Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War [Hardcover]

The marketing department at Allen Lane must have loved this book - or at least the title, beyond which point most marketing people in my experience lose all interest. The title - "Britain's War Machine" - probably seem ideally placed to draw from the fathomless well of British interest in everything to do with the Second World War. The title certainly works - it grabbed me. I bought it, hoping to learn more about the logistical and strategically vital economic and technological basis from which Britain fought this war. What I take from it, however, apart from many lists of names and titles, is a redundant claim that Britain was actually much stronger in the 1930s and 1940s than has been said before. Is this 'new'?

Edgerton sets up an Aunt Sally in his Introduction, asserting that "we have all grown up in the shadow of a relentless barrage of what I call declinist histories which indulged in inverted Whiggism, finding past failure to account for present decline...For all the mountains of writing that implied otherwise, Britain has been one of a handful of great scientific, industrial and military powers of the twentieth century and its history needs to be written with that firmly in mind. In this book I do so without troubling the reader with the older declinist picture." This is a bit like switching on the TV to watch a sporting event half way through - if Edgerton is correct, and the prism through which most of us have acquired our understanding of twentieth century British history is wrong, then we need to know how it is wrong, not simply have it asserted that it is wrong. But this statement of his is in any case largely vacuous; surely everyone grew up believing the reverse - that Britain was indeed a great power for much of the twentieth century?

I have problems with the way in which Edgerton sometimes seems to use statistics to suit his need to imply that Britain actually never really struggled during any point in the Second World War. On page 165 he writes that "[British] Losses at seas, while significant, need to be kept in proportion. In 1941, a bad year, 5 per cent of British food imports were lost at sea." It is almost as if he is asking us to adopt the view that, yes, of course, 5 per cent is actually very small, nugatory - almost nothing at all. Yet a moment's reflection will surely result in an entirely different view - 5 per cent losses for a country that is already being squeezed for shipping capacity in all directions is potentially highly damaging. The notion of a 'tipping point', or that it is always at the margins that the delicate balance between lavish supply and starvation can be found, finds no consideration here.

Edgerton's point about shipping not being under any real pressure is in any case undermined by what he writes on page 189, where he considers what Britain would have needed to feed itself during the war: "This would have needed a doubling of the agricultural workforce, to perhaps a million, though it is not clear there was enough land for them to work." The country clearly was unable to feed itself. Even if the worst year saw 'only' 5 per cent shipping losses, that put immense strain on capacity. And who at that time knew for certain that next year it might not be 10 per cent?

Sometimes the problem with this book is that Edgerton does not know where to stop. Thus on page 214 he makes an interesting comparison between "Two hundred Lancasters, roughly the establishment of an RAF group, cost about the same as a single battleship." He then goes on to explore the Lancaster/battleship parallel only to end in banality: "In the air force air crew were at great risk, while the erks at base, the cooks and medics were generally quite safe." The style is relentlessly list-compiling, yet lists are not enough, they must be made to do work. The muddled (and muddied) points he wishes to make are generally lost in a rather dull prose style. He obviously wanted to write an all-encompassing book, but some of the interesting characters who pop up really deserve longer treatment.

Probably the most controversial aspect of his analysis is his assertion that Britain was not inferior to Germany in terms of tanks, self-propelled guns, and other armoured fighting vehicles, either in quantity or quality. He bases himself on a 1959 history of the Royal Tank Regiment by Basil Liddell Hart. Surely there is later and more thoughtful (and perhaps more reliable) scholarly work than this? There is no doubt that British tank production grew fast during the war and the combined Allied forces eventually had many more tanks than the Germans - but in mechanical and fighting quality they always remained inferior, or where they matched the Germans (such as in the Sherman 'Firefly' tank) there were never enough. British memoirs of the war are full of comments about the relative inferiority of the Sherman versus more or less any German tank.

Occasionally the text does not internally cohere. Thus on page 263 we can read that Edward Terrell, a barrister, was awarded £10,000 in 1949 for his invention of plastic armour (an interesting tale this but rather buried), yet two pages later, in a list of those who received awards for their inventions (and the discrepancy in the sums involved is vast, and unexplained by Edgerton) we read that Terrell was awarded £9,500. A trivial point perhaps - but which is true? And are there similar but less obvious slips?

I hate giving a poor rating to a book. So many books appear that are not worth reviewing because they are so bad. The difficulty with a book like this is that it promises a great deal, and the topic is not well covered - so it's worth reviewing, even if ultimately it disappoints. I so wanted to like this, not least because the author's background (founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College) promised an authoritative insight. But ultimately I think it is a book where preconceptions - that Britain was much stronger than usually imagined, in the build up to and during the early years of the war - got in the way. Edgerton has an axe to grind, but he fails to grind it clearly and sharply, and in any case it really isn't an axe that needs grinding. I am going to read his Warfare State, Britain 1920-1970, and hope - because it is not aimed at a general audience - it is much better.

