The formation of REME

In 1942 Sir William Beveridge chaired a committee to look at making the best use of the technical skills the army had. As part of this the committee recommended that:

There should be established in the Army a Corps of Mechanical Engineers. The success of the Navy in making use of mechanical engineers is not due solely to the fact that the naval problems are simpler to those of the Army. It is due also to the fact that the Navy had had for so long an engineering branch of high authority and has had other technical branches specialised on torpedoes and electricity or ordnance. The Navy is machine minded. The Army cannot afford to be less so. The Navy sets engineers to catch, test, train and use engineers. 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.

They proposed that the technical elements of RAOC, RASC and Royal Engineers should be combined in the newly formed REME which in future would carry out all major repair work. The RAOC would take over all vehicle and spare part provision.  The RASC would focus on its transporting activities, since, at the same time, it lost its catering activities to the newly formed Army Catering Corps.

From this recommendation REME was born and went on to work closely with the RAOC for the duration of the war.

Post script:
My researches into WW1 indicate that the AOC, as it then was, had extensive repair workshops behind the trenches dealing mainly with artillery. In the early part of WW2 the RAOC had major repair capabilities, not least in setting up the army centre of mechanisation at Chilwell.

Possible prequel to War on Wheels

A possible prequel to War on Wheels.

My father, Bill Williams who lead the mechanisation of the army in WW2, was ordnance officer to the 19th division on the Somme in WW1. He would have seen the Lincoln Tank in action, possibly images like these:

The images are taken from a weekly magazine that my grandfather collected.

Bill's friend and rival Dickie Richards commanded an ammunition train, the core means of transport.

I am researching to see what records and images exist to help tell the story of how the British Army was supplied  in WW1 and am finding some remarkable material.

The story after the Lincoln tank

My Dad was ordnance officer in the 19th division on the Somme. He would have witnessed a scene such as this

On 15 July, at Lincoln Drill Hall, I will be telling the story of how this experience influenced the mechanisation of the army in WW2

The Somme July 1916

On 7 March 1916, Lieutenant Bill Williams, as he then was, was appointed DADOS to the 19th Division.

The Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Services (DADOS) had the job of insuring that the troops in the trenches were properly supplied with everything they needed to do their job apart from fuel and food: so armaments and ammunition, boots and uniforms, periscopes, bicycles, pontoon wagons. Speed was of the essence in making sure what was lost was replaced without delay.

It was a front line job, often under fire and immensely hard work. Bill received a letter from General Sir Tom Bridges, who commanded the 19th Division in the battle of the Somme. It said, 'I should like ot have seen you to thank you for the great services you rendered the division since you joined.'

The 19th Division had been held in reserve on the first day of the battle. In a Special Order of the Day dated 4 August 1916, General Bridges wrote 'I thank all ranks of the Division for the way in which during the last 10 days, they have upheld the best traditions of discipline and hard fighting. The Division leaves a name behind it in the Fourth Army which will never be forgotten.'

The experience of very much the sharp end of ordnance work would help equip Bill for the enormous task that would lay ahead for him in WW2. I tell his story and that of his colleagues in Dunkirk to D Day

Innovation and the mechanisation of the army in WW2

Will Hutton’s article in the Observer 15 May 2016, Great companies are precious. But to be the best they need a guiding light,  brought to mind many parallels with the mechanisation of the Army in WW2.

Hutton was writing ahead of the publication of the Big Innovation Centre Purposeful Company interim report. He suggested that ‘successful companies are defined by their capacity to deliver and pursue clearly defined visionary corporate purposes - to be there best, to do business that is sustainable, to serve humanity, to stretch every muscle to innovate.’

The key principle was obvious, but could so easily have been ignored, especially in an army not known for its humility. If you set out to do something completely new, talk to as many people as you can; not just any people, but people who have been down similar paths. So Bill Williams talked to motor companies, component companies, distribution companies and he sought to recruit people who actually worked in key areas. Having brought the team together, he set them off to put into practice what they knew, but not just in one place, but in a number, in their case, of depots- let many flowers bloom.

Allow no room for selfishness, compare and share your ideas: each month each senior manager  (Chief Ordnance Officer) had to visit another depot to see what they were doing. Every quarter all COOs came together, at each major depot in rotation, to receive a presentation on what had been done, to question, challenge and learn.

Ideas evolve: for example the insistence that no lorry makes its return journey empty; this is now obvious but wasn’t then. The biggest example was packaging where skills were sought from many disciplines and then shared and implemented at top speed.

