes of 1940 and 1941 derived from it, all reflected the intention to achieve the output of 2,550 aircraft per month—the peak rate—during 1942. Even in the Admiralty the planners looked forward to 1942 as the year when the supply of small vessels under the 'emergency' programmes would reach the point beyond which exclusive concentration on the 'emergency' programmes themselves could stop.⁴

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From these expectations obvious strategic and economic consequences followed. Now that weapons were in more plentiful supply more could be spared for offensive action, even if the delays over bombers made it difficult to launch full-scale bombing attacks for at least another year. The economic consequences were, if anything, even more immediate. War industry was absorbing its final targets. The year 1942 was therefore destined to bring the country to the very verge of the fullest possible industrial mobilisation.

In this way, on the eve of Pearl Harbor the twin summits of the war, strategic and economic, were rapidly coming into view. The strategic and political situation had been transformed by the German attack on Russia in June 1941, though the effects of German involvement in the East on British strategic planning did not become apparent until the strength of Russian resistance revealed itself in full, as it did during 1942. More directly relevant to Britain's economic and strategic plans was the evolving attitude of the United States. On the eve of Pearl Harbor American aid was already great, and prospects of further aid were rapidly rising. The events of the winter of 1941—Pearl Harbor, the entry of the United States and Japan into the war—greatly amplified both the prejudice and the promise of 1941, and thereby intensified the crises to which the country was in any case moving. They brought immense accretion to Allied strength and a firm assurance of victory, but they also raised the height of the peaks yet to be scaled and probably also the length of time which this country would have to stay at topmost levels. It suddenly became possible to embark on offensives greater and more far-reaching than any which Britain could have undertaken alone; and it also became necessary to raise military output and economic mobilisation to limits even higher than those which the pre-1942 programmes had forecast. At the same time the offensive action could not be planned to reach its dénouement for at least another eighteen months or two years; nor were the strains of industrial mobilisation expected to ease off in the meantime.

The sustained height of the war effort during those years and, above all, the combination of full industrial mobilisation with mounting military offensives, must be borne in mind if the story of war production in this period is to be properly understood. War industry was called upon to continue its movement towards the inherited targets of its earlier plans; it was also called upon to respond to the successive stimuli of the offensive strategy; and all this had to be done at a time when the productive resources and, above all, the manpower of the country were stretched to the furthest possible limits.

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(2)

The Offensive Strategy

The changing emphasis of war production reflected not only the growing shortage of manpower but also the constant and unremitting pressure for expansion—a pressure to which the country found it increasingly difficult to respond, but which strategic necessity made it equally difficult to dent. It would be a truism to insist that between 1942 and 1944 the demand for supplies was bound to expand with every step of the unfolding offensive. Somewhat less obvious and familiar are the effects on supply programmes of the slow and necessarily circuitous progress of the offensive plans. With the entry of America into the war the military prospects underwent a transformation as profound as most contemporaries wished it to be. Eventual victory now appeared to be assured and the road towards it more or less open. Yet the military position did not alter at all suddenly. While future horizons were lightening and spirits were rising, the immediate prospects remained for a while gloomy. Until the very eve of Alamein and Stalingrad the Allies continued to suffer reverses in every field of battle—in the Philippines, in Malaya, in the Western Desert, in the Atlantic and in the approaches to the Caucasus.

No comparable reverses were likely on the supply front, but enough has already been said here to show that 1942 was bound to be a year of great difficulties and shortages. Indeed the first phase of the Anglo-American alliance turned out to be one of unrelieved stringency. At the end of 1941 American war industry was still in the early stages of expansion and was not to be fully employed or to be working at maximum rates until well into 1943. There was even some deterioration in the immediate outlook, for weapons manufactured for British use in the United States were being diverted to the American Army, and the vast ambitions of American war industry were threatening the supply of critical raw materials. In these conditions it was obviously impossible for Britain and the United States to come to grips with the main forces of the enemy at once. However certain the victory, the road towards it was turning out to be both longer and more roundabout than it may at first have appeared to some Allied leaders. Its true length and direction were not to be revealed until most of its distance had been traversed.

The mapping of the road began immediately after the Pearl Harbor. Within three weeks of America' entry into the war Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt met in Washington to consider the broad strategy of the war.⁵ They had no difficulty in agreeing on the strategic

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priorities. As Germany was the predominant member of the Axis powers, the Atlantic and the European area was to be considered the decisive theatre of the war, and only the minimum of force necessary to safeguard vital interests in other theatres was to be diverted from operations against Germany.

The date and direction of the main attack were not, however, and could not be settled at once. In the spring of 1942 General Marshall came to London with a plan for an early and even an immediate offensive in Western Europe. He proposed that Allied troops should invade Europe and establish a bridgehead there as soon as possible, indeed in the autumn of 1942. This operation if successful was to lead in 1943 to a full-dress invasion of Europe (Operation 'Round-up'). These dates, however, proved too early and too definite. In general, the British leaders were prepared to accept the American proposal for an offensive in Western Europe in the spring of 1943. In a manner still more general, they agreed that the Allies might be compelled to launch an attack, however limited, in 1942 or might be induced to do so a favourable opening occurred. Before long, however, both the date and the point of the attack were revised. At a further conference between the President and the Prime Minister in Washington in June 1942⁶ the Allies decided to push forward with all speed and energy the building up of American forces in the United Kingdom for an early offensive. But, at the same time, they laid it down that if detailed examination were to show that a successful invasion of France and the Low Countries was as yet impracticable, the Allies must be ready with an alternative plan for an early operation against German land forces. As an alternative, a landing in North Africa—Operation 'Torch'—appeared most promising and desirable.

When in the following month, July 1942, the United States Chief of Staff visited England to investigate the possibilities of offensive action during 1942, the decision to postpone the invasion of the Continent followed almost inevitably. The bomber offensive had not yet developed sufficiently to prepare the ground for an Allied landing; the technique of such landings had not been worked out; the United States did not yet dispose of large bodies of battle-trained troops, nor did their war industry turn out supplies in the necessary quantities. The smaller and purely preliminary alternative in North Africa had therefore to be launched first.

The invasion of North Africa took place as planned; yet even after it had been completed—in the early summer of 1943⁷—the culminating point of the offensive was still far off. While preparations for the North African campaign were in full swing, attention and resources

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had to be diverted to other military objectives. The German advance into Egypt was a strategic threat of the greatest gravity, and the preparations to repulse it, which had been going on throughout 1942, could not be held up. Nor was it possible to stop or even to reduce the assistance to Russia. Measures purely military, such as help for the defence of the Caucasus or the invasion of northern Norway were seriously considered but proved impracticable. On the other hand, supplies to the White Sea ports were absorbing on ever-mounting volume of resources, and were not allowed to slacken off. At the same time an assault on Madagascar had to be planned and was executed in May 1942. Above all the Allies, more especially the Americans, had to do all that was possible to prevent the position in the Pacific from becoming even more critical than it was. In this country there was also the ever-present, and at time overshadowing threat to Atlantic sea-lanes, were throughout 1942 and the first half of 1943 the German U-boats were levying a heavy toll.

For these and the more general reasons of strategy and supplies (which in the main were still those of 1942) the success in North Africa was not to be followed by an immediate switch-over to France. The Prime Minister and the President met at Casablanca in January 1943⁸ and decided to follow up the success in Tunisia with an attack of Sicily, to be launched in June or July.⁹ The invasion of Sicily was followed by other moves in the encircling offensive. The Italian mainland was invaded on 3rd September, and when Mussolini fled and Italian resistance collapsed in the autumn of 1943, the British military leaders were anxious to complete the campaign in the south, even at the cost of some further postponement of the invasion of France. The problem occupied the Allied leaders at the Quebec Conference of August 1943, and at Cairo discussions in November 1943; and it was only at Teheran,¹⁰ where Stalin joined the President and the Prime Minister for the first time, that the 'Overlord' operation in Northern France and the accompanying invasion of Southern France were fixed for May 1944 with the clear understanding that no other operation would be allowed to interfere with their date and success.

In these final decisions the argument of supply played a decisive part. Hitherto it had been possible to contend that, although the long-term objectives of military equipment were nearly attained, there still remained the task of preparing the specialised equipment without which the final offensive in France could not be launched, and, in the first place, the all-important landing-craft. The reason why the summer of 1944 could at last be fixed as the final date for 'Overlord' was not only that the preliminary phases of the encircling offensive had

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been successfully carried out and that the bombing attacks on Germany were approaching the point of highest intensity, but also that the preliminary supply tasks appeared capable of being completed in time.

