Abstract
The establishment and development of the Ministry of Munitions by Lloyd George in 1915–16 was one of the Asquith Coalition’s few success stories, and the chapters devoted to munitions remain (in contrast to other chapters of the War Memoirs) a valuable contribution to our historical understanding of a comparatively neglected topic.1 War production was put on a sounder footing and rose dramatically from 1916. Lloyd George and his new ministry, he claims in the War Memoirs, laid the foundation in 1915–16 for the Allies’ material superiority in 1917–18. His account of the work of the Ministry of Munitions in the War Memoirs, however, can be criticised on a number of fronts. His allegations of War Office inefficiency prior to his appointment in June 1915 are, for example, greatly exaggerated, and to a significant extent quantity came at the expense of quality in many areas.
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Notes
For general accounts of Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, see R.J.Q. Adams, Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions 1915–1916 (London: Cassell, 1978);
Chris Wrigley, ‘The Ministry of Munitions: An Innovatory Department’, in Kathleen Burk (ed.), War and the State: The Transformation of British Government 1914–1919 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), pp. 32–56;
John Grigg, Lloyd George: From Peace to War 1912–1916 (London: HarperCollins, 1997), ch. 11;
Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert, David Lloyd George, A Political Life: Organizer of Victory 1912–1916 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), ch. 6;
Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol. I To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1065–113
And Keith Grieves, ‘Lloyd George and the Management of the British War Economy’, in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilisation on the Western Front 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 369–87.
See Michael and Eleonor Brock (eds), H.H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 558;
Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 1928), II, p. 77; on Lloyd George, H.C. Deb. 5s, col. 318, 21 April 1915, cf. War Memoirs, I, pp. 195–96; and PRO MUN 9/33: Draft chapters for War Memoirs.
Martin Gilbert, The Challenge of War: Winston S. Churchill 1914–1916 (London: Minerva, 1990), pp. 452–53.
BL Balfour Add. MSS 49692: Asquith to Balfour, 20 May 1915. See also Asquith’s daughter’s account in Mark Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), pp. 50–51.
Chris Wrigley, ‘The Ministry of Munitions: An Innovatory Department’, in Kathleen Burk (ed.), War and the State: The Transformation of British Government 1914–1919 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 38; a similar point is made by Strachan, The First World War, I, pp. 1069.
Grigg, Lloyd George, III, p. 183. Cf. Great Britain, History of the Ministry of Munitions, 12 vols (first published in London: 1921–22, Microfiche Ed., Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976), IX, Part I, p. 11.
George H. Cassar, Kitchener: Architect of Victory (London: William Kimber, 1977), pp. 333–35; Kitchener, according to Cassar, aroused Lloyd George’s ‘envy and hatred’; and Lloyd George saw Kitchener as blocking his path to power; the former was ‘destitute of all moral qualities … [and] placed his own interests ahead of the nation’.
Duncan Crow, Man of Push and Go: The Life of George Mncaulay Booth (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965), pp. 114–15.
Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Fire-power: British Army Weapons and Theories of War 1904–1945 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), pp. 98–99.
James E. Edmonds, Military Operations: France and Belgium 1916, Vol. I (London: Macmillan, 1932); Vol. II (London: Macmillan, 1938), I, 123, II, pp. 568–69.
Ibid.; Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p. 238;
See also Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 69; according to War Office statistics, there were 418 heavy guns and howitzers (6 in. and over) in France on 1 July 1916, compared with 1328 just over one year later;
War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War (London: HMSO, 1922, repr. London Stamp Exchange, 1992), pp. 441–42.
Hew Strachan, ‘The Battle of the Somme and British Strategy’, journal of Strategic Studies, 21, 1, March 1998, p. 85, and his The First World War, I, p. 1085; see also Bidwell and Graham, Fire-power, pp. 98–99; Middlebrook, First Day on the Somme, p. 69. Of course, the problem of unexploded shells was not confined to the British. Unexploded shells from 1914 to 1918 still lie in all the battlefields of northern France and Belgium; see, on Verdun, for example,
Donovan Webster, Aftermath: The Remnants of War (New York and Toronto: Vintage, 1998), p. 18.
Trevor Wilson, ‘A Prime Minister Reflects: The War Memoirs of David Lloyd George’, in John A. Moses and Christopher Pugsley (eds), The German Empire and Britain’s Pacific Dominions 1871–1919: Essays on the Role of Australia and New Zealand in an Age of Imperialism (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2000), p. 48; Strachan, The First World War, I, p. 1086; Bidwell and Graham, Fire-power, pp. 98–99.
Military Operations 1916, II, p. 282, n. 1; see also John Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War (London: Leo Cooper, 1992 ed.), pp. 130–42
And Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 204–05.
Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare 1900–1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 63–66;
David G. Hermann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 20.
On the origins of the tank see Ernest D. Swinton, Eyewitness: Being Personal Reminiscences of Certain Phases of the Great War, including the Genesis of the Tank (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932); also on Swinton IWM Gwynne MSS HAG/23/2: Lord Algernon Percy (ADC to George V) to H.A. Gwynne (editor of the Morning Post), 19 September 1916, who emphasised E.D. Swinton’s pivotal role in the conception of the tank.
See however J.P. Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces 1903–1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 34–38, who rather downplays Swinton’s role.
See also Wilson, Myriad Faces, pp. 338–45; B.H. Liddell Hart, The Tanks, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 1959), I, pp. 21–26; Ministry of Munitions, XII, Part III, ch. 1, on Swinton esp. pp. 3–6 and Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, vol. I (London: Collins, 1970), pp. 146–47; Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire, pp. 148–60
David J. Childs, A Peripheral Weapon? The Production and Employment of British Tanks in the First World War (Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood, 1999).
Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001), p. 146;
J.P. Harris, ‘Haig and the Tank’, in Brian Bond and Nigel Cave (eds), Haig: A Reappraisal 70 Years On (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1999), pp. 147–48;
John Terraine, Haig: The Educated Soldier (London: Hutchinson, 1963), pp. 221–22; Ministry of Munitions, XII, Part III, pp. 33–35.
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 6 vols (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923–31), II, pp. 89–90.
Military Operations 1916, II, pp. 365–66. By late 1917, if anyone in the German High Command had realised the tank’s potential it was too late; the German economy was by then ‘strained to capacity’ and could not have produced tanks in any significant numbers; see Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 179.
Quoted in Martin Gilbert, World in Torment: Winston S. Churchill 1917–1922 (London: Minerva, 1990 ed.), p. 62.
See Tim Travers, How the War Was Won: Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western front 1917–1918 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 20–22; Wilson, Myriad Faces, pp. 486–89; Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire, pp. 153–54.
Military Operations 1916, II, p. 365; Robin Prior, Churchill’s ‘World Crisis’ as History (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 239.
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© 2005 Andrew Suttie
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Suttie, A. (2005). Munitions 1914–16. In: Rewriting the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505599_5
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