Kindle Notes & Highlights
The original storage at the factories was planned to hold a month’s output but this never equalled the requirement, so magazine depots at Bramley
Records for each individual gun were kept on index cards; these showed how many rounds were fired. Bores were measured regularly,
and workshops, and they tended to expand as time went by. The number of items stocked rose
The workshops, as well as effecting necessary repairs to guns, updated all arriving equipment by carrying out any modifications
By the end of the war there were seventy-three of these workshops employing over 10,000 people.
The main cause of problems, apart from enemy shell fire, was damage to the recoil buffer, especially in field guns. It needed to be kept full of oil,
The mobile workshops were so effective in keeping guns working that in May 1915 the allocation was increased to two per corps.
Some civilian workers were used in all these workshops.
Armourers’ shops, usually comprised of all but one of the armourers per brigade,
By May 1915 the production of cordite was falling behind demand and the factories producing it were ordered to produce more.
Various problems occurred with all types of ammunition; the first was that the bullets for British pistols had a flat nose,
Another problem was that of insufficient care of stocks of ammunition at some of the bases, especially where cases had been opened
National Projectile Factories
National Filling Factories
At the beginning the strategy was to aid the Belgians in expelling the German invaders; this involved mostly infantry with a little artillery support in a comparatively small theatre. However, as the war progressed the strategy developed into a series of massive artillery battles intended to soften up the enemy before the infantry moved in to dislodge them from their positions, but it was not until the end of December 1915 that Kitchener reluctantly looked at the artillery requirements to implement these tactics.
After pointing out that the war was turning into one of heavy artillery use, they estimated that some 750,000 rounds of ammunition would be needed each week. This assumed that the guns and howitzers to fire it would be available. They were not. At that point, the British Army had no more than sixty-one guns of 6in bore or larger, and they were certainly not producing that many heavy shells.
After much prompting from the Ministry of Munitions, at the end of June 1915 Kitchener finally produced, after consultation with Sir
The Ministry of Munitions produced some different figures, based on seventy divisions. By June 1916 they wanted 5,107 18-pounder guns,
By 13 September, partly due to priority issues among the French officials on the railways,
Despite the organisation of railway deliveries, this did not provide anywhere like enough shells, and Haig complained in
It had been intended that ammunition should be despatched by train in the form of standard packs, containing some of each type of
As with other supplies, at the beginning of the war regulations laid down a scale of ammunition for each gun, working on the assumption that
stand silent. By the beginning of 1916 ammunition production was increasing dramatically but this brought its own problem:
It was necessary to hold vast stocks of ammunition in France. Depots were needed for receiving the ammunition,
The French system of packing each truck with complete rounds (shells, tubes, fuses and cartridges) was adopted; this meant that if a truck had to be taken out of the train, it did not leave the rest short of crucial ‘ingredients’. When the BEF was divided into separate armies,
The depot at Audriucq was full on the night of 20/21 June 1916 when an enemy aeroplane dropped a bomb which wrecked the entire depot and its stock of some 9,000 tons. Over a hundred loaded trucks were also destroyed. One of the resulting craters was more than 60ft deep, and it took several months to clear the debris.
brought with it another difficulty: the guns began to wear out with continual use. Gun barrels were lined with rifled tubes, which wore a little
During one six-week period of fighting in 1917 the sixteen light and five medium workshops overhauled and reissued over 1,600
Whenever activity paused at the front or moved on, and also at the end of the war, special teams searched for discarded or unused ammunition.
The precise number of tanks made in Britain during the course of the war is uncertain, as different sources give different numbers,
These facilities soon caught up with requirements, and by the end of the war more than 250,000 had been produced.
Unlike the machine guns of today, First World War machine guns were heavy and required a team of up to six men to site and operate them.
Another machine gun was the Lewis ‘light’ gun, which began to be supplied to the British Army on the Western Front in July 1915.
There was also the Hotchkiss. Mainly used by the French Army, it was also used by the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1917–1918.
At the beginning of the war Britain had just over a hundred machine guns. Orders for more were rapidly placed and deliveries commenced at fifty per week,
Many trench weapons were improvised by the troops themselves, including one called the ‘hairbrush’ grenade.
Although much smaller than howitzers, they came in several sizes, from 2in to 12in, with the 3in the soldiers’ favourite. This version was normally used for high explosive and smoke shells, and the slightly larger
The mortar shell was dropped into the tube manually, where it connected with a firing pin at the bottom of the tube which detonated it.
Mortar launchers needed to be fixed firmly, with base plates and support legs to absorb the recoil, but they could also be elevated to make the bomb drop from a height.
For the British Army the standard rifle supplied was the Short Magazine Lee Enfield (SMLE), so-called because its magazine held only ten rounds of .303 calibre. Designed by the American James Lee, it was manufactured at the Royal Small Arms Factory based at Enfield, just north of London.
Supply shortages affected the infantry’s rifles, with ammunition supplies rarely exceeding 100 rounds per rifle.
Overall, in August 1914 there were 1,295 officers and 10,394 other ranks. By August 1918 these figures had increased to 11,830 officers and 225,540 other ranks. A separate Directorate of Engineering Stores was started in the summer of 1918.
By the end of 1915 it had been concluded that he needed a fleet of ten ships to take engineering stores to France. This soon grew to twenty-two vessels and a number of barges were used exclusively for transportation to France.
One area where the workload at home increased rapidly was that of inspections and testing.
It started with the war establishment of the numbers of personnel by type: one captain and three subalterns,
This store table lists over 600 items in the Vocabulary of Stores, and a further 195 as ‘not in
vocabulary’, which meant they had not gone through the full testing programme but were unofficially approved.
The types of engineering stores requested was dependent on the usual constraints: the climate and terrain of the theatre, its natural resources and the nature of the operations.
Constant bombardment of the trenches made huts for the troops essential in autumn and winter, and corrugated steel sheets were in demand for this, as well as for revetments, roofing and temporary shelters for troops,
Camouflage netting was in great demand and thousands of yards of fishnets, canvas, calico and hessian were used. There was some dispute over the specific colouring and patterns demanded by artists but standardisation was finally imposed.