Mistakes will be made. I am sure that the commanders of the BEF in 1939 believed that this time they were ready. They were ‘run off the park’, to take a sporting analogy. So they learnt. In North Africa new approaches were tried, but failed. Amendments were made; things improved, but still failed. Major revisions were tried and began to work. Bill Williams went out and listened to customers (the fighting troops) and took back what he had learnt. He took it back not just to his own team but to a whole raft of suppliers in the UK and the US and Canada. He learnt what the other Allies were doing and they in turn learnt from him.

There were battles, and not just with the enemy. As ideas developed they had to be pursued with steely determination. Old ways had to be challenged. New blood had to be brought in. From time to time different sections of the army and different allies had to be reminded that they were on the same side.

I was going to say that they all had a single purpose, but that wasn’t entirely true with inevitable jealousies. These jealousies had to be challenged.

With the single objective which was met:

‘To almost every man of the Allied Armies, the predominant memory of the campaign, beyond the horror of battle, was the astounding efficiency of the supply services’ Max Hastings in Overlord

Hutton was at pains to emphasise the need for trust within the organisation and in the leader. He or she may not be liked, but they must be trusted.

War on Wheels preview

During the Second World War the British Army underwent a complete transformation as the number of vehicles grew from 40,000 to 1.5 million, ranging from tanks and giant tank transporters to jeeps, mobile baths and offices, and scout cars. At the same time the way in which the army was provided with all it needed was transformed – arms and ammunition, radio, clothing and places to sleep and wash.

War on Wheels is the story about the men and women who achieved this extraordinary feat.

The following extracts from the low resolution pdf publisher's proof give a flavour of the book which is of 65,000 words and 120 images divided into these chapters:

The Beginning
The British Expeditionary Force
The UK Motor Industry
The Depots and Mechanisation
The Desert War and Italy
Preparing for D Day
D Day and the battle for Europe
The Far East

It was published by The History Press on 8 September 2016 and is available from all good book shops and direct from The History Press

The Beginning

Had you been a passenger on the omnibus from Nottingham railway station to the little village of Chilwell on a wet November morning in 1934, you may have seen a tall, heavily built soldier fidgeting as he sat, his eyes scanning all that they passed. In his pocket was the letter from the War Office instructing him to visit the site of a former shell filling factory. In his mind there could well have been wild imaginings: a fully mechanised army, light years from that which he had experienced in the four dark years of the Great War. He had been asked to see whether the site could be right for the first Royal Army Ordnance Corps Depot specifically for motor transport and, if so, how he would create it.

Pegasus Bridge

Stan Carter had boarded a landing craft at Tilbury loaded with 200 tons of ammunition destined for the Airborne Division which had flown in by glider to take Pegasus Bridge.

The job of Ordnance Beach Detachments was to follow on quickly behind the assault troops and set up ammunition dumps just behind the beaches ready to issue ammunition to replace that used in the initial assault.

The 21st Army Group was to invade three beaches: Gold, Juno and Sword. Each beach had attached to it Ordnance Beach Detachments and Ammunition Companies. Advance parties came ashore within an hour or so of the first assault troops and created sector dumps just off the beaches. The main stocks were anti-tank and anti-aircraft ammunition, Landing Reserves, stretchers and blankets for casualties and survivor kits. These latter were complete changes of clothing and kit for soldiers who experienced a ‘bad’ landing. Landing Reserves were designed to supply troops with spare parts for the first four weeks and comprised 8,000 cases calculated to maintain a brigade.

Stan had been promised a dry landing but in the event was offloaded into 5ft of water some 15 yards from the sand. To make matters worse his job, with one other, was to pull a handcart to carry the ammunition from the craft up the beach to the dump, and all under mortar fire.

Accounts of other landing craft laden with ammunition talk of DKWS being used to transport across the beach. I noted, from the War Diaries of Brigadier Readman at Chilwell, that right up to D Day there had been a problem with supplies of DKWS. Perhaps Stan’s craft drew the short straw and so ended up with the handcart.

Just as Stan made it up the beach the first time, the Bren carrier next to him ran over a mine and some of the resulting shrapnel embedded itself in Stan’s thigh. He didn't remember pain, rather the need, with his mates, to get on with the job. The ammunition was duly stacked and issues made, again all done under fire from German mortars only yards in front. Stan recalled that once on the beach all the good intentions to keep records of issues went out of the window.

