After Dunkirk

The British Army that returned from France was exhausted, dispirited and no longer mechanised in any real sense. The stark reality in the summer of 1940 was that at some point Hitler would invade these islands. Accordingly the Army set up, within what was really a peace time structure of area Commands, a Home Army alongside a vital anti-aircraft command. By July 1940 by hook or by crook some five divisions had been re-equipped by the small largely civilian manned Ordnance Depots within each area Command. These were  supported by the then five existing Central Ordnance Depots. In addition to Chilwell, there were depots dating from the Great War at Woolwich (armaments), Bramley (ammunition), Weedon (small arms) and Didcot (clothing and general stores).

“God, what a war!” he said. “There’s always some blasted spare part missing and you can’t get a sausage out of anybody urgently! It was different when we only had rifles”  This complaint by a staff captain comes in JK Stamford’s account of the Dunkirk evacuation and states the underlying problem with stark clarity. The older depots were still organised largely as if they had ‘only rifles’, whereas they were trying to handle an ever increasing range of items. The requirements of an army of the 1940’s were different but nothing like as complex as they would become by 1945. 

It was clear to Bill Williams, who by then have been given full charge of the Depots (other than clothing and general stores) as Director of Warlike Stores, and to those around him that the end of the war would come only with a return to France on a massive scale. In the days and months following Dunkirk this must have become more an article of faith than a realistic proposition. Yet it was a target and something to plan for. 

An invasion on a massive scale would demand vehicles, armaments and equipment in an unprecedented number, but, unlike the BEF, effectively supplied and supported. This would take time and, in the build up, effective storage would be needed. The existing Ordnance depots dated back to before the Great War and so new space was needed. It was needed also since the war of the mid twentieth century would need supplies wholly different from the wars of the past.

The key impact on the RAOC of the Dunkirk evacuation and the experience of the BEF had been first and most obviously a sickening return to where they had been over year earlier desperately short of everything. In the aftermath of Dunkirk, Winston Churchill writes in his account of the war that he contacted President Roosevelt who immediately made US ordnance reserves available. Yet none of this came free and the British government had to part with its fast diminishing reserves of dollars and gold. This remained that case until Roosevelt achieved the passage of the Lend-Lease act in March 1941. 

One more immediate result of this piecemeal arrangement for supplies from the US was a huge variety of different makes and models of equipment. Add to this the consequences of the separate UK motor companies developing their competing models each with their own set of spare parts and that, after Dunkirk, the fact that the vehicles that could be obtained relatively quickly were an even greater variety: the RAOC was faced with a store man’s nightmare.

So, it wasn't just about volume, it was about hundreds of thousands of parts which make up the volume. Official accounts all talk about the tons of stores held or issued and the picture conjured is of bails or crates of bulk. Truly the devil is in the detail explaining another of Bill’s favoured saying, a place for everything and everything in its place. The task was to set up an organisation which could estimate what needed to be ordered, order it, receive it, check it, store it, issue it and then maintain it.

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 passed, one cigarette lighting the next. 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 were wild imaginings, a fully mechanised army light years from that which he had experienced in the four long years of the Great War. He could hardly believe it; 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.

In the late 1920’s the War Office had begun to explore just what a mechanised army might look like by setting up an experimental armoured force, however with the depression this came to nothing. During the depression, as government sought to conserve resources and set its face against re-armament, the Royal Army Ordnance Corps had suffered more than most. It was the cinderella of the army and it is probably safe to say that it was regarded as a corps of store-men, never to confront an enemy and seldom to leave the safety of the warehouse. This was reflected in the staffing which was overwhelmingly civilian, and even the soldiers were not regarded as combatant troops: pen-pushers, little more. If the Corps itself had suffered, so too had its equipment: there were no more than 4,000 vehicles for the whole Army and most of those old and unreliable and with few in the Corps able to maintain them; it had only 25 drivers. Now things were going to change.

