The British Workers That Secured Allied Victory In WW2 | War Factories Complete Series | Timeline

this channel is part of the history hit network stick around to find out more [Music] the untold story of war [Music] all production are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph over the other side hitler knows he needs industry if he wants to build a war machine this is a war between the factories the real story of how the second world war was fought and won the united states is about to launch the single greatest program of armament production in human history [Music] they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production the secret war of the factories that would decide the fate of the whole world gotta get back to work [Music] [Applause] at a factory on the isle of wight skilled engineers are restoring world war ii fighter planes [Music] the spitfire is one of the great iconic weapons of the war what we do here is to rebuild these aircraft using the same methodology to produce the same parts that they were making 85 years ago each spitfire here is lovingly restored by skilled craftsmen during the war britain's factories mass produced no fewer than 20 000 spitfires and an incredible 130 000 bombers fighters and other aircraft [Music] all wars in the second world war is the greatest example of this are about competition in production and british war production is staggering its factories build over a hundred thousand tanks and other military vehicles its shipyards produce more battleships even than the united states [Music] the result for germany is devastating in just one year the allies dropped over a million tons of bonds on their enemy the germans not even 10 000 the side that can produce more is always going to ultimately triumph over the other side even if the other side has better soldiers braver soldiers more skillful soldiers the side that can produce more will come out on top but it's not at all obvious in the early 1930s that britain will be able to perform this war production miracle germany has been preparing for another war since the 1920s this has stepped up further under the nazis who spend vast amounts of money on military production [Music] with giant firms like coupe and daimler building perhaps one of the most formidable military machines the world has ever seen [Applause] germany it would seem are far more prepared than britain to fight a war on this scale and britain has always traditionally been reticent to spend money on stuff like this anyway but germany have started producing earlier they've more extensively planned the highly centralized way of doing things so it would appear germany hold all the cards britain does not want to make war britain has a very strong anti-militarist tradition there's never been the kind of glorification of war that you find in some continental countries war is always bad for trade and to the extent that the society is dominated by a trading interest they are going to seek to avoid war in the early 1930s britain hopes the threat of german militarism will pass [Music] britain is slow to arm and reluctant to spend valuable taxpayers money on making war machines [Music] even its famous navy looks antiquated and to some extent this is an inevitable consequence of the first world war that had seen very high levels of expenditure a very large number of ships added to the fleet after the first world war defence spending falls off sharply and so those ships are naturally going to be used to the greatest possible extent [Music] britain's army is small and poorly equipped out of the few hundred tanks it does have most are obsolete the general staff decided that the tank was not going to be a priority they disbanded the tank design teams the generals who were particularly interested in developing the tank arm were retired and so we entered really the period 1936 to 1939 without essentially a tank production capability it is the same across the aircraft industry where germany is out producing britain by two to one britain in the eyes of the nazis looks weak but here they greatly underestimate the strength of british industry britain is known the world over as the first industrial nation this is where the modern factory was invented the industrial revolution started in britain and this was a move from skilled individuals making things by hand to factories and the beginning of mass production and the idea that you could have a non-skilled person working a bit of machinery that would produce far more than one individual could britain has long been surpassed by the united states as the world's biggest industrial power but in the 1930s while america languishes in its worst ever depression britain is growing fast what we often don't realize is that the united states and great britain had very different experiences during the 1930s and the great depression following the wall street crash america embarks on the vast public spending spree known as the new deal britain reacts to the financial crash quite differently the british response was very different to the american one the british response was to cut government spending dramatically and also reduce taxes the result is breathtaking in the years between 1931 and 1939 the british economy grew more rapidly than at any time before or since and a large part of that was the growth of a whole lot of new manufacturing industries britain has other things going for it as a pioneer of free trade it has unrivalled global trading links it also has some giant manufacturing companies one in particular will be crucial to the success of british war production vickers they do everything they are multi-purpose multi-plant firm right at the heart of the british military-industrial complex when hitler enters france the german wehrmacht has six times as many medium tanks as the british expeditionary force what's more the german army has some of the most advanced tanks in the world first come heavy breakthrough tanks to drive through the opponent's lines in their weight comes quadrant after squadron of assault tanks designed to scatter the tanks that germany does have are the very latest designs many of the british tanks are completely obsolete because there's been minimal