David Edgerton's "Britain's War Machine" is a wonderful book which deserves a place on one's boookshelf beside the companion work The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze.

The first merit of Edgerton is to demolish the die-hard myth of Britain's unpreparedness in 1939. On the contrary he convincingly demonstrates that Britain was first of all opulent, "the richest state in Europe... certainly richer than Germany"; no wonder that "the British were the great meat-eaters of Europe" (even during the war "rationing did not imply drastically cut supplies, except in the case of sugar") and that "Britain was the most motorized nation in Europe" as well as "the world's largest importer of oil"; to be more precise "Britain started and ended the war as the world's largest importer". "So powerful was Britain in the world economy that it could in effect force many people around the world to supply it with goods for credit". Moreover "it had resources to spare, was wealthy enough to make mistakes, and could fight as it chose to rather than had to".

This enviable condition reflected itself both in the industry and in the armed forces. "The warfare state was one of plenty, of armed forces generously supplied with new equipment by new factories", "interwar Britain was a military superpower at sea and in the air, supporting the largest arms industry in the world" (incidentally, "it was the largest arms exporter of the world"). "Britain rearmed on a scale unprecedented in peacetime". The "liberal militarism" which pervaded Britain caused a veritable "orgy of techno-nationalist excess", the scientific pursuit of its industrial and military aims was spasmodic: not only "in some key sectors, efficiency of production was the same as in the USA", but "if one of the forces was organized with Teutonic efficiency and regimentation, it was the RAF, not the Luftwaffe". Moreover "Britain was the world's greatest tank producer in the years 1941 and 1942" and "although it was widely believed from 1941-42 that Britain tanks in North Africa were inferior to German in quantity and quality, this view was shown to be incorrect". "By nearly every standard the British army was much better equipped than the German army from the beginning to the end of the war". "Another measure of preparedness was that during the war forty-four overwhelmingly new ordnance factories were in operation".

Britain was so utterly self conscious of its industrial might and technical primacy that "when the British team... went to the US with new British developments in October 1940, there was again a clear sense that the British had more to offer the Americans than vice versa". On the battlefield "the British were also much more successful imperialists than the Germans, mobilizing a huge imperial force, a large part of it effectively mercenary".

The second merit of the book resides in the enormous amount of little known facts that it collects in support of its solid analysis (always suggesting orders of magnitude). The narrative is full of paragraphs which can be read as veritable monographs: the history of the ambitious and velleitarian atomic bomb program since 1941; the airframe and aircraft engine industry; the rifle crisis and the radios shortage in 1940; the import issue and the Liberty ships program; the story of Churchill, his cronies, the boffins and their often bizarre, costly but inconclusive war-winning gadgets; the uneasy relationship among science, technology, universities and operational research; the food and agriculture problems; the oil and fuel production (one of the very best parts of the book, perfectly supported by extremely enlightening maps of refineries, hydrogenation plants and pipelines locations; the perfect complement to Goralski and Freeburg's Oil and War: How the Deadly Struggle for Fuel in WWII Meant Victory or Defeat); the peculiarities of the British Army (the first to have a complete cold-store chain as well as a blood transfusion system); "the Middle East Supply Centre [which] coordinated civil imports and promoted local supply", including the "growing of potatoes in Egypt and Syria, potatoes without which the British soldier does not consider himself properly fed", and the lavish "some 10 million fourteen-man packs... produced between 1942 and 1945, in seven varieties, which included pudding"; the bureaucracies (one finds out that "at one stage of the war the three key procurement officers [Ministry of Supply, Ministry of Aircraft Production and the Controller of the Navy] all knew each other from their days as naval officers" and "many crucial disputes between their ministries were solved in a genial manner in private": those three so called "boilermakers" launched every week at the Carlton Hotel!); "the Bengal famine of 1943, when millions perished".

Such a well documented (118 pages of notes and bibliography!) and convincing praise of the British Imperial spirit makes the continental reader sometimes cringe, as his ears resound with the words of Mussolini, when he declared war on the "plutocratic democracies", proclaiming that the Axis war was "the struggle of the poor and proletarian peoples against the exploiters which ferociously hold the monopoly of the world wealth".

Yet there are some aspects of the book which are at the same time stimulating and unconvincing.

