June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 106, Spring 2000

Page 31

By Chris Bell

Churchill, Munitions and Mechanical Warfare: The Politics of Supply and Strategy, by Eugene Edward Beiriger, New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Hardbound, 188 pages, published at $39.95, member price $37.


In July 1917, David Lloyd George rescued Winston Churchill from the political wilderness by appointing him Minister of Munitions. This move provoked a storm of political protest. Churchill’s judgment was widely distrusted following the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, and leading Tories had no desire to see Churchill return to a position of power. Not surprisingly, the new minister was denied a seat on the War Cabinet. This was an arrangement which suited Lloyd George well: it enabled him to exploit Churchill’s considerable administrative talents and drive for the sake of the war effort, but also kept an unpopular, controversial colleague at a safe distance from the central direction of the British war effort.

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While Churchill threw himself into the task of managing munitions production, he also attempted to use his position to influence British grand strategy, just as his opponents had feared. By 1917, Churchill’s strategic views no longer resembled those he had held at the beginning of the war. The failure of the Dardanelles campaign made him doubt that victory could be won quickly or easily by attacking Germany’s allies in the east, but his service in the trenches helped to ensure that he never became more than a qualified “westerner.”

From the time Churchill arrived at the Ministry of Munitions, his strategic advice did not waver: Britain must remain on the defensive against Germany until overwhelming force could be gathered for a great Allied offensive in 1919 or 1920. Costly battles like the Somme and Passchendaele were to be avoided at all costs, while massive American armies were transported to the Western Front to ensure a comfortable margin of superiority over the German army. Most importantly, Allied forces were to exploit mechanical means of waging war: lives would be saved by capitalizing on and increasing the Allies’ superiority in new weapons like the tank and aeroplane. As Minister of Munitions, it was Churchill’s job to supply these instruments of victory. He also had to convince skeptics within the government and the army that this was the correct path for Britain to follow.

Beiriger is clearly impressed with Churchill’s strategic ideas during the final years of the First World War, and with good reason. The Minister of Munitions understood the requirements of total warfare in the industrial age better and sooner than most of his colleagues, and he offered a realistic prescription for achieving ultimate victory. Beiriger is not the first to make this observation, but he does provide a clear and detailed discussion of Churchill’s thinking. Unfortunately, the author’s vision does not extend much beyond Churchill himself. Other key actors in these events—most notably Lloyd George, Field Marshal Haig, and General Sir Henry Wilson — receive only cursory treatment, while Churchill’s relationship with the War Cabinet, the War Office, and Haig’s GHQ. in France are never systematically examined. As a result, the reader is left wondering when and how Churchill’s efforts actually influenced the formulation of British strategy.

The author cannot seem to decide how much credit Churchill should receive for his efforts as Minister of Munitions. He rightly notes that munitions production increased substantially during the final sixteen months of the war, but he does not explain what part Churchill played in this process. He also implies that Churchill single-handedly reshaped British strategy during this same period, and that it was the Allies’ superiority in tanks and aircraft built during Churchill’s tenure at the Ministry of Munitions that ultimately brought about Germany’s defeat in 1918. This is claiming too much.

Churchill was not the only tank advocate in Britain during this period, and credit for the movement towards mechanized warfare should be spread around more widely than Beiriger seems to realise. Moreover, the Allied victory was not simply the result of replacing a “traditional” strategy of attrition with a mechanised and mobile form of warfare. For example, the British victory of August 1918 at Amiens was more a symptom than a cause of Germany’s collapse. The reintroduction of mobility to the battlefield in 1918 did not mean that attrition was no longer taking place, or that the British army had embraced the tank as the surest means of obtaining victory.

Beiriger’s inability to place Churchill’s actions in a wider context is traceable to a single cause: the author has skimped on his research. The book’s bibliography reveals a shortage of secondary sources—particularly those dealing with the formulation of British grand strategy and the course of the struggle on the Western Front—and a near-total absence of archival sources. In other words, Beiriger has relied almost entirely on Churchill’s own writings and a handful of published sources. As a result, the story he tells is often one-sided and incomplete. This is a serious shortcoming in an academic study with a hefty price tag.


Chris Bell ([email protected]) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy Between the Wars (2000).

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