_Addressing the House of Commons on June 20, 1915, Mr. Lloyd George
said, in part:_
What I want to impress not merely upon the House but on the country is
that the duration of the war, the toll of life and limb levied by the
war, the amount of exhaustion caused by the war, the economic and
financial effect--and in order to understand the whole depth and
meaning of the problem with which we are confronted I would state the
ultimate victory or defeat in this war--depend on the supply of
munitions which the rival countries can produce to equip their armies
in the field. That is the cardinal fact of the military situation in
this war. (Cheers.)
I heard the other day on very good authority--and this will give the
House an idea of the tremendous preparations made by the enemy for
this war and of the expansion which has taken place even since the
war--that the Central European Powers are turning out 250,000 shells
per day. That is very nearly eight million shells per month. The
problem of victory for us is how to equal, how to surpass, that
tremendous production. (Hear, hear.)
The Central European Powers have probably attained something like the
limits of their possible output. We have only just crossed the
threshold of our possibilities. In France I had the privilege of
meeting M. Thomas, the Under Secretary for War, a man to whose great
organizing capacity a good deal of the success of the French
provisions of war is attributable, and I am very reassured not merely
as to what France is doing and what France can do but as to what we
can do when I take into account what France has already accomplished.
Let us see the position France is in. Her most important industrial
provinces were in the hands of the enemy. Seventy per cent. of her
steel production was in the hands of the enemy. She had mobilized an
enormous army and therefore had withdrawn a very considerable
proportion of her population from industry. She is not at best as
great an industrial country as we are. She is much of an agricultural
and pastoral country. It is true that we have certain disadvantages
compared with France, and they are important. She has not the same
gigantic Navy to draw upon the engineering establishments of the
country. That makes a very great difference. She has more complete
command over her labor. That makes an enormous difference, not merely
in the mobility of labor and the readiness with which she can transfer
that labor from one center to another, but in the discipline which
obtains in the workshops. She has another advantage with her arsenals,
which at the outbreak of war corresponded to the magnitude of her
Army--a huge Army. We had a small Army to provide for. She, in
addition to that, had undoubtedly a very great trade with other
countries in the production of munitions of war. These are the
advantages and disadvantages. Still, knowing these things and taking
them all into account, the surplus of our engineering resources
available for the materials of war is undoubtedly greater than that of
France, and if we produce these things within the next few months as
much as they are likely to produce the Allies would not merely equal
the production of the Central Powers, but they would have an
overwhelming superiority over the enemy in the material essential to
victory. That is the first great fact I would like to get into the
minds of all those who can render assistance to the country.
Germany has achieved a temporary preponderance of material. She has
done it in two ways. She accumulated great stores before the war. She
has mobilized the whole of her industries after the war, having no
doubt taken steps before the war to be ready for the mobilization of
the workshops immediately after war was declared. Her preponderance in
two or three directions is very notable. I mention this because it is
essential they should be understood in inviting the assistance of the
community to enable us to compete with this formidable enemy. The
superiority of the Germans in material was most marked in their heavy
guns, their high explosive shells, their rifles, and perhaps most of
all their machine-guns. These have turned out to be about the most
formidable weapons in the war. They have almost superseded the rifle
and rendered it unnecessary.
The machinery for rifles and machine-guns takes eight and nine months
to construct before you begin to turn a single rifle or machine-gun.
The Germans have undoubtedly anticipated the character of the war in
the way no other Power has done. They realized it was going to be a
great trench war. They had procured an adequate supply of machinery
applicable to those conditions. The professional man was essentially a
very conservative one--(hear, hear)--and there are competent soldiers
who even today assume that his phase is purely a temporary one, that
it would not last long, and we shall be back on the old lines.
I have no doubt much time was lost owing to that opposition. The
Germans never harbored that delusion, and were fully prepared to
batter down the deepest trenches of the enemy with the heavy guns and
high explosives, and to defend their own trenches with machine-guns.
That is the story of the war for ten months. We assumed that victory
was rather due as a tribute from fate, and our problem now is to
organize victory, and not take it for granted. (Cheers.) To do that
the whole engineering and chemical resources of this country--of the
whole Empire--must be mobilized. When that is done France and
ourselves alone, without Italy or Russia, can overtop the whole
Teutonic output.