The strategic plans of the Allies in their turn had profound economic and, more especially, industrial effects. Not only was war industry called upon to supply very large quantities of special equipment for the coming offensive, but it was also subjected to a heavy and at the same time irregular pressure from the so-to-speak intermediate strategic needs. The offensive strategy developed over a period so long and was compounded of preparatory activities so dispersed and so divergent that the flow of offensive weapons had to be kept not only high but also very elastic. Incidents, all of them critical, came in quick succession: the bombing offensive, the massing of troops and supplies for the battles in Libya and Tunisia, the critical stages in the Battle of the Atlantic, the mounting of the landings in Sicily and Italy, and the maintenance of the armies there. They all raised urgent demands which had to be satisfied rapidly, and sometimes concurrently, before final concentration on 'Overlord' could be decreed at the end of 1943. And no sooner was the landing launched than urgent demands began to come in from the armies in the fields of battle and from the air force over them. At the end of the period, while the prospects of victory in Europe were drawing near, the requirements of war in the Far East were coming to the forefront.

Is there then any wonder that the progress of war production during those years was irregular as well as great? Requirements had to be constantly reassessed in the order of military urgency, and the course of war production was therefore bound to be highly unstable. Yet the general tendency towards expansion, though repeatedly checked, was never arrested. In so far as additional demands merged into the periodic Service programmes (as the bulk of them did) they will be recounted again later;¹¹ but it is not necessary to catalogue them in order to account for the growing industrial tasks. The growth reflected itself in every direction: in the higher demands for munitions, the rising requirements for raw materials, and, above all, in the ever-larger demands for labour.

(3)

The Economic Strains

(a) MACHINE TOOLS¹²

The culminating point in the military preparations, i.e. the opening up of the offensive the inevitably heightened pressure of

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requirements for munitions, coincided with the final stages in the industrial mobilisation. These stages were bound to be fraught with difficulty. As the peaks of industrial activity were coming into view the concomitant stresses were becoming more pronounced and more difficult to relieve. The 'limiting' factors of wartime industries as they figured in all the rearmament plans—machine tools, raw materials, labour—were now beginning to exercise to the full their limiting effect. At the same time not all the productive resources were equally strained, and the various shortages did not constrict war industry in equal measure. What is more, the worst strains were not those which had done most to hold back industrial expansion in the early phases of rearmament.

Capacity—factories and machines—was ceasing to be the pace-maker of war industry. If, until 1942, the output of munitions did not grow—and indeed was not expected to grow—much faster than it did, the main reason was that the country was still 'tooling up'. And if, in its turn, this process dragged on for several long and impatient years, the obvious (though, of course, not the only) explanation was that demands for fixed capital were so great that they could not possibly be met sooner. Factory buildings took a long time to erect (on the whole much longer than in the war of 1914–18),¹³ while the supply of plant and machine tools, not only in this country but also in the United States, was for a long time unequal to the need. By the end of 1942, however, the general position had greatly changed. Capital equipment was ceasing to be short; supply had caught up with demand, and in 1943 the demand itself dropped well below the peak.

That the demand should have decreased at this stage of the war was, of course, in the nature of the industrial build-up. Hitherto the whole timetable of British rearmament had largely depended on the rate at which new factories could be brought into production or other factories be converted to munitions; and this meant that some time before the highest levels of war production were reached the making of fixed capital equipment should have begun to slow down. The turning-point under the programmes of 1939 and 1940 would have come some time before Pearl Harbor, and soonest of all in the aircraft industry. Throughout the greater part of 1941 the Ministry of Aircraft Production was still engaged on the original programme of 2,550 aircraft per months. The programme had been approved in general terms in September 1939,¹⁴ and between that date and August 1941 orders had been placed for the bulk of the necessary Government expenditure on plant and buildings—£97 millions out of about £110 millions. Had the programme been allowed to run its

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course, the requirements of capital equipment would probably have begun to diminish in the autumn of 1941. In the Ministry of Supply the turning-point was expected to come later, somewhere early in 1942, for it was in the course of 1942 that production under the Z+27 programme¹⁵ was due to reach its zenith. In the Admiralty the capital schemes launched in the first two years of the war were mainly to expand capacity for armaments and ammunition, and there were also expected to mature at the end of 1941 or early in 1942.

Thus, according to the original production plans, the process of industrial re-equipment would have culminated at the turn of 1941 and 1942. The process was not, however, allowed to run according to plan. Even before the date of completion arrived, the supply departments had to sponsor additions to factory programmes and to extend the period of 'tooling up'. Greatest of all were the additions to the aircraft factories resulting from the bomber programmes of the late autumn of 1941. It will be recalled¹⁶ that the Prime Minister's wishes for additional bombers could not be met even half-way without additional factory construction. There were also to be changes in plant and machines and additions to the machining capacity in general in a number of existing factories. Hence there was a very large increase in orders for plant and machine tools at the end of 1941 and during 1942. Indeed so large was the increase that the approved financial commitments for additional plant and machinery sanctioned for engines, airframes and propellers from September 1941 to December 1942, at nearly £48 millions, were more than twice that of the comparable commitments between December 1939 and the end of August 1941, and only £6.5 millions less than the total commitment for the provision of plant and machinery, at Government expense,

Commitments approved for machine tools and plant

TABLE 26			£ millions
	1936–39	Dec. 1939 to 31st Aug. 1941 (20 months)	Sept. 1941 to 31st Dec. 1942 (16 months)
Engines	26.4	10.0	28.1
Airframes	5.9	9.5	12.9
Propellers	0.9	1.7	6.9
	33.2	21.2	47.9
All aircraft products17	45.2	37.5	62.0

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for this section of the aircraft industry in the five years since 1936. The increase in plant and machinery requirements over the whole field of aircraft production was only slightly less severe. The peak requirements of the Ministry of Aircraft Production for capital goods were thus inevitably put off to some in 1943.

Important additions to capital, though on a much smaller scale, also too place in the shipbuilding industry. It will be shown later¹⁸ that in the middle of 1942 the Admiralty reached an impasse in its endeavours to force out of the shipbuilding industry a large increase in output. This led to a technical enquiry which, in its turn, led to an ambitious plan for a State-assisted renovation of capital equipment in the shipyards. Large and costly machine tools were to be provided as well as shipyard plant and welding equipment. In consequence the total value of major capital schemes for naval shipbuilding and marine engineering for the two years 1942 and 1943 exceeded £4½ millions, compared with less than £1 million for the two years 1940 and 1941. In addition a further large scheme for torpedo production was approved in 1942. The large increase in capital equipment for naval construction and marine engineering which followed the 1942 inquiry is reflected in the Admiralty expenditure on this account (Table 27).

Admiralty expenditure on plant and machine tools for naval shipbuilding and marine engineering contractors

TABLE 27				£ millions
1940	1941	1942	1943	1944
0.259	0.869	1.245	4.002	4.090

In the Ministry of Supply alone the additions were not sufficiently large to lead to a great postponement of the decline, which in any case was planned to come later there than elsewhere. In the capital schemes approved in 1942 provision of plant and machine tools at more than £26 millions was only £2 millions lower than in 1941, though more than £16 millions higher than the figure to which it was to drop in the course of 1943. The 1941 level of demand for capital was thus prolonged throughout the greater part of 1942 but fell sharply in 1943. But for the further schemes for the tank programme and for the increasing demand for 20-mm. weapons and ammunition the 1943 figure would have been lower still, and the drop might have come earlier.

The compilation of total requirements of machine tools for delivery in each year was undertaken by the Machine Tool Control from 1941

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onwards. The process was subject to much uncertainty, and figures computed at the beginning of the year were subject to drastic changes in the course of the year. The actual demands for machine tools, on which orders for delivery were issued, frequently differed widely from these estimated requirements. Requirements were related almost entirely to demands arising out of financial projects of capital expenditure financed and subsidised from Government sources, but there was also a smaller flow of order emanating directly from private firms and financed wholly by them. Outside the official lists were also the machine tools and gauges, for labour training schemes, for export and for replacement of worn-out and of war-damaged machines. In 1940 and 1941 the annual total requirements was estimated at 100,000 machine tools. In 1942, when returns became more complete, the estimate reached 111,000. Reckoned in number the estimated decline in 1943 and 1944 was remarkably small, but the needs of these years were for a larger proportion of low-cost machines and for a larger number of machines to replace worn-out machinery in factories.¹⁹

Estimated requirements and actual supplies of machine tools to supply departments²⁰

TABLE 28					Number of machine tools
	Ministry of Aircraft Production		Ministry of supply		Admiralty
	Requirements	Supplies	Requirements	Supplies	Requirements	Supplies
September 1939 to December 1940	40,00021	30,00021	45,00021	33,00021	6,00021	3,50021
1941	38,61122	32,00021	27,723	29,00021	6,063	4,50021
194223	32,928	30,631	38,00024	38,154	2,40025	5,478
194323	24,650	21,498	25,56024	23,641	6,000	6,644
194423	16,363	15,790	24,18024	15,514	7,000	5,987

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The turning-point in the total demand for plant and machine tools was thus postponed; but it was bound to come before long. Allowing for the interval between the date at which expenditure was sanctioned and the date at which orders could be placed, the end of 1942 might be regarded as the time when the pressure of demand for capital equipment in war industry as a whole would begin to fall off.