investment in tank design for an entire decade so when the war does start the brits are really struggling to catch up [Music] by the time the war starts what few tanks britain is producing come from a vicar's factory in elzick west newcastle and it's to vickers that the war office turns when it needs tanks in their thousands because we're ready to go when the general staff turned to vehicles and said help we need tanks now vickers produce them the model it goes for is the valentine and the company is told to give it absolute priority a simple and reliable design and is an updated version of a model that vickers is already producing the lower part is actually almost identical and the engine is also the same as well as the transmission the steering and even the tracks now this means that most of the components and parts are already being produced which should in theory make it easier and quicker to build [Music] the problem as always is scaling up production and vickers has never mass-produced tanks before so it turns to the car industry for inspiration after the united states britain has the most advanced auto industry in the world and its perfected assembly line production [Music] the valentine would have come through on the vickers production line in two parts first of all the main hull which is a combination of cast and welded elements to it and that would have been machined certainly the turret ring would have been obviously machined and then the engine would have been dropped in and the various elements of the running gear the sprocket the road wheels and when the track is married to the road wheels the tank is ready for production trials soon vickers is averaging 40 tanks a month but it's still not enough when france falls britain loses many of the tanks it had the shortage of tanks is now perilous and there is no spare capacity at existing plants britain has to think outside of the box which is that you look around and you say what kind of business is closest to this and you think well actually could car manufacturers and locomotive manufacturers not just adapt their plant and adapt their processes to produce a tank because they're not that different and that's what happens the british war production system has obviously a certain degree of planning and control but the degree of detailed oversight is much less than you might imagine you don't get detailed targets prescriptive planning of the productive process instead that's left to the private sector manufacturers nuffield morris starts production of the a15 crusader which will become the principal tank in the western desert campaign and over five thousand churchill tanks are built in voxel's luton plant but the tank that is produced in greatest numbers is the valentine and it's updated continuously throughout the conflict right the way through the war there was innovation going on to meet the the tactical needs of the battles of all the variants of the valentine that were used perhaps the most extraordinary was the valentine bridge layer a scissors bridge mounted on the valentine hull extremely useful vehicle by the end of 1940 british tank production overtakes germany's in one year it has left by 40 percent the following year production almost quadruples britain is now producing almost twice as many tanks as the germans british tanks destined to help the soviet in her gigantic grapple with the german war machine are here seen on tests before dispatch to russia and the east and front by 1941 britain is producing so many tanks it is even able to send them to the soviet union to help fight on the eastern front [Music] britain fighting to crush the german army sends more tanks to russia and east and front by the end of the war more than 3 000 of the tanks driven by the red army would have been built in britain [Music] but vital in the next war will be the battle for the skies and here britain is lacking they want first of all a great air striking force a bomber force that will reduce germany to rubble but also a fighter force that will defend against german bombers vickers waybridge develops a twin-engine bomber called the wellington which goes into production in 1936 [Music] this twin-engine long-range bomber with gun turrets four enough should prove a very formidable reply to any aggressor another plane that the air ministry orders in large numbers is the hawker hurricane but the plane that overshadows all the other fighters is a modified seaplane made by vickers supermarine the is the latest type of spitfire fighter and as you can see a monopod in design and construction she is not unlike the last snyder trophy winner that she's going to be a great asset to the raf is pretty obvious we are flying along in our own plane at about 175 so what speech he is capable of you may judge from the page at which he overtakes us [Music] airframe assemblies on the isle of wight is one of a handful of companies in the world restoring them when super marine got the order for the first couple of hundred aircraft they had never made aeroplanes or contemplated making aeroplanes in such numbers they did actually do it in a very similar way to we're doing here lots of people around lots of benches making lots of individual parts to all come together scaling up production is proving hard with the spitfire and by the end of 1937 vickers supermarine has yet to finish a single one britain is lagging well behind germany when it comes to combat aircraft if the british are going to mass produce their aircraft they're going to have to try something very different so the war office turns once again to the car industry and lord nuffield head of britain's biggest car manufacturer morris motors lord nuffield offered his own expertise to design and construct a vast new factory at castle bromwich now he claims he would build as four times as many planes there as any other factory in the country the treasury of course had its doubts but it does end up approving the project and agrees to pay the 1.125 million it would cost to build nuffield claims he can make 60 spitfires a week but he soon discovers that mass producing a plane is totally different from a car the motorcar makers often didn't have the expertise that you needed to make airplanes