326 Chapter Nine
the changed scale of operations. Massive orders were placed with pri
vate firms and with Woolwich for everything the new army needed.
But such orders had to compete with French and Russian orders, and
with demands from the navy as well. The result was instant overload.
Deliveries lagged while an inflamed public opinion urged everyone to
enlist, regardless of industrial skills or civilian occupation. About 20
percent of the munitions workers actually joined the army in response
to these pressures, thereby hampering production of shells and guns
that were already in desperately short supply.^42
Not surprisingly, acute shortages soon began to afflict the British
Expeditionary Force in France. In May 1915 the commander, Sir John
French, decided to appeal to the public over the head of his military
superiors. The resulting scandal provoked a Cabinet crisis and the
establishment of a new Ministry of Munitions, headed by Lloyd
George. Lloyd George promptly and peremptorily set out to mobilize
the entire industrial resources of Great Britain for war. He set pro
duction goals that far exceeded anything the War Office asked for or
yet conceived to be possible.^43 Voluntarism blended with compulsion
in the way the new ministry went about its work. Among its first acts,
for example, was to send out questionnaires asking every firm whose
address the ministry could discover for an inventory of its machinery
and suggestions as to what kind of munitions work it might be able to
undertake. In a similar spirit of voluntarism, labor unions were per
suaded to suspend traditional work rules and promised not to au
thorize strikes. This was an important concession, for, as in France,
new machinery soon automated a good many production lines, allow
ing unskilled or semiskilled labor to do what skilled men had done
previously. On the other hand, profits were legally limited to not more
than 20 percent above the average of the prewar years, and the shrill
ness of war propaganda against “slackers” put a very real element of
compulsion behind the recruiting drives that brought the “Kitchener
army” up to a total size of 2,466,000 men by 1916.
Lloyd George gathered a group of “men of push and go” to staff the
Ministry of Munitions, drawing them mainly from business and the
- Cf. Clive Trebilcock, “War and the Failure of Industrial Mobilization, 1899 and
1914,” in J. M. Winter, ed., War and Economic Development (Cambridge, 1975), pp.
139–64.
- The spirit of the new regime was reflected by a remark attributed to Lloyd
George: “Take Kitchener’s maximum, square it, multiply that result by two; and when
you are in sight of that, double it again for good luck.” R. J. Q. Adams, Arms and the
Wizard; Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915–1916 (College Station, Tex.,
1978), p. 174.
