The supply blueprint for D Day

In Detroit on Sunday 13 June 1943 UK Ordnance Chief, Bill Williams, met with his American opposite numbers and worked out what was to become the blueprint for D Day for the vital supply of spare parts for the thousands of vehicles that would cross the channel in June 1944.

A number of problems needed to be addressed.

Full sets of spare parts were being shipped, whereas experience showed that it was only 10% of items that fell regularly to be used in order to keep vehicles moving. This meant that the spares pipeline was full of items that may never or hardly ever be needed. A reduced list of frequently used spares would ease the flow.

Spares were being shipped in box sets of 100 and the receiving Ordnance staff were faced with the task of searching, 'mining', for the item they needed. Spares packed in multiples that reflected likely usage, and clearly marked would save the time spent in searching.

Different spares were needed at different periods in a campaign. A few common items would be needed for beach landings, a slightly larger number for field maintenance and a full set for Base Shop.

The spares had to be packed in clearly marked boxes for landings and these had to weigh 70lbs or less and have rope handles to facilitate handling on the beaches.

It was Bill's 42nd birthday and so an appropriate present that would make a big difference when the invasion took place.

The Lincoln Tank

In his brilliant book, The Churchill Factor, Boris Johnson gave his take on the birth of the tank. Next year Lincoln will be marking its very particular role. This is an extract from War on Wheels about the early years of the tank.

The tank was a British invention, the first examples having been manufactured by William Foster and Co in Lincoln.

In 1915 Winston Churchill became horrifically aware of the stalemate of the Western Front and how young men were being slaughtered because, whilst mankind had invented bullets and shells, it had not yet found an effective defence against them. Thus time and again the order would come for an advance and time and again it would fail with horrific loss of life. What was needed was a machine out of HG Wells, a ‘Landship' protected by steel armour capable of travelling over trenches, mud and barbed wire. With Churchill’s influence it was the Navy who made the first prototypes.

The biggest problem was the sheer weight of armour. Eventually two alternatives emerged, one with a large wheel and one with caterpillar tracks. It was not Churchill himself who gave the orders for their production, since he was out of office following the disaster of the Dardenells. Contracts for the two alternatives were awarded to Fodens for the wheeled version and Foster for the tracked vehicle. The project was of course secret and it was let known that the factories were producing motorised water ‘tanks’ for use in Mesopotamia; the name though stuck. The tracked version proved vastly superior and over four thousand were produced.

When Churchill returned to office as Minister of Munitions, he resumed oversight of the project and so had a hand in the victory at the battle of Amiens in August 1918 when 600 British Tanks sent terrified Germans into headlong defeat. In time they recovered their cool, but crucially morale had been broken by this invention with which Churchill had had more than a hand

Tanks under construction at Trittons - with thanks to Richard Pullen

The RAOC Depots

Here is a map of the #WW2 RAOC Depots

Here are some the larger ones.

Bicester, COD, Oxfordshire, OX25, Map

Bramley, CAD, Map
Branston, COD, Burton on Trent

Chilwell, COD, Nottingham, Map
Corsham, CAD, Wiltshire, Map
Derby, COD, Sinfin Lane, Map
Didcot, COD, Map
Donnington, COD, Shropshire, Map
Feltham, COD, Middx, near Browells Lane and the former Aston Martin factory (previously Whitehead Aircraft) Map
Greenford, COD, near the former Heinz factory and the Kelvin Industrial Estate (UB6), Map
Kineton, CAD, near Stratford on Avon in Warwickshire, (CV35), Map
Longtown, CAD, and COD Solway southwest of the town of Longtown in Cumbria, Map
Nesscliff, CAD, Kinnerly, Oswestry, Shropshire, SY10, Map
Old Dalby, COD, Leicestershire, Map
Weedon, COD, Map

The withdrawl to Dunkirk

An extract from an account of the retreat of ‘A’ Section 1st Brigade RAOC  Workshop gives a sense of what it might have been like. 

“On receipt of the news that Holland had been invaded, plan ‘D’ was put into operation and all outstanding work was cleared up. This included assembly of a Ford V8 engine and two Leyland Terrier Engines which had been stripped down for complete overhaul. A Humber with clutch cable trouble and two motor cycles had also been repaired…by 1800 all work in hand had been completed and returned to units and at 1830 hours the workshop moved off…two bombing raids were encountered but no damage done. Workshops were established in a large barn and surrounding buildings at Arbres…Extensive repairs were carried out to a Bofors gun which had overturned…two Bren Gun Emplacements were dug to defend the workshops…many bombing attacks were experienced.

