Ordnance E-Book

Philip Hamlyn Williams

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 349

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In August 1914, Kitchener's 'Contemptible Little Army' was highly professional but small, equipped with only what they could carry – and they were facing a force of continental proportions, heavily armed and well supplied. The task of equipping the British Army was truly Herculean. Many able men had volunteered to fight in the trenches, and others would soon be called up, so this vital work was to be undertaken by the ordinary men and women left behind. In time, the government recognised the need for skills of engineering and logistics, and many of those who had survived the onslaught were brought back home to work. Ordnance is the story of these men and women. It traces the provision of equipment and armaments from raw material through manufacture to the supply routes that gave the British Army all the material it needed to win the war. It is a story of some failures, but also of ingenuity and effort on the part of ordinary people to overcome shortfalls in organisation. It is a story of some lessons learnt, but of others that weren't, and these would have long-lasting repercussions.

Leseprobe

Cover Illustrations

Front: (top) A brand new Male Mk IV paid for by the Federal Council of the Malay States in 1917. (Richard Pullen)

(bottom) Aftermath of the Chilwell explosion. (Perks Archive)

Back and Frontispiece: Chilwell War memorial. (RLC Archive)

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Philip Hamlyn Williams, 2018

The right of Philip Hamlyn Williams to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9780750988728

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

1   The British Expeditionary Force

2   The Home Base and Supply of Warlike Stores under the Master General of Ordnance

3   Gallipoli, Salonika and East Africa

4   The Shell Crisis and the Birth of the Ministry of Munitions

5   Trench Warfare on the Western Front

6   Vehicles and the Tank

7   Other Theatres of War – Palestine, Mesopotamia, Italy and Russia

8   The Role of the USA

9   The End

Notes

Bibliography

Chilwell War Memorial. (RLC Archive)

INTRODUCTION

Kitchener’s ‘Contemptible Little Army’ that crossed to France in August 1914 was highly professional, but was small and equipped only with what it could carry. Facing it was a force of continental proportions, heavily armed and well supplied. The task of equipping the British Army, which would grow out of all recognition, was truly Herculean.

It was, though, undertaken by ordinary men and women all around the British Isles and beyond. Men fit to fight in the trenches had been called to the colours to do just that; so equipping them was largely the task of those left behind. In time the government recognised the need for skills of engineering and logistics and men with such skills who had survived the onslaught were brought back to their vocation. Women also had a key part to play.

Ordnance is a story of these men and women, and traces the provision of equipment and armaments from raw material through manufacture to the supply routes that put into the hands of our soldiers all the equipment that they needed to win the war.

In writing it, I am indebted to a number of people. Major General Forbes, a senior officer of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC), who in 1928 wrote from his first-hand experience the volume of the History of Ordnance Services dealing with the Great War; where he didn’t have first-hand knowledge, he used the accounts of colleagues who did. George Dewar who, again from first-hand observation, in 1921 wrote of the Great Munitions Feat. Then the authors of the histories of the many companies who dedicated their production to the fight. The men who kept diaries and wrote unpublished accounts of their own war, and the National Archives, The Imperial War Museum, the British Library and the Royal Logistics Corps Archive, where their works are kept for posterity. Also, more recent works: Martin Gilbert’s First World War, R.J.Q. Adams’s Arms and the Wizard, Kathleen Burk’s Britain, America and the Sinews of War 1914–1918 and Henrietta Heald’s William Armstrong, Magician of the North. In relation to images, I thank my friend, Richard Pullen, for his generosity in relation to tank images and also for allowing me to draw on his research in The Landships of Lincoln. Again, in relation to images, I thank the Royal Logistics Corps archive, the Rolls-Royce archive, the Jaguar Daimler archives, and the University of Glasgow for the use of images from the Beardmore archive.

This volume is very much a prequel to my first book, War on Wheels, which was an account of the men and women who mechanised the British Army in the Second World War. In writing War on Wheels, I found myself talking about how various characters, including my own father, Bill Williams, and his friend and rival, Dickie Richards, had learnt from their experiences in the First War. I was certain that this was true, but as time went by I needed more and more to try to found out just what those experiences had been, what they had taught them and indeed how.

