MUNITION MIRACLES
DR ADDISON’S STORY OF A COLOSSAL ACHIEVEMENT
The House of Commons had an opportunity yesterday of listening to one of the most interesting and encouraging speeches ever made within its walls. Very few members, however, accepted it. During most of the time that Dr. Addison and Mr. Montagu were speaking the Chamber was as bare as though it had been the Scottish Estimates day. Such is the sense of national values at Westminster! Dr. Addison’s audience fell below the quorum; Mr. Montagu had to be content with about a score, fit, no doubt, but painfully few.
Yet it was a wonderful story that the Minister for Munitions had to tell of his great Department and its unparalleled achievements. Dr. Addison is not in the front rank as an orator, but he spoke well and clearly yesterday, and with justified pride. The Department has its critics – niggling critics for the most part, who peer about to find faults to here and there, and are much too weak-eyed to be able to contemplate its work as a whole. Dr. Addison was ready for them. “We face our critics,” he said, “without any apology whatever.” And well he might, for as he took his hearers from department to department he presented them with new wonders and marvels in each. It was all colossal, all magnificent, and all very much war. Yet by no means wholly, for much of this mighty engine, created for the purposes of destruction, will be available for the purposes of peace.
Everyone understands by this time in a vague way that the Ministry of Munitions has saved the situation, and that its output of big guns, little guns, machine-guns, shells, &c., is on a fabulous scale. What is not so well known is that it is now responsible also for the supply of aeroplanes and seaplanes, and the Minister said that the output last May was twice as great as it was last December. By Christmas it will be vastly increased again. We may quote just a few of the figures and phrases by which Dr. Addison tried to bring home to the House the rich fruition of the work done during the last two years by scores of devoted public servants, scientists, and business men, who have placed themselves at the disposal of the State. They may be taken almost at random:
The capacity for the production of high explosives last March was four times what it was in March, 1916, and twenty-eight times that of March, 1915. We have reached such a production of shells that some of the new national shell factories have been diverted to other purposes. The national filling factories employ 100,000 persons. The cost has been reduced 40 per cent. compared with that of a year ago.
The inspection staff alone number 40,000, of whom 61 per cent. are women. The number of prematurely exploding shells was fifteen times greater a year ago than it is to-day. The small arms output at Enfield has increased tenfold; the weekly output of machineguns is twenty times what it was two years ago. Woolwich employed 10,000 persons in 1914; it now employs 73,000. The women at Woolwich in 1914 numbered 125; they now total 25,000.
Two thousand miles of railway track have been supplied in complete condition. Canada, alone offered to tear up 800 miles of track and ship it then and there. The tanks – male and female created he them – are fruitful and multiply, and the end of their story is not yet written.