In the aftermath of the First World War, the army’s defence industrial base had shrunk massively and the commitment of successive governments to “limited liability” continued the trend but Corelli Barnett
[1], says that the production difficulties were far more deep-seated. He says that British industry was inefficient, obsolete, and badly organised. British firms were too small to take full advantage of economies of scale and be able to invest in new production methods. British conservatism and a lack of scientific input made them unwilling to do so. Craftsmen were needed at every stage of production, and workers spent too much time on protecting their trades and demarcation disputes. These men did everything they could to keep their jobs going and to prevent other people from taking them over. He reserves his most scathing criticism for the production of tanks but says that the limitations on the production of coal limited the production of steel, which limited the production of tanks and other weapons, making the crisis of 1940 (and the reliance on the USA to make up the gap) worse than it might have been. These troubles led to the procurement and production of the Home Guard Vehicles, Molotov Cocktails, The No. 76 Special Incendiary Grenade, The No. 73 Grenade, The Sticky Bomb, The Blacker Bombard, The Smith Gun, and the Northover Projector.
One firm that did invest in new production methods, Guy Motors, had its workshops filled with orders for gun tractors and lorries and as a result they had insufficient capacity to make the Guy armoured car, which was the only four-wheel drive British armoured car at the time. Production stopped at 101, and it was passed onto Humber, who made a very similar armoured car but it wasn’t available until 1941.
David Edgerton
, tries to counter Barnett by recounting British achievements in the war, and stressing the role played by pre-war policies and priorities, but doesn’t really succeed. For instance, he says that the British army did not lose nearly all its equipment at Dunkirk as it had enough spare capacity left at home for Churchill to send tanks to Egypt in August 1940. This is not true, as they represented a significant proportion of the available tank strength (particularly infantry tanks) and there had been two months’ production since Dunkirk. Actually, Churchill took a gamble (that paid off handsomely), believing that the threatened German invasion of Britain wouldn’t get past the Royal Navy. Egerton agrees that the British relied on the wealth and manufacturing strength of the United States to carry them through. He says nothing about industrial relations, and gives no coherent overview of scientific policy-making or weapons procurement.
[2]
Barnett says that the production problems were not just those of quantity, but also of quality. He says that British armour plate wasn’t as good as it might have been, and British tanks sent to Egypt had to go straight into the workshops to be fixed up (e.g. they arrived with nuts and bolts only hand tight). Equipment supplied to the army could be unreliable – and early war British tanks and vehicles were infamously unreliable. This was another reason why the numbers supplied were insufficient. Anthony Tucker-Jones says in
Hitler’s Great Panzer Heist that by early July 1941, the Home Forces could muster 1, 141 infantry and cruiser tanks but only 391 were considered fit for action. “British repair facilities at this stage remained lamentable and a month later 25% of the infantry tanks and 157 out of 400 cruiser tanks were still out of action.”
[3] The poor quality of British products extended to electronic devices, with RV Jones (
Most Secret War[4]) saying that German products (though technically inferior) were much better made – the inferior quality of British radio sets (that admittedly worked in the desert) being part of the chain of failures that led to defeat at Arnhem.
David Fletcher
[5] agrees with Corelli Barnet though he does have one or two vehicles which he thinks were pretty good. He also criticises British industry for not being able to standardise its vehicles and producing a large number of different models of the same types of vehicles. He says also that there was very little development so that the same vehicles were being produced at the end and the beginning of the war. These problems were compounded by insufficient manufacturing capacity; there were not enough steel mills and foundries to maintain adequate supplies of armour plate. The shortage of factory space led to contracts being issued to subsidiary manufacturers for the production of major sub-assemblies or even complete tanks. This meant that time and resources were wasted moving large pieces of tank to and fro across the country before final assembly, and also that inferior stock was made. He says that the British Army was deficient in third line transport even in September 1940.
[6] That was used to provide supplies from rear areas to divisions, with second line transport being organic to divisions and their smaller formations, and first line transport being provided to the troops in combat. The problem of providing enough transport for the army was partially solved by hiring buses. Bernard Montgomery in his memoirs
[7] describes the problem of getting enough transport for the troops as well as hiring the buses through the payment of petty cash, as they had to be given back when the money ran out.
The pre-war design and production of tanks was something of a disorganised cottage industry, in which anybody thought they could design a tank. Many tank models were designed and produced for small contracts by a widely dispersed gaggle of small firms. There was no central tank production centre and little central direction of design and production. However, the shortage of money for tank development meant that only two firms were working on new designs before the war: Vickers (makers of the Valentine tank) and the Department of Design at the Royal Ordnance Factories. Neither had contact with the General Staff and so they knew nothing about what the army wanted. Later Nuffield Mechanisation was created to make cruiser tanks using the Christie suspension system but a separate manufacturer was engaged to design and build the superficially similar Covenanter.
The main pre-war problem was a lack of money. The Great Depression caused government income to fall and social security payments to rise equally alarmingly, at a time when the huge debts of the First World War were still being paid off. The insistence on balancing the budget and restoring the value of the pound, and the prevailing attitudes to another war (which anyway it was hoped that international diplomacy and co-operation could prevent), caused the army’s five year budget to be halved in 1934. Between 1920 and 1938, British defence spending was at its lowest ever, in terms of percentage of national income, at a time when the British Empire was at its maximum extent. [Ferguson, 1997, p. 284]. The British rearmament process began in I935, in the wake of abandonment of the 'ten-year rule' (that there would be no major conflict within a rolling ten-year horizon). However, priority was given to the air force and navy. Until March I938 British defence preparations had to be carried on within the limits of the doctrine that 'the course of normal trade should not be impeded'. Strict financial constraints were soon rationalized in military policy, in the theory of a 'war of limited liability', ruling out the need for any major reconditioning of the ground forces Attempts to build up the numbers of tanks started in 1936 but were held back by a lack of suitable designs, cavalry conservatism, and indecision about doctrine. The price of a tank was also a key constraint, ensuring (along with the rail transport requirements) that they stayed small and under-armed.