Ordnance is the result of that search. In writing it, it became clear that it was in itself a story of how the British Army was equipped in the First World War, since that was the core of the experience of those giving their accounts in the book. It was not the heart of it, since, whilst my father never said, I can only believe that the heart for them, as it was for so many, was the sheer horror of it all; I know that my father suffered from nightmares until the day he died. Nevertheless, the task facing them in the summer of 1940 was just how the lessons they had learnt in the equipping of the army in the First World War could help inform the massive task they faced in doing essentially the same in the Second. I chose the date following Dunkirk deliberately, since that was when backs were truly against the wall.

The subject is vast and the sources idiosyncratic, in that it is a matter of serendipity as to what men chose to record and which records survived. For these reasons alone, this account is very far from comprehensive. It does, though, seek to offer an impression of the issues faced in the differing theatres. In some cases, it homes in on aspects of detail, such as Chilwell, where the records of the National Shell Filling Factory are comparatively extensive, indeed where my maternal grandfather worked as a supervisor. It also follows the particular experiences of certain people, Lieutenant Colonel Omond, for example, who left an extensive account of his experiences as Divisional Ordnance Officer on the Western Front, and SQMS Hawkes, who left diaries of his experience in Gallipoli and France in 1918. There are other accounts and to all their authors I owe a debt of gratitude. I do not hold myself out as a military historian, rather a writer who has tried to tell a story that draws on the writing of others who were closer to the events.

As with War on Wheels, I thank in particular Gareth Mears, who kept the archive of the Royal Logistics Corps, for all his help. However, without my parents I would never have found the story of War on Wheels and, had I not written that book, I would never have dreamt of writing Ordnance. I am so glad I have. Our debt to those men and women is huge.

I thank my publishers, The History Press. Most of all, though, I thank Maggie, my wife of now over forty years, for her encouragement to me in this, my third career.

1

THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

In September 1939, Dickie Richards, who had command of the huge Ordnance depot at Le Havre, played merry hell when tons of shelving that he had ordered from England failed to arrive.1 I just wonder whether he was haunted by the description of another huge depot in the same French town a quarter of a century earlier. Richards had served through the four horrific years of the Great War and, like his fellow Ordnance officers, must have been determined to ensure that costly mistakes were not repeated.

Scattered about the gigantic Hangar au Coton and other sheds or wharves were some 20,000 tons of clothing, ammunition and stores of unknown quantities and more arriving daily. The articles were in miscellaneous heaps often buried under piles of forage; wagons had been dismantled for shipment, the bodies had not yet been erected on their wheels, machine guns had not been assembled with their mounts or cartridge belts, guns with their mechanisms, cases of horse shoes with those of nails. The very spaciousness of this immense shed tempted the Base Commandant to use it whenever he was in want of accommodation and, in spite of protests, horses were stabled among the stores and French and Belgian soldiers encamped there. The French were still removing barrels of oil and bales of cotton lying in the hangar when new arrived, and lorries belonging to the Army Service Corps depot, lodged under the same roof, thundered to and fro. Altogether the scene was one of great confusion.2

This was the scene, recorded by Forbes, of the Army Ordnance depot at Le Havre in early September 1914, just before its evacuation to escape the German advance.

In human terms, given the alarming number of casualties already suffered, it was the least of the problems facing the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), but, in terms of equipping an army to be able to continue to fight, it was a disaster and one that probably no one had even contemplated.

The British Expeditionary Force, the contemptible little British Army as the Germans called it, had first seen major action at Mons against a vastly larger German force. The result was retreat and a terrible loss of men and guns. Possibly as influential as the numerical superiority of the Germans was the superior power of their artillery. Martin Gilbert reports General Gough as saying, ‘I turned to the battery commander and said sharply, “For God’s sake hit them!” It was Foreman – a splendid officer – but his reply was damning: “I cannot get another yard out of these guns.”’ Gilbert goes on to explain that the British guns were 13-pounders. Neither their range nor the weight of their shells could match the German 77mm field gun with which they were confronted.3

Unloading stores. (RLC Archive)

On 12 August, and during the ten days that followed, some 120,000 men made the Channel crossing in remarkable secrecy ‘behind a protective shield of battle ships’.4 The men were accompanied by some thousands of horses but only a few hundred artillery guns, reflecting the view of the General Staff of how the war would be waged. Each of the divisions to which the troops belonged had been fully equipped at the base depot in the UK. They were said to be the best equipped army ever to leave our shores.