A mortar hit an adjacent petrol dump and burning petrol spread toward the ammunition. Stan spoke of his Captain’s bravery in putting out the fire with his bare hands, an act which cost Captain Thompson his life. The wound in Stan’s thigh couldn’t be left and so he was taken to the field dressing station and from there back to England. He did return to France and his story continues later in my book War on Wheels 

Photograph by permission of the RLC Museum

A shortage of published material

I have been working on War on Wheels for nearly two years and have amassed some fascinating material.

Some of this will be included in the book, but I have set up a new blog waronwheels.org for stories that came too late.

I was recently asked about COD Donnington, which is now MOD Donnington. COD Bicester and COD Chilwell are shadows of their former selves. Some have gone altogether: COD Feltham and COD Greenford to name but two. They were all hives of activity in WW2 and the immediate postwar years; thousands of young people all working with the focus of winning the war. One of those stories of WW2 that has never been told. It needs to be.

COD Chilwell with thanks to the RLC Archive

How I found the story

I discovered the story in some albums my Mum had kept. I had always known the albums were there, but I’d never really looked at them.

They were of my Dad’s war.

My Dad, Major General Sir Leslie (“Bill”) Williams, had been Controller of Ordnance Services and Director of Warlike Stores. The albums in total are about three feet thick; they’re scrap books really, with press cuttings, copies of speeches, many photographs and all kinds of documents from menu cards and invitations to formal reports - all about the Royal Army Ordnance Corps whose job it was to supply vehicles and armaments, indeed everything soldiers need part from food and fuel. I supplemented what I discovered in the albums with research at the National Archive, British Library, the National Motor Museum and Imperial War Museum, including listening to many accounts of their war by RAOC men and women.

The story I found was no small beer; the army went from, in 1934, having 4,000 vehicles left over from WW1 to holding some 1.5 million in 1945, ranging from giant tank transporters and trucks, to tanks and armoured cars down to motor bikes and utility vehicles.

At the same time the way in which the Army was provided with all it needed was transformed: arms and ammunition, to say nothing of radio, clothing and places to sleep and to wash. For D Day, some 375 million items were packed ready for the invasion force to use.

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.

I have now built on this research by exploring the lives of some of the leaders of the RAOC and this story is told in Dunkirk to D Day. These were some truly remarkable people living in an extraordinary time; many fought in two world wars, a thought that even now I find hard to grasp.

The very first tank

On 21 January 1916, the first ever shot was fired on waste ground in Lincoln from a prototype tank manufactured at Fosters in Lincoln. This was the beginning of the realisation of the dream Winston Churchill had had of providing an effective shields for infantry advancing over no mans land toward the enemy trenches.

2016 is thus the year when the invention of the tank will be marked in Lincoln, although 2015 was the year chosen by the Tank Museum at Bovington.

The first tank was Little Willie.

Little Willie, at Bovington Tank Museum

This was then developed into the Tank known as Mother, although sadly none exist today. This was developed into a slow strong tank that ran over trenches and barbed wire and was untouched by machine gun fire.

 WW1 tank at Bovington Tank Museum

From this the War Office went back to Fosters to develop a faster tank.

Lincoln film maker, Andrew Blow and Military Historian, Richard Pullen, will talk about the social and engineering history of the tank on 18 October 2018 at the Lincoln Drill Hall in a Commemoration of Lincoln in WW1.

I write about the story of the tank in the context of the overall effort to equip the army in part of Ordnance, the prequel to War on Wheels. I say part, since the tank was but one a very many vehicles with which the British Army was supplied in the process of mechanisation. My first draft of the Lincoln Tank in War on Wheels drew on an account in the book, The Churchill Factor. Richard Pullen has a much more detailed and engaging account in The Landships of Lincoln

Tank recovery in the desert WW2

More of the story can be found on the Lincoln Tank Memorial website, in Richard Pullen's book The Landships of Lincoln, Andy Blow's DVD and their Facebook page

The role of women

The role of women was massively important as was apparent from an article in the fortnightly publication by the Army Bureau on Current Affairs entitled, The Women Bogey. This sought to bolster the argument in favour of women retaining after the war the more prominent position in the workplace that they enjoyed during hostilities.

Newspaper articles appeared regularly emphasising the crucial importance of the work women undertook in the Ordnance Depots, to say nothing of Royal Ordnance Factories, manufacturing companies and indeed just about every walk of life.

