Our debt of gratitude to the British Motor Industry in WW2

The History Press has published on their website an article I wrote on the British Motor Industry's contribution in WW2 in which Coventry played a major part.

The more I think about it, the more open mouthed I become.

These companies made motor vehicles; they made guns, jerrycans, tin helmets. They made aircraft. The story of the Stirling Bomber, the MacRobert's Reply, which I have written with Phil Jeffs for Story Terrace, has centre stage a Stirling Bomber made by Austin.

The motor industry in the 1930s had been exciting, but far from secure. The Rootes brothers saved Humber and Hillman by buying them.

I am struck by the contrast with the American motor companies where Ford, for example, was turning out massive numbers of vehicles using the techniques of mass production.

Rolls Royce built Merlin engines by hand.

Pictures from the Chilwell depot show similar hand techniques.

With so many men joining the armed forces, many women joined the industry and worked to great effect under the careful eye of those men too old to be call up.

The result was phenomenal. We owe a huge debt of gratitude.

Voices of the time

Part of the joy of writing War on Wheels was to pick up on voices from the period. Here is an extract from the Sunday Pictorial, a popular magazine of the time.

'By 1944 there were established ATS units at most depots and the women themselves had become fully skilled at the tasks they undertook.

'They are dressed in grubby fatigue suits - boiler suits more or less to you - with an old piece of rag to tie up their hair.

'Like twenty-year old Beryl Barnes, for instance. People in Rainham, Essex, probably know her by sound. She used to say, “number please?”, at the end of their telephones.

'Until her particular Second Front started at this depot, which nourishes our armies in the field with nuts and bolts, Beryl was a clerk in the office. She used to watch the trains load and unload, rather bored with the whole thing, if the truth be told.

'Then her Second Front started. “May I leave the office?” asked Beryl. “I would like to work out there.” Perhaps the fact that she’s engaged to an officer in the Sherwood Foresters had something to do with it.

'I know it did in Doris Atkinson’s case. This twenty-two year-old ATS wife from West Mailing is married to a Marine who fought at Narvick, Matapan and Crete.

'Yes, these are men and women we tend to forget. But when the historical moment arrives when we set foot on the first stage of the march to Berlin, I suggest you remember this. Remember that without the sweat and toil of thousands of unsung heroes like them your son and husband would have nothing to fight with. Their private Second Front is almost over. They can do no more.

Pre-publication copy

There is something very exciting about seeing your book 'in the flesh' for the first time.

It is of course an old friend, affection being rekindled by the distance from periods of agony in its creation! I had of course seen the pdf file sent off to the printers. I had seen all the photographs. The total result though was so much better: the clarity of the images especially.

Thank you, History Press for a job well done.

There was one small glitch which has been bothering me. In the 'blurb' on the back page a couple of words have been omitted. I wrote, 'through the near disaster of the BEF, Desert War and Italian invasion, to preparations for D-Day and war in the Far East.'

The words 'the BEF' are missing from the back cover and so it reads, 'from the near disaster of the Desert War and Italian invasion...'

It made me wonder whether, from a supply point of view, the Desert War and invasion of Italy were near disasters.

Neither was perfect. The start of the desert war demonstrated all too clearly the challenges of supplying a mechanised army. The invasion of Italy showed up the drawbacks of having the place of command far removed from the action.

I don't think they were disasters.

The BEF could have been a total disaster, had it not been for Dunkirk. Yet, from a supply point of view, the vast amounts of equipment left behind certainly represented a near disaster.

Having said all this, it is all too easy to be wise after the event.

What was happening in WW2 was all a learning process. It had never been tried before. Had there not been failures, you could argue that those concerned weren't trying hard enough.

The final result though is for me the proof of the pudding as Max Hastings puts it in Overlord:

‘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.’

Getting the right mix of people

One of the big challenges for the RAOC in WW2 was to get the right skills, and this meant looking to industry, motor manufacturers and distributors and the big retail groups. Those recruited from these companies would have to become soldiers and work alongside seasoned regulars. An regular officer later recalled the challenge.

'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.

Brigadier de Wolff with the Queen at COD Donnington

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.