“At Romarin a big amount of gun work was completed. One 3.7 inch AA gun was completely rewired…

“On 28 May orders were received to destroy and dump the majority of our vehicles.

“29 May in the afternoon we were again heavily shelled and moved into the sand dunes behind La Panne…at 2200 hours with 17th AA Battery [the last operating] a light battery and Regiment HQ moved to the racecourse at Dunkirk…the remainder of the vehicles were destroyed and the party marched with personal weapons and two Bren guns in good order onto the mole at Dunkirk and embarked on a destroyer at 2100 hours arriving Dover at 0450 hours on 2 June.

“It was a heart rending process. I saw one particular sergeant who had tended his specialised equipment vehicle with loving care who was in tears when we smashed costly equipment with the sledge hammers we wielded….we slashed tyres, ran engines until they seized up, put sugar in the fuel tanks and hammered cylinder blocks.

“Later, we made our way to the cooks lorry for an issue of stew. We were told it was the last meal to be served, but were each given a tin of bully beef and a packet of biscuits and told to make it last….”

AEC and the big beasts

AEC at Southall in West London, the manufacturer of the world famous London bus, turned its production in wartime to Matador and Marshall heavy trucks. These had all-wheel-drive chassis with six pairs of wheels powered by 120bhp engine through two gearboxes giving six speeds to all three axles. These beast were used, amongst other things, for transporting pipes for the construction of oil pipelines.

Design work on what became the Matador was carried out by Charles Cleaver of the Four Wheeled Drive Motor Company. AEC bought out FWD and Cleaver finished the design at the Southall Factory. The initial contract was for 200 trucks; by the end of the war 10,500 Matadors had been produced.

AEC also produced the six wheel drive model 850 which it developed from the FWD R6T. Only 57 of these beasts were produced by were used by the RAOC on occasions as temporary tank transporters.

Special Corps Instruction VE Day

Special Corps Instruction signed by Major-General 'Bill' Williams 10 May 1945

Vast number of different vehicles in WW2

Over the five years of WW2 the number of different vehicles used by the British Army grew almost exponentially. Charles Graves puts it like this, referring especially to the tank, :

‘Since 1939, under the stress of wartime conditions, a whole sequence of tanks has been developed. Beginning with the Matilda, of which there have been five designs to date, and the Valentine, of which there have been eleven, there are the Crusader with four designs, the Covenantor, the Centaur, the Cromwell with seven designs, and the Churchill with eight. On top of that, there have been six types of light tank, nine types of reconnaissance car, scout car and armoured car, together with 350 types of army lorries, and all kinds of armoured recovery vehicle…’

The reasons for the huge variety of different vehicles can now only be stabbed at. I would venture one reason as being cultural. In his book, The Industry Ordnance Team, Bill’s American opposite number Levin Campbell wrote that ‘Ordnance is responsible for the design and development of the vast majority of the weapons, ammunition and automotive vehicles of our fighting forces.’ This resulted in common specifications, common spare parts. This may well have come from the Henry Ford dictum, any colour you want so long as its black. This contrasts with the craftsmen based UK motor industry and the tradition of the gifted amateur engineer. To them, variations were seen as challenges to be tackled with relish rather than inconveniences that got in the way of efficiency. I suggest that the suppliers was only too keen to oblige when the army chiefs demanded this or that variation. In between came the Ministry and endless committees - in four years no less than four Minister of War - surely a recipe for chaos.

This is no way detracts from the magnificent way in which the motor industry served the county in war time, indeed it makes it all the more commendable that they delivered as much as they did.

Carmen of the Army

On 28 October 1941 Bill Williams gave the response to the toast at the Worshipful Company of Carmen, the City of London Livery Company for the Motor Distribution Industry.

He began by apologising for the insatiable demands he was placing on motor manufactures for both new vehicles and spare parts.

He then went on to talk about the problems of tank production explaining that this was the area of latest development for the army Carmen business.