Nuffield Motors

I wondered why I could find little about the group of motor companies headed by Lord Nuffield with factories in Birmingham, Coventry and Oxford (Cowley). The reason, I find, is like all the motor companies they were supporting the war effort in very many ways, but most particularly the RAF.
It became clear very early in the war that the RAF was 'wasting' a great many planes, in the sense that planes crashed and could no longer fly. Nuffield set up a network of Civil Repair Organisations which would collect the crashed aircraft, bring them to repair factories in various parts of the country and, largely by trial and error, put them back into airworthy condition. This was a massive operation that provided vital support in the Battle of Britain.
Nuffield also built tanks, first the Cruiser and then the Crusader and the Cromwell. These tanks were initially outgunned by Germany's Panzers, but later with a 6lb gun gave as good as they got. In the Desert War, at least initially, they proved unreliable, but Nuffield flew out a team of engineers to investigate and address the problems. In addition to tanks, Nuffield championed the self propelled gun, in particular, the Bofors. They manufactured ammunition and much else.
It was said that the motor companies were ideally placed to manufacture anything out of metal, and this they did.

Or War on Wheels?

What is in a name? The story is about the mechanisation of the British Army in WWII. Its challenges, mistakes, lessons learnt and ultimate success.

Tanks at COD Chilwell en route to North Africa

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.

Chilwell, Didcot and Bicester

What do the Chilwell housing estate,  Didcot power stations and Bicester Garden City have in common? 

They occupy the sites of three of the vast Ordnance depots that supplied the British Army in WWII. Together with over one hundred other such depots they comprised 40 million square feet of covered and 50 million square feet of open storage of anything from tanks and Bailey bridges to mobile radar and boot laces. In them and elsewhere around the theatres of war, some 250,000 soldiers, ATS and civilians, including many with expertise drawn from industry, worked together handling hundreds of tons of some 750,000 different lines including 375 million items packed by them and teams of volunteers for D Day.

In a speech for Salute the Soldier Week June 1944, Bill Williams, Controller of Ordnance Services for the British Army, said this: 'War in itself is essentially wasteful and if we are to be victorious we must waste more, or what appears to be more, than the enemy. This is the cost of war.' 

The Waste of War is the story of the men and women who handled all those supplies and, in doing so, invented 21st century logistics.

Houses built at Donnington to accommodate the many ROAC men moved from Woolwich

Salute the Soldier week

This is the speech that Controller of Ordnance Service, Major-General 'Bill' Williams, gave in Halifax in July 1944

I am deeply conscious of the honour of being asked to open the “Salute the Soldier" Week for your great Town.
When my good friend Sir Harold Mackintosh and your Committee asked me to do so, I said "Yes, certainly, I will do anything to help. Perhaps you would call it a selfish gesture, as the more money you save the easier my job becomes.
As Controller of Ordnance Services, I handle practically the whole of the· equipment with which our Army fights.It is your money that buys that equipment, so I act as your agent.
It is rather like an enormous ·industrial concern, you are the shareholders and I am the Director of the firm responsible for placing orders and delivering the goods to the customers. The customers are the Army, every unit; every soldier to me is a customer to be clothed and equipped .
My Corps, the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, incidentally is one of the oldest Corps in the Army, as in bye-gone days it was responsible for supplying the Army with bows and arrows and armour for the men at Arms, in fact, I believe in the early stages of our history we planted the yew forests, from which the bows were made.
Well, to continue, the R .A .O.C. of to-day supplies the soldier with all his equipment, weapons, vehicles, tanks, guns, wireless equipment, ammunition and explosives, Radar equipment; accoutrements, clothing, camp equipment, in fact, almost everything which he needs to fight with: so that the firm in which you are shareholders holds stocks of stores ranging from trouser buttons to tanks and big guns.
I think I will give you a few figures to bring home to you the large sums of money which are needed to equip and maintain a modern Army. A tank costs something in the neighbourhood of £14.000. spare parts to keep it going for a year entails another £4,000.The 25 pdr. gun which is the best Field gun in the world costs £2,250, with a further £1,000 for the tractor. Both these in turn need large quantities of spare pats to keep them going.
The R .A .O .C. to-day are handling over 750,000 different types of stores, all these have to be purchased and sent to the right place at the right time, if we are to wage war successfully against the Germans and the Japs. This is no mean task and without your money it would be an impossible one.
I have been fortunate enough to see at first hand how your savings are helping to win the war.I have been round the great production centres, both in England and America and Canada, and I have seen the vast spate of munitions of war pouring out to all the theatres of war throughout the world, and particularly during the last few months to this great European theatre which will be probably the greatest military operation which has ever taken place in the history of the world.
In addition to seeing the way your money is being spent and the manufacture of this vast and formidable array of equipment, I also, like a good business man, go to see my customers, the fighting men in the theatres of war, and during the last eighteen months I have visited firstly Tunisia and Algeria when we were formulating our plans to push Rommel out of North Africa and then to Sicily and Italy for the invasion which now seems to be going pretty well, thanks again to the vast range of equipment which has been purchased with your money.
Next, I visited Middle East, Iraq and Persia, India and Burma, or as near as I could get to it. All these different theatres of war have their own special problems. They require equipment of different types; equipment has to be specially preserved and packed, according to the climatic conditions in which it will be handled and used.

