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!

The context of army mechanisation

I have been asked to give a talk about War on Wheels and, as is so often the case with writing, I was totally surprised by what came out. A draft at this stage:

To talk about the mechanisation of the army in WW2 is, in a sense, wrong since, as we know well in Lincoln, it had begun in the Great War with the tank, the first of which we made here in Lincoln on Tritton Road. But there were also lorries, motor bikes and ambulances but not many of any and the main form of transport certainly for supplies was the train from the base depot up to the relatively static front line.

After the war had ended the overwhelming feeling was that it should never happen again and so little thought was given to further mechanisation, indeed there was little resource to spare. The conventional view was that all that was needed were light vehicles and weapons to keep the empire in check, in northern India for example. There were military thinkers like Liddle Heart but no one paid much attention to what they had to say.

It all changed in the mid 30s when the Baldwin government initiated a low level of rearmament. Much of this was related to the air and much was very forward thinking. There is a story of Sir William Rootes, whose group produced Humber and Hillman cars, on tour of the middle east receiving a phone call asking if he would set up a shadow factory ready to manufacture aircraft parts. He said yes. Similar conversations took place with Lord Nuffield, Herbert Austin and other industry leaders. An infrastructure was to put put in place to ensure that Britain could manufacture the aircraft it might need.

It was wasn’t just aircraft; it was the tank and other heavy vehicles. Again there is a story of the remaining very few Great War tanks being taken to Woolwich which was the then base of the RAOC. It was somewhere to put them. But elsewhere thought was being given to the development of the tank from its Lincoln origins. In Russia they had overcome the literal headache of suspension; all too frequently tank drivers would knock themselves out when their vehicle went over large bumps. The technology was developed further by a man called Christie in the States and  the Nuffield group took it forward into production in England in a line of models that would include the Crusader. Vickers, the mainstay of tank production, developed their offering further with the famous Matilda.

All of this though is background, I take the start of the story as a cold November day at Nottingham railway station. Interestingly the same start is taken by the historian who wrote of the contribution of the British motor industry to the war effort. On this cold day a rather large soldier stood impatient for the omnibus, in his pocket was a letter from the war office instructing him to visit the site of the old ammunition factory at Chilwell, to consider its suitability as the centre of army mechanisation and to come up with detailed proposals. The man was temporary lieutenant colonel Bill Williams.

The site was overrun by brambles, the sheds were open to the elements, the massive underground storage area was intact, above all it was in the right place, close to Coventry where the vehicles would be produced.

In his mind's eye was a vast distribution business that would received vehicles from numbers of manufactures and then distribute them to the countless units that would need them worldwide. It would also need to hold spares for each vehicle and have the engineering capability to maintain and adapt.

It was clear to him that no one in the army had this expertise and so he wrote to all the motor companies to pick their brains. The response was warm and his visited Humber, Vauxhall, Morris but also the big lorry producers Scamell and AEC. He visited the competent manufactures: Dunlop would play a big part in the story. It wasn’t just motor expertise, it was distribution, so letters to Marks and Spencer, to Harrods and Woolworths. This was radical. He had the support of his boss and pressed ahead pestering officials at the Treasury to release more and more money - it was raised from a poultry £20,000 to £1 million by the time it was finished in 1938.

VJ Day at seventy

It was all over; for many it had been over since 8 May when Victory in Europe was declared.

I remember being in a tiny church in the Vale of Belvoir in Leicestershire in May 2005 and talking about Victory in Europe in the sermon I preached. After the service, when most people had left, I asked the churchwarden for his memories of VE Day.

‘We had no idea it had happened.’ He went on to tell me that he had been a prisoner of war in Japan and he and those who had survived with him had spent their years oblivious to anything that was happening outside their camp, unless the camp commander chose to tell them.

For the last year I have been researching a book, War on Wheels, about the mechanisation of the Army in WW2. It is about the many thousand soldiers, ATS and civilians who worked in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, my father’s Corps, and who were responsible for giving the army its wheels. As part of this I looked hard at the war in the Far East. My researches took me to the archives of the Imperial War Museum where I read accounts of the fall and surrender of Singapore and Hong Kong and then the first hand accounts of some of those Ordnance men who survived their imprisonment. I remember sitting at the desk holding the typed and handwritten sheets of paper telling of just what human beings are capable of doing to each other. It was a sacred experience.

