Chapter 5.
History of the Trench Warfare Department. Part II.
The Transfer of Section FW3A to the Ministry of Munitions.
Section 3. Characteristics of the Trench Warfare Department and the Outside Engineering Branch.
The creation of the Trench Warfare Department as a discrete entity brought into the Ministry of Munitions a department with a culture and methods of working alien to the Ministry's procedures and policies. This distinctiveness originated in the restrictions on manufacturing and the necessity for Section FW3A to exercise control over all stages of munitions production from the original design to issue to the army. This gave Jackson the freedom to develop his own methods that dispensed with many of the regulations the War Office considered essential, while still producing safe and effective weapons. When Section FW3A joined the Ministry, it was still being formed, with its staff heavily engaged in organising the civilian engineering industry to meet the needs of a wartime economy. To the managers, FW3A appeared to be a going concern, and for the first few weeks of its existence as the Trench Warfare Department, it was left alone and continued to operate very much as it had done when at Storey’s Gate.
Miss Lillian Redstone, the senior administrative officer who wrote many of the draft chapters of the Official History of the Ministry of Munitions and had access to individuals, information, and gossip no longer available to us, wrote that the transfer of FW3A introduced an alien culture that was vastly different from that practised by the Government departments and units brought together to create the Ministry. She attributed this to three factors,
1. The distinctive characteristics of the munitions being developed by the department.
2. The fact that FW3A was staffed by military engineers for whom improvisation and problem-solving were second nature.
3. The short period of freedom from the bureaucracy of the War Office following transfer to Storey's Gate allowed Colonel Jackson to implement new ways of working.[1]
Interestingly, her perceptive comments are omitted from her second draft of the chapter after review by her political masters, for the civil servants and businessmen who worked in that vast bureaucracy that was the Ministry of Munitions were beginning to recognise that the Trench Warfare Department was effectively operating outside their control and began forcing it to conform to the policies and procedures that they were putting in place across the Ministry.
(vi) The Outside Engineering Branch.
Upon transfer to the Ministry of Munitions, the concept of the Outside Engineering Branch was still in its infancy, with only Lieutenant Leeming and Mr Hague available to oversee munitions production. When the Trench Warfare Department acquired responsibility for organising the manufacture of grenades and trench mortars, the Branch rapidly expanded, reaching 92 in January 1916 and 156 in January 1917. To accommodate this expansion of the Outside Engineering Branch, Jackson and Leeming expanded the concept of one officer responsible for overseeing all aspects of the production of a single pattern of weapon to create several semi-autonomous Sections responsible for a range of similar weapons, such as the Grenade Section or the Trench Mortar Section. The Heads of which were given great freedom of action to organise the production of their munitions to achieve maximum output while maintaining quality and economy of resources.
An overview of the general principles under which the Outside Engineering Branch operated can be illustrated by tracking a hypothetical order for a batch of 100,000 ball grenades placed in the summer of 1915,
1. GHQ France informs the War Office of its demand,
2. After checking to see if it could be met from ordnance stores, the War Office would forward an order to the Ministry of Munitions,
3. The Statistics Division would log it in before passing it to the Trench Warfare Department to be manufactured.
4. The department's drawing office would produce the necessary number of engineering drawings.
5. The Outside Engineering Branch (OEB) would arrange for the gauges and other measuring devices to be purchased or manufactured.
6. The OEB discusses contracts with a number of metal foundries to cast the grenade bodies. To understand the complexity of even this simple operation, we need to consider the rate at which the completed grenades were to be delivered, which, in our example, is 25,000 per week. As each foundry may only have a maximum output of several hundred grenade bodies a week, as many as 25 or 30 foundries would need to be contracted to meet the weekly quota, with the Outside Engineering Branch providing the necessary iron and carrying out daily inspections of the completed casts to ensure that output was maintained, and the freshly cast grenade bodies met specification.
7. Arrangements in place to transport the grenade bodies to the engineering workshops where they are machined, and the necessary holes for screws, fuses, etc., are drilled, with the same workshop contracted to supply the screws and other fitments necessary to hold components of the grenade together, all of which were quality assured before being assembled into the completed grenade.
8. The grenade bodies are transported to a filling factory to be filled with explosives, with a separate specialised manufacturer, such as Nobels, providing the fuses. Here, the final assembly takes place with the completed grenades and any accessories packed in specially designed boxes for transportation to the front. These strong wooden boxes have internal compartments for grenades, fuses, and detonators, along with the tools to fit them, all snugly designed to prevent the contents from rattling around, since these boxes are expected to be roughly handled by soldiers on the lines of communication and in the trenches. Stuck onto the inside of the lid were the necessary instructions for fitting the fuse and the correct procedure for using the grenade. A distinctive coloured marker on the outside identified the type of munition, for example, whether it was explosive, chemical or smoke grenade.
