Frontline and Factory

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XIX

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2. Technological Mobilization and Munitions Production: Comparative Perspectives on Germany and Austria

   • Jeffrey Allan Johnson

   Pages 1-20

3. Mobilization and Industrial Policy: Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals In The French War Effort

   • Sophie Chauveau

   Pages 21-30

4. First World War Explosives Manufacture: The British Experience

   • Wayne D. Cocroft

   Pages 31-46

5. Transforming a Village into an Industrial Town: The Royal Prussian Powder Plant in Kirchmöser (Brandenburg)

   • Sebastian Kinder

   Pages 47-60

6. Wartime Chemistry in Italy: Industry, the Military, and the Professors

   • Giuliano Pancaldi

   Pages 61-74

7. Munitions, the Military, and Chemistry in Russia

   • Nathan M. Brooks

   Pages 75-101

8. Technical Expertise and U.S. Mobilization, 1917–18: High Explosives and War Gases

   • Kathryn Steen

   Pages 103-122

9. Operating on Several Fronts: The Trans-National Activities of Royal Dutch/Shell, 1914–1918

   • Ernst Homburg

   Pages 123-144

10. Kuhlmann at War, 1914–1924

    • Erik Langlinay

    Pages 145-166

11. Organizing for Total War: DuPont and Smokeless Powder in World War I

    • John Kenly Smith Jr.

    Pages 167-178

12. Science and the Military: The Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation for Military-Technical Science

    • Manfred Rasch

    Pages 179-202

13. Managing Chemical Expertise: The Laboratories of the French Artillery and the Service des Poudres

    • Patrice Bret

    Pages 203-219

14. The War the Victors Lost: The Dilemmas of Chemical Disarmament, 1919–1926

    • Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Roy Macleod

    Pages 221-245

15. Back Matter

    Pages 247-279

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It has been said that history is a debate between the present and the past about the future. Nowhere are these lines drawn more significantly than in the study of science and war. And nowhere is the discourse more relevant, than in the study of science and technology as foundations and multipliers of military power. This book is concerned with one particularly seminal aspect of this development — the history of chemical munitions during and immediately after the First World War. The Great War, as it came to be known, was not the first industrial war, but it was the first to involve all the major industrial nations of the world. Within four years, the world witnessed unprecedented feats of industrial development, many of which drew upon and extended pre-war reservoirs of scientific and technological knowledge. The experience comes down to us as a conjuncture of scientific, economic, political and, ultimately, military departures, which by their nature involved new ways of meeting crises, and eventually new forms of critical thinking. That these new forms emerged only gradually and unexpectedly is not to underestimate their capacity to endure, or to minimize their relevance. From the Great War came patterns, assumptions, and practices which were to make an indelible mark on science and technology for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.

• Chemical Industry
• Disarmament
• Europe
• First World War
• Great War
• Industrial Chemistry
• Russia
• chemicals
• mobilization
• technology

• University of Sydney, Sydney

  Roy Macleod

• Villanova University, Lancaster Avenu e, PA

  Jeffrey Allan Johnson

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