I decided that these accounts must be in my book both to honour those men but also to offer to my readers a whole picture, warts and all.

A short while ago I came upon a piece on television about two old men, one a former PoW and the other one of his guards. We saw them shaking hands and smiling. The former PoW said quite simply, ‘you could go on hating until you die, but what is the point?’

It made me think hard about whether I should change my mind and, in the interests of reconciliation, remove the offending passages.

I have decided to leave them in. It is, for good or ill, part of the horror of war. I have said more than once that politicians and others sadly need reminding of these horrors before they send our young men and women to fight.

We have moved on, but I believe we must remember, I think, for two reasons. Firstly, for those men and women who gave up their lives and endured so much for our sake. Those I have read about weren’t soldiers by choice. Many were store-men or mechanics or clerks. They were caught up in a maelstrom; they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They conducted themselves with enormous bravery and dignity. We must never forget them.

The second reason is that it was, as I said earlier, human beings doing unspeakable things to other human beings. We see reminders every day that this is not a thing of the past. If we stand up against anything, surely it must be this.

Tanks for Russia

On 22 June 1941 the German-Russian pact came to an end and Russia joined the war against Germany.

Both Prime Minister Churchill and the Minister of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook, placed a high priority on making materiel available to the Russians notwithstanding the relative insecurity of the British Isles.  It follows that supplies to Russia were an important feature of the Donnington depot’s work, as John Bull magazine reported:

'Ah, here was a man just back from Russia. He braved the Arctic seas and the German dive-bombers to take tanks  to our  Allies. With the thermometer  at more than forty below freezing, our ordnance lads worked twenty-four hours a day to clear the ships before another convoy arrived. It was dawn at 10.30 a.m. and dusk at three - so they had to work with lights on even with " Jerry " overhead. And men of the RAOC manned the light anti­ aircraft guns.

'And here was another man from Russia. He had gone to teach the Russians all about our tanks and the multitudinous spare parts accompanying them. “Loveable” was his word for these people. They surrender their  cold reserve slowly, and then become the friendliest people in the world.

'As one instance of the all-outness of Russia in the war effort, he said that women are being sent into the munition factories to work alongside their husbands. When they have learned the job themselves, their menfolk go into the army. Yet the one ambition of the woman is to learn as quickly as possible, and of the men to teach them with all speed.

Another story about tanks for Russia concerns Brigadier de Wolff at Donnington who used the knowledge that he had gained of Russian ways in WW1 to smooth the process. All in chapter 4 of War on Wheels.

Bill Williams, wartime leader of the RAOC, died on 7 August 1965

This is part of the obituary, written by Major General Sir John Hildreth, that appeared in the RAOC Gazette in September 1965 telling something of Bill's achievement for the RAOC, The Army and his Country.

'Without him and his drive and determination, I doubt whether the RAOC [and I would say the RLC] would exist today. Many things went wrong in those early days, enough certainly to daunt the spirit of a lesser man, but not Bill Williams. Many people, Corps and Regiments wanted to take over for themselves those stores and equipments of their particular concern. Some to a limited extent succeeded. It was only Bill Williams's audacious determination, first to put right what had gone wrong and second to hold the Corps together as a successful entity that prevented the wholesale distribution of our job to others....

'I found it exhilarating to serve someone who really knew his job - and mine, and most other people's, and who also knew what he wanted done and by when. He was a great leader, probably the greatest the Corps had known. Some found him harsh - and he had to be, for we were at war and only the best was good enough...He would not allow any Officer to call for a junior to explain any facet of the functions for which he was responsible. If he did not know the detail himself, he was "out"!

'And yet, with this detail on his mind, he had the widest vision of any of the big issues of the day...

'He was asked to visit India and to advise on the best way to reorganise Ordnance Services there - a prodigious task for one unacquainted with that country. Nevertheless he picked the wood from the trees and clearly and succinctly told Field Marshal Auchinleck and his Staff exactly what was to be done to put things right - and it was done....

'When, before Normandy, spares for American tanks could not be obtained from that country because of the policy to provide tanks over spares, he went there and talked to the factory workers of our difficulties in maintaining their tanks in battle. He asked for, and got, additional production effort from the workers which, not only maintained the output of tanks, but gave us the spares as well...