9. Once these components had been brought together, a final quality check was carried out to determine that the grenades were ready for immediate use before the boxes were dispatched to the Ordnance Officer at the port of embarkation.
A significant feature of this method of organising production was its efficiency, and it proved more productive than the established manufacturing model employed elsewhere in the Ministry of Munitions, as evidenced by the Trench Warfare Supply Department consistently exceeding its production targets.
Jackson’s plan for the Outside Engineering Branch was to organise into sub-sections responsible for specific groups of munitions, such as the grenade section or the trench order section. For staff, he tended to appoint military officers, particularly as Section Heads, who had relevant experience with the munitions they were responsible for. They were to be involved in both research and development, as well as overseeing manufacturing and quality assurance, and were expected to introduce design improvements without interrupting production. Towards the latter part of 1915, this concept underwent a radical change when Dr Addison, with the support of his Minister, Lloyd George, finally defined Mr Roger’s role in the Trench Warfare Department. Still doubtful of Jackson's skills in managing manufacturing, he offered Roger management and financial control over the department's manufacturing activities, which accounted for almost 90 per cent of its total activity. As this included the authority to appoint and dismiss staff, Roger, soon after accepting the appointment, embarked on a policy of replacing the military staff in the sub-sections with civilian industrial and production engineers who reported to him rather than to General Jackson. This was the first step in creating a fatal division in the Trench Warfare Department between the predominantly civilian staff engaged in manufacturing, reporting to Mr Roger, and the predominantly military staff engaged in research and development, reporting to General Jackson.
Within weeks of joining the Ministry of Munitions, Jackson’s original concept of the outside engineering branch underwent radical change following Dr Addison’s decision to enhance Mr Rogers’s responsibilities by giving him management and financial control over the manufacturing activities of the Trench Warfare Department, including the appointment of staff. It had been Jackson’s practice to appoint, whenever possible, military officers as outside engineers on the assumption that their military knowledge and experience would inform the design and functionality of the munitions for which they were responsible.
However, Roger was primarily focused on manufacturing, and he progressively replaced the military officers with civilian industrial or production engineers, a practice that led to a partial separation of the staff with the department between those primarily involved in research and development, most of whom had military experience and reported to General Jackson from those who populated the Outside Engineering Branch, mostly civilians with industrial experience who reported to Alexander Rogers. The separation was never absolute, with several civilian engineers contributing significantly to the development of munitions under their responsibility.
The dramatic expansion of manufacturing under Mr Roger's management led him to claim credit for developing the Outside Engineering Branch. Neither Jackson nor Lemming had spelt out the role and responsibility of an Outside Engineer, and Roger, on 5 August 1915, following a period of rapid recruitment of new civilian staff, issued a departmental memorandum formalising, for the first time, the duties and responsibilities already carried out by the established members of the Outside Engineering Branch.[2] As was his practice with anything he thought significant, he copied this memorandum to Dr Addison and Mr Lloyd George, who assumed that he was introducing a new, efficient system for managing the production of trench warfare munitions. Accordingly, his stock rose within the higher echelons of the ministry, so much so that he was among the first batch of ministry officials that Lloyd George recommended for a knighthood. Jackson, as an officer and gentleman, may have thought it was bad taste to curry favour in that way, but it is clear from Lemming's history of the OEB that Jackson introduced the concept of outside engineers before Mr Roger's appointment and the transfer of FW3A to the Ministry.[3]
As we move into 1916, the range and quantities of munitions in production made it apparent that allowing each Section to have independence over how it organised its manufacturing may not be the best use of limited resources. It was now possible for two Outside Engineers, managing the production of separate munitions, to draw upon the resources of the same industrial area, which was not only wasteful in the use of the department’s available talent, but the competition for resources was tempting some suppliers to increase their prices by playing one engineer off against the other. To end such abuses, Lieutenant Leeming undertook a root-and-branch reorganisation.
While adhering to the principle of one Outside Engineer responsible for the production of a particular pattern of munition, he divided the country's manufacturing areas into districts, roughly corresponding in size and boundaries to the Ministry of Munition Area Offices. He then appointed a highly experienced industrial engineer recruited from one of the great industrial areas, such as Manchester, Birmingham or Newcastle, where their local knowledge was essential in identifying engineering workshops and sources of materials not currently employed in the war effort, with the authority to oversee and coordinate all Trench Warfare Department contracts awarded in his district. They were also encouraged to develop and maintain close relationships with local manufacturers and to ensure that their staff were always on hand to support them through the many changes in manufacturing processes that typified the production and modification of trench warfare munitions.
