ARMAMENT FACTORIES

Southland Times, Issue 22157, 27 October 1933, Page 4

ARMAMENT FACTORIES

BRITAIN’S WAR EXPERIENCE. Any scheme of defence that does, not make adequate provision for munitions is useless and futile. It cannot be said that the munitions question in Australia has been handled with a full appreciation of its importance, (writes Major P. Goldenstedt in the Sydney Sun.) While the Munitions Board boasts that there is everything in the country required for the manufacture of guns and shells, the vital question is the capacity of the factories to produce them up to full war requirements. Australians who served on Gallipoli remember the tragic shortage of gun ammunition that limited the batteries of the Ist Infantry Division to seven rounds per gun per day. Some of those men lived to see those guns fire 18,000 to 19,000 rounds a day during the battle of Pozieres. This was war on a titanic scale. And it has a peculiar application to Australia, since in the event of aggression her frontiers will be closed and her supplies from outside will have to run the gauntlet of an enemy fleet. At the outbreak of war, Britain was deficient in trained men and military material. More important still, she. had no. machinery ready whereby material could be produced in requisite quantities and within a reasonable time. Everything had to be improvised hurriedly and improvization is never satisfactory or economical. The result was that the high water mark of the British fighting strength was only reached after tvzo and a half years of conflict. By that time terrific casualties had occurred. Not until midsummer of 1916 was the artillery situation such that the British forces were able to undertake operations on a grand scale. It was because the Germans had such a firm grasp of the importance of. shooting that they were so formidable at the outset. It was the number and weight of their guns and the abundance of ammunition rather than their talented leadership which placed their armies in 1914 within Teach of Paris.. With the creation of an intimate relationship between man and munitions, Britain was destined untimately to produce 258,000,000 shells, 4,000,000 rifles, 240,000 machine guns, and 25,000 field guns and heavy guns and howitzers. Her output of small-arms ammunition during the four years approximated 10,000,000,000 rounds. While nobody suggests that war would be on such a scale in Australia, the fact remains that whatever form it takes it will be in relative keeping with all modern standards. It will be no time to put the pressure on factories when war breaks out.

There is barely enough ammunition now stored in the Commonwealth to last more than a few days of intensive operations. The experience of Britain demonstrated that it. takes the best part of a year to produce shells on a manufacturing scale when you have to start from the beginning. The gun ammunition expended by the Fourth Army during the operations that preceded the Armistice was in the vicinity of 3,000,000 rounds a month.

The peak expenditure on one or two days during August when the Australian Corps began their advance to the Hindenburg Line, reached the enormous total of 400,000 rounds. Unless we are prepared to resist aggression on this scale, it is hopeless to expect victory. Whoever elects to invade our shores will come prepared to conduct a war with all the implements known to mechanical and chemical science, with all the devices known for the destruction of man and his works.