Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 273
mained generally satisfied with what the arsenal could supply and
avoided contracts with private firms on principle whenever possible.
This was facilitated by the fact that technical changes in land armament
remained comparatively modest.^18 Everyone assumed that field wea
pons would always have to be light enough for horses to pull. The
potentialities of internal combustion motors (developed from the
1880s for private automobiles) were left unexplored. Such technical
conservatism made it easier for soldiers to preserve their traditional
affection for horses and their no less traditional suspicion of profit-
seeking businessmen and inventors. This was true on the Continent as
well as in Great Britain. Even the Germans, who had to deal with
Krupp rather than with arsenal personnel for their field artillery after
1871, nurtured a deep repugnance towards the self-seeking and greed
that they felt to be intrinsic to commerce; and the few army officers
who lent themselves to Krupp’s blandishments remained an isolated
handful, more or less suspect among their fellows.^19 Conversely, the
preservation of such attitudes in all European armies after the 1880s
held back the pace of technical change to no more than a snail’s pace
in comparison to what was happening simultaneously to European
navies.
The very complexity of naval construction dictated a quite different
attitude as soon as the Royal Navy began buying guns and other heavy
equipment from private manufacturers. Inevitably, personal links
between the circle of technically responsible naval officers and the
managers of private firms became very close. William White, for
achieve mobility in the field, as all European armies did before 1914, simply lacked the
transport capacity to supply more than a token population of guns that spat forth bullets
at the rate of 600 a minute.
- Change, radical enough measured against older standards, was modest only by
comparison to the galloping transformation in naval armament. Brass cartridges (1867
onwards), steel artillery (1883), magazine rifles (1888), and control and communications
devices to allow accurate indirect artillery fire (from 1906) added up to a revolution in
tactics and fire power. Cf. Arthur Forbes, A History of the Army Ordnance Services
(London, 1929), 3:112–34; Charles E. Caldwell and John Headlam, The History of the
Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, 2 vols. (Woolwich, n.d.), 2:105
and passim.
19– Documents reproduced in W A. Boelke, Krupp und die Hohenzollern in
Dokumenten (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1970), pp. 104–6, 123, show how stubbornly the
German army officers held aloof from collaboration with private arms makers, despite
the fact that both Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II entered into personal relations with Alfred
Krupp and his heir. Oddly, admirers and critics of the house of Krupp agree in distort
ing the relationship between German army officers and the firm. Cf. Wilhelm Berdrow,
The Krupps: 150 Years of Krupp History. 1787–1937 (Berlin, 1937), and William Man
chester, The Arms of Krupp (Boston, 1964). Gert von Klass, Krupps: The Story of an
Industrial Empire (London, 1954) does better justice to the social distance and mutual
distrust that prevailed between buyer and seller.