The Trench Warfare Supply Department delegated to them the authority to organise manufacturing in their districts as they saw fit, taking into consideration local conditions, including the availability of labour and materials. Their aim was to achieve their production targets, stay within budget, or, better still, come in under budget, through strict cost control and efficiency gains while meeting the required quality standards. They were also expected to meet unexpected demands generated by the military situation, such as supplying emergency Ball grenades for the Dardanelles or creating an ad hoc manufacturing system for a new munition, such as the Mills bomb, while a new supply section dedicated to managing its production was being developed. The efficiency and success of the District Engineers were enhanced by disseminating best practices for resolving manufacturing problems via a regular newsletter and a twice-yearly conference of all District Engineering Officers.
Their involvement in the development and manufacture of chemical warfare agents kept them up to date with innovations in a rapidly expanding chemical industry, and they acquired knowledge of emerging technologies, such as electric welding imported from France, while producing ammunition for the heavy mortars. Such knowledge and expertise extended the range of work undertaken by the Trench Warfare Supply Department, and by late 1916, we find them responsible for the development and manufacture of munitions far removed from trench warfare, such as aerial bombs and mine-sinkers for the Navy, as well as sophisticated accessories for accurately placing sea mines. District Engineers were supported by Supply Officers, who were either engineers or highly experienced craftsmen, and worked with individual suppliers to train their workforce, resolve practical difficulties that may arise during manufacture or in the supply of materials, and support suppliers through the introduction of any changes in the manufacturing process. It is also important to appreciate, for it is often overlooked, that the Trench Warfare Supply Department was responsible for the design and manufacture of the huge range of accessories essential for the weapons it produced to be effective. For example, the Chemical Warfare Section was responsible not only for organising the chemical industry to produce sufficient chemicals for use as weapons, but also for organising the design and manufacture of special cylinders, pipes, valves, and other fittings necessary for the discharge of toxic gases under battlefield conditions.
(vii) The Outside Engineering Branch Loses Its Autonomy.
As the Trench Warfare Department settled down as an independent Directorate, the fundamental differences between its methods of working and those of the rest of the Ministry of Munitions became clearer as Ministry officials came to understand more fully the nature of this strange department that had dropped into their midst. Concerned that they were operating outside their control and might damage the already fragile relationship with the War Office, they moved to enforce conformity to and coordination with Ministry procedures. Two practices of the Outside Engineering Branch were of particular concern.
The practice of delegating control over the design and the manufacture of a munition to an individual, which senior management viewed as a potential source of corruption or collusion between the engineer and his manufacturers. More significantly, there was confusion on how the Trench Warfare Department received and dispatched orders for its munitions. The agreement between the War Office and the Ministry of Munitions specified that all orders for equipment would first be received by the War Office, where their urgency would be assessed before they were forwarded to the Ministry for manufacture. However, orders for munitions provided by Section FW3A were classified as emergency supplies, and never processed according to War Office procedures, but dealt directly by FW3A and this procedure was carried over into the Ministry much to the frustration of the Ministry's bean counters who had difficulty in keeping track of orders from GHQ, individual Army commands, and the wide range of miscellaneous items requested by the Special Brigade and the Tunnelling Companies.
Consequently, neither the Ministry of Munitions, War Office, nor even GHQ knew exactly which trench warfare munitions, or in what quantity, were being provided to the army. It was October before the War Office and the Ministry of Munitions agreed on a protocol to ensure that trench-warfare munitions would be issued through the approved channels, using duly authorised warrants. The exception, as always, was the special stores, that is, chemical munitions, which continued to be ordered and supplied directly through the Special Brigade. Another area to be tackled was contracts, where the substantial autonomy enjoyed by the individual Sections within the Trench Warfare Department was anathema to the Contracts Division. Most warlike stores produced by the Ministry of Munitions had been manufactured and in service before the war, so when it came to placing contracts, the Ministry knew, with fair accuracy, how much an item, plus the approved profit, would cost.
This was not the case with trench warfare supplies manufactured by small firms with no prior experience in munitions manufacture. Under such circumstances, the Outside Engineer lacked the information necessary to set a fair price that minimised the risk of the manufacturer making a loss, without being so over-generous as to make an excess profit. The solution, initiated by Captain Leeming for Section FW3, was to agree on approximate terms that allowed the work to proceed with the manufacturer keeping a record of the actual costs involved, and once sufficient experience had been obtained, final terms would be agreed and a written contract issued on the basis of actual costs plus a 5 or 10 per cent profit depending on the difficulty of the task.