George Dewar wrote5 a remarkable book in 1921 entitled The Great Munitions Feat in which he told the story of the production of the army’s equipment from a vantage point close to the event, with the benefit of seeing many of the places where the equipment was used and produced, but perhaps without time to reflect. Nevertheless, his observations do shed helpful light. He questions whether the BEF was as well equipped as some suggested.

The equipping of the army had fallen to the men of Army Ordnance Department at Woolwich and the short history of that organisation, written after the war, records the speeding up of the issuing of items and, with overtime and additional men, how this went without a hitch. An appeal had been made for saddles and some 5,000 were received, together with blankets in ‘multifarious hues’. A further request for 7,900 sets of officers’ saddlery was met with the comment, ‘there isn’t enough leather in the world for that lot.’6 The leather was found, and indeed much more.

The supply plan was that formations would go into battle fully equipped and would only be re-equipped when withdrawn for rest. The troops in the front line would receive daily supplies of food, fodder and ammunition, but that was all.

Given this all or nothing plan, each division had a minimal Ordnance Services representation in the field, indeed a tiny one, with one junior officer, known as the Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Services (DADOS), one staff sergeant, a horse and a box of stationery.7 One such DADOS, J.S. Omond, later wrote:

The text book theory that all troops taking to the field were completely equipped proved to be a delusion. The number of blankets per man was two and not one, and the issue of extra blankets was a heavy job for divisional Ordnance Staff to handle when fresh to the country and to the way of work.8

ARMY ORDNANCE SERVICES

The role of Army Ordnance Services was quite particular and far reaching. Lieutenant Colonel Tom Leahy, later known affectionately as Uncle Tom, had been one of the first DADOS and had a deep knowledge of ordnance work.

In a lecture Leahy gave in 1916 he encapsulated the ordnance role in a nutshell very much of its time:

The Army Ordnance Department is, as regards supply of ammunition, guns, equipment, clothing and stores of all kinds, the William Whitely of the Army, and is a good deal more besides, as we shall see later on – for not only is the Department the Agency for the supply of all fighting equipment, but it is also responsible for the care, storage, maintenance, repair and salvage of this equipment.

In addition, therefore, to being the Universal Source of Supply, it is also the Universal Repairing Agency and Universal Salvage Department for the Army, as regards the whole of its fighting stores.9

Bill Williams later described the origins of ordnance in a speech for Salute the Soldier week in 1944:

My Corps, the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, is one of the oldest Corps in the army, as in bye-gone [sic] days it was responsible for supplying the Army with bows and arrows and armour for the men at Arms. In fact, I believe in the early stages of our history we planted the yew forests, from which the bows were made.10

The job of equipping the army had grown from this beginning, most particularly, with the development of gun powder and cannon. Following the restoration of the Crown in 1660, a Board of Ordnance was formed that was given charge over the castles and forts that defended the kingdom and which would spread through the Empire.

Tom Leahy. (RLC Archive)

Fireplace of fort on Alderney. (Author)

It also had the role of supplying ordnance, that is cannon, powder and shot, to the navy and to supply siege trains to the army when on overseas service.

The early history of Army Ordnance Services11 was one of checks, balances, excesses and power. No less soldiers than the Dukes of Wellington and Marlborough had held the then prestigious and powerful office of Master General of Ordnance, but it was also held from time to time by powerful civilians. It was not part of the army. Following the Civil War both Parliament and the Crown were keenly aware of its power and the need to keep control of weaponry, and sought to contain it. The warrant setting up the Board of Ordnance set out a detailed structure of checks and balances for the operation of the Office of Ordnance supervised by the board. Forbes12 suggests that the procedures were followed more in theory than in practice, with shortcomings in both efficiency and effectiveness. It was an age of sinecure offices and the board was no worse than any other institution.

