Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War by David Edgerton

Author:David Edgerton [Edgerton, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780713999181
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2011-03-30T22:00:00+00:00

BUREAUCRACIES

One very obvious feature of the war was the growth of bureaucracy, a machine (to use the language of the time) which was needed to organize the vast enterprises, military and civil, which the state had created, and to control much of the rest. One index of its growth was the huge and increasing amount of paper consumed by government in a world where paper supplies were much reduced. While supplies for newspapers and books were cut, government (including HMSO, the government publisher) consumption of paper surged from 3 per cent of use for printing to one third, quadrupling in quantity.130 By far the biggest users were the service ministries (headed by the War Office, way out in the lead with 25,000 tons in 1942).131

Great controlling ministries were built up to run arms production, based in pre-war corporate headquarters. The Ministry of Aircraft Production moved into ICI’s headquarters in Millbank; the Ministry of Supply into Shell-Mex House on the Strand, which was the centre also for the control of oil supplies. Some parts of ministries went out of London: some Admiralty offices went to Bath and much of the Ministry of Food was to operate from the Welsh seaside resort of Colwyn Bay. The bureaucracy spread abroad. Cairo and Washington, and many other places, sprouted military and civil British bureaucracies to coordinate and control the most mundane materials, as well as decide on high policy.132 In 1943 Lord Louis Mountbatten was sent to New Delhi as head of South-East Asia Command; the HQ was moved to Kandy, in the centre of Ceylon, and further from the front, in early 1944. Mountbatten installed himself in the King’s Pavilion within the grounds of the old royal palace of the kings of Ceylon, on the shore of Lake Kandy, and installed his HQ in the beautiful Botanical Gardens in nearby Peradiniya. A new airfield was built, as well as headquarters for army and air force. The total staff was an incredible 10,000. Headquarters life was a ‘byword for elegance and luxury’ and was indeed ‘an expertly contrived theatrical entertainment’.133 The British government even had ministers stationed abroad. There were Ministers Resident in the Middle East, West Africa and Washington from 1942 to the end of the war.

What kind of men were at the top of the machine which acquired the weapons of modern war? It was certainly not politicians or technocrats of the left. At the very top were, as we have seen, Churchill and his production ministry cronies, and Cherwell, with a tiny leavening from the left. In the bureaucratic machine an old elite, drawn from the state, industry and the military-industrial complex dominated. Their control was challenged, but not very strongly. Before the war the armed services had been in charge of supply and research for their services. However, in a powerful expression of the view that there was a radical difference between the worlds of production, science and engineering, on the one hand, and the military users on the other, there was a move to put production and research under civilian ministries.

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