because airplanes and aero engines were much much more complicated than motor cars and motorcar engines it's not an easy leak to sort of be making door panels for a car one day and then making wing ribs or putting together a flap or an aileron for an aircraft a couple of weeks later the tolerances are far far greater the materials are much tougher to work with it's almost like comparing a very old 1920s or 30s car with suddenly leaping forward to an e-type jag by may 1940 not one single spitfire has been completed at castle bromage the following month france falls and churchill knows that hitler's next target is britain there is so much resting on the spitfire they simply cannot allow production to fail so what churchill does is to set up the ministry of aircraft production in may 1940 and he recruits law beaver brook to run it beaverbrook is a canadian press baron who owns the daily express at the time the biggest selling newspaper in the world he is a brusque brash self-made man with no experience in aircraft production but he knows how to get things done we need them so urgently we need them so earnestly nuffield wasn't really up to the job what the minister decided to do was to hand this production facility over to vickers armstrong lord beaverbrook reorganizes chains of command and brings in engineers from supermarine to help run the factory he also decides to focus on just five types of aircraft which speeds up production it's very easy to produce the same aircraft again and again and again changing from one model to another itself reduces your ability to to produce by tearing through the red tape and streamlining the production process beaverbook transforms the entire industry in just a few weeks every operation manufacturer and assembly is carried out with that delicate precision for which british workmanship is famous on completion the machines are given a thorough tryout and you'll no doubt be pleased to notice the rapidity of their climb and their handiness in the air [Music] his intervention comes just in time that july the luftwaffe launches large-scale attacks against britain it is the first major military campaign fought entirely in the air if the germans destroy the royal air force they will be able to invade britain the odds are desperate germany has 2 600 aircraft the british only have 640. what britain does is really turns it around there's no doubt that the raf shot down more german planes than it lost and that british factories were able to replace those fighters that were damaged or destroyed in 1939 britain's war factories make just under 8 000 aircraft 12 months later they are producing almost double that number in spite of the number of nazi planes the whole nation has complete confidence in our own fighters and with good reason our hurricanes and spitfires day after day are breaking up the nazi formations and shooting down nazi planes by the skull raf fighters destroy 50 percent more enemy bombers and fighters than they lose in germany it's a totally different story you've got more than 1700 luffa planes destroyed and there are just over two and a half thousand casualties it's actually the first major defeat for hitler during the second world war and the luffa never fully recovers from the plains and all the experienced pilots it's lost between august and october 1940. that year the british are producing 30 percent more planes than the germans britain is now making more warplanes than anyone else in the world [Music] vickers has been making ships at barrow infinesse on the northwest coast of england since the end of the 19th century there's still a thriving industry here today and it's these yards that play a critical role when building up the royal navy becomes a necessity in 1937 with the threat of war looming the british government stirs into action and places a major order with vickers one battleship two aircraft carriers two cruisers four destroyers and six submarines the united kingdom and the whole british empire depends on british naval power why because it is dependent on world trade trade with europe trade with north america with south america with asia its lifeblood is trade and that trade needs to be defended by a powerful navy war ii is a war of machines and it's a war that the british are winning everywhere except the atlantic [Music] over the last 50 years the uk has seen a significant increase in the value of trade it accounts for 61 of our gdp and is a fundamental part of our economy during the second world war it is even more important one of the great myths is the idea that self-reliance or tarki is the way to success in war in fact the historical evidence completely contradicts that if you are a country that is integrated globally connected to the rest of the world you're going to have a far wider range of knowledge talents and potential innovations at your disposal than if you're a country that has locked the doors on the rest of the world and chosen to rely purely upon its own resources at any one time there are on average 2 000 merchant ships out at sea each loaded with the resources and supplies from around the world that britain needs to keep on fighting and each one of them is a target for german u-boats particularly after the fall of france once they've got french bases their short-range submarines can now get out widely into the atlantic and there are many more points from which they can attack us for the threat goes up exponentially from 1940 onwards particularly as germany can produce more u-boats [Music] at the bottom of the atlantic ocean shipwrecks are being reclaimed by the elements barnacles cling to their rusted hulls while shoals of fish colonize their interiors many of these wrecks are of merchant ships [Music] by february 1941 u-boats are sinking them three times faster than the british can replace them germany fails to bring britain to its knees by the threat of an invasion so now it's trying to starve britain into submission by cutting off those vital lifelines that connect her with the rest of the world from the very beginning of the war one of germany's principal aims has been britain's starvation at the time britain is the world's largest importer half its food comes from abroad it did a