On 15 June 1942, The Yorkshire Evening Post reported on the role of the ATS at Chilwell which had the largest such unit in the country. The Chief of the ATS stressed that ‘it has never been the the aim of the ATS to turn girls into mere weak imitations of men. Girls are individualists and throughout the organisation there must be the individualistic touch.’ The article highlighted the range of tasks undertaken: machine shop, drawing offices, stores and, of course, the 14 cookhouses that keep the depot operating 24 hours a day. ‘More specifically women undertake the Articisation of tanks bound for Russia and the Desertisation of those bound for Africa and the East. To counter the effects of condensation in tanks being delivered to hot climates, a ball of lime is suspended inside. All parts are ‘sozzled’ with oil and grease.’ Not surprisingly the article finds ATS who in their former lives were in the public eye such as the first woman to cross the desert on a motor cycle and who later competed against men in Army trials. No wonder men were scarred.

A similar theme emerges from The Sunday Times on 1 November 1942 of a visit to ‘Woolwich-in-the-country’ described as being in the north but more probably Donnington in Shropshire. The special correspondent tells how, ‘in that radiant summer of 1940 when the sunshine seemed to mock our anxieties as France tottered to capitulation’, he visited a ‘new Woolwich buried in the countryside many miles from London.’ He marvelled at the size of the place but also the many innovations that had been introduced adding that, ‘the American authorities were so impressed by ‘Woolwich-in-the-country’ that they sent an ordnance expert across by bomber to study its methods.’ In relation to women he wrote:

'There are girls wherever you turn and most of them are in the ATS…in one of the huts in the training section a slim 18 year old ATS corporal was lecturing officers, soldiers and ATS on the identification of wireless components…later in the instrument repair shop a good looking young woman with sergeants stripes pinned on her overalls paused for a moment from measuring thousandths of an inch to talk rather diffidently about her civilian studies at five British and foreign universities and to admit that she was a BSc Edin (First Class Hons)…in terms of facilities he saw the hall with  a loan collection from the National Gallery on show.'

The work of the ATS prompted an exchange that paints a contrasting picture of the time.

Early in the war, Dame Helen Gwynne Vaughan was the officer commanding the ATS at the War Office. Betty Perks’ diary tells that she was a ‘real old battle-axe’ with many pre-conceived ideas about women and their role in the services. Many of the younger ATS at Chilwell pleaded to be allowed to wear trousers whilst driving army vehicles, firstly because they were warmest and secondly because it was very difficult to sit in an army vehicle in a tight skirt without showing ‘everything’! Dame Helen wouldn't hear of it - she was horrified that her young ladies would even suggest such thing. A cartoon of a ATS girl climbing into a lorry revealing frilly knickers changed her mind.

The idea of joining the ATS and working with the RAOC was not always attractive at first sight. Margaret Sherman, for one, was not at first inspired:

'We were given our posting instructions and gathered round with excitement. A lot of us had hopefully asked for London District or South Eastern Command. Would we get it? Mary and I heard with a good deal of dismay that we were going to a Central Ordnance Depot somewhere in Northern England.

Perhaps it won’t be for longer than the initial three months,” Mary said comfortingly. “Ordnance, who’d want that?” I said with the nightmare vision of millions of issue and receipt vouchers. I didn’t know then that the only thing I’d hate about Ordnance would be leaving it.'

The ATS did change lives. Gwendoline Walker joined up in 1942 and after initial training had to sit an intelligence test. She was summoned by the senior ATS officer at COD Derby and asked what job she wanted to do. She replied that she had thought of becoming a cook. Her grandparents had been in service and this was the life she had expected to lead. She had left her job in a shop and without telling her parents had ‘escaped’ to join up. She remembered the shock at the officer telling her that she had a high IQ and could do anything she wanted. She had no idea what an IQ was, but suggested that she might work in stores. She went from Derby to Greenford and was a very effective store-woman before moving toward clerical work and accounting after the war. ‘The ATS was where I found myself.’

You can find where to buy War on Wheels by following this link

What the depots did

An ordnance depot must have been like a vast ‘Amazon’ distribution warehouse, but without computers. Delivery wouldn't be by courier who’d leave card if the customer was out; it was by soldiers often under fire and always under pressure. This is how wartime leader, Bill Williams, described their work.

'The fighting and technical equipment of the British Army consists of half a million different bits and pieces. These are made by many hundreds of different manufacturers scattered all over this country and overseas.The maker of a wireless set, for example, does not make the valves which go with it, or the batteries which work it. The maker of a gun does not make the carriage on which it moves, or the sights and the hundred and one intricate items of technical equipment, without which it cannot be fired. Somewhere the incomplete equipment has to be brought together.

Even the tanks come to us with empty hulls into which we fit the armament, the wireless and the vast array of fighting and technical equipment before they can be issued as fighting tanks.

