The Gathering Storm: The Second World War (99 page)

11. It is not suggested that the Air Ministry or Air Staff are at present capable of assuming unaided this heavy new responsibility. In the formation of the anti-air command recourse must be had to both the older services. Well-trained staff officers, both from the Army and the Navy, must be mingled with officers of the existing Air Staff.

N.B. –
The question of the recruitment and of the interior administration of the units handed over to the anti-air command for operations and training need not be a stumbling-block. They could be provided from the present sources unless and until a more convenient solution was apparent.

12. This memorandum has not hitherto dealt with
matériel,
but that is extremely simple. The Admiralty will decide upon the types of aircraft which their approved functions demand. The extent of the inroad which they require to make upon the finances and resources of the country must be decided by the Cabinet, operating through a priorities committee under the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence. At the present stage this Minister would, no doubt, give his directions to the existing personnel, but in the event of war or the intensification of the preparations for war he would give them to a Ministry of Supply. There could of course be no question of Admiralty priorities being allowed to override other claims in the general sphere of air production. All must be decided from the supreme standpoint.

13. It is not intended that the Admiralty should develop technical departments for aircraft design separate from those existing in the Air Ministry or under a Ministry of Supply. They would however be free to form a nucleus technical staff to advise them on the possibilities of scientific development and to prescribe their special naval requirements in suitable technical language to the Supply Department.

14. To sum up, therefore, we have:

First – The Admiralty should have plenary control of the Fleet air arm for all purposes which are defined as naval.

Secondly – A new department must be formed under the Air Ministry from the three Services for active anti-aircraft defence operations.

Thirdly – The question of
matériel
supply must be decided by a priorities committee under the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, and executed at present through existing channels, but eventually by a Ministry of Supply.

Appendix C, Book I

A NOTE ON SUPPLY ORGANISATION
J
UNE
6, 1936

1. The existing Office of the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence comprises unrelated and wrongly grouped functions. The work of the Minister charged with strategic co-ordination is different, though not in the higher ranges disconnected, from the work of the Minister charged with: (
a
) securing the execution of the existing programmes, and (
b
) planning British industry to spring quickly into wartime conditions and creating a high control effective for both this and the present purpose.

2. The first step therefore is to separate the functions of strategic thought from those of material supply in peace and war, and form the organisation to direct this latter process. An harmonious arrangement would be four separate departments – Navy, Army, Air Force, and Supply – with the Co-ordinating Minister at the summit of the four having the final voice upon priorities.

3. No multiplication of committees, however expert or elaborate, can achieve this purpose. Supply cannot be achieved without command. A definite chain of responsible authority must descend through the whole of British industry affected. (This must not be thought to imply State interference in the actual functions of industry.) At the present time the three service authorities exercise separate command over their particular supply, and the fourth, or planning, authority is purely consultative, and that only upon the war need divorced from present supply. What is needed is to unify the supply command of the three service departments into an organism which also exercises command over the war expansion. (The Admiralty would retain control over the construction of warships and certain special naval stores.)

4. This unification should comprise not only the function of supply but that of design. The service departments prescribe in general technical terms their need in type, quality, and quantity, and the supply organisation executes these in a manner best calculated to serve its customers. In other words, the Supply Department engages itself to deliver the approved types of war stores of all kinds to the services when and where the latter require them.

5. None of this, nor the punctual execution of any of the approved programmes, can be achieved in the present atmosphere of ordinary peacetime preparation. It is neither necessary nor possible at this moment to take wartime powers and apply wartime methods. An intermediate state should be declared called (say) the period of emergency preparation.

6. Legislation should be drafted in two parts – First, that appropriate to the emergency preparation stage, and second, that appropriate to a state of war. Part I should be carried out now. Part II should be envisaged, elaborated, the principles defined, the clauses drafted and left to be brought into operation by a fresh appeal to Parliament should war occur. The emergency stage should be capable of sliding into the war stage with the minimum of disturbance, the whole design having been foreseen.

7. To bring this new system into operation there should first be created a Minister of Supply. This Minister would form a Supply Council. Each member would be charged with the study of the four or five branches of production falling into his sphere. Thereafter, as soon as may be, the existing service sub-departments of supply, design, contracts, etc., would be transferred by instalments to the new authority, who alone would deal with the Treasury upon finance. (By “finance” is meant payments within the scope of the authorised programmes.)