lot of trade with continental europe it imported some very very important raw materials iron ore from the north of africa from sweden timber from the baltic bacon from denmark fruit from southern europe so the british economy is highly integrated into a continental european economy if britain can't import what she needs then she is out of the war churchill said that it was the only thing that ever really terrified him was the concept of britain completely cut off unable to import everything she needed um not only to survive but to maintain the war effort as well but how is germany able to do this when the royal navy is the biggest in the world and has always been at the heart of britain's defense strategy when the war starts you have yards like vicars still building big ships like battleships and cruisers big ships are needed for a big war that's the way the admiralty thinks britain has successfully blockaded germany during the first world war so what it intends to do is exactly the same again but that strategy has to change because you've got these u-boats starting to blast british ships out of the water commander fletcher royal navy has this to say about the grave menace of the u-boat nobody should imagine for a moment that because the figures of sinkings of our merchant ships are not published that they are not very heavy the government does not publish the figures because it considers that to do so would give information to the enemy of value to him but i can assure you that the sinkings are very serious indeed the uber campaign certain to be intensified is hitler's greatest hope of staving off defeat he has hundreds of uber to see now he'll undoubtedly have more the answer is to destroy them what's now needed are smaller ships more suited to protecting merchant convoys and of course more merchant ships to replace those that are being destroyed we go from a navy that is focused on enormous very very expensive ships that go very fast to a whole lot of smaller ships that are much more straightforward to operate much simpler to build the time between the leveling of the building blocks and the launching of a british vessel has been reduced to the minimum and wherever prefabrication is possible it has been adopted as for example in the construction of keel sections gradually though by no means slowly the vessel takes shape cranes hang the plates which are bolted into position before being riveted and talking of rivets there are as many as half a million in a 10 000 ton cargo ship this particular riveting squad comprises george peake 16 the rivet heater georgina hayward 17 the rivet catcher the holder up is john willis and there are two more george's george askew and george gillespie all skilled workers doing a first-class job as well as building merchant ships there's another priority at vicar's yard repairing the damage caused by enemy action and the brutal atlantic weather they literally work around the clock to these really tight schedules so the ships spend as little time as possible in the port so as the battle of the atlantic intensifies you've got increasing numbers being able to be brought in to all of vicar's defensive arming of british merchant ships continues a pace at the same time vickers is fitting weaponry on merchant ships by the end of 1940 four thousand are armed with anti-submarine guns already several of our cargo carrying ships have given a very good account of themselves in duels with u-boats and there'll be more of such stories to follow you can be sure of that the gunners aboard these merchant ships are itching to have a shot at the nazi submarine and with these modern guns they should make good shooting [Music] by the end of 1940 germany has built just four major ships while britain has made over 20 times that number vicar's shipyards now employ over 40 000 people [Music] building the vessels that are needed to protect britain's merchant shipping only now they're using some of the methods that were pioneered in the us such as welding instead of riveting if you have someone welding it's arguably much easier to train someone to just weld two bits of metal together there are many women in the shipbuilding industry welding being one more contribution made by them towards the winning of the wall you can pre-fabricate large sections of metal that just need to be welded together far more easily than you could try and do with individual plates that need to be riveted tens of thousands of times welding steel components transforms production particularly when it comes to submarines the main difference between the submarine the conventional ship is just that lack of tolerance for failure so because of the nature of its environment because it goes underwater even a relatively minor manufacturing floor operating floor and submarine can lead to total loss of the vessel so therefore the requirement of getting it absolutely right in the submarine fleet is even higher than it is for the surface fleet this is a t-class submarine of the patrol type at sea where our cameramen were permitted to film her at work at its peak vicars can assemble an entire submarine in just two weeks after a long patrol or return to port where the submarine depot ship is waiting to welcome her home she wears the jolly roger on which various signs indicate the measure of her success straight bars for freighters sunk are you crossed out for a u-boat destroyed a badge for gunnery successes and daggers for other items of good work faithfully done german attempts at mass producing u-boats are disastrous what the germans come up with is an entirely new model of u-boat called the mark 21. now this is inspired by american production methods and they've decided to divide the hull into eight separate sections and have each one built by a different manufacturer so when they use these american style techniques the germans hope to reduce the time each u-boat takes to build to just 175 days however there's a problem and it's calamitous because they all leak like crazy where these sections join together and it took almost as long again to repair them as it did to make them in the first place of the 80 mark 21 u-boats only four are launched neither manages to think a single allied ship by the