A statement like "it went to war, allied with France, in pursuit of great interests, by choice", appears to hint that in September 1939 Britain was not just a purely formal aggressor (in fact declaring war on Germany in defence of Poland and of the status quo). No real evidence is offered for such an interpretation, which could be nonetheless correct, at least towards Italy, if it is true that (as Raynolds M. Salerno explains, Vital Crossroads: Mediterranean Origins of the Second World War, 1935-1940 (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)) as early as 1937 "Eden told the Cabinet that Britain should adopt a policy of intimidation by manifesting the progress of British rearmament with military reinforcement in the Mediterranean". One observes "Britain's arrogance in the Mediterranean" theater only (and intermittently), when a contemptuous Alexander Cadogan affirmed: "We shall have quite enough abuse of `Ice-creamers'" and wondered "what to do with the ice-cream vendors. Drown the brutes is what I should like to do" (quoted by Salerno).

Somehow enigmatic remains Edgerton's statement that "if we understand British strength not in continental military terms but in British terms, there is little doubt about relative British strength, bearing in mind that Britain never envisaged fighting a great power alone". The richest and supposedly most powerfully armed nation in Europe would be expected to demonstrate its strength on the battlefield, i.e. in the classical (not British nor continental) terms. Considering then that "external support was vital to high British mobilization. Indeed Lend-Lease was designed precisely to achieve this", one wonders if British strength was intrinsic or not. And if not, what was the price to pay and to whom. Edgerton stresses the "cheapness of the victory" affirming that "for the richest belligerents, the USA and Britain, victory came at very low cost" and that for Britain the war was "only a financial and not a commercial or industrial Dunkirk". Yet reflecting on the undeniable postwar British decline, Edgerton comes to the point with a phrase which is worth the whole book: "Britain's stupendous relative decline in wartime was caused not by its decision to fight, but by that of the USA". In fact Britain strove to keep direct military American help out of Europe for as long as possible, or at least for as long as the British could show off a purely indigenous triumph. As H.P. Willmott observes (When Men Lost Faith in Reason: Reflections on War and Society in the Twentieth Century (Studies in Military History & International Affairs)), "at a time when Britain stood on the edge of the eclipse as a great power, here was the victory that paid for all the defeats, won before dependence upon the United States undercut Britain's status and authority: Alamein was Britain's swan-song... Alamein, not the Somme, was Europe's last great love-battle. This was the last battle involving Europeans with virtually no reference to outsiders and somehow it seems both perverse and appropriate that with its fate to be decided by non- and extra-European powers greater than itself, Europe should have fought its final battle beyond its shores". Nevertheless not even Alamein prevented that feared direct American intervention which would compound British problems and engender Britain's decline. Thus it seems that the fall of the Empire originated from the Mediterranean stoppage since mid 1940, following which, Edgerton notes, "indeed Egypt was now closer to Australia than to Britain". Very meaningful was therefore the alternative proposed to the Britons: "Beef or Bardia"; but even though Bardia was taken (and in what a spectacular and "mechanical" way!), the defeated and humiliated Italians (Cadogan's "purulent dogs"!) managed nevertheless to make the Germans keep the Mediterranean closed for two fatal years more.

Taking into account the postwar convergence and the catching up with Britain of all European powers (particularly Italy, although it had mobilized for the war the tiniest fraction of its scant national income: see Mark Harrison, ed. Read more ›

My father, who grew up in 1930's South Africa would never have described GB as a plucky underdog. He told me the story as a young man where someone had broken the cue ball or a cue in their local leisure centre. They waited weeks and weeks for a replacement to be shipped from the heart of the Empire which of course was London. When he came to this country he would automatically buy British goods as he knew these would be the best ! When war came it was automatic that he should fight - as of course did many thousands from overseas. Notwithstanding this the book does have a refreshing and thought provoking perspective on Britain's war time stance. I suspect that Churchill would only be too happy to talk to the USA as a junior partner as this gave him more leverage, the same way perhaps that MacMillan did in order to secure Polaris from Kennedy. To people like my dad our industrial might and excellence was never in question. This book is perhaps quite correct when it questions whether the direction was always the right one. I suspect for many alive at that time, War was very much a novel experience that they were not prepared for. The garrison that surrendered at Singapore for instance no doubt thought they would be treated humanely and obviously retrospective analysis is the most powerful but the most unforgiving of instruments. Some messages are harder for me to buy into that British tanks were superior to German tanks in anything other than numbers. The Germans did not christen Sherman tanks "Tommy Cookers" for nothing and you will have read of Michael Whitman destroying 15 in as many minutes and the 8th Army losing 25 tanks before they eventually got round the back of one Tiger tank. Prof. Edgerton also hints that Britain started the bombing blitz which I cannot agree with. In any event the German soldier had a much envied and justified reputation on the whole and whilst no-one is saying that we could have won the war as anything other than a team - there is much to admire in our performance in most areas and this book pays more than homage to this.