'He is reputed while over there to have persuaded Mr Kaiser to build an extra ship to carry the spares over and I can well believe that he did, too...

'He was without doubt the greatest DOS we ever had and he was one of the greatest of all Corpsmen. So long as history records the activities of the RAOC, so long will he be remembered and honoured among us. With his death an era is passed. For those who lived through it, it must always remain a glorious era. For those who come after it should remain forever an inspiration’.

Bill was born in South London in1891. His father died when Bill was 14, forcing him to leave school and take a job as an office boy. I write of the remainder of his life in Dunkirk to D Day. 

MacRobert's Reply preview

Writing MacRobert's Reply was a remarkable experience, talking to Don Jeffs and reading Phil Jeffs' own research, but then digging further into the accounts of many other people of their experiences of war.

My research has taken me deeper into the MacRobert family story and I am indebted to Marion Miller for her remarkable work, From Cawnpore to Cromar: The MacRoberts of Douneside. I have looked deeper into XV Squadron and am indebted to Martyn Ford-Jones for the books he wrote, in particular Bomber Squadron: The men who flew with XV. and the archive he maintains. I have explored the story of the Stirling bomber and Jonathan Falconer’s book Stirling Wings. Anyone exploring Bomber Command during the Second World War would be the poorer had they not read Bomber Boys: Fighting back 1940-45 by Patrick Bishop or Bomber Command by Max Hastings. The administrative staff of XV squadron maintained detailed records of operations and the National Archives have digitised these and made them available. I am grateful to both but also specifically to the National Archive for the records of Lady MacRobert’s correspondence with the Air Ministry on which I have drawn extensively. Finally, I say thank you to the Imperial War Museum for making recordings of the recollections of veterans and to the veterans themselves for telling their stories.

My generation has been truly blessed not to have been confronted by such horrors.

We can though be proud of what our parents' generation did; we can also warn our children's generation of what war actually means.

In my work on War on Wheels, I have found instances of individuals, groups and businesses raising money for the war effort. The MacRobert's Reply is more than one such instance, since it was substantial, enduring and told the story of great commitment by a grieving mother. The result today is the MacRobert Trust.

Put very briefly, Lady MacRobert lost all three of her sons in the early part of the war. Inspired by Spitfire Week, she gave to the RAF a cheque for £25,000 (£700,000 in today's money) to buy a Stirling Bomber.

The story that followed was about the young men who flew the aircraft and its successors. It is their story that I am now beginning to explore in collaboration with the son of one the surviving crew members, Donald Jeffs, and Story Terrace.

The story of MacRobert's Reply is remarkable in so many ways. I do hope that you find reading it as rewarding as I did writing it.

The book is now available to buy on Amazon. You can find it by following this link .

British motor industry in WW2

The British Motor Industry had been put of war alert on the declaration of war. They had ceased domestic production and awaited orders from the Ministries. For a few, orders came quickly; for many there was nothing and factories lay silent. In time orders did come but in what can only be described as a torrent of uncoordinated demands. Ministries requested aircraft parts and ammunition; they needed helmets; they gave instructions for the development of new vehicles; they demanded cars cut in half with ambulance bodies replacing what had been in the rear. Factory managers must have wondered who was running the war; nevertheless they coped.

'Since 1939, under the stress of wartime conditions, a whole sequence of tanks had been developed. Beginning with the Matilda, of which there had been five designs, and the Valentine, of which there had been eleven, there were the Crusader with four designs, the Covenantor, the Centaur, the Cromwell with seven designs, and the Churchill with eight. On top of that, there had 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…'(Drive for Freedom, Charles Graves)

How to celebrate the Lincoln tank

Over the past few months I have heard a whole range of views on how and, indeed, whether we should should celebrate the invention of the tank, here in Lincoln.

I love the simplicity of the memorial on Tritton Road, but also the imagery of the tank being painstakingly put together by the ordinary men and women of this city. For me this resonates with the original purpose of the tank. The story goes that in 1915 First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had become 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. For the Great War, the rest is, as they say, history. The tank was invented and built here in Lincoln by Fosters under the guidance of William Tritton, interestingly using caterpillar tracks which had been invented just down the road in Grantham. By all accounts it was largely instrumental in shortening the war and so could be said to have saved a great many lives.