Moving forward two centuries to the experience of the army’s supplies in the Crimea, the situation was pretty close to disastrous. There is an apocryphal story of a shipment of boots being sent comprising only those for the left foot. For this reason, and no doubt many others, the office of Master General was abolished and the supply of ordnance was taken into the Army Service Corps (ASC).

The experience of the Boer War again revealed shortcomings and led to the formation of the Esher Committee to review the organisation of the army. One result of the review was the re-instatement of the office of Master General. The Master General’s role, though, was manufacture and procurement, with supply coming under the Quartermaster General.

With the growing complexity of the army’s needs, a degree of centralisation within the remit of the Quartermaster General was seen as appropriate and an Army Ordnance Department (AOD) was formed at the Woolwich Arsenal comprising officers with appropriate technical skills, particularly with guns and ammunition. To this department were added inspectors of ordnance machinery, who were transferred from the Royal Artillery (RA) and became ordnance mechanical engineers.13 In parallel with this, the other ranks, who dealt with stores other than food, were formed into an Army Ordnance Corps (AOC); to these men were added the Corps of Armourers and Armament Artificers. Thus a loose organisation that comprised the AOD and AOC had within it the expertise to supply and repair guns and ammunition. It had men skilled in the repair and manufacture of equipment such as wooden wheels; most of the supplies used by fighting soldiers were brought to them on wagons. It had warehousemen who would supply anything from uniforms to horseshoes.14

ARMY ORDNANCE SERVICES WITHIN THE BEF

Three distinct elements of ordnance, in addition to those attached to divisions, had crossed to France in early August 1914.

The Director of Ordnance Services, Brigadier Perry, went to Amiens to join the Inspector General Lines of Communication. The Lines of Communication (L of C) were the vital connection between the base and the fighting troops. In supply terms they comprised supply trains, principally for food, fodder and ammunition, which would run to a railhead from which supplies would be taken by lorry or horse to the troops.

The Deputy Director of Ordnance Services, Colonel Mathew, went to Le Cateau to join General Headquarters (GHQ) under the Quartermaster General. This was the planning heart of the force.

Thirdly, there was No. 1 Company Army Ordnance Corps from Aldershot, which would be joined by 2, 3, 4 and 7 companies to establish the base depot at Le Havre under Colonel Egan as Chief Ordnance Officer.

The men comprising the Ordnance Companies were either regular soldiers or reservists who had been called up on the declaration of war. One such wrote to the AOC Gazette in August 1914 of his experience:

The writer – a missionary in Egypt – little thought when he left Egypt in June for six months’ holiday that he would be called once more to carry arms and learn to dodge parade. Once Austria had declared war upon Serbia, events moved pretty quickly and soon Britain was involved in a struggle in the interests of Righteousness. Much as we all deplore war, certain we can be that Right is with us, and if we are called upon to fight, we can fight as men having clear consciences, knowing that whatever sacrifice we may be called upon to make, it will not be made in vain.

I was conducting service in Clacton when I saw that mobilisation was imminent. The sixpence a day I received for nothing for about 8½ years was a silver link that held me to my duty; and on Monday, August 3rd, I telegraphed to the C.O. [Commanding Officer] Woolwich requesting that my papers be sent to P.O. [Post Office] Clacton in the event of mobilisation. Next morning found me in possession of papers; and early on Wednesday I left for duty at Woolwich. I was amused as I travelled up. Excited territorials stood with fixed bayonets in various stations. Holiday makers were fleeing back in terror from the seaside; and in some stations crowds of infantry reservists dissipated their energy in singing and dancing with sweethearts and sisters! I was made angry when certain minor railway officials refused to allow reservists to travel by their lines because their passes were not exactly in order. Men were sent roundabout ways which in at least one case involved the loss of an hour.