‘There is not only the tank itself, but the guns, the machine guns, the wireless which has to operate under the most difficult conditions, and stand up to incredibly rough treatment, and many other things as well - watches, binoculars, sighting instruments and other secret devices of all sorts. All these are items of extreme delicacy in design and manufacture and need skilled hands to make them. All these different articles of equipment have to be married together in our Ordnance Depots before the tank can be issued to the troops or fighting unit….

'There must be no mistakes. Everything must be of the best, the best armour-plating, the best guns, the best engines, power operated turrets, the best wireless, the best that the Ministry of Supply and the great engineering industry of this country can produce. …

'Even when the tank has been completely assembled, has left the depot, and joined its unit, we still have to look after it. A tank, for all the strength, is a delicate instrument of war. It requires constant attention.

‘Modern warfare is largely a Carmen business. It consist of getting heavy loads of men and guns and ammunition to a certain point in the shortest possibly time, regardless of obstacles, whether they be rivers, ditches, trenches or Germans.

‘The Carmen in the army are the people who do this job on the battlefronts. But you Carmen are the people who have to do a lot on the roads and railways of Britain. Incidentally the Ministry of Supply and the War Office have done their best to help you in your problem by allotting a definite proportion of the output of new vehicles and spare parts to civilian transport. …

'The carmen of Germany are good. But I believed that the Carmen of Britain - both in and out of the army - will do the better job. We shall in the end go further, our staying power is greater, and we shall go on until victory is ours.

Which were the British made equipment stars of WW2?

I have spent the day reading about scout cars and trucks, Matadors and other gun tractors, recovery vehicles and tank transporters and of course, endlessly, about tanks.

There must have been an RAOC, and later REME, folklore about what worked and what didn’t. I have heard that the much loved Jeep was a b***** to repair, unlike the Humber or Daimler.

I have read articles telling of the COS praising American Sherman Tanks and Jeeps. There had been a problem with recovery vehicles and it seems that later in the war most of these were American. Was everything good American?

The British Centurion tank was good, but came too late. The Cromwell was good, but outshone by the Sherman.

I have heard no criticism of Tillies. The Carriers in their various forms seemed to have performed. The motor bikes and bicycles seemed OK.

I would love to hear the ‘word on the street’.

Home from Dunkirk

Many people played a part in caring for the troops as they arrived back home from Dunkirk. COD Chilwell welcomed some 7,000 evacuated troops. Sergeant Major Hall of the ATS recalls them arriving.

“We gave them bacon and eggs and lashings of hot tea and when they’d finished they just fell asleep at the table. Everyone came to building 176 to cook, serve, wash dishes…the commanding officer and the newest recruit rolled up their sleeves and worked side-by-side; our men gave up their cigarettes and chocolate and beds, handed over some of their own clothes and did any odd jobs they could…”

Doris Smith was one of the cooks. She came from South Shields where before the war she had been a housekeeper. When war was declared she volunteered, choosing the ATS rather than the WRNS because she didn’t like water. Her reaction on arriving at Chilwell was the sheer volume of food to be cooked. The arrival of the Dunkirk evacuees tripled the number of mouths to be fed. She recalled having to step sleeping body after sleeping body as she tried to cross one of the massive sheds to wake the stoker so that the kitchen ranges could be ready to cook thousands of breakfasts. A later memory of that summer was being handed a pair of binoculars and a tin hat and being sent up to the roof of one of the sheds to look out for enemy planes. She arrived as a shy country girl; her experience at Chilwell gave her the confidence to pursue a successful career in catering.

The Tank

The tank was a British invention, the first examples having been manufactured by William Foster & Co in Lincoln.

In 1915 Churchill became horrifically aware of the stalemate of the Western Front and how young men were being slaughtered because, whilst mankind had invented bullets and shells, it had not yet found an effective defence against them. Time and again the order would come for an advance and time and again it would fail with horrific loss of life.

What was needed was a machine out of HG Wells, a ‘Landship' protected by steel armour capable of travelling over trenches, mud and barbed wire. With Churchill’s influence, it was the Navy who made the first prototypes. The biggest problem was the sheer weight of armour. Eventually two alternatives merged, one with a large wheel and one with caterpillar tracks. It was not Churchill himself who gave the orders for their production, since he was out of office following the disaster of the Dardenells. Contracts for the two alternatives were awarded to Fodens for the wheeled version and Fosters for the tracked vehicle. The project was of course secret and it was let known that the factories were producing motorised water ‘tanks’ for use in Mesopotamia, the name though stuck.