end of 1942 britain is out producing the germans on every level making 30 more aircraft four times as many tanks and 15 times as many major surface vessels [Music] during the second world war there is a real effort by the government to make sure that the british people have enough to eat and to make it possible to grow more food there's also a rise in the number of tractors being produced at ford's dagenham plant they're making 80 a day which are given to farmers with the help of government financing while you have most of europe surviving on a really restricted diet britain actually increases the amount of food it grows so what you see by the end of the war is that britain is producing 91 of the food it needs and although a picture of farming may look like a holiday believe me it's one of the toughest war jobs there is would you like to go back to the bank of england after you no no i haven't any desire to be able to go back thank you at all the women's land army and farmers all over britain have fought and are still fighting their hardest to win the battle of supply [Music] by the end of 1943 the conflict is turning in favor of the allies whose war factories are producing a staggering amount of military hardware and vickers is at the heart of this increased production roy chadwick of avro develops the powerful lancaster bomber it's vickers who helped to build it giant bombers like these massive lancasters are rolling off our production line even within airplanes you get radical changes from year to year so governments don't really know where the leading edge of aviation will be 18 months down the line they're living with massive uncertainty about what weapons will be will be effective and i don't think you can understand the second world without understanding that very unstable technical arms race that's going on the lancaster goes into production at vicar's new aircraft factory in may 1941 over 8 000 people produce over a thousand of the bombers in a single factory with a shop length of more than a quarter of a mile the men and women who are working on the assembly lines these production soldiers know that this is in truth and reality war between the factory between 1939 and 1945 the british and the americans transformed not only the aircraft they produced but how they produce them by contrast the germans are essentially producing the same airplanes in 1945 as in 1939. why essentially because they're a much poorer country they can't devote resources to development successfully at least in the same way that britain and america can the lancaster is comparatively easy to fly easy to maintain and easy to repair and ideally suited to mass production it has a maximum speed of 287 miles an hour and a range of 1660 miles far enough to penetrate and destroy germany's industrial heartlands using vickers made bombs the lancaster has the raf's lowest heavy bomber loss rate and it's used extensively in high and low level day and night raids germany does not stand a chance against the lancaster has promised germany a tremendous unprecedented non-stop bombing and a lot of people say that bombing can never win a war well my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet and we shall see by the second half of 1943 bomber command is attacking with the same kind of accuracy as daylight bombing and the british are absolutely pulverizing german factories like never before the lancaster is britain's most successful bomb deadly accurate highly effective and all part of the plan by 1944 britain is dropping a hundred times more bombs than the germans and it shows the remarkable resilience of this lonely island off the pan-european german empire [Music] in june 1941 after the germans attacked the soviet union britain has to find a way of sending huge amounts of war materiel to its new ally which it does through the icy waters of the norwegian sea british sailors face not just the enemy but extreme cold and pack ice the loss rate for ships is higher than on any other allied convoy route winston churchill calls it the worst journey in the world germany occupies all the main routes into russia so the only way for ships to reach the soviet union is to travel north from scotland around the very top of norway deep into the arctic circle and then down to mamansk there are 35 merchant ships in each convoy with an escort of 20 royal navy ships delivering over 4 million tons of supplies to the russians churchill insists on making this really big effort to encourage stalin to stay in the ring now this is a big political gamble but as it gathers pace it gains in strategic importance those arctic convoys are absolutely vital in keeping the soviet union in the war men and women you will be delighted to know that we have just received a cable gram from lord beaver brook thanking you for a record output of thanks for russia [Applause] every tank completed a schedule is one more nail in hitler's coffin so let him roll over a period of four years the british send an astonishing amount of military hardware to the soviet union on the eastern front russia manages to turn the tide on germany now the time is right for britain to launch its own attack and reopen the western front all over britain war factories are in production overdrive as it prepares to launch the largest seaborne invasion in history supply includes every weapon of war heaven knows the variety of weapons for this war is almost infinite the field depots contain examples of many weapons already familiar to us temporarily parked here awaiting distribution certainly doesn't look as if the anglo-american forces are going to go short does it one of the most extraordinary aspects of the british war production effort is you get a transformation of british industry of british infrastructure to make it possible not only to create a great army that will invade europe but also to bring over an american army that will invade you times have certainly changed since those days when invasion implied invasion of britain well even with the mere gloves of some of the invasion supplies we can imagine the amount of shipping that's going to be required british american and canadian invasion of normandy looks like a terrible gamble but in fact the allies