The general position, however, improved some time before that point was reached. Although the total demand had been fast approaching the highest point, the supplies of machine tools and plant were growing faster still. For this, American deliveries were partly responsible. During 1940 and 1941 the number of machine tools supplied to the United Kingdom from the United States was at a record level of four times the number supplied from the United States in 1939, and at least three and a half times the 1939 tonnage. The main source, however, was not American supplies but the ever-expanding production at home. Indeed, the growth of the British machine-tool industry during the war was very remarkable. From less than 20,000 machines in 1935 and about 35,000 in 1939 the British output of machine tools approached 100,000 by 1942.

For the early stages of the expansion the pre-war planners may claim some credit. In the war of 1914–18 the shortage of machine tools, jigs and gauges was one of the main limiting factors of war production. The machine-tool and gauge problem consequently figured very prominently in the inter-war discussions of industrial mobilisation and in the investigations conducted by the Supply Board.²⁶ As a result a good deal had been achieved by 1939. The output of standard machines to meet rearmament requirements and to maintain exports had expanded, and new capacity²⁷ had also been developed for gauges and for special machines for gun and shell production. But much more was needed, and in the end much more was done. In the early years of the war the output of machine tools directed by the Machine Tool Control in the Ministry of Supply grew from month to month and reached by the end of 1942 a point far beyond the scope of pre-war expectations. There was also a commensurate expansion in the output of the supply of small tools—cutting tools and equipment, gauges and measuring instruments.

This achievement was one of the great industrial successes of the war. What made it possible was the remarkable response of the established machine-tool firms, but one of the most important features of the growing output was the contribution made by undertakings not previously engaged in the manufacture of machine tools. In the end about a third of the output came from a large number of 'general'

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engineering firms. The manufacture of many types of machine tools was, of course, well suited to the qualities and limitations of medium-sized and small firms in the British engineering industry. Yet even so their contribution revealed reserves of skill and adaptability out of the ordinary.

Supplies of machine tools

TABLE 29					Number of machine tools
	1939	1940	1941	1942	1943	1944
United Kingdom production	37,00028	62,00028	80,927	95,788	76,208	59,125
United States supplies29	8,364	33,111	32,044	24,023	20,514	8,516

Supplies of small tools

TABLE 30				£ thousands
	1940	1941	1942	1943	1944
United Kingdom production30	17,000	25,047	35,837	42,172	38,600
Imports	764	2,595	6,160	8,030	…

(… not available)

Thus, after Pearl Harbor domestic production was able to meet the bulk of British requirements for machine tools and dependence on American supplies was increasingly confined to machine tools of certain sizes and of highly specialised design. But even in this field the country was becoming less dependent on imports. Successful endeavours to replace continental types and some United States types with United Kingdom products go back to 1940 and beyond. In 1941, with the growing stringency of supplies from the United States, the Machine Tool Control arranged for further new types to be introduced to replace some United States designs, including gear-cutting and specialised milling machines. As a result, the range of types not manufactured in the United Kingdom was narrowed down, and the need for foreign tools was correspondingly reduced.

It goes without saying that however fast and however successfully

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the general problem of plant and machinery was being solved, local shortages and difficulties continued to occur. Throughout 1942, and even in 1943 and 1944, delays and failures in production could still, more or less justly, be blamed on non-delivery of plant and tools. Small as the arrears were now becoming, even small arrears were capable of delaying production, especially if they happened to include critical key tools. The Ministry of Aircraft Production was especially difficult to satisfy. Not only was it deemed for machine tools at a very high level in 1942, but it was especially sensitive to unbalancing effects of production 'shortfalls'. For the M.A.P. requirements contained a high proportion of 'difficult' tools and, in addition, were to a great extent made up of large production units, sometimes whole factories, which took on the average not less than twelve months and sometimes as many as eighteen months to complete. For this and other reasons it is not surprising to find M.A.P. complaining about arrears in the supply of machine tools in May 1942 and again in October of that year and at the beginning of 1943. The Machine Tool Control was reassuring about the prospects and could claim that by the end of 1942 not more than 2,300 machine tools, or about seven percent of the requirements, remained undelivered. But improvements were all very recent—mostly in the last months of 1942—and among the machines still in arrears were large plano-millers essential for the manufacture of the long spars of airframes and certain specially-designed machines vital for the manufacture of engines and propellers.

M.A.P. could thus claim that delays in delivery of machines not only upset the timing of major programmes but also impeded necessary changes of types. Thus, in December 1942 when a changeover from Stirlings and Wellingtons to Lancasters was considered for Austin's, Short's and Vickers', it was found that the changeover could only be made at either Short's or Vickers' but not at both, through lack of sufficient specially-designed plano-millers of large size. In December 1942 eleven more of these machine tools were required for existing Lancaster production; twelve more were required for the changeover at Short's and eighteen more at Vickers'. Against this total of forty-one plano-millers the best delivery was twelve in nine months and four per month to follow. Thus, whilst the general statistics showed the requirements as fully or almost fully met, serious delays in the supply of key machines could still be held responsible for failures in production.

Needless to say, this argument was not accepted in full, and was often met by the arguments that the M.A.P. demands were inflated, that the existing machine-tool capacity was not fully worked, and that in any case the industry did not possess the labour necessary to work the new machines. The labour arguments was of course double-edged,

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for machines were often needed to economise in labour and also to train new cadres. But the argument that the requirements were exaggerated could not be dismissed by mere denial. That by the end of 1941 the industry had accumulated a great deal of redundant plant and machinery appeared very probable. In the summer of 1941 the Controller General of the Machine Tools Control could refer without fear of contradiction to the surplus of machine tools in certain M.A.P. factories as something generally known; and a few weeks later the M.A.P. Director of Machine Tools reported to the Supply Board that in his estimate some 10,000–12,000 machine tools were idle through shortage of labour and equipment or for other reasons and that some 50,000 were inefficiently operated through lack of skilled labour. The same view was to be expressed in a manner characteristically unambiguous by Lord Beaverbrook, now Minister of Supply. In a memorandum to the Defence Committee (Supply) relating to the Prime Minister's bomber programme, Lord Beaverbrook stated categorically that for the bomber programme:

no more machine tools are needed, over 30,000 new tools were directed to M.A.P. factories in 1941. The machine-tool plant must be worked night and day. Some special-purpose machine tools must be provided. The flow of replenishments and renewals must be maintained. But the main jobs are all completed and in fact some consignments of tools remain unused and even unpacked.

The categorical opening of this memorandum was qualified in its later sections, but its main argument still implied that at least half of the 30,000 machine tools asked for were unnecessary.

Lord Beaverbrook's criticisms of M.A.P. demands or the more moderately expressed criticisms by the Machine Tool Control could be neither generally disproved nor upheld until April 1942, when M.A.P. at last agreed to have its machine-tool demands examined by technical experts of the Machine Tool Control. The object of the examination was to check the requirements of new machine tools as stated by M.A.P. against the Machine Tool Control's own calculation of what would be needed if the most suitable machine tools were most effectively used. As a result of the inquiry the utilisation of tools may or may not have improved, but M.A.P. requirements lost some of the controversial aura which had hitherto surrounded them. It is very probable that even then the industry continued to possess a reserve of machining capacity. When in the earlier stages of discussion Lord Beaverbrook and others had tried to apply to the M.A.P. requirements of double-shift working, M.A.P. insisted that the only realistic level for measuring utilisation of tools was by assuming that machines would be worked to the extent of not more than 165 percent, i.e. 65 percent above their hypothetical full utilisation in a single shift. It is, nevertheless, doubtful whether even

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165 percent of utilisation was attained in machining shops throughout the aircraft industry, and it is more or less certain that the coefficient of utilisation in some branches of aircraft production remained considerably lower than that.

The hang-over of the machine-tool problem also continued to be felt in the branches of production controlled by the Admiralty and the Ministry of Supply, but in neither department did it appear as troublesome or as persistent as in M.A.P. Their demands—especially those of the Ministry of Supply—were not linked to a single large production scheme like the 'bomber programme', capable of being delayed in its entirety by local shortages of vital machines. The Ministry of Supply also enjoyed the advantages of fairly interchangeable industrial capacity and of somewhat less exacting requirements.