This policy was transferred to the Ministry of Munitions, where it was immediately apparent that such flexibility in contract-setting was incompatible with the rigid protocols that characterised all the Ministry's financial transactions. Jackson and Leeming attempted to explain that such a wide-ranging delegation of powers to the Sections was necessary to negotiate terms with new manufactures that had never previously manufactured a munition and for which no-one knew the costs involved, but the Ministry's officials would have none of it, and in July 1915 the Outside Engineering Branch were issued with instructions that contracts negotiated by them had to be submitted to the Ministry Contracts Branch for approval before they could be activated. In many ways, this was a sensible move. Once the initial problems in setting the contract price had been resolved, the Ministry statisticians had information on the volume of trench warfare stores being manufactured and the amount of money the department was committing to each item.
Also, the experienced staff of the Contracts Branch identified inefficiencies and wasted money inherent in the practice of giving each Section control over its own contracts. Manufacturers took advantage of naïve staff in the Outside Engineering Branch, as did Eley's for filling grenades. As this work was new to the company, the original contract for 2,000,000 grenades allowed an additional 25 shillings per 1,000 for setting up the plant and training the workers, and on receiving a repeat order for 5,000,000 grenades, the company continued to add this supplement, something missed by the Outside Engineer but noticed, and stopped by the eagle-eyed clerks of the Contracts Branch. Another practice that added costs was the manufacturer’s policy of providing the munition complete in all its aspects. Such contracts normally specified that a firm manufacturing grenade bodies would also deliver them to the filling station already boxed up, but in many cases, the contract holder was an engineering workshop which did not have the facilities to manufacture the special boxes and sub-contracted the work to a specialised box-making company, adding to the costs through increased transport and the need to generate a profit for the box maker. Financial control may have been one of the successes for the Ministry's bureaucrats, but there were also some spectacular failures.
The Trench Warfare Department’s policy of providing munitions complete in all its aspects required suppliers to manufacture the screws, bolts and other fitments necessary to hold the components of the munition together. This practice was radically different from the rest of the Ministry, where components were manufactured in separate factories that maintained stocks of the various items that were drawn upon as required by the factory assembling the finished munition. This was seen as the most efficient use of scarce resources when components were manufactured by a predominantly female, semi-skilled workforce. Based on their experience with this manufacturing model the managers in the Ministry believed that the model employed by the Trench Warfare Department was inefficient and expensive and in their drive to increase productivity and reduce costs they instructed Mr Alexander Roger that for the manufacture of grenades, mortars and mortar bombs, as many of the components as practicable should be obtained from those Divisions within the Ministry responsible for bulk manufacture. This decision was a disaster. With the production of conventional weapons increasing rapidly, it soon became apparent that the factories could not supply the volume of components required to meet this demand, as well as the new demand for trench-warfare munitions, in which some items, such as grenades, were manufactured in hundreds of thousands per week. Very quickly, the shortage of simple accessories, such as screws, resulted in significant delays in the completion of both conventional and trench-warfare munitions.
A sharp reversal of policy was required, and in January 1916, the Trench Warfare Department reverted to its previous practice of manufacturing its own accessories. One significant area of conflict was the relationship between the Outside Engineering Branch and the Ministry of Munitions' Area Offices. On its formation, the Ministry divided the country into Munitions Districts, roughly coinciding with the local authority boundaries around major manufacturing centres such as Birmingham, Manchester or Glasgow. Each was provided with an Area Office and were originally set up to coordinate the production of artillery shells but, as was the nature of bureaucracies, they expanded their power, and they became responsible for overseeing and coordinating all Ministry contracts issued in their area. It became their policy to enter into long-term contracts with suitable suppliers, and, as the size of these contracts would have a significant financial impact on the local area, the Area Offices worked through the established mechanisms of Local Authorities and Trade Associations to identify available machinery, materials and workers. Such a procedure may have been a political necessity for a Government Department, but as a decision-making process, it was slow and cumbersome, requiring tedious work through numerous local committees to gather the required information and reach a decision. The time taken to finalise Ministry contracts was not considered an issue, as they were intended to run for months without any significant alterations.
In contrast, the Outside Engineering Branch often had to deal with sudden, unexpected demands from the Front to meet a military emergency, requiring rapid response, which would be impaired if they had to comply with the elaborate, time-consuming procedures of the Area Offices. However, the Director of Area Organisation argued that, to effectively control and allocate the available resources in an area, it was necessary that all contracts issued for the manufacture of warlike stores be managed by one central organisation, the Area Office, with the Outside Engineering Branch integrating its contracts through the Area Offices. Sensing empire-building by the Departments of Munitions Supply, the Trench Warfare Department argued that this was unnecessary, as they did not compete with Munitions Supply for local resources; they were forbidden to encroach on companies, materials, or labour that might be required by the Ministry.