knew that they had overwhelming superiority and equipment over the germans and what it tells us really is the huge spare capacity the british and indeed the americans had by this time in the war [Music] out of the total number of warships used in d-day more than three-quarters of british and the british make three times as many landing craft as the us the german air force is outnumbered by a factor of 30 to one on d-day they will not manage to overcome these odds for the rest of the war from here the fall of berlin is only a matter of time d-day is the great victory in the war that the british had been fighting since the first ship rolled off the docks at barrow inverness the great war of production the british war economy was a place of plenty there was more than enough food for troops there was more than enough oil there was more than enough equipment you had thoroughly mechanized and modern armed forces the case of germany was very different the german war economy was short of food it was short of coal it was short of steel it was short of labor and that transferred itself into the armed services themselves the british victory was not only due to the heroism of its soldiers or the tactical genius of its generals but to the strength of its industry and ambition of its entrepreneurs britain fought a profoundly industrial war it was a war of investment a war of factories a war of technology and war of science however it's britain that learns the wrong lessons from the six years of conflict they conclude from their experience during the war that a controlled economy is more efficient and more effective than a more free market one and the result is that the dynamism that the british economy had shown during the 1930s is lost it goes from being one of the most innovative economies in the western world with the most dynamic sectors in areas like consumer goods car manufacturer light engineering to being as it was by the 1970s the sick man of europe instead of sticking with the strategy they'd been following successfully in the interwar period they go down the road of much greater state involvement and also trying to sustain a very large and very expensive welfare state which the british economy simply could not afford britain may have won the war but it lost to peace a country which rose to every challenge during the second world war now languishes behind its old enemy germany by failing to learn the lessons from its past [Music] the untold story of war production all wars are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph over the other side this is a war between the factories the real story of how the world wars were fought and won it may sound strange but modern wars they're not won by battles they're won by factories they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production and those factories would shape the modern world volkswagen fiat mitsubishi they're all household names now but they made those names as wall factories [Music] the avro lancaster one of the most iconic british aircraft of the second world war people always celebrate the spitfire and the hurricane but let's not forget the lancaster is surely just as iconic my great uncle flew in them in world war ii in the latter part of world war ii i get weepy every time i get within 100 feet of a lancaster bomber and i get massively excited every time i see one in a fly path what started out as a deadly design the manchester was killing crews turned into a pilot's dream they called it from a beast to a beauty because the lancaster was a beauty the lancaster's unique capabilities helped change the course of the war in europe it plays an extremely important part in winning the second world war this is the story of the avro lancaster and of the war factory that built it [Music] 1936 as hitler's nazi germany turns its factories to military production britain prepares for war there was uh very much uh a possibility of war in europe hitler had become chancellor in 33 the luftwaffe had been officially unveiled shortly thereafter so there was no kidding themselves to the fact that there was a rising power in continental europe it's terrifyingly clear to british high command that britain does not have the war machinery it needs to compete with hitler the british government urgently needs new aircraft the emphasis in the beginning is on fighters not bombers and that's mainly because of cost you can build four fighters for the price of a single bomber but the british high command know that they also need those bombers obama needs to do a few things it needs to fly a significant distance compared to most aircraft at the time you had to start extending range and you had to extend payload you actually have to carry bombs those specs call for an aircraft that can match german bombers in delivering destruction the air ministry issues specification p13 slash 36 for a new bomber the specification asked for a six crew aeroplane that could carry 8 000 pounds of bombs fly at 275 miles an hour and at 15 000 feet uh that was not going to be an easily achievable aim building a bomber is a vast task from an engineering standpoint so they really are asking quite a lot of the aircraft and they want to do it and this is another thing in a two engine bomber this is a really tall order not least because as well that this all of this has to be achievable using two rolls-royce vulture engines which are still in development at the time but this is music to the ears of a struggling little aeroplane company called avro avro was born out of one young man's dreams of flying avro is started by a man called sir edwin elliott verdin rowe a v row so that of course is where the name comes from together with his brother humphrey edwin rowe founds the av row aircraft company in a basement in manchester in 1910 world war one provides it with just the lift it needs to get off the ground and the military knows they're going to need some new aircraft so what they do is that they order up a whole series of aeroplanes and seaplanes from av row and that is just keeping the manchester factory absolutely humming but after the end of the war a slump in demand rings big changes at avro so after the first world war military contracts were cancelled