I arrived in Woolwich about midday and saw the Regimental Sergeant-Major, who advised me to go home and get all my papers. This I did, returning at seven p.m. What a crowd we were! Some smart and supercilious, others glad to feel that they would soon be decently clad, and able to get something to eat. Some talked bombastically of the fine jobs they had left; others cursed the day they signed on; some groaned because their time would have expired in a few days; and one unduly loquacious individual informed me that ‘he didn’t believe in no religion, although he had brothers who were M.A.’s etc., etc.!’ There was plenty of exercise of the Englishman’s privilege – ‘grousing’, especially when some were left blanket-less for a time upon corridor floors owing to misappropriations by their comrades. This was, however, soon put right when the C.O. came round on a visit of inspection. I got down pretty early, but could not sleep for the tramp, tramp of restless fellows who tried to work off their excitement by marching to and fro. Patriotic catches, reminiscences, greetings of old fellow ‘canteen wallahs’, all this was not conducive to sleep.

Next morning an attempt was made to get the Reserves into something like order and uniform. The R.S.M. [Regimental Sergeant Major] wore his voice out, and the men looked like a mob on the barrack square. I volunteered to shout, and for some hours shouted myself hoarse; at last we began to look and feel something like soldiers. It was funny to see the old training reassert itself. Occasionally parties were cheered off – but on the whole one could see we needed to work up some enthusiasm to counteract the pangs of parting with loved ones. The Colonel came and expressed his gratification at the way the men had turned up. It was fine to notice the difference between Ordnance Reserves and those of the fighting units.

Next day we got twisted up in the intricacies of the modern drill. The Adjutant said it was extraordinary to see the smart appearance of the men, considering that they had done no drill for years.

What column dodging went on for the first parades, and how we grumbled when we did parade. Then came the assurance that wives and children would be cared for, and what a change seemed to come over all. With true dogged British resignation, we accepted the inevitable and determined to do our best – and a little over – in the ordeal that lies before us. H.E.E.H.15

The variety of backgrounds was huge. Ernest Hutson was a railway clerk and he had to obtain permission from the railway company to volunteer. He remembered being full of enthusiasm, seeking change and actually having no regrets – until it became clear that the war would not be over in six months. He recalled too the shortage of ammunition in the early months.16

There was also a need for men with relevant trades. In Bill Williams’ archive there is a small book entitled Handbook for Military Artificers. This book was aimed at tradesmen whose role would be to work on artillery devices in the field. There are five sections of instructions: Carpenters and Wheelers; Smiths; Painters; Saddlers and Saddletreemakers; and RGA Smiths (those working with steam engines). This goes further to emphasise that at this stage of the war the use of the internal combustion engine was not widespread.

Steam transport. (RLC Archive)

The small book spoke of the England of 1914. Villages would often have a wheelwright and a smith close by.17 They were both vital parts of the community in the making of carts, wagons and wheels. In military terms the wheel made of wood and iron was fundamental both to transport and to artillery. I was told of a village wheelwright who joined up ‘to escape the workshop’. Some former soldiers might be surprised that in less than six months his skill had been identified and he was back making and repairing wheels, though this time for gun carriages and limbers.

Altogether, some thirty officers and 1,360 men of Ordnance Services were deployed in France in August 1914.18

Premises were found for the base depot in the form of the recently built Hangar au Coton, which spanned some 9 acres under cover. As already noted, also in this building were Army Service Corps vehicles. A separate repair workshop was set up in neighbouring premises. From the base in Le Havre, a mechanical transport depot was set up at Rouen for the Army Service Corps.

The Ordnance Companies were required to set up an advance depot at Amiens. Forbes19 questions why such a depot was set up so near to the base. Forbes, who had described the opening scene at Le Havre, had witnessed army manoeuvres in 1913 and had seen at first hand what was going wrong. He pointed out that Ordnance officers simply were not involved in the planning of supplies for the BEF. He had had the opportunity of seeing how the French Army was supplied and to witness in its methods much that would profit the British. It was only over the years that slowly and reluctantly that methodology was adopted.