The tracked version proved vastly superior and over four thousand were produced. When Churchill returned to office as Minister of Munitions, he resumed oversight of the project and so had a hand in the victory at the battle of Amiens in August 1918 when 600 British Tanks sent terrified Germans into headlong defeat. In time they recovered their cool, but crucially morale had been broken by this invention with which Churchill had had more than a hand.

Herbert Ellis, in The Autocar magazine of 16 June 1944, reported on an invasion-eve visit to an Royal Army Ordnance Corps vehicle reserve depot where transport was massed for the assault on France. He began though with a a piece of serendipitous history.

‘One afternoon in 1921 a number of Mark IV and Mark V tanks, which a few years previously had rumbled over the battlefields of Flanders, were delivered at Woolwich Arsenal, the peacetime depot of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. These tanks were obsolete and clumsy, yet their arrival at Woolwich represented a milestone in the history of the RAOC. It marked the point at which the Corps. not previously concerned with the supply of motor vehicles to the Army, began to set up which is now the greatest distributive system the motor trade of Europe has ever seen or is likely to see.’

Garages around the country help the war effort

In towns and villages around the country, garages large and small found that many of their mechanics had joined up, initially a blessing as domestic motor use declined and with it the need for repairs. Many businesses found they had capacity and the more entrepreneurial approached the Ministry of Supply. At first they were met with a bureaucratic 'no', then, with the blitz, dispersal had become the other of the day and the result was the awarding of contracts for war work. One London garage repaired the vehicles of the 51st division before it embarked for North Africa. Others manufactured parts for munitions and some whole shells; army vehicles were repaired and serviced, mainly lift armoured cars and Bren carriers; in fact a huge range of different work was undertaken. 

In time work forces expanded and, with so many men in the armed forces, many garages recruited women who soon gained the necessary skills from the careful teaching of those mostly older skilled men left behind. 

There was a shortage of machine tools and many garages made their own, but using the parts they had to hand and suitable for use by relatively unskilled labour. The same was true of spare parts, where those coming from the USA were lost in sunk Atlantic convoys; these too were manufactured on workbenches of garages, large and small, urban and rural.

These are some of the unsung heroes of WW2.

The Liberation of Belsen

On 15 April 8 Corps arrived at Belsen and the Deputy Director of Ordnance Services 8 Corps was one of the first to enter the camp. The camp, he found, was ‘a cesspit of filth and disease; men, women and children were dying by the hundred every day; and 10,000 unburied bodies, in various stages of decomposition lay around. Priority one was to get the medical services going, and within 48 hours, 304 mobile laundry was in the camp and working. Bath sections 304, 105, 305 and 310 Mobile laundries arrived within a matter of days. and inmates of the camp were soon having their first bath since imprisonment’. The principal role for Ordnance was the provision of mobile Laundries and Baths and bedding and clothing.

On entry into the camp the medical teams found that of 28,135 women, 21,000 required hospitalisation and of 12,000 men over 9,000 required urgent treatment from conditions including typhus, tuberculosis, enteritis and famine oedema. The camp had been without water for five days and so the most immediate task was the trucking in of water and the construction of new supplies. Every inmate was starving and so appropriate food was needed. Then came the burial of the dead, the washing of the living and the provision of clothing, and the dusting of everything to kill lice.

Requisitions of clothing had been made from the local population and substantial stores were discovered in the blocks previously occupied by SS guards. These stores, including clothing and bedding, were issued to non-hospitalised inmates. The block itself was converted into use as a hospital and again much of the equipment needed was found to have been on site. The remaining equipment needed was brought in by Ordnance personnel from the Antwerp AOD.

The operation, led by the 249 (Oxfordshire Yeomanry) Battery of the 53 Anti-Tank Regiment, included, in addition to RAOC personnel operating baths and laundries, men from REME, RASC, Military Government and of course British Red Cross and RAMC General Hospital, Field Hygene, Light Field Ambulance and Mobile Bacteriological Laboratory.

In spit of everything that was being done, the death-role continued to be high for many days.

103 Laundry Unit operating earlier in France