The plan on which we have proceeded until recently I explained to the
House in April. We recognized that the arsenals then in existence were
quite inadequate to supply the new Army or even the old Army, giving
the necessary material and taking into account the rate at which
ammunition was being expended. We had, therefore, to organize new
sources of supply, and the War Office was of opinion that the best
method of attaining that object was to work through existing firms,
so as to have expert control and direction over companies and
workshops, which up to that time had no experience in turning out
shells and guns and ammunition of all sorts. There was a great deal to
be said for that. There was, first of all, a difficulty unless
something of that kind was done of mobilizing all the resources at the
disposal of the State. The total Army Estimates were L28,000,000 in
the year of peace. They suddenly became L700,000,000. All that
represents not merely twenty or twenty-five times as much money; it
means twenty or twenty-five times as much work. It means more than
that, because it has to be done under pressure. The sort of business
which takes years to build up, develop, strengthen, and improve has
suddenly to be done in about five, six, seven, or eight months. The
War Office came to the conclusion that the best way of doing that was
to utilize the skill of existing firms which were capable of doing
this work. The War Office staff are hard-working, capable men, but
there are not enough. There is one consideration which cannot be left
out of account, and that is that men who are quite equal to running
long-established businesses run on old-established lines, may not
always be adequate to the task of organizing and administering a
business thirty times its size on novel and original lines.
To be quite candid, the organizing firms--the armament firms--were
also inadequate to the gigantic task cast upon them of not merely
organizing their own work but of developing the resources of the
country outside. They could not command the stock, and sub-contracting
has undoubtedly been a failure. Sub-contracting has produced something
like 10,000 shells a month. We have only been at it a few days, and we
have already placed with responsible firms orders for 150,000 shells a
month. In a very short time I am confident it will be a quarter of a
million or 300,000. (Cheers.) It is a process of inviting business men
to organize themselves and to assist us to develop the resources of
their district.
We have secured a very large number of business men; many business men
are engaged in organizing and directing their own business, business
which is just as essential to the State in a period of war as even the
organization of this office; but still there are the services of many
able business men which are available, and we propose to utilize them
to the full, first, in the Central Office to organize it; secondly, in
the localities to organize the resources there; and, thirdly, we
propose to have a great Central Advisory Committee of business men to
aid us to come to the right conclusions in dealing with the business
community.
I should like just to point out two or three of the difficulties, in
order to show the steps which are taken to overcome them. The first
difficulty, of course, is that of materials. There is, as I pointed
out, material of which you have abundance in this country, but there
are others which you have got to husband very carefully, and there is
other material on which you have got to spend a considerable sum of
money in order to be able to develop it at a later stage. With regard
to this question, I think that it might be necessary ultimately for us
to take complete control of the Metal Market, so that available
material should not be wasted on non-essential work. (Hear, hear.) To
a certain extent we have done that.
I should like to say a word with regard to raw material for
explosives. We are building new factories so that the expansion of
explosives shall keep pace with that of shells, and in this respect,
again, I should like to dwell upon the importance of keeping up our
coal supplies in this country. It is the basis of all our
high-explosives, and if there were a shortage for any reason the
consequences would be very calamitous.
Sometimes we do not get the best in these yards through the slackness
of a minority and sometimes through regulations, useful, perhaps
essential, in times of peace for the protection of men against undue
pressure and strain, but which in times of war have the effect of
restricting output. If these are withdrawn no doubt it increases the
strain on the men, and in a long course of years they could not stand
it. But in times of war everybody is working at full strain, and
therefore it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of suspending
restrictions which have the effect of diminishing the output of war
material.
The fourth point is that the danger of having stoppages of work by
means of strikes and lock-outs ought to be removed during the time of
the war. (Hear, hear.) I should have liked to have seen strikes and
lock-outs during the war made impossible in any trade, and I do not
despair of getting the assent of those who object to compulsory
arbitration under normal conditions to a temporary application of that
principle during the period of the war.
The next step is one in which the Trade Unions are concerned. There
was a very frank discussion between the leaders of the Trade Unions
and myself, and I was bound to point out that if there were an
inadequate supply of labor for the purpose of turning out munitions of
war which are necessary for the safety of the country compulsion would
be inevitable.
They put forward as an alternative that the Government should give
them the chance of supplying that number of men. They said, "Give us
seven days, and if in seven days we cannot get the men we will admit
that our case is considerably weakened." They asked us to place the
whole machinery of Government at their disposal, because they had not
the organization to enlist the number. We have arranged terms upon
which the men are to be enlisted, and tomorrow morning the seven days
begin. Advertisements will appear in all the papers, an office has
been organized, and the Trade Union representatives are sitting there
in council directing the recruiting operations. I am not sure, but I
believe my honorable friend Mr. Brace is the Adjutant-General.
Tomorrow we hope to be able to make a start. We have 180 town halls in
different parts of the country placed entirely at our disposal as
recruiting offices. We invite the assistance of everybody to try to
secure as many volunteers as they possibly can--men who are not
engaged upon Government work now, skilled men--to enroll themselves in
the Trade Union army for the purpose of going anywhere where the
Government invited them to go to assist in turning out different
munitions of war. If there are any honorable friends of mine who are
opposed to compulsion, the most effective service they can render to
voluntarism is to make this army a success. (Cheers.) If we succeed by
these means--and the Board of Trade, the Munitions Department, and the
War Office are placing all their services at the disposal of this new
recruiting office--if within seven days we secure the labor, then the
need for industrial compulsion will to that extent have been taken
away.