The war with the Japs presents us with an entirely new state of conditions, and if we don't look well ahead and plan and get our equipment together, we cannot hope to win that war in a reasonable period.
I know you all realise how vitally important it is that our fighting men are equipped with the best. We all want them to have the best and finest weapons which we can provide.

Now, war in itself is essentially wasteful and if we are to be victorious we must waste more, or what appears to be waste, than the enemy. This is the cost of war.

It is rather like a business: you have two courses open to you, either you carry on with your old-fashioned plant and gradually fall behind in the race, or you constantly instal the very latest and best plant, and thus get ahead of your rivals. So it is in war. It is even more essential, in fact it is vital that we should be ahead of the enemy in all of our equipment. Our fire-power must be greater than his. Our tanks must be more powerful, faster, better armoured, in fact we must ruthlessly scrap equipment before it is out of date if we are to win our way to final victory, and that costs money.
You will realise, therefore, that your money must constantly roll in,. but please don't think we in the Army take that money for granted. Believe me we make it go as far as we can and we only scrap equipment and buy new equipment when we know it is essential and vital for Victory.
We know that to save it you have to sacrifice many of the little luxuries which in peacetime you have always enjoyed.
It is our aim to make the most of th.e equipment at our disposal.
By the savings of the people in this country, our Empire is now being equipped with the latest and best and deadliest weapons in the world and I am confident that our fire-power is now superior to that of the enemy. We know that our Tommy should be armed with the best and finest weapons obtainable.I am here to-day as I have already told you to ask you to lend even more to fight our way to Berlin and Tokyo.
I know you all realise that you are getting more for your money than the interest paid on your savings. You are helping to ensure for yourselves and your loved ones, a future which we all sincerely hope will be free from the horrors of war.
Your pennies, shillings and pounds are building up a rampart against those who would destroy England, or at any rate leave it as a little island off the coast of Europe and not the centre of the greatest Empire that the world has ever known.
Halifax has its own Regiment, the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, one that I know personally and have had the honour of serving alongside on at least two occasions. This is a regiment with great traditions and a fine record, and I would like you to feel that all that you save will help to give your local boys the best possible equipment for their own regiment, and the best possible equipment and fire-power in the Royal Engineers, the Royal Artillery, and the Royal Armoured Corps, to support and enable them to reach their objectives in the field of battle with the minimum loss of life.
I hear that Halifax holds the War Savings record for any Town in the amount subscribed per head. The more heads that lend their money to their country, the greater the chance of beating previous records, in support of your own Regiment and all your gallant boys.
Let "Salute the Soldier" be the greatest of all your record weeks, and don't forget that this campaign is the personal inspiration of your own great citizen and Chairman of the National Savings Committee, Sir Harold Mackintosh.
A final word regarding our mutual friend, Sir Harold. He is a Halifax man and I am sure you must be very proud of him. I have had the good fortune to be closely associated

The challenge of civilian 'experts' working alongside soldiers

The presence in all of the depots of men direct from industry with technical expertise in aspects of logistics posed management problems when they were put with men who had served in the BEF and who had built up a resentment for having field promotions forgotten. The direct entrants would be promoted to management positions and so command, or try to command, troops who were in effect their workforce. That this was a live issue is clear from Bill Williams’s 1942 speech. 