Wagon wheel. (Author)

GS vehicle. (RLC Archive)

The divisions, though, were the sharp end. Major Jasper Baker was another DADOS and wrote of his experience that first August and September. He had seen to the equipping of his division before it left for France. He tells of the only outstanding stores being bicycles for the Cyclists Company and field kitchens. On arrival in France the bicycles still had not arrived and so he placed an order in the nearby town of Valenciennes. He tells how the ‘purchase was never effected, as the bicycles arrived from the base the next day, and, before those ordered from Valenciennes could be delivered, the town was in the hands of the Germans’.20 In the case of the field kitchens he continues:

The day after the Battle of Mons, I received a waybill by post showing that my travelling kitchens had left Le Havre several days before. The post arrived at 10 p.m. The railhead for the day was some 40 km away and my only means of transport a horse which had already marched since 5 a.m. The difficulties of transport here became very apparent. I was informed that there would be no room in the supply lorries for Ordnance stores and no means of transport for the DADOS to get to the railhead … the next day I met Major Cowan from GHQ who informed me that he had seen several kitchens offloaded at Valenciennes two days before but that the town was now in the hands of the enemy.

The plan of the BEF as regards ammunition was to have the base depot at Boulogne and then ammunition trains under command of an Ordnance officer. These would be loaded with a ‘standard pack’ of ammunition of all kinds that would then be taken to the railhead for distribution by men, wagons and horses of the ASC to the fighting troops.

In August 1914 one such train came under the command of Lieutenant Campbell and during this period of mobile warfare it had an eventful journey. The train, which became known as ‘Campbell’s Train’, set off from Amiens. This is how Forbes describes its circuitous route:

First it went to St Quentin, pushed on to Busigny, and then retired again to St Quentin, there to provide ammunition parks with 100 tons of ammunition. Then came the battle of Mons, after which the train was sent back to Amiens en route for Criel, to the north of Paris. Whilst part of the train however, delayed by a hot axle, was still in Amiens station, fresh orders arrived at midnight of the 26/27th August, giving Noyon as the destination, to which place as much ammunition as possible was to go by road on any lorries that might be available.

By 6am on the 27th the supply of lorries ran dry and Perry, who was on the point of leaving, ordered Campbell to follow with the rest of his ammunition by rail to Noyon. At this time the station was a seething mass of humanity seeking to get away to safety, for there were rumours of Uhlans [Polish light cavalry] having been seen close by; and, on returning after a temporary absence, Campbell found his men had been ordered into a train crowded with refugees.

Campbell was thus faced with contradictory orders but, by careful persuasion, managed to secure an engine for his train to take its valuable load to where it was needed.

A second train was in operation under the command of Lieutenant Cunningham, ‘Cunningham’s Train’, which was to deal with the ‘heavier natures’ – 6in howitzers and 60-pounders. Dickie Richards, who would go on to the post of Director of Clothing and Stores for D-Day, was later in the First World War to command such an ammunition train.21

The original plan was for each division to have a mechanised ammunition park to link the railhead with the points where horse-drawn ammunition columns would take over. These parks were to be under the control of the Lines of Communication. With the constant movement of troops in the early stages of the war, the railhead would change almost daily and with it the lines to the ammunition columns. It soon became clear that the Commander of the Lines of Communication was simply too distant to manage this process and so it fell to the GHQ, and in particular the Deputy Director of Ordnance Services (DDOS) at GHQ. Colonel C.M. Mathew thus had to take control of the whole of the organisation of ammunition supply in the rear of divisions.22

The British retreated from Mons towards the French frontier, engaging the enemy again at Le Cateau. In addition to casualties, exhaustion was taking its toll as ‘infantry staggered half asleep as they marched’.23

The Diary of an Old Contemptible, that remarkable first-hand account by an ordinary solider, describes the retreat day by day. This is but one entry:

A 3-tonner in the mud. (RLC Archive)

28 August: Trek resumed at 3.00am. Every hour we pick up stragglers of various units, all recounting their own tale of whole Regiments being wiped out in the battle … dead horses, sides of beef, boxes of milk, tea, jam, ‘bully’ and biscuits mark our line of retreat. Dumps could not be formed owing to the hurried retrograde movement.24

It is after Le Cateau that we can once again join Major Baker:

On the 28th August we were told that we had come to the end of our retreat and a day of rest was ordered for the morrow. No sooner was this order sent out that indents flowed in, and my staff sergeant and myself spent most of the night and the whole of the next day dealing with these and forwarding them on.

