Inter-Allied munitions organisation

The British chronology of the war records under 25 November 1915 that the French Under-Secretary of State for Artillery and Munitions, Albert Thomas, announced the completion of work on an inter-Allied organisation of munitions production. This concerned the decisions of a conference that met in London in November with representatives of Britain, France, Russia and Italy. The official history of the British Ministry of Munitions calls it the “Big Four” conference, but does not give the exact dates of its sittings. Thomas, a socialist, had directed French armament production since the autumn of 1914, became Under-Secretary of State in May 1915, and kept the post in Aristide Briand’s new government.

Allies as competitors

The need for agreement was obvious. At the beginning of 1915 Britain, France, Belgium and Russia were each buying arms and materials in the United States on their own account, and American suppliers played them off against one another. While the British were negotiating a supply of TNT, the Belgians bought it at a higher price. All the Allies competed for explosives from the DuPont company, and British agents blamed French purchases for the rise in the price of picric acid. Things were no better in Europe. France had difficulty obtaining British licences to export coke, while itself suddenly stopping exports of ferrosilicon and at the same time demanding shell steel from the British.

Ever since the Ministry of Munitions had been set up in London, David Lloyd George and Thomas had met regularly. In June 1915 they conferred at Boulogne on the number and type of guns needed for the next great offensive. Even then Thomas spoke of the need for joint purchasing in neutral countries. On 7 July they met at Calais, and at the beginning of October they again held talks for three days. Thomas argued then that he did not regard the ministry in London and his own office in Paris as two separate institutions: “I consider that there is one Ministry of Munitions for both countries.” The talks showed, however, that Russia, Serbia and Italy also had to be brought into the agreement. Russia was bombarding France and Britain with demands for guns, transport and machinery, which neither country could satisfy for a long time.

Central Munitions Bureau

The London conference met in plenary sessions, while detailed matters such as machine tools, platinum or guns were handled by small groups of delegates from two or three interested states. Thomas proposed setting up a Central Munitions Bureau of the Allied states, composed of one representative of each country. Within a month each state was to send the bureau its programme for the production of guns, ammunition, trench weapons, rifles and cartridges with delivery dates, a list of orders placed at home and abroad, and information on what raw materials, machinery and labour it could share with its allies. The data were to be updated monthly and passed to the munitions ministries and the high commands. The bureau was also to collate the Allies’ orders in each neutral country, and the munitions ministers were to meet every two months with representatives of the general staffs. The principle was also adopted that orders for goods subject to export bans would be placed by one government directly with another.

Lloyd George strongly supported the French project. “I consider that before we begin to consider the general plan of campaign for next year, instead of each acting separately, we must know what the resources of each country in war material are. That, in my view, is exactly where the campaign of 1915 failed: we did not know how much we could expect from one another,” he said. All the delegations accepted the project, although the head of the Italian delegation, General Marafini, signed the resolution subject to his government’s approval, as he had no explicit authority. It is his words that the official history of the Ministry of Munitions quotes: the Allies were waging not one war but four, and in munitions matters they were practically fighting one another.

The official history of the Ministry of Munitions admits that in practice the resolutions achieved little. The central bureau was never established because of the opposition of the military. Lloyd George hoped that the adoption of Thomas’s proposals would pave the way to unity of command, but the general staffs acquired the full mutual confidence of which he spoke only in the last months of the war. The munitions ministers did, however, meet at further conferences in 1916, and in December 1916 Thomas became the first French Minister of Armament.