In so far as the Ministry of Supply requirements contained large and specialised machines, or were made of complete production complements, delays continued for some time after the general problem of supplies appeared to be solved. Thus, the factory programme for production of the Meteor tank engine, involving some 850 machines, both British and American, took eighteen months to complete; it was approved early in 1943, but the delivery of machine tools for full production was not completed until November 1944. Generally speaking, 'critical' machines, i.e. those of special design or otherwise in short supply, could not be made available in under twelve months except by transfer of existing orders. Fortunately, from 1942 onwards the Ministry asked for relatively few 'difficult' machines. And even when machines were required in complete production units, as for 20-mm. ammunition, fuses and small arms, or for tank engines, the units were usually much smaller than those required by M.A.P. In general, new machine tools in the Ministry's programme were to an increasing extent required not to tool up new capacity but to convert existing munitions capacity for the production of new types of weapons and ammunition.

Increases in the demand for general tools such as there were (a large part consisted of workshop tools of smaller and portable type for the Army) did not raise serious difficulties. By the end of 1942 they could be supplied within six to nine months, and in the course of that year many machines were being delivered at a rate which kept pace with the rate of requirements. From 1943 onwards a rapidly increasing number of machines on the Ministry of Supply list were becoming redundant and were passing into the Machine Tool Control pool; private orders for replacement of worn-out machines were increasing and in many instances were easily met.

There was, however, some delay in the delivery of machines under the Admiralty scheme of shipyard renovation.³¹ The delivery dates

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for the heavier and more specialised machine tools for shipyards and engine-makers, such as hydraulic presses, joggling and flanging machines, riveting machines and special horizontal boring machines, were invariably long—indeed in some cases so long as to extend the period of re-equipment for about eight to nine months beyond the end of 1943 which was the planned date of completion. There was some feeling in the Admiralty that the delays were in part due to interference by Russian orders for similar machinery, though the Machine Tool Control did not admit that Russian orders had any great effect. Difficulties may also have been caused by lack of finality and definition in the technical requirements of the shipbuilding firms. Yet great as these difficulties were, they were not such as to upset the programme as a whole. In general, the requirements of the yards were filled more or less on time. Thus, in the supply of welding machines, which formed a crucial part of the modernisation scheme, the measures taken by the Machine Tool Control to standardise a large percentage of the welding machines and to scrutinise the Admiralty demands for machines above a certain size made it possible to fulfil the programme without delay. Some ninety percent of the welding schemes were completed by the autumn of 1943, at least a couple of months before the terminal date of the renovation scheme as a whole.

(b) RAW MATERIALS³²

The shortage which on the morrow of Pearl Harbor appeared most dangerous and most immediate was that of raw materials. It was to prove much less crippling in the event than it appeared in anticipation; there is, however, no doubt that until well into 1943 the anticipations were very disturbing. From May 1941 imports of raw materials increased to a rate which was sufficiently well above current consumption to raise the stocks of materials subject to import programme by several million tons above what in 1942 was to be regarded as the minimum 'distribution' stocks required to keep the flow of production uninterrupted. In the autumn of 1941 the prospects for a short time appeared still brighter, and the Government hoped that imports of raw materials would be higher in the course of 1942 than in 1941. Even when, by the middle of November, the import programmes had to be reduced to allow for the mounting demands of Russia and of the Middle East and for the slowing down of American shipping assistance, the expected imports of raw materials in 1942 were still planned at approximately the same levels as the actual imports of 1941.

These hopes did not survive Pearl Harbor. The Japanese conquests

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in the Far East removed several sources of important raw materials. Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies and the neighbouring territories had produced ninety percent of the world's rubber supplies, sixty percent of the world's tin and also quantities of sisal. In the Philippines the Allies lost the only source of manilla hemp, and elsewhere in the Far East they lost supplies of tungsten, chromite, antimony and hardwood. Not all these losses were wholly and permanently irreplaceable. There were hopes of expanding rubber production elsewhere, especially in Ceylon, and the production of synthetic rubber was due to develop on a large scale in the United States. The mining of tin could be expanded in Nigeria, the Belgian Congo and Bolivia, and the loss of tin-smelting capacity was to be made good by the new American smelter already in process of erection in Texas. Yet all these schemes could not mature at once, and even when mature they could not be expected to make good the entire deficiency.

In addition, the immediate prospects of supplies for Britain were, for the time being, dimmed by the inevitable increase in America's own demands arising mainly out of her immense armament plans. Most serious of all was the threat to the allocations of steel and non-ferrous metals, especially copper; and in this respect the situation remained dangerous until late in 1942, i.e. until the United States' munitions programmes had been pruned sufficiently to revive, at least in part, hopes of continued American supplies to Britain.

More important still, indeed much more important, was the new shipping situation. In 1942 the Y-boat activities in the Atlantic raised the rate of sinkings to new and alarming peaks. At the same time the demand for shipping was greatly swollen by the military needs of the Eastern and Middle-Eastern theatres of war and by the gradual development of the Allied counter-offensive. America's own need of ships in the Far East and elsewhere reduced the immediate help she could give. Merchant shipping construction, especially in America, was originally expected to replace losses and overtake demands by the end of 1942, but in June it became clear that American shipping assistance would not greatly increase until the second half of 1943. As a result, the total tonnage to serve British imports not only failed to grow but was in danger of continued decline for at least another year or eighteen months. Added to the shortages of shipping tonnage, both present and future, was also the difficulty of suiting military shipping to the needs of the import programme. In theory ships shipping to the needs of the import programme. In theory ships carrying supplies to the Far East or to the Mediterranean were available to bring back imports, but in practice the available cargoes did not necessarily fit the pattern of military sailings, and ships homeward bound were sometimes compelled to sail not fully laden and generally to bring imports in proportions no strictly corresponding to the import programmes.

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It is, therefore, no wonder that the expectations of raw materials imports had to be drastically reduced. By February 1942 the high expectations of the autumn of 1941 were cut by more than a quarter. In the new conditions, supplies of materials had to be planned on assumptions involving not only far greater economy than before, but also much greater risks. In considering the import programme in February 1942 the Lord President decided that the time had come to reduce expectations of raw materials to the absolute minimum needed for the war effort, and in so doing to assume that stocks would be reduced by the end of the year to the safety line. On that basis the Raw Materials Department of the Ministry of Supply had drastically to reduce the total volume of requirements and some of the most essential items in it. Above all, iron and steel and non-ferrous metals were to be cut to an extent which threatened to reduce stocks of pig iron, steel and scrap by a very large figure. Stocks of other imported raw materials³³ were also to be drawn upon.

Yet, even at this level, expectations of imports appeared to be higher than the shipping situation justified. At the invitation of the Lord President the Raw Materials Department of the Ministry of Supply submitted in February 1942 two programmes of imports both smaller than the previous much reduced expectations, and in March 1942 Department had to act on the dismal assumption that the quantity of materials to be received by sea would be only seventy-five percent of the forecast in November 1941. At this level imports would be considerably less than the amount below which, it was though they could not fall without creating a serious situation. As planned production was expected to rise in the course of 1943 to its topmost peak and consumption of raw materials to grow in proportion, the accumulated deficiency over the eighteen months from January 1942 to July 1943 looked as if it might exceed the safety figure by a wide margin.

It will be shown presently that, in fact, the situation in the second half of 1942 did not deteriorate quite so badly and that no serious shortages developed. This, however, was not sufficient to relieve the fears for the still more distant future. Even though in the course of 1943 American assistance was expected greatly to relieve the shipping position, the authorities expected that further dislocation of import programmes would result from the offensive campaigns of the Allies. At the same time consumption was due to rise in keeping with earlier plans, and the munitions industries alone were due to consume 12.5 percent more raw materials in 1943 than in 1942. The prospects was very disturbing, and what made it still more disturbing was that in the last quarter of 1942 the rate of sinkings rose and the amount of

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tonnage diverted to military preparations was greater than expected. At the level of imports that could now be expected, reserves set aside to meet unforeseen emergencies might at the end of the year be reduced to three to four weeks' supply.

Indeed, so dangerous appeared the position and prospects of stocks that the Prime Minister was obliged in December 1942 to intervene with a direction that stocks should not be allowed to drop to a level which would leave this country without 'elbow room' for possible contingencies. This meant cancelling the assumption on which the current programmes were based, i.e. that this country would run down its stocks of imported raw materials to the level of 'distribution' stocks. The new 'elbow room' was set by the Ministry of Production at a figure which was near the level at which stocks of imported raw materials had stood at the end of 1942. The estimates of consumption in 1943 had therefore to be reduced accordingly, and above all, heroic measures had to be taken to maintain the rate of imports. And nothing was more 'heroic' than the Prime Minister's decision to sanction the withdrawal of ships from military uses. In accordance with is direction, fifty-two out of every ninety-two ships which it had been planned to use for the carrying of military stores to the Indian Ocean during the first six months of 1943 were to be diverted to bring imports to the United Kingdom.