During the 29th, the remnants of the 1st East Surrey Regiment, 3rd Division, which had been badly cut up at Le Cateau, marched in and, having no further use for its regimental transport, handed it over to me enabling me to make good the more important deficiencies in transport in my own division.

The next day I received an urgent indent for picks and shovels to dig trenches. I went into Soissons but found great difficulty in obtaining anything as it was Sunday evening and all the shops shut; but finally, with the assistance of one of the officials of the Marie, I found a French military store with a civilian foreman in charge, who gave me the whole of his stock.25

The result of the German advance for the Base Ordnance Depot had been the urgent need to evacuate both Amiens and Boulogne. Amiens proved straight forward and Boulogne was emptied and put on board ship bound for Le Havre. With the army now seriously in retreat, the order came that Le Havre itself was to be evacuated. Chaos ensued. Shipments into Le Havre had arrived with no bills of lading to tell what should have been received. Warehouse systems were not in place to ensure efficient storage and ease of identification. Stores were thus bundled on to ships bound this time for Nantes, with Le Mans as the advance depot.

Forbes offers a description of the scene at Nantes:

There were cases of service dress, caps, parts of guns and machine guns, bales of horse-rugs and blankets, ammunition, tentage, signalling gear – much in broken packages – mingled with forage, medical, veterinary and other goods just as they had been indiscriminately bundled into the hold; and to sort out this chaos was a lengthy and tedious operation, accompanied by a considerable amount of looting.26

Commanders cried out for supplies but, with the chaos and lack of records, none could be located quickly. It was only in time that demands were met from stores taken from Nantes to the advance depot at Le Mans.

Major Baker highlights another major problem from the point of view of the divisions, namely the lack of available transport for Ordnance Services. Quite simply, it was impossible to get up to the front line anything like the amount of materiel being requested.

All the time the Germans were advancing and in particular a second wave swept through Belgium. The French took over the British front line on the Aisne and the British transferred by rail to Flanders, where they arrested the German advance at Ypres.27

Another view of the challenges facing Ordnance in this first, mobile, stage of the war comes from Tom Leahy. An article written on Leahy’s retirement in 1935 tells that he was DADOS of the 3rd Cavalry Division and in the Royal Logistics Corps (RLC) archives there is a scrap of paper on which he drew a map of the division’s advance into Belgium in 1914 together with a rough note of its progress.

Leahy’s map. (RLC Archive)

Private Haylett of the Royal Navy Brigade in an armoured car. (Richard Pullen)

He records that he was appointed on 2 September and one month later was ordered to ‘equip the division forthwith’. They embarked from Southampton on 6 October and disembarked at Ostend on 8 October where he immediately requisitioned blankets. He noted that ‘wounded [were] arriving’. The diary continues:

9 October: rode to Bruges. Met the Belgium Army in retreat also officers and men of British Naval Division.

11 October: returned to Ostend to requisition motor tyres.

He goes on to record moving up to Ypres and being caught in heavy fire. On 31 October he writes of a ‘lucky’ escape for himself but four French officers being killed at our HQ:

11 November: very heavy shelling and HQ moved back.

The article on his retirement adds rather more. The force had been hurriedly mobilised under Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng and was rushed out to Ostend with the object of relieving Antwerp.

THE END OF THE MOBILE WAR AND THE BEGINNING OF THE CHALLENGES OF TRENCH WARFARE

Back in the autumn of 1914, though, the British began to move forward to the line that would be held for the next four years.

The main stores were returned to more appropriate accommodation at Le Havre and this time stored and recorded in an orderly manner.

GHQ was established at St Omer and Headquarters Lines of Communication at Abbeville, where the advanced horse transport depot was also set up providing wagons, harnesses, etc.

Just as there seemed to be a semblance of order, there began to be felt a great scarcity of ammunition and so every hour lost in delivery from Britain became vital. ‘Campbell’s and Cunningham’s trains were despatched to railheads at Aire and Arque, and the rest of the ammunition was concentrated at Boulogne.’28 The shortage of ammunition was destined to grow into a major problem.

