Wheels of War

The name of a book has to be right. Telling some old friends about the book recently, it became very clear that it is about the mechanisation of the army - a monumental task. So I am now working to a revised title, Wheels of War.

“The British Army which crossed to France in 1939 differed from other armies at that time in being fully mechanised.” Report on the British Expeditionary Force

In a little over eight months they discovered to their cost just what a truly mechanised army could do as German General Guderian and his Panzers drove all before them and would have taken the whole force prisoner had Hitler not hesitated.

The next five years would see a completed transformation of the British Army as the the number of vehicles grew from 40,000 to 1.5 million.

The driving force behind mechanisation was the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and the 250,000 soldiers, ATS and civilians who worked in over one hundred massive depots in the UK and in the theatres of war worldwide, but also the motor industry both here in the UK and in Canada and the USA.

Wheels of War is their story.