For a few months in 1943 the position appeared to deteriorate still further, partly through a sharp fall in the amount of shipping space allocated from the United States, but also through severe weather. The position was expected to improve in the second half of 1943; yet allowing for all possible improvements, the Minister of Production unofficially estimated in the spring that it would not be possible to import during 1943 anything like the amounts budgeted for. A grave deficiency thus appeared inevitable. The requirements of the production departments had been pruned in January 1943 to a level which was below that of 1942, but as consumption of raw material in general had been running at a relatively high rate during the last three quarters of 1942, it was difficult to cut it sufficiently to satisfy the Prime Minister's expressed with for 'elbow room' over and above the minimum distribution stocks themselves might have to be raided, and if so, the flow of production would not be sustained.

Sustained it nevertheless was. At no time during the period was munitions production in the country interrupted or even slowed down by a failure in the supply of raw materials in the narrow sense of the term but to the 'fabricated' materials—rolled products, castings, forgings, etc.—and were due not so much to difficulties of import as

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to problems of fabrication in this country. At no time were stocks of imported raw materials in general drawn upon to the extent which the Lord President of the Council and the Raw Material Department had been forced to contemplate at the beginning of 1942. This was due in part to a decline in munitions requirements, but also to the steps which the Ministry of Production took in April 1943 to restrict consumption.

The cumulative reductions of stocks over the eighteen months January 1942 to June 1943 are difficult to compute with any exactitude, but they were certainly nowhere near the figure which once seemed inevitable, and what is more, total stocks of raw materials began to rise again by midsummer 1943. In the three months June to August 1943 they rose by nearly 1.5 million tons.

The relatively satisfactory condition of stocks and supplies was partly due to a flow of imports better than at one time seemed probably. In the first six months of 1942 and again at the turn of 1942 and 1943, imports were below programme, but, with the possible exception of the opening months of 1943, they never dropped below the safety line. Over the period as a whole the actual flow of imports was above the minimum programmes, and from late spring 1943 onwards the position improved very rapidly. The early months of the year saw a decisive turn in the Battle of the Atlantic, and a little later the military success in North Africa and Italy opened the Mediterranean to Allied shipping. As a result, more goods arrived than forecast; and the American promises of shipping assistance also proved easier to fulfil. No doubt supplies of individual commodities still remained very difficult. Above all, as more shipping was made available, so did the difficulty of finding appropriate cargoes in foreign ports grow.³⁴ Nevertheless, by June 1943 the total of non-tanker imports reached the highest level since October 1941, and, as mentioned above, stocks of imported raw materials were beginning to rise. By the end of 1943 they were higher than at the beginning of the year and well above the 'distribution' minimum.

Mutatis mutandis, the situation in 1943, with imports and stocks higher than the more pessimistic forecasts, was recreated in 1944. Although the year began with hopes higher than ever before, certain dangers were anticipated. The needs of the offensive on the Continent were expected to put a strain on shipping, and inland transport was also heavily burdened. Nevertheless, imports in the first half of 1944 ran higher than even the more hopeful versions of the programmes allowed.

The higher rate of imports in 1943 and 1944 was not only, and.

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perhaps not even the main, cause of the satisfactory rate of supplies. Domestic sources also proved very buoyant. The production of iron ore had reached its peak in 1942 when nearly 20 million tons were produced, eight million tons more than in 1938,³⁵ and, what is more important, one million tons more than in 1941. In 1943 3.7 million tons of domestic timber had been felled, slightly more than had been assumed in earlier discussions.

Production of some essential raw materials³⁶

TABLE 31			Thousand tons
	1942	1943	1944
Iron ore37	19,540	18,487	15,496
Pig iron	7,604	7,187	6,760
Scrap for steel-making	7,688	7,782	7,349
Steel ingots and castings	12,764	13,031	12,116
Hardwood	1,025	1,251	1,163
Softwood	861	805	560
Pitwood	1,574	1,765	1,506

Source: Cmd. 6564

The main relief, however, came neither from the better rate of imports nor from the higher output from domestic sources, but from a much reduced consumption. Consumption would in any case have run below estimates. The expected demands for raw materials, like all other estimates of requirements for war production, were computed on the assumption that all other factors of production would be available in planned proportions at the right times and in the proper places, and that production of munitions would run at full programme rates. This assumption, of course, highly unreal and inevitably led to over-estimates in every individual item of the programmes. In addition, most estimates in the programmes contained insurance margins against contingencies and sometimes against possible cuts. It is, therefore, no wonder that the demand for raw materials in 1942, as anticipated in February 1942, turned out to be nearly twenty percent higher than the actual intake of raw materials by industry in that year. The estimates were revised in the middle of the year; yet even in their June version they were about nine percent higher than actual consumption. The over-estimates were especially marked in programmes for steel, non-ferrous metals and softwood—all of them materials where shortages were expected to be most serious.

This tendency to over-estimate, inherent in the nature of wartime programmes, did not cease, but in general the margins over over-estimates

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estimates were themselves becoming small. In the same period, however, the gap between supply and requirements narrowed down to an extent far greater than improved estimates alone can explain. A further and more potent cause will be found in further reduction of requirements which were forced upon the Ministries by economic circumstances. This time what was being reduced was not only the requirements of raw materials based on current production programmes, but the current production programmes themselves. In December 1942 the Prime Minister, in his endeavours to protect stocks, enjoined upon the Ministries drastic reductions in their requirements of imported raw materials.³⁸ But even before these economies could be carried into effect the supply departments, and in the first place the Ministry of Supply, had to cut down most of their forward plans for expansion. For in the meantime the shortage of manpower became so pronounced that it made general retrenchment in economic effort inevitable. Consumption of raw materials was bound to follow suit. The peak demands were reached earlier than originally planned, somewhere in the middle of 1943, and ran at lower levels. In short, the main reason why the deficiency of labour was far greater.

(c) THE LABOUR FAMINE

The growing shortage of labour was rapidly becoming the main obstacle to continued expansion, the one limiting factor to which all others were rapidly reduced. The difficulties of labour supplies had been, of course, the inescapable accompaniment of industrial progress from the earliest days of rearmament.³⁹ But whereas before the end of 1941 the labour problems were mostly local and were largely confined to skilled workers, by 1942 the labour problem had become that of manpower in general.

It is not  that the shortages of skilled labour were no longer felt. Dilution and training had much progressed and the total number of skilled operatives, more especially of skilled engineers, was now very much greater than it had been at the beginning of the war. By the middle of 1942 one and a quarter million people in the engineering industry alone were drawing skilled rates of pay as compared with about half that number in June 1940 in the 'engineering and allied industries'.⁴⁰ But skilled men's wages did not always go to wholly skilled men. Managers now frequently complained that the quality of

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skilled labour was much lower, even if the quantity was higher. What is more, even the quantity, high as it was, was not equal to the demand. For in spite of up-grading, dilution and concentration of production⁴¹ the demand was growing with the general expansion of war industry and also with the development of new techniques requiring special training and aptitude. Welding was probably the most insatiable of the new skilled grades. In the course of 1942, 1943 and 1944 welding came to be adopted in almost every branch of metal-working. The change in shipbuilding was perhaps the most abrupt, and more will be said about it later,⁴² but welded construction had also made great headway in the manufacture of aircraft, gun carriages, engineering stores and tanks. Fortunately it did not take as long to train a welder as it did a skilled worker in alternative processes—a riveter or skilled foundryman. It was also fortunate that women often proved well fitted to the delicate and painstaking character of the work and were trained in very large numbers, more especially in the engineering Royal Ordnance Factories. Nevertheless, the demand for highly skilled welders always exceeded the supply. Equally unsatisfied remained the demand for shipwrights, platers and riveters in the shipyards, toolmakers, electricians, fitters, draughtsmen and some other higher categories of industrial skill. In general, shortages of skilled labour were still sufficiently real to be used as convenient alibi for recurrent production problems in the aircraft industry and elsewhere. But the shortage was especially acute in the shipbuilding industry where, in spite of the technical transformation which was to take place in the course of 1943, skilled labour was still needed in proportions higher than those which prevailed in other branches of war industry.