and it became the lean years it became a very difficult time obviously nobody needs a constant constant supply of military airplanes anymore and so money is really hard to come by and eventually afro is sold to costly motors who want the factory space to build cars and in 1928 av row resigns from the company [Music] a brand new management at avro tries to build the business back up it's a really ambitious move but it's led by this really legendary lead designer avro and he's a man called roy chadwick roy chadwick has been at avro almost from the start by this stage he and general manager roy dobson are now running the company roy chadwick i think very fortunately met av in the very early days and i think they hit it off straight away if you like they both had the same and similar ideas about how an aircraft should be designed and they have the same enthusiasm for aviation at a time when many people thought that flying was against nature's needs and it shouldn't happen and it was wrong for people to fly chadwick's a real character frankly but he's also a brilliant designer and he learns his craft from row himself and he actually holds to rose design ethos av's mantra was build it strong build it light and build it powerful because the the horsepower of engines and in their day you had to be as light as possible to be able to fly as high as you could so when the p13 tender comes around in 1936 chadwick has to employ all his persuasive skills to get the contract for the new bomber chadwick was able to convince the air ministry because of his previous history that he could meet and more all the specifications in the contract once the air ministry gets on board a new bomber is born there's a tradition that bombers are named after town so that's it they are now actively pursuing building a manchester bomber the first prototype manchester l7246 rolls off the avro lines and begins flight testing in july 1939. but things don't fly smoothly the problem when the manchester's tested is that the rudders don't provide enough control the engine runs too hot and the hydraulics are rubbish everything stems from issues with the vulture engines that they were being told they had to use you can have a brilliant airframe but it doesn't matter if you don't have the right engine to power it but despite its faults bomber command and the air ministry stuck with this airplane because they desperately needed it they had nothing else effectively they commissioned this thing anyway and they ordered from avro 200 of 1200 manchester bombers but it just becomes increasingly obvious that they're not up to the task and so the government orders them to cease production but roy chadwick isn't having any of this chadwick realized pretty early on that the uh the engine issue with the um voltage wasn't going to be solved satisfactorily he could see that that engine was going to ruin his aircraft if he couldn't get that changed and what he does is adapt the manchester and replaces the two dud vulture engines with four rolls-royce merlin engines instead and it makes the world of difference chadwick proposes a new updated version of the manchester powered by these new engines he calls it type 683 as an engineer he can look at the manchester and say actually the airframe is fine you can make the airframe bigger so we can move from two mediocre engines to four excellent rolls-royce merlin engines and all of a sudden move from a medium bomber with flaws to a large bomber that can be very effective type 683 now gets an official name and the lancaster bomber is born after weeks of poor weather on the 9th of january 1941 chadwick's four engine bomber taxes out for her maiden flight the first test flight the poor guys flying it had tested the manchester which had nearly killed them so they can't have been that enthusiastic about getting into a really similar aeroplane they were only meant to be up in the air for not very long but they were up there for much much longer and they did a low fly past and dipped the wings and they just said how fantastic it was the test pilot came back and he was absolutely cock-a-hoop with the performance of the aeroplane and they were smiling absolutely beaming and they called it from a beast to a beauty and in june of 1941 the air ministry issues a contract to avro for almost 500 lancasters it's a huge order but avro is ready for it avro had a good setup for building the aircraft they had learned building techniques and experience from the manchester so they were hitting the ground running as it were when they went into production towards the end of 1941 and they were still building lancasters at the end of the war the lancaster inspired extreme devotion not just in its air crews but in the ground crews that maintained it as a full-scale replica airframe at the avro museum in stockport cheshire shows my late father was a ground engineer on the original aircraft as for sugar which is now hendon he went on to restore that aircraft post-war so consequently i grew up working on the aircraft with him and it had quite a big impact on me so after my father passed away some years after i used my income to create this airframe that you see behind you with the express purpose of enabling the general public to go on board learn about the lancaster [Music] in my opinion world war ii could not have been won without the lancaster with the success of chadwick's designs avro expands its production lines the government gives avro a grant of one million pounds to build a new factory at chatterton now it's a really beautiful building but you know even chatterton isn't big enough because what britain needs are more and more planes and of course what does that mean avro needs more and more factories so what avro decides to do is to build their next plant at yidan in yorkshire on the site of the leeds bradford municipal airport it's actually going to be the largest factory under one roof in all of europe and avro's going to need it because the lancaster is about to show the german people what it means to start a total war [Music] avro's eden plant opens in february 1941. eden's an incredible factory the floor space takes up about one and a half million feet i mean that is huge there are thousands