While that was true the Trench Warfare Department was not as free of entanglements from the local economy as it pretended, for although it did not compete directly with the Departments of Munitions Supply for manufacturing resources it did tap into the same pool for materials, such as steel and other metals, so when the demand for trench warfare munitions increased rapidly in the later part of 1915 some accommodation with the Area Offices was necessary as confusion among suppliers was occurring as a consequence of two departments, belonging to the same organisation but working independently of one another, utilising different procedures, even down to using different coloured forms when placing orders for the same item. The resulting mix-up could result in a factory producing munitions for the Ministry receiving a delivery of material intended for another factory manufacturing for the Trench Warfare Department, or vice-versa and, with the just-in-time manufacturing policies operating in factories managed by the Ministry, the time taken to rectify such simple errors could, and occasionally did, disrupt munitions production. For the Ministry's management, that was a cardinal sin, and they lost patience trying to reach an accommodation with the Outside Engineering Branch, so in September, the Ministry issued instructions that the Outside Engineers must be located in their local Area Office and submit all communication and reports directly to the Office of the Director of Area Organisation which would forward relevant information to the Trench Warfare Supply Department.
As a coordination scheme, it was unworkable. Most Area Offices were too small to accommodate both groups of staff, so the Outside Engineers remained in their own offices, a trend reinforced by several who refused, point-blank, to have anything to do with their local Area Office because of previous bad experiences in trying to agree on local collaborations. In response to the edict on limiting communication with their own Head Office, the Senior Engineers significantly reduced the number of written reports they submitted and took to making frequent personal visits to the Headquarters of the Trench Warfare Supply Department, so that local cooperation and information exchange between the two groups of staff was worse than it was before.
Fortunately, common sense prevailed. The people on the ground were aware that their first responsibility was to the fighting troops, and the senior staff of the Area Offices and the Outside Engineering Branch began to bend the rules, developing local compromises that allowed both branches to get on with producing their own particular supplies. Eventually, the advantages of these local arrangements were recognised by the Director of Area Organisation, who relaxed his efforts to impose his authority over the Outside Engineering Branch and agreed to a new system that allowed the Area Offices to track the resources consumed in the production of trench warfare munitions. Direct communication with Trench Warfare Headquarters was re-established, with staff sharing the same office where possible. If not, only the Senior Trench Warfare Engineer needs to be accommodated to share his production statistics and reports with the local Boards of Management.
After being reluctantly forced to conform to the procedures of the Area Offices, the final blow to the autonomy of the Outside Engineering Branch came in September 1916, not from the central administration of the Ministry but from Sir Alexander Roger. He now argued that the original arrangement of one officer responsible for overseeing the production of a single munition had been an emergency measure designed to meet the specific demand for novel trench warfare munitions in 1915 whereas now, with the production becoming standardised on a small number of approved weapons, such as the Mills Bomb and Stokes mortar, this arrangement was no longer necessary. He appointed Mr E. V. Haig as Deputy Director-General Trench Warfare Supply Department with a brief to undertake a root and branch reorganisation of the Department and in his reorganisation the Outside Engineering Branch lost the responsibility for overseeing aspects of manufacturing such as contracts and the supply of materials, but Mr Haigh, recognised that its role too valuable to discard and the Branch retained responsibility for developing the skills of suppliers and their workers, and the final quality assurance of their products.[4]
[1] TNA: MUN 5/382/1600/6: History of Trench Warfare Supply. Part I. Departmental Organisation for the Production of Trench Warfare Stores. June 1915-April 1916. Prepared by Miss L. J. Redstone. Historical Records Section.
[2] TNA: MUN/5/382/1600/2: Record of History and Work. Ministry of Munitions. Trench Warfare Supply Department. The Director-General.
[3] TNA: MUN/5/382/1600/11: History of the Outside Engineering Branch of the Trench Warfare Supply Department. Captain Leeming.
[4] In preparing their submission for the Historical Section of the Ministry, managers were asked to suggest what role, if any, the Ministry of Munitions should play after the war. The managers of the Trench Warfare Supply Department strongly recommended that the skills developed by the Outside Engineering Branch in organising manufacturing, training workers, and quality assurance be retained to assist industry in reverting to its civilian role, encourage post-war industrial expansion, and assist in the retention of returning soldiers. The Outside Engineering Branch was disbanded and its staff dispersed before the armistice.