“To some or these men we gave direct commissions - just as the other branches of the army, such as the Engineers, the Medical Corps, also gave direct commissions. We gave these commissions for two reasons. Firstly, we were desperately short of officers. We had to have men who could carry the load at once, whilst others went through the ranks and were trained . Secondly, we wanted new blood and new experience as soon as possible. We wanted to get on with the job.

“We have been criticised for opening the door to people who received direct commissions. How else would you have tackled the problem?”

It required a great deal of effort on the part of senior officers to create an effective unit staffed in this way. It is interesting to read about the issue from two points of view. De Wolff was very much at the sharp end as COO trying to draw it all together. Stamford came from the regimental background with an understandable loyalty to his soldiers.

“The climax came when I received a draft of 350 privates who were mostly ‘departmental managers’ from a vast chain store. Their Managing Director had dug himself into the War Office and was now a field officer with one month’s service. Their wives had driven to the camp in expensive limousines and parked them around the parade ground while they searched for billets….The mutterings among ex-corporals back from France became a steady rumble, especially when one private, with a foreign name, announced incautiously that he expected to be a sergeant in three day’s time…That evening I heard on the telephone the high-pitched voice of the deaf commandant. ‘I understand you’ve got in your company a Private X who handles a million pounds’ worth of packing a year for Fuchs and Bieber.?” 

This man was found and his skills put to good use, nevertheless good management was needed to integrate these skilled men into an Army.

De Wolff was invited to visit British businesses to get from them advice and ideas on setting up Donnington. It was to have the best possible chance of efficiency. Even in De Wolff, though, it is possible to detect a hint of disapproval at this new way of doing things, what Stamford refers to as the New Army whose performance is bolstered by buns and cigarettes (one assumes as opposed to old fashioned army discipline).

“There were many ‘experts’ in civil life who were given Commissions, but they were just ‘civilians' in uniform. Those who were posted to the War Office did not know the difference between standing to attention and standing at ease! One of these ‘experts’ was given the rank of Captain at the War office and six months later he was promoted to Major. He was bachelor and lived in rooms in London. He had nothing to do when his duties ceased for the day and so he haunted all the night clubs and made himself a nuisance. This came to the ears of the QMG who told my General, ‘I am demoting that officer to Captain. Send him to de Wolff and let him have go at him.’  

It seems that this was thoroughly successful as the officer emerged 18 months later as a Lieutenant Colonel described as First Class. de Wolff applied his discipline to a number such officers with equal success.

Brigadier de Wolff with the Queen on her visit to COD Donnington

The Waste of War

The writing of a book is a process and crystallises from time to time in the 'blurb' that seeks to describe it. This is the latest iteration.

In the Second World War, the Army grew from having just 4,000 old and battered vehicles in 1935 to being a fully mechanised force with 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, to say nothing of radio, clothing and places to sleep and to wash. On D Day, some 375 million items were packed ready for the invasion force to use.

None of this materiel endured; it was all expended to achieve victory. The title, the Waste of War, was born out of a speech made by Bill Williams, the head of the RAOC during WWII. 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.

The Waste of War is the story of the 250,000 men and women of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and volunteers who mechanised the Army and who made sure it had all it needed for victory. It is a story of an organisation growing by learning through its mistakes. It is the story of that waste.

Vauxhall Motors, WWII and the Churchill Tank

This may be an example of those who choose to record their role in an historic event gaining a voice for posterity. Whether this is the case or not, the story is important.

Vauxhall Motors in Luton began the war with the delivery of many thousands of Bedford trucks. In time a number of variations on the basic model were produced including an all-wheel-drive that would revert to a single axle drive in normal road conditions.