In the 1920s and 1930s, British governments strove for peace and the only possible use they saw for a tank was to protect the far reaches of Empire. It follows that little was done to develop the idea, indeed many soldiers believed that there would be a return to the use of horses. Nevertheless Vickers Armstrong kept producing the Matilda and in the mid thirties Lord Nuffield brought to bear the expertise and resource of Morris Motors. Again ‘the story goes’ that he visited Moscow with senior generals and they witnessed the powerful displays of the Russian Army, in particular a very fast tank which used a revolutionary American invention that made it much less hazardous over rough ground. Nuffield then developed a British version which became the Cruiser and which had a big and positive influence in the early years of the Desert War in WW2.

It was though a two edged sward.

It is probably fair to say that many of the allied WW2 tanks were deathtraps for their crews. The British tanks had less firepower and thinner armour than the tanks they faced. American GIs nicknamed the Sherman Tank, the “Ronson’, after the famous cigarette lighter, because when it was hit, it had a 50% chance of catching fire, and, if it caught fire, the crew had only a 50% chance of survival.

 The tank was though a triumph of engineering. This is what my father wrote about it in 1940.

‘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’

The devastation caused to people and buildings by the tank was incalculable.

The story of the tank is a sharp reminder of what human beings are capable. We should celebrate the engineering but then use theatre and other art forms to remind a new generation of the horror.

This piece was published in the Lincolnshire Echo on 16 July 2015

RAOC in Italy 1944

Kenneth Lucas came from Bolton and joined up one month after the outbreak of war, only two months after his wedding. He opted for Ordnance since he thought it had something to do with maps.

Following a period of chaos at Hillsea, he was posted to Branston where his previous experience in the textile industry was noted and he was placed in the shipping department. He steadily progressed through the ranks and eventually was encouraged to take commission. He moved to Donnington and remembered the formal mess dinners each night politely listening to the anecdotes of the CO.

In the spring of 1944 he found himself together with 4400 other troops on board a ship sailing from Liverpool to Naples as part of the 8th army being sent to reinforce those who had invaded at Salerno.

In the winter of 1944 he was promoted to Major and posted as OC Ordnance Store Section 25th Armoured Assault Brigade, 685 Tank Troops Workshop REME.

Here are some of the photographs he took.

Some great images of the Italy campaign 1944 from the RLC archive

Nuffield's role in the Battle of Britain

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 was commissioned to 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.

Lord Nuffield was a single minded, patriotic entrepreneur. He had seen the threat from Germany building in the mid thirties and had set up, as an offshoot of the Riley company, a factory to manufacture aero engines. In spite, or perhaps because this was at his own expense and initiative the Air Ministry declined to make use of it.

The Nuffield organisation also had much to do with the design and manufacture of tanks but with far greater impact in the desert rather than with the British Expeditionary Force. It wasn't just tanks, in Coventry the Nuffield Organisation manufactured Bofors guns under licence from Sweden. It, like the other major motor companies, manufactured anything from trucks to ammunition, steel helmets and trucks such as the Morris Commercial.

The Tank and the Lincolnshire Agricultural Engineers

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

The story goes that in 1915 First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had become 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 and hence the initial name of Landship. The biggest problem was the sheer weight of armour.

Quite separately, Lt Col Swinton, then a war correspondent, had identified the need for, ‘a power-driven, bullet-proof, armed engine capable of destroying machine guns, of crossing country and trenches, of breaking through entanglements and of climbing earthworks.’ Swinton had been told of an earlier invention by Hornsby Agricultural Engineers of Grantham of a tracked vehicle suitable as a cross-country tractor. Whilst the design had won first prize in a 1908 War Office competition, the company had failed to make it a commercial success and so had sold the patented track system to the Holt Tractor Company of California who had found a strong demand for such a vehicle from their agricultural customers. The Holt system seemed to address the problem of weight.

Contracts were awarded for the production of 100 landships to Fosters where the naval officer responsible, Walter G Wilson, had joined William Tritton. 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. Following a period of experimentation a revised tracked version proved satisfactory 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.

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.