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 She had mobilized an enormous army and therefore had withdrawn a very considerable proportion of her population from industry.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 £28,000,000 in the year of peace. They suddenly became £700,000,000. 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.