These problems were compounded by insufficient manufacturing capacity; there were not enough steel mills and foundries to maintain adequate supplies of armour plate. The shortage of factory space led to contracts being issued to subsidiary manufacturers for the production of major sub-assemblies or even complete tanks. This meant that time and resources were wasted moving large pieces of tank to and fro across the country before final assembly, and also that inferior stock was made. Contracts were issued to companies that had no previous experience of manufacturing tanks (the Covenanter is perhaps the worst example) and, to begin with, orders were small and production slow. The design process also inhibited production efforts, as the tank builders weren’t involved in the design process until a prototype had been built. Thus the Covenanter was designed with welded armour but built with riveted armour instead. By the late 1930s many firms had full order books building civilian vehicles and were reluctant to build tanks instead. They lacked modern plant and the skills and resources required to develop new techniques. In any case, they preferred traditional methods and British craftsmanship. Mass production demanded a degree of standardisation in which craftsmanship had no place. The locomotive manufacturers, shipbuilders, and agricultural engineers all used riveted construction and took a long time to switch to the faster and higher quality welded or casting methods. Welding reduced weight and made a much better join that was less likely to fail if hit – riveted armour had a tendency to collapse or fire rivets through the tank in similar circumstances.
Nevertheless, at the outbreak of war, there were nearly 2,000 tanks available to all British tank units at home and abroad. 300 were completely obsolete and most of the rest were light tanks suitable only for fighting tribesmen on the North-West Frontier or for reconnaissance duties. 8,000 fully tracked carriers (some unarmoured but including innovative larger designs such as the Dragon) were shared between the armoured and infantry divisions. There were also about 200 armoured cars, half of which were old Rolls-Royce, Lanchester, and Morris armoured cars between ten and twenty years old.
[ii] The only modern purpose-built armoured car available to the British was the Guy armoured car. “Seven or eight different models of tank were in production, four or five existed in prototype form or advanced stages of design, while others were only undeveloped paper projects.”
[iii]
Production of tanks in quantity did not begin until several months after the outbreak of the war, and no sooner had it begun than the difficulties common to all war industry, above all shortages of skilled labour and materials, piled up. To overcome them, tank production needed preferential treatment. However the main defence against invasion was the navy and the RAF; the general priority direction of 14th June 1940 gave the highest priority to aircraft production. On 22nd July 1940 the Ministry of Supply formally drew the attention of the Defence Committee (Supply) to the fact that the production of tanks did not figure in Priority 1A, whereupon the Committee (on the Prime Minister's recommendation) invited the Production Council to consider the inclusion in Priority 1A of the manufacture of tanks. The Battle of Britain, however, prevented this instruction from bearing fruit.
In the pre-Dunkirk period of the war, i.e. from the beginning of September 1939 to 1st June of the following year, 739 tanks were produced and the average monthly rate was about 82. By the end of1940 the total produced since the beginning of the war rose to 1,713 and the average monthly rate in the last quarter of the year approached 150. This wasn’t far short of the annual production of some types of German tanks for that year.
[iv] Between September 1939 and September 1940, 2,412 tanks were produced: 548 Cruiser, 524 Infantry, and 1,340 light tanks. 615 tanks were lost in France, leaving at least one government minister to believe that there were no tanks at all in the south of England immediately after Dunkirk. Fortunately for Britain the majority of these were obsolete light tanks and the older Matilda I infantry tanks. The number of Cruiser tanks lost was however quite significant, representing more than half of the total number of Cruiser tanks available.
[v] The Mk VI light tank (only slightly better than a Panzer 1 and armed with two machine guns) remained the mainstay of the British army in England, and to increase tank numbers by 100, the Guy armoured car was renamed a “wheeled tank”.
In order to produce as many tanks as possible, older designs stayed in production while newer designs were delayed in production and even when they were manufactured, they were turned out with older equipment. Thus the Covenanter stayed in production until 1943, and all British tanks were equipped with two pounder guns until 1942, long after the two pounder was obsolete. It also wasn’t possible to upgrade the tanks because their turret rings were too small, as the tanks had to be narrow enough to fit British railway carriages.
Robert Kershaw, Tank Men, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2008, p. 59
[ii] David Fletcher, The Great Tank Scandal, p.3
[iii] David Fletcher, The Great Tank Scandal, HMSO, London, 1989, p.6
[iv] German annual production 1940: Panzer IV - 268; Panzer II - 99; Sturmgeschütz III – 192; Panzer 38(t) -367; Panzer III - 862
[v] Michael M. Postan, History of the Second World War – British War production, Chapter IV. P 184.
Robert Kershaw, Tank Men, 2008, p. 77
[1] Corelli Barnett, The Audit of War, Macmillan, London, 1986
[2] David Edgerton, Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War, Penguin, London, 2012
[3] Anthony Tucker-Jones, Hitler’s Great Panzer Heist, Pen & Sword, Barnsley, 2007, p.31. This comes from a minute written by Churchill. Most of the cruiser tanks would have been Covenanters, which were especially reviled by their crews.
[4] R.V. Jones, Most Secret War, Coronet Books, London, 1978
[5] David Fletcher, British Military Transport 1829-1956, HMSO, London, 1998
[6] David Fletcher, The Great Tank Scandal, HMSO, London, 1989, p.6
[7] Bernard Montgomery, The Memoirs of Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, K.G, Collins, London, 1960