Appendix D, Book I

M
Y
S
TATEMENT ON THE
O
CCASION OF THE
D
EPUTATION OF
C
ONSERVATIVE
M
EMBERS OF
B
OTH
H
OUSES TO THE
P
RIME
M
INISTER
, J
ULY
28, 1936

In time of peace the needs of our small Army, and to some extent of the air force and Admiralty, in particular weapons and ammunition, are supplied by the War Office, which has for this purpose certain Government factories and habitual private contractors. This organisation is capable of meeting ordinary peace-time requirements, and providing the accumulation of reserves sufficient for a few weeks of war by our very limited regular forces. Outside this there was nothing until a few months ago. About three or four months ago authority was given to extend the scope of War Office orders in certain directions to ordinary civil industry.

On the other hand, in all the leading Continental countries the whole of industry has been for some time solidly and scientifically organised to turn over from peace to war. In Germany, of course, above all others, this became the supreme study of the Government even before the Hitler régime. Indeed, under the impulse of revenge, Germany, forbidden by treaty to have fleets, armies, and an air force, concentrated with intense compression upon the perfecting of the transference of its whole industry to war purposes. We alone began seriously to examine the problem when everyone else had solved it. There was, however, still time in 1932 and 1933 to make a great advance. Three years ago when Hitler came into power we had perhaps a dozen officials studying the war organisation of industry as compared with five or six hundred working continuously in Germany. The Hitler régime set all this vast machinery in motion. They did not venture to break the treaties about Army, Navy, and air force until they had a head of steam on in every industry which would, they hoped, speedily render them an armed nation unless they were immediately attacked by the Allies.

What is being done now? Preparation cannot reach a stage of mass deliveries for at least eighteen months from the date of the order. If by ammunition is meant projectiles (both bombs and shells) and cartridge-cases containing propellant, it will be necessary to equip the factories with a certain amount of additional special-purpose machine-tools, and to modify their existing lay-out. In addition jigs and gauges for the actual manufacture must be made…. The manufacture of these special machine-tools will have to be done in most cases by firms quite different from those to whom the output of projectiles is entrusted. After the delivery of the special machine-tools, a further delay is required while they are being set up in the producing factories, and while the process of production is being started. Then and only then, at first in a trickle, then in a stream, and finally in a flood, deliveries will take place. Not until then can the accumulation of war resources begin. This inevitably lengthy process is still being applied on a relatively minute scale. Fifty-two firms have been offered contracts. Fourteen had last week accepted contracts. At the present moment it would be no exaggeration to state that the German ammunition plants may well amount to four or five hundred, already for very nearly two years in full swing.

Turning now to cannon: by cannon I mean guns firing explosive shells. The processes by which a cannon factory is started are necessarily lengthy, the special plants and machine-tools are more numerous, and the lay-out more elaborate. Our normal peace-time output of cannon in the last ten years has, apart from the Fleet, been negligible. We are therefore certainly separated by two years from any large deliveries of field guns or anti-aircraft guns. Last year it is probable that at least five thousand guns were made in Germany, and this process could be largely amplified in war. Surely we ought to call into being plant which would enable us, if need be, to create and arm a national army of a considerable size.

I have taken projectiles and cannon because these are the core of defence; but the same arguments and conditions, with certain modifications, apply over the whole field of equipment. The flexibility of British industry should make it possible to produce many forms of equipment, for instance, motor lorries and other kindred weapons such as tanks and armoured cars, and many slighter forms of material necessary for an army, in a much shorter time if that industry is at once set going. Has it been set going? Why should we be told that the Territorial Army cannot be equipped until after the Regular Army is equipped? I do not know what is the position about rifles and rifle ammunition. I hope at least we have enough for a million men. But the delivery of rifles from new sources is a very lengthy process.

Even more pertinent is the production of machine-guns. I do not know at all what is the programme of Browning and Bren machine-guns. But if the orders for setting up the necessary plant were only given a few months ago, one cannot expect any appreciable deliveries except by direct purchase from abroad before the beginning of 1938. The comparable German plants already in operation are capable of producing supplies limited only by the national manhood available to use them.

But this same argument can be followed out through all the processes of producing explosives, propellant, fuses, poison gas, gas-masks, searchlights, trench-mortars, grenades, air-bombs, and all the special adaptations required for depth-charges, mines, etc., for the Navy. It must not be forgotten that the Navy is dependent upon the War Office and upon an expansion of national industry for a hundred and one minor articles, a shortage in any one of which will cause grave injury. Behind all this again lies of course the supply of raw materials, with its infinite complications.

What is the conclusion? It is that we are separated by about two years from any appreciable improvement in the material process of national defence, so far as concerns the whole volume of supplies for which the War Office has hitherto been responsible, with all the reactions that entails, both on the Navy and the War Office. But upon the scale on which we are now acting, even at the end of two years, the supply will be petty compared either with our needs in war, or with what others have already acquired in peace.