All these difficulties, however, were now merged into the rapidly growing shortage of labour of every kind and the gradual exhaustion of manpower resources. The exhaustion was not, of course, unexpected or unheralded. Manpower was the ultimate limit of the war effort 1914–18, and eve since the beginning of rearmament the planners and the administrators of war industry always assumed that if another war were to come the industrial effort would again be limited by manpower. This was the obvious postulate of the arguments for and against a large field army at the beginning of the war, and a rough notion of an eventual limit of manpower reserves also underlay the later discussions of the Army intake which were to lead to Mr. Churchill's directive of March 1941.⁴³

The size of the manpower reserves or the time when they would give out could not, of course, be determined in advance with any

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accuracy. Full and reliable manpower budgets were not available until the last eighteen months of the war, and in the meantime it was impossible to measure with any accuracy either the actual needs or the future requirements of the Services and of war industries. Rough estimates were, however, made, and were sufficient to foretell a general labour shortage some time in 1941 or 1942. Though in its report of May 1940 Lord Stamp's Survey of Economic and Financial Plans was mainly concerned with the period over which the current programme of war effort could be achieved, its implied prediction was that manpower resources would be wholly taken up by the end of the current programme.

On the other hand, the Beveridge committee of the autumn and winter of 1940⁴⁴ was, as its name shows, primarily concerned with the future supplies of men and women for the Services and war industries, and its findings were not only more definite and precise than anything hitherto available, but they were also more strictly relevant to the main problem, of labour resources. On the strength of the evidence available to it the committee calculated that by the end of 1941 the personnel of the Forces and of war industries would under their current plans by some 9.5 millions strong, 3.5 millions more than in mid-1940. The needs of the fighting Services (including civil defence) would have to be met largely by drafting into the Services some 1.7 million men, previously excluded from call-up or shielded from military service by reserved occupations or otherwise retained by civil occupations or even in war industry. As a result of these measures the munitions industry stood to lose some 300,000 men, whereas its estimated needs by the autumn of 1941 were for an additional 1,465,000 workers. The shortage in the munitions industry would thus be very great—far greater than transfer of men from other occupations could cover. The committee reckoned that by getting hold of youths below military age, of older men, and of men physically unfit, war industry might scrape up a million or so. This would still leave a deficit of men—300,000 or thereabouts—in the munitions industry as well of a further deficit of some 700,000 cause by the withdrawal of men from the non-munitions industries and services. The deficits, as well as the additional demand of the Forces and civil defence, could be covered b recruiting some 1,690,000 women, and in the opinion of the committee this number could not be found without impinging upon population groups not normally reckoned as 'employable', and in the first place upon married women. This, by implication, would be the country's last reserve of labour.

The estimates of the Beveridge inquiry were not, and could not, be borne out in detail, for future demands of both the Forces and war

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industry could not be measured in advance with any precision; but the general prophecy proved only too true. When in July 1941 the War Cabinet asked for a survey of demands and of resources and that Ministry of Labour presented its first Manpower Survey based on its midsummer count of employment books, the state of the country's manpower resources appeared not far different from the Beveridge forecast. The total in the Forces and the munitions industries was about eight millions, not 9.5 millions as anticipated by the Beveridge Committee, but then the year was not yet up,⁴⁵ and much of the Services' demand to the end of the year was still to be met. Moreover, civil defence and some further 775,000 men and women for munitions and other essential industries, such as mining and timber. And no sooner were these figures published than the autumn bomber programmes presented the Ministry of Labour with additional demands from the Ministry of Aircraft Production to the tune of 850,000 men and women.⁴⁶

The country was thus entering 1942 with demands for labour for that year at least 1.5 million higher than the figure on which the Beveridge Committee had based its dismal prophecy and its drastic recommendations. In other words, even before Pearl Harbor and the extension of the war to the Far East the country was faced with the near prospect of a labour famine. The events following Pearl Harbor brought the prospect of famine nearer still. Throughout 1942 and 1943 the Services and the supply ministries, responding to the rising needs of the war, presented a series of ever-growing demands for manpower which far outstripped the possible yield of the country's reservoirs of men and women.

The reservoirs were in any case being drawn on to the full. The transfer from other fields of employment had by 1942 gone as far as it could go, for apart from distributive trades, civil engineering and building, from which some further transfers were still possible, the civilian industries and services no longer possessed any big residues of transferable labour. In order to reinforce the Services the Government introduced individual deferment in the place of the system of reservation hitherto in force under the Schedule of Reserved Occupations.⁴⁷ This change was designed not to disturb production at its most essential points, but war industry was now bound to lose some of the men previously shielded from enlistment by the reservation of entire occupations. The extension of the age of conscription to fifty-one

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years also impinged on the supplies of males still available for industrial employment: supplies which had in any case been attenuated to a mere trickle. There was a small intake of men invalided from the Services and of older men, of immigrant labour from Ireland, of timber-workers from Canada and Honduras; later came also prisoners-of-war. But the contribution of most of these sources could make was not great, and, from the point of view of war industry, it was mostly indirect. Prisoners replaced in various outdoor occupations men drawn into the Services or into war production, but their main spheres of employment were agriculture and navvying. Irish labour was more generally available for industrial employment and, on one occasion early in 1942 a single large batch of Irish labour, shepherded into this country by the Ministry of Labour, helped to clear a difficult 'bottleneck; in drop-forging labour. Over the period as a whole the direct contribution from Ireland reached quite a sizeable figure. During 1940 and 1941 the total number of Irish immigrants who took up employment in this country exceeded 60,000, and a further 100,000 came in during 1942 and 1943, but by no means all the immigrants sought employment in war production or in other essential occupations.

New supplies of labour commensurate with new demands could come from the only domestic source not yet exhausted by the beginning of 1942, i.e. women; and the Government proceeded to mobilise all the women that could possibly be mobilised. In his early approaches to the problem of the employment of women, Mr. Bevin may have given the impression of holding back. But now that all other domestic sources had given out, and the demands of the war machine were high and urgent, he was prepared to proceed very quickly and to go very far. In the end the Ministry of Labour and the War Cabinet in general went farther in this direction than the war governments of any other country, not excluding Germany and Russia, and even farther than the advocates of drastic mobilisation in 1940 had anticipated. The net cast by the Registration for Employment Order of March 1941 had by October 1942 been spread to take in the bulk of the young and middle-aged women in the country' by then all women between the ages of 18 and 45½ had registered at employment exchanges. When in the summer of 1941 an urgent call for labour for aircraft production had to be answered, another 20,000 women or thereabouts were scraped up by extending the registration to 'grandmothers'—the women of 50.

Extension of the age limits was not, of course, in itself the main instrument of mobilisation. What brought women in was the growing vigour with which the Orders were applied, the wider use of official powers, and, above all, the gradual paring down of the definitions of 'immobility' and 'domestic responsibilities' by which a large group of

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women had originally been shielded from mobilisation. In March 1941 when the registration of women was first introduced, the measure was directed at 'unoccupied' women.⁴⁸ Only later in the year did it aim largely at identifying women in 'less essential' occupations, and even then its immediate object was not so much to compel women to move to more essential occupations as to measure and to locate the supplies immediately available for transfer. But in the course of 1942 and 1943 the emphasis gradually changed. Inducement and, in the end, compulsion had to be used to enforce transfers. Power of direction were extend to mobile women already in employment and the, by degrees, the definitions of mobility and the grounds for exemption were tightened. In the spring of 1942 exemption from work on grounds of 'household responsibilities' was confined to women looking after at least one other person. In practice, the immunity was narrowed down still further to women looking after children living at home; all other women with 'household responsibilities' were to be regarded as available for work, full-time or part-time. And if, at the time, women, deemed available only for part-time work, were not yet subjected to compulsory direction, within a year this later exemption was also removed.

By these measures the Ministry of Labour succeeded in decanting into the Forces and into war industry the entire supply of the country's employable women. Thereby the level of employment in the country was lifted to an exceptionally high peak. By the middle of 1943 the total employment in the country (including the Forces) reached 22 millions, which was at least a million more than in June 1941.⁴⁹ More men and women were now drawn into the Services and war industry than in the war of 1914–18. Not only was the total number at the beginning of 1944 some three to four millions more than at the peak of manpower mobilisation in 1918, but it also formed a larger proportion of the total population—thirty-two percent compared with twenty-eight percent. The actual number of people directly drawn into service was even greater than the statistics of mobilisation at first sight indicate. For in the statistical computation two part-time workers counted as one whole-time person, and there were, at the end of 1943, the equivalent of 750,000 whole-time workers (mostly women) engaged in part-time work.⁵⁰ There were also large numbers of men and, above all, women, outside the registration, foreigners, men and women of sixty-five years of age and over. In addition, there were a million voluntary workers, mostly women, whose contribution to the national effort was difficult to measure, but who

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undoubtedly replace in the national life a large amount of paid labour.