A 25-pdr. gun is only a headline to newspapers. To a Central Ordnance Depot it is 2,000 different pieces, plus another hundred accessories. If any of these accessories are missing, if one maker falls behind in his production programme, if one case is packed for Libya and an essential part left out, this 25-pdr. gun cannot be used.

A key role for the RAOC was to estimate the likely requirement for both original equipment and spare parts. This would depend on ware and tare but also on estimated casualties from enemy action. With motor vehicles in particular this must have been well neigh impossible. Bill continued for his press conference audience:

You can see there the orders coming in from the War Office, the formations and the overseas theatres of war. We use teleprinters for speed and accuracy. You can see the tanks, the guns, the packing cases leaving the depots for Libya and Russia and India and even America. Codes and symbols tell the initiated their destination, and ensure that the right packages are loaded on the right ship.

Let us suppose that certain packages of vital accessories for a shipload of guns are loaded in another ship, and that particular ship in the convoy is sunk. It means that the guns will be useless when they arrive in the theatre of war.

You can see women and men whose job it is to keep an accurate record of all the bits and pieces they deal with. You can see others undergoing their infantry training for defence of the depots and for service overseas. You can see tanks being tested and fitted for service. You can see repairs carried out. Ordnance depots are towns in themselves, humming with activity alive for twenty four hours every day.'

Had you tuned into the BBC Home Service at 7.00 or 8.00am on Saturday 19 July 1941, you might have heard a slightly different story in a recorded piece by Richard Sharp about his visit to an Army Supply Depot.  It was the very old story of the Crimea and how an Army Supply Depot managed to send a shipment consisting entirely of left boots. Sharp makes the entirely valid point that, with a 20th century depot handling some 97,000 different items, the potential for mistakes is increased exponentially. Sharp marvelled at how the new depot was equipped: its own electricity plant, telephone exchange, furnaces and print works, but then said this:

All this is very nice and comforting, of course. It’s good to know that we have all this stuff, particularly when you remember that it’s only passing through, a sample of what thousands of factories are pouring in to be distributed to the troops, but - the depot that issued that shipload of left boots was a big place too, no doubt. What about the efficiency of this place? The printing press prints two million pieces of paper a week. Think what muddles you could make with two million pieces of paper?

The answer came from a Lieutenant Colonel in charge of organisation and planning. This officer’s approach was simple, bring to bare that skills learnt from industry. Things like planning routes so that lorries both go out from the depot full but also return full. The lorries covered a million and a quarter miles in three months and so the savings in petrol alone would have been huge. It was not just petrol; rubber was in short supply and so all road journeys had to count. It wasn’t just transport, the way transactions were routed through the depot make a huge difference to staffing requirements. The Lieutenant Colonel estimated that better procedures had saved 55% in costs. As the war entered its fourth and fifth year, this would matter not so much because of money but because there simply were not the people available and labour saving became very much the order of the day.

The depots were throughout the UK. The image is of the main stores at COD Chilwell

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Story Terrace blog interview

I was delighted to have been asked by Story Terrace to be interviewed for their blog. Here is the link

This is some of the interview

Your first book, War on Wheels, is set to be released in September 2016. Can you tell us a bit about it?

How long have I got? This was a labour of love. My Mum had kept albums some three or four inches thick of her’s and my Dad’s war. Five years after she died, I opened them and was entranced. I found a man I hardly knew. He was Bill Williams aged then 45 and brimming with energy. When I, as a very young teenager, knew my Dad he was seventy and terminally ill. Bill couldn’t have been more alive. He had been given the job of setting up a massive depot that would handle 

the vehicles that would give the British Army its wheels. Of course it wasn’t just him; some 250,000 soldiers, ATS and civilians were involved as they pressed ahead with tasks that had never been done before. Some failed, but they learned from their mistakes. They laboured long and hard and created a vast organisation that in the end triumphed. The story had never been told before. The vast enterprise would never happen again.

 If you could choose any person in history to do a Story Terrace project with, who would it be?

William Smith Williams published the Brontes. He and his brother came to London in the late seventeenth century, their family having been for generations ‘dealers in hides’ just outside Oxford. As well as publishing some of the greatest writing in the English language, William Smith Williams and his wife produced some remarkable progeny: Anna Williams who in 1870 was Professor of Singing Music at the Royal College of Music and Sir Arthur Lowes Dickinson who was a founding partner of Price Waterhouse in the USA to name but two. I would love to write their story.

I now have!