The harsh experience of the first weeks had a number of consequences. Most visibly for Ordnance, General Parsons took over from Brigadier Perry and stayed in post for the remainder of the war. Brigadier Perry would go on to have influential roles in some of the other theatres of war.

Le Havre depot. (RLC Archive)

Mobile workshop. (RLC Archive)

Horse transport. (RLC Archive)

Parsons’ great gift was the empowerment of subordinates. For example, as the demands for the repair of guns increased, he brought on to his staff an Ordnance mechanical engineer who could advise on the most appropriate workshop provision. This soon took the form of a number of workshop lorries close to the front.

Yet, the most serious issue that Ordnance officers still faced was how to get supplies to the front. With the onset of the winter it simply was not possible to make troops wait for up to two weeks for replacement boots to cope with the Flanders mud. In the earlier panic of retreat, greatcoats and other heavy items had been discarded; these too now needed to be replaced. Divisions were calling for items such as warm clothing, boots, socks, blankets, tents and braziers in immense quantities. What was needed was a systematic way of replenishing equipment and clothing of the troops whilst in the front line.

Forbes identified four related aspects of the problem. The first was transport from the base depot by rail to the railhead. Then there was the shorter but crowded route by horse or lorry from the railhead to the front. Third was the totally inadequate divisional staffing of an officer and staff sergeant. Lastly the task of packing thousands of individual parcels for a rapidly growing army was simply no longer possible.

In relation to transport, the Army Service Corps lorries were jealously guarded for use in carrying food. Trains were filled either with food and fodder or with ammunition with no room for anything else. What Ordnance Services needed was a regular transport service that could take up to the line the supplies that had been indented by the divisional DADOS.

As a result of the Commander in Chief at last recognising the problem, arrangements were made to attach trucks of general ordnance supplies to all food trains headed for the front and for each division’s Ordnance officers also to have lorries at his disposal to collect and distribute such supplies.29

At the same time, the resource of divisional ordnance services was expanded to become the DADOS with four warrant officers, four clerks, six store-men, a motor car and four 3-ton lorries. Forbes adds a statistic from the summer of 1915 when horse shoes were being expended at the rate of 400,000 per month, with seventeen sizes equating to thirty-four different sorts, each with particular nails. Without this additional staffing at division level, the base depot would have needed to know for each individual unit what horses it had and how heavily they had been worked, which would clearly have been impossible (in that non-digital age). It is interesting that in the Second World War the Army Centre for Mechanisation at Chilwell did maintain a record of which vehicles were in which unit in order to ensure that the correct spare parts were provided.

One of the least easy to understand problems that had contributed to the chaos was the fact that the Army Ordnance Department officers were not informed of what the Master General of Ordnance Department had ordered or was about to deliver.

This problem was overcome with the appointment of Sir John Stevens, a retired Ordnance officer, to the post of Director of Equipment and Stores at the War Office. One of his first acts was to ‘send out a list of what stores were due to France from a certain fixed date, and to arrange for a supercargo to accompany each future consignment’.30 The relationship between Ordnance Services and the Master General would continue to present challenges for many more months.

Forbes recounts one quite particular issue affecting supplies, which would emerge again and again, that he himself witnessed in faraway Marseilles in the latter part of 1914. The Indian Army had sent a number of divisions and these had arrived in the south of France pending transfer to the front in the north. The problem was their totally unsuitable equipment. Their ground sheets were not waterproof and so had to be replaced. None of their rifles were of the same specification as the British and so too had to be replaced together with all necessary ammunition. Indian soldiers provided their own tents, which were simply not up to the demands of northern Europe as it entered the autumn. Much the same went for clothing and boots. All this posed a huge further drain on British ordnance resources.

The particular challenges faced by Ordnance Services in this first stage of the war can perhaps be traced back to the fact that, as Forbes identified back in 1913, it did not have a seat at the planning table and so had to make do with the uninformed decisions of others. Crucially, as has been seen, it had to beg and borrow transport from the Army Service Corps, whose attitude to Ordnance Services may perhaps be summed up in their description of it as ‘the bugbear of Ordnance stores’.31

This could also lead one to the view that Britain’s whole approach to war was somewhat chaotic. The arrangements made for transporting her troops to France, though, would call this into question.