With the poor performance of existing tanks largely of a Great War generation, there was a major initiative to produce a tank that would take on the Germans. Initially Vauxhall contributed to its development, but were then asked to design and manufacture a brand new and more powerful engine of 350 b.h.p., six times greater than the Bedford engines currently in production. A new test bed had to be built, but the prototype of the new engine was running only 89 days after the request had been made.

The Ministry of Supply then decided that it needed a very much heavier tank and Vauxhall were commissioned to design and build it. In his account of Vauxhall during WWII, W.J. Seymour is at pains to point out that no self-respecting engineer would produce a brand new vehicle without extensive testing and a whole sequence of prototypes. However, England after Dunkirk was in a desperate hurry to get into a position when it could stand up to Germany. The Churchill, as it was called, was put int production. It was not a success on day one, but rather developed through modification into a machine that did the job. Vauxhall were developing a successor when hostilities ceased.

The Churchill was perhaps best known in the many ways it was adapted, from flame thrower to bridge transport and anti-mine flail.

A square mile of weeds and rubbish

Eighty years ago this month, my father,  temporary Lieutenant Colonel Bill Williams, was summoned from Catterick Camp in Yorkshire by the War Office to visit a derelict shell filling factory just outside Nottingham. He stood on a hill surveying the site and saw a square mile of weeds and rubbish. Yet, it was in the right place: good road and rail links, a plentiful supply of staff, but above all Coventry. Chilwell, on the outskirts of Nottingham was near the motor industry and that held the key. Wars in the middle of the 20th century would be fought on wheels.

The factory, which had been the largest shell filling factory in Britain, was said to have supplied most of the ammunition fired on the Western Front. It had been created by Viscount Chetwynd, a man of great vision, but in 1918 it suffered a disastrous explosion which cost the lives of 134 munition workers and rendered most of the site useless.  One of Bill’s first acts on taking command was to put in place a tradition of honouring these men on each Armistice Day. After the war what remained of the site  became a general Ordnance depot until it closed in 1926.

When Bill returned to Catterick his mind was buzzing. The War Office had asked him to create an Ordnance Depot specifically for Motor Transport.

The full story is told in War on Wheels

COD Chilwell - the 'after' image

It had never been done before and probably would never be done again

A morning at the National Archives has clarified for me the astonishing truth about the RAOC operation in WWII: it was monumental because of its scale, because there was no depth of experience to fall back on, because, at least initially, and there was grossly insufficient resource. Time and again documents refer to learning new ways and to me to begin with this seemed a luxury, surely better just to get on with the job. It then occurred to me that the job was something entirely new and so the seeking of new ways was business as usual. The RAOC was perhaps one of the first learning organisations.

Senior WS Officers would meet each quarter to share expertise

Operation Market Garden 17 September 1944

Seventy six years ago the largest ever airborne operation was gathering at RAF Barkston Heath in Lincolnshire.

Amongst those who would take off for Arnhem were men of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, some of whom formed the Ordnance Field Park Recce Party whose job it was to seek out large garages and commandeer suitable vehicles to help transport the troops from the drop points. It was a group of seven men, including Private Ted Mordecai who wrote a gripping account of the five days he spent face to face with the enemy.

The beginning was unexceptional. The Dutch civilians, all wearing Marigolds,  welcomed the soldiers as saviours. A small village pub offered beer which they had been told to refuse. Local people gave them cups of ersatz coffee.

With the news that the battalion ahead of them was encountering tough opposition, they were ordered to press forward at all speed. Further orders came that their intended role had been shelved and they were to take an active part in securing the bridge across the river.

Ted's words paint the picture better than mine ever could:

"As we moved up the road parallel to the river we could see the span bridge outlined against flashes of gunfire against the sky. At the same time the Germans on the other side of the river were concentrating all their fire in our direction and at the bridge...the sound of shot and shell was deafening, but we inched our way forward up to the bridge..."

They successfully occupied a house within reach of the bridge. It was 2000 hours on 17 September.