The supply of manpower for the war was thus greatly expanded, but the expansion could not go on much longer. The inflow of manpower was bound to slacken, and the time was bound to arrive when the human reserves would be exhausted, and industry and the Services would have to reduce their estimates. The coming of the exhaustion point had been long foreseen and even dated. In September 1942 the Joint War Production Staff foresaw in their Report that the time would come when the essential needs of the Forces for men would have to be met by cutting the munitions programmes. Although precise estimates of future industrial needs could not be formed, they showed that between April 1942 and December 1943 the current programmes of the Services and of war industry would require for their fulfilment another two million men or women, which was out of all proportion to what could be scraped up by further measures of mobilisation. They therefore foresaw that the Service demands might have to be reduced, and that the munitions industry would have to obtain higher output not from additional bodies but from higher productivity of the bodies they already employed. In October, almost before the warning of the Joint War Production Staff had had time to sink in, the Ministry of Labour's Survey of Manpower covering the twelve months mid-June 1942 to mid-June 1943 (the first Manpower Budget in the proper sense of the term) revealed the full length to which the demand for manpower was outrunning the supply.

With manpower resources exhausted and total employment about to recede; it was no longer possible for the War Cabinet to plan for continued and uninterrupted expansion along the entire front of the war effort. The need for retrenching the demand for manpower was brought home to the War Cabinet by the Lord President in his report of November the same year. The Prime Minister had requested him to consider the labour prospect to the end of 1943 and to lay before the War Cabinet the issues which emerged from the Ministry of Labour's Survey. His verdict was that the additional requirements of the Services and of the munitions industries would be that date approach 2.7 millions or thereabouts. On the assumption that the remaining reserves of 'unoccupied' women could yield up as much as half a million, and that 'less essential' occupations could be made to give up another half a million, there would still remain a deficit of well over a million. Allowing for every possible exaggeration in the demand of the supply departments (the Lord President put them at 150,000), the gap between supply and demand still remained perilously near the figure of a million. The Lord President's conclusion, therefore, was that the Government must face the fact that manpower

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resources did not match the current programmes. The country could not at the same time meet the essential needs of the Navy, provide for an Army of 100 divisions⁵¹ and expand the Air Force to a total of over 600 operation squadrons. The total calls on manpower would have to be cut and further adjustments be made.

The Lord President and his immediate advisers on manpower problems based their conclusions on the assumption that if 1944 were to see the peak of the military effort, and if victory were to be achieved by the end of that year, the peak of industrial effort and of employment would have to come in 1943. After 1943 war industry would have to contract in order to provide men for a final military effort in 1944. The alternative, i.e. that of continuing to put equal weight into both sides of the war effort would mean a gradual loss of efficiency in both.⁵²

However unwelcome, the conclusion was not unexpected, for by the end of 1942 the labour deficit had ceased to be a mere accounting forecast. Hitherto, it had been possible to provide for excesses of demand over immediate supply by mobilising additional categories of men and women, and by contracting still further the less essential fields of employment. There were now few prospects of fresh supplies from either source. By the end of 1942 most civilian industries and services had contracted as far as the maintenance of communal life on these islands would allow. Indeed in some civilian industries, such as transport and laundries, it had gone too far, and now that American forces were arriving in the country these and some other civilian occupations had to be reinforced with new recruits. Nor could further measures of registration and mobilisation of women be expected to yield much result.⁵³ The British Government, and Mr. Churchill in particular, had no difficulty in recognising that the limit of British mobilisation was near.

From the end of 1942 periodical cuts in supply programmes had to be made and manpower additions had to be doled out at much reduced rates; additions at some points had to be matched by subtractions at others. The Prime Minister's first set of proposals for reductions in the Service and munitions programmes were made very shortly after the Lord President's report:⁵⁴ their effects on labour allocations to the supply departments are shown in Table 32.

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Manpower allocations to the end of 1943 as authorised in December 1942

TABLE 32		Thousands
	The demands in July 1942	Cuts	Allocations authorised
Admiralty (Supply)	186	75	111
Ministry of Supply	148	226	-78
Ministry of Aircraft Production	603	100	503
TOTAL	937	401	536

The requirements were thus drastically cut, and the Ministry of Supply was for the first time asked to reduce its total labour force, but the demands of the bomber programmes⁵⁵ and of naval construction⁵⁶ were still sufficiently insistent to received between them an additional allocation of some 614,000 workers by the end of 1943. The position did not materially change in the course of that year. When in the spring of 1943 the Ministry of Labour presented an interim survey of manpower, the labour intake of the supply departments was still increasing. The Ministry of Aircraft Production may not have been getting all the workers to which it was entitled, but the Ministry of Supply had not yet succeeded in reducing its labour force and was still adding to its establishment. The survey was followed by further endeavours to bring down the manpower 'targets' of the Services and of the supply departments. The extent to which labour demands had been exaggerated had by now become apparent, and cuts could be correspondingly more severe. Table 33 shows the numbers to be allotted to the supply departments by the end of the year under the revised allocations of July 1943.

Manpower allocations to the end of 1943 as revised in July 1943

TABLE 33		Thousands
	Allocations of December 1942	Revised allocations of July 1943
Admiralty (Supply)	111	111
Ministry of Supply	-78	-165
Ministry of Aircraft Production	503	259
TOTAL	536	205

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Thus, on paper at least, the additional supply of labour to war industry was reduced to little more than 200,000. Yet when the 1943 Manpower Survey appeared in the autumn of that year it revealed new and still higher demands for 1944. The total requirement for additional men and women for the Services and industry came to 1,190,000.⁵⁷ In December 1943 the three supply departments tabled urgent demands for at least 114,000 men and women in addition to the numbers they employed at that time.⁵⁸ The Ministry of Supply needed an addition 31,000, the Admiralty 71,000, the Ministry of Aircraft Production 12,000, and the other branches of production participating in the preparation for the invasion claimed another 6,000.

The full incidence of these demands will be realised if it is remembered that under the previous cuts, those of December 1942 and July 1943, the planned size of the armed forces had to be curtailed to relieve pressure on manpower. The reductions had involved a cut of four divisions in the planned strength of the Army, of fifty-seven squadrons in the R.A.F.'s programme for 1943 and of eighty-nine squadrons in the programme to the end of June 1944. In addition, owing to the cut in the labour intake of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, a loss of fourteen heavy bomber squadrons in 1943 and of nineteen heavy bomber squadrons by mid-1944 was expected. No such further cuts were possible at the beginning of 1944 when preparations for final battle were in hand. At the same time natural wastage alone, not counting battle casualties, was expected to reduce in the course of the year the total number of employed population in the country by 150,000.

Hence the continued endeavours of the Government to prune the supply programmes. Hence also the continuous regimen of stringent though shifting priorities. Of the three supply departments, the Ministry of Aircraft Production had enjoyed at the turn of 1941 and 1942 the first claim on resources, mainly by virtue of its all-important bomber programme. In April 1942, however, the War Cabinet approved a high programme of naval construction to deal with the mounting attacks on shipping, and no sooner had this urgency passed away than the need for landing-craft became acute. From May 1942 the Admiralty accordingly acquired the highest priority for important items of its programmes, a priority which it continued to enjoy until the preparations for D-Day began to overshadow all other military objectives. In the final months of preparation the bomber had again to be singled out for preferential treatment, and so also were the special offensive projects on which the Ministry of Supply were engaged. Since the middle of 1942 that Ministry had been cutting its programmes and its manpower in order to facilitate the general reducations

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in war industry, and also in order to make possible continued additions to labour in the Ministries enjoying higher priority. Now the emphasis shifted to it again. In the summer of 1944 the needs of the British armies on the Continent reacted again on its programmes, and the Ministry of Supply had to be allowed to add somewhat to its labour force in spite of the far-reaching cuts which had by then been introduced into the munitions industry as a whole (see Table 34).

Manpower allocations for 1944

TABLE 34			Thousands
	Original demands	Allocations of December 1943	Revised allocations: September 1944
Admiralty (Supply)	71	-13	-68
Ministry of Supply	31	-220	-170
Ministry of Aircraft Production	12	-69	-198
TOTAL	114	-302	-436

The actual emphasis of war production shifted even more frequently and irregularly than the alternating priorities of the three supply departments indicated, for within each of the three main programmes the weight attaching to individual weapons and stores rose and fell with military events. These changed will be recounted in somewhat greater detail further on;⁵⁹ but they must be borne in mind in tracing the course which the war economy was compelled to take under the double compulsion of expanding requirements and diminishing resources. The progress of war production had to be 're-tailored', hemmed in at some point, released at others, in accordance with the changing emphasis of strategic necessity and with the dwindling reserves of productive resources. But even thus 're-tailored' it might not have been sufficient to meet the most essential requirements of British forces without much greater American assistance.

