producers in Germany, making everything from screws to gas lamps and harmonicas.11 The ghastly slaughter of World War I would have been impossible but for the fact that all the combatants were capable of mass-producing the means of destruction on an enormous scale. Perhaps most remarkably, by 1918 Britain, France, Germany and Italy were outbidding each other in the production of combat aircraft, surely the most spectacular mechanical invention of the early twentieth century.12 Between 1914 and 1918 Germany alone turned out 47,000 aircraft of all types, a record which was in no
