The final book of the trilogy on army supply

The final  book of the trilogy on army supply
The third of my books on army supply

Saturday 28 October 2017

Remembrance 2017

In one year's time it will be a century since the armistice was signed to begin the end of what came to be called the Great War. There will be a host of events to mark the anniversary.
This year, in the comparative quiet, I take time to reflect.
I have spent the last four years immersed in war, as I have been writing successively War on Wheels and then Ordnance. I have read of terrible loss of life, examples of bravery but mainly the dogged work of ordinary people in trying to make sure that our soldiers would have all they needed to defeat the enemy. It was inspiring and has made me think long and hard.
The one enduring image is of waste.
My own father, who led the RAOC in WW2, gave a number of speeches with the title The Waste of War. He had witnessed massive waste of human life in both world wars, but a colossal expenditure of materiel in WWII. As he put it, the side prepared to waste the most would emerge victorious. I might now add, after researching WW1, that alongside the waste of life, the waste of material resources was on a scale so great that made a shortage of raw material a real issue.
I encapsulate this waste in the image of the War Memorial at Chilwell.
Chilwell was a major shell filling factory in WWI and the Army Centre for Mechanisation in WWII. The Memorial remembers the 134 munition workers who lost their lives in an explosion that nearly destroyed the factory on 1 July 1918; it also remembers those who have lost their lives in WWI and later conflicts.

Monday 9 October 2017

Europe's Deadly Triumvirate

Writing Ordnance and before that, War on Wheels, I have gained more than an insight into the birth of the modern arms trade. It is not surprising that in my quest for the story of the men and women who equipped the army I should find the inventors and makers of armaments. Whilst it might not be surprising, it is salutary.

As my own father said, when speaking of the RAOC, arming the British army goes back to the willow to arm the archers. It progresses through to gun powder and shot, cannon and ball. My starting point though is the rifled gun invented by William Armstrong. I talk of him quite a lot in Ordnance.

A recent biography of Armstrong by Henrietta Heald looks at the competition in armament manufacture in the years following the Crimean War. She looks at Armstrong, of course, but also Krupp in Germany and Schneider in France, together known as 'Europe's deadly triumvirate'.

She quotes Manchester's biography of Krupp. 'Over the next eighty years they were to be celebrated first as shields of national honour and later, after their slaughtering machines were hopelessly out of control, as merchants of death.'

Monday 2 October 2017

REME 75

'Steadily the Metallurgist, the Scientist and the Engineer began to rank in importance with the General in the field; the older and perhaps more chivalrous type of conflict of the Napoleonic days was passing, just as the bow and arrow of the sixteenth century had to give place to the firearm.'

This comment was made by the writers of the history of the Wolseley Motor Company about the Great War. During that conflict a great many mechanical engineers joined the Army Ordnance Department who had responsibility for maintaining all weapons or the Army Service Corps which handled all mechanical vehicles. The tank came somewhere in between, maintained in the great central workshop at Erin in France. 

One of the huge challenges in the Great War was that skilled men were joining up and being sent to the trenches in their thousands with their skills ignored. It took the initiative of Lloyd George to ensure that skilled men were either directed to the armaments factories at home or in the AOD in the field.

In the interwar period, vehicles were added to the remit of the then RAOC and this included the creation of the Army Centre for Mechanisation at Chilwell. 

In 1942 there was growing concern within the army that men skilled in engineering were disbursed too widely in the RAOC, RASC and Royal Engineers and that is would be far more efficient to bring them together in a single Corps. In the words of the Committee's report:

Until the Army gives to mechanical and electrical engineers, as distinct from civil engineers, their appropriate place and influence in the Army system, such engineers are not likely to be caught, tested and trained as well as in the Navy; there is a danger that they will be missed by men who main interests and duties lie in other fields.

It was in this way that REME came into being.

Happy Birthday!

You can read more about the mechanisation of the army in WW2 in War on Wheels and about how the army was equipped for the Great War in Ordnance. I explore further the story behind the formation of REME in Dunkirk to D Day.