(4)

The American Munitions

(a) THE NEW NEED

New importance now attached to American supplies. A history of British war production may not, of course, be the right place in which to tell the story of American supplies in all its aspects. But the two themes were closely interwoven, and the weave got closer as the war

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was approaching its end. If in the earlier period, i.e. before the middle of the end of 1941, British expectations of 'finished' munitions were not greatly dependent upon the output of American factories, by 1942 and thereafter they had more and more to be adjusted to what could or could not be obtained from the United States. With its economic resources engaged to the full Britain found herself unable to meet the additional demands for munitions in the same proportion as before. As it was, some cuts in individual programmes had to be made. It was only the rising scale of American assistance that prevented the cuts from being still greater. Without it most essential preparations for the offensive employment of the British forces and for their needs in the field of battle would have had to be sacrificed; indeed the whole problem of Britain's war effort and the scale of her combatant action would have had to be radically recast. By 1944 reliance on American supplies went so far as to enforce what amounted to a division of labour between the war industries in the two countries. But long before then the American supplies figured so prominently in British calculations that the size and the character of the home-produced deliveries could not be understood without taking note of what had come to be expected and in fact was being received from the United States.

(b) SELF-SUFFICIENCY

It has already been explained that in the early stages of the war the British war effort was more or less self-sufficient. The size of the British forces, the scale of British war production, the pace of rearmament and presumably the scale of military preparations were for the time being determined by the manpower and economic resources directly available to the United Kingdom. Britain had been producing at home the bulk of her weapons and building up her Forces to an establishment capable of being supplied out of domestic production. This does not of course mean that the British Government was making a deliberate choice between alternative plans resting on a statistical military argument. Its general attitude was much more opportunist and less articulate than that. While American support was uncertain and the British resources not yet fully taken up, there appeared to be no other way of planning the war effort than by taking the self-sufficiency of the war effort more or less for granted. Not until the American alliance had become a reality and British manpower was on the point of being fully mobilised did it become necessary or possible to conceive a different distribution of resources.

The assumption of self-sufficiency was of course from the outset tempered by a number of factors which did not directly concern British relations with the United  States. From the very beginning of

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the war Canada, a member of the Commonwealth, figured in British calculations of combatant strength as well as in British programmes of supplies. At first she may not have figured very largely. Half-hearted attempts had been made before the war to prepare the ground for munitions production in Canada, but apart from a modest aircraft programme the only significant results had been small orders for Bren guns and field artillery. The 1st Canadian Division was equipped almost entirely in the United Kingdom. Nor was the position much altered by the outbreak of war. Doubts about the ability of Canadian industry to deliver the goods quickly and shortage of dollars combined to keep the British munitions programme in Canada before Dunkirk within very narrow bounds—ten corvettes, small quantities of gun barrels, ammunition and explosives, and capacity for an eventual output of 250 aircraft a month, mostly trainers. Even so, up to June 1940 a more important role in the supply of munitions, other than aircraft, was allotted to Canada than to the United States.

These assumptions, however, were bound to be influenced by the growing numbers of overseas troops to be armed. Whereas the planned establishment of the field army to be raised at home seldom exceeded the equivalent of fifty divisions, Britain's responsibility for arming and equipping troops under her command had by the end of 1942 extended to a large number of allied and colonial divisions (at one time that accretion was expected to reach the equivalent of more than seventy-five divisions).⁶⁰ The rough and ready assumption of self-sufficiency which may have underlain the planned distribution of resources in 1939 was obviously untenable in the conditions of swollen liabilities of 1942.

The demands on American supplies—not only their size but their very raison d'être—changed accordingly.⁶¹ To begin with they were very modest, and their modesty reflected not only the scale of the war as it was conceived in Britain but also a number of factors more specifically American. Most important of all was the difficulty of payment. As long as the rule of 'cash and carry' applied, dollar payments in the United States were severely rationed; and the total ration, in itself small, was in its turn mainly given over to non-munitions goods—food, raw materials and machine tools. Dependence on American and Canadian raw materials was great and it grew greater as the war advanced. Dependence on American machine tools was never again to be as great as it had been in the years 1939 to 1941:⁶² the time when the main network of British war

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factories was being equipped. So even if American industry had been capable of delivering large quantities of munitions (it will be shown presently that with the possible exception of aircraft American output was as yet small even by British standards)⁶³ the dollar ration would not have allowed them to be bought in any quantity.

From this point of view the situation changed in the summer of 1940. With the dreadful prospect of defeat and invasion so near there was no sense in keeping within the limits of the dollar allocation calculated on a three-year basis. There was in any case no question of Mr. Churchill's Government doing so; and one of the first manifestations of the 'reckless abandon' with which the war was now to be waged was the decision no longer to refrain from ordering American supplies through lack of dollars.

The decision had an immediate effect on the scale of British purchases from the United States; yet it made little difference to the 'make-up' of British requirements. The need for American raw materials and machine tools was even greater after Dunkirk than it had been before. When on the morrow of Dunkirk there occurred the chance of acquiring the large quantities of machine tools ordered in the United States by the French, it was eagerly seized by the supply departments, and indeed the initiative came from the Ministry of Supply. The need for American machine tools was acutely felt all through 19841, and the demand for special-purpose tools of American make and design remained high and unsatisfied to the very end of the war.⁶⁴ As for raw materials, the expanding output of munitions, the loss of several European sources of raw materials and the mounting difficulty of shipping continued to raise the volume of raw materials obtained from the United States.

On the other hand, the flow of munitions across the Atlantic was for the time being bound to be scanty; and it was so made up as to leave little scope for the purchase of standard weapons in common use and least of all for the army weapons in the Ministry of Supply programmes. The main claim of American supplies was from the outset conceded to the R.A.F. The United States possessed in peacetime a substantial aircraft industry, and the early British orders for aircraft could therefore be cast on a larger scale and stood a better chance of  early delivery than those of the other Services. In mid-summer 1940 while the Battle of Britain was being fought Lord Beaverbrook made it clear that in addition to current contracts he would be prepared to take all the aircraft which could be produced up to 3,000 a month. The figure was of course hyperbolic: in spite of the rising rate of deliveries, the average monthly exports of American

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aircraft in the second half of 1941 ran at about 270.⁶⁵ But in general Lord Beaverbrook was as good as his word and throughout 1940 and 1941 pressed for as many aircraft as America could possibly yield, thereby greatly outweighing the volume and the value of American supplies to the other Services.

By comparison, the volume and value of what the Navy and Army received from the United States in 1940–41 (not counting the weapons from old stocks which the President dispatched in the summer of 1940 or the old destroyers ceded later in the year) was exceedingly small. The total value of Admiralty contracts at the height of the naval crisis of 1940–41 stood at about £33 millions; they included orders for munitions amounting to about £20 millions, for engines including motor-boat engines to about £9 millions and for small vessels, other than warships, and motor boats for about £600,000. With the exception of small ships, no naval vessels properly speaking were to be ordered from the United States until the middle of 1941. The main demand was for merchant vessels, for even the authors of the pre-war plans had assumed that the Merchant Navy would have to draw on American shipbuilding resources. Yet the first Kaiser-Todd contract for Liberty ships—sixty in all—was not concluded until December 1940; the great Kaiser organisation for prefabricated shipbuilding was not set going until the spring of 1941, and the first Kaiser ships were not launched for at least another six months.

The Ministry of Supply orders were almost entirely confined to so-called 'deficiencies', i.e. urgent items which British industry could not for the time being supply in sufficient numbers, and to so-called 'insurance' orders against possible losses in output through bombing or other causes. Even at their highest the deficiencies did not form a large proportion of the British programmes. On occasions the Ministry of Supply were anxious to get from the United States relatively large quantities of certain exceptional weapons. This in August 1940 the Ministry of Supply were anxious to get from the United States relatively large quantities of certain exceptional weapons. Thus in August 1940 the Ministry of Supply authorised the placing of contracts in the United States for 3,000 cruiser tanks, about thirty percent of total tank requirements. The list of deficiencies which in September 1940 Sir Walter Layton, as he then was, took with him to Washington included 1,600 heavy anti-aircraft guns, or just over thirty percent of the total requirements;⁶⁶ 1,800 field guns, nearly thirty percent of requirements and 1,250 anti-tank guns, twelve percent of requirements. The other deficiencies on his list were less than ten percent of requirements and most of the Ministry

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of Supply's stores were not on the list at all. A rough computation of the total deficiencies then list represented rather less than five percent of the Ministry's current programmes at Z + 27 (30th November 1941) measured by values. Even this estimate exaggerated the real need, for the defici