of people working at this plant it's like a small town but all under a roof one of the people working there was lillian grundy a young shop assistant who finds herself drafted into the factory i was 16 when the war started i worked the old toffee factory at whitefield and the woman came one day and asked a lot of personal questions about a month after i was called up to go and see this av rose that be about early 41 and a b18 the war factory where lillian worked was an impressive size it presented a massive target for german bombers as the story of nearby chatterton shows as a factory manufacturing bomber aircraft it's always going to be a target for the enemy um and on easter monday 1941 a german bomber aircraft find the factory and drop bombs thankfully it's easter monday the workers are off on their easter holidays so there's almost no one inside and there are no casualties but then it makes them think about how to protect the factory from any further attack to protect the massive yidan factory avro needs to think outside the fuselage general manager roy dobson completely understands the vulnerability of the factory better than anyone else and he knows know just one bombing raid could [ __ ] the entire plant and could stall production indefinitely so he comes up with what we always call in britain a cunning plan what he does is to call in designers from the film industry what they do is that they bank up earth at 45 degrees all the way around the walls to eliminate any shadows being cast from the walls and do the roof up so that when you look at it from above as a german bomber you see mock houses farms trees everything they even had artificial cows and they would move them on a daily basis and they even tried to change it for the seasons so they would have leaves and so on and so forth absolutely astonishing and there are some wonderful photographs of that quite amazing but even with the extra capacity at the factories demand for lancaster's soon outstrips avro's ability to produce them 55 000 parts make up a lancaster so that is an enormous number of parts that have to come in from war factories all over the country you then have to spend 70 000 man hours doing half a million individual processes to come up with a finished airplane at the peak of lancaster production avro employs 40 000 people but actually it's a lot more than that because if you include all the subcontractors it was estimated that you have more than a million people taking part in putting the lancaster together it is a great testament to the the people from avro in particular and all these other subcontractors and other factories that during the height of the war seven or eight a day were coming out of production [Music] lillian played her part in this process by making the ties that bound the front of the plane together i was there on the machine and we made big screws it was a hard work 12 hours a night the women was on all the makeups and ladies and the machine was well i would say 50 times bigger than me we wore a heart to put all your hair in because the drill going round would have sculptured were only your feet not moving everything else was moving and your brain had to keep alert because the machine would go around and round and round with the job and it would tell your fingers so you had to watch all the time when i first went to my fingers yes and the lancasters are needed to open a new front in the war immediately and then you have the person of arthur harris come into the equation who takes over bomber command in 1942. harris is a committed believer in city bombing that he really believes that britain can can drive germany out of the war by laying waste to its cities there are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war well my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet germany will make a most interesting initial experiment when harris is talking about attacking a german city you will devastate everything about that city fly at night with masses of bombers don't worry about hitting individual small targets just blanket an area at the end of may 1942 harris launches the first thousand bomber raid designed to obliterate the rail links and factories in one of germany's key industrial cities the thousand bomber raid on cologne is over in 90 minutes but in that time they managed to start 2 500 fires and destroy or damage 13 000 buildings it's shocking and devastating to the people on the ground the raid was intended to [ __ ] the city's industry while protecting the bombers through sheer weight of numbers the raid is a success in that they only lose four percent of the aircraft that left britain to take part in it so yes it absolutely works and yet a month later the city is beginning to get back to work so that the long-term impacts of the cologne raid don't live up to the immediate hype of the moment when it seemed to be so devastating and such a turn this is why many people today question bomber harris's methods though some still support him the thousand bomber raids were primarily to hit industrial areas yes civilian areas unfortunately got hit but it wasn't quite the same as the blitz in london or somewhere like that so actually i think bomber harris has been slightly hard done by by some of the criticism and i think that's unwinding now i think that people realize that those raids hit and destabilize a lot of the industrial production which actually foreshortened the war without it the war may have gone on longer than it did but thousand bomber raids don't come cheap and someone has to make the bombers to fly them to fulfill the insatiable demand avro's war factories are working round the clock during the war the work regime was extremely extremely tough it was a 12-hour shift it was 24-hour production and it was freezing cold the doors opened at back of you for him to take the wings out which the riveters did they were up ladders riveting so it was noisy everywhere you went with noise noise noise don't forget we was doing a man's job we only got ladies pay despite working at full capacity the lancasters don't come in unlimited numbers to keep up the pressure british high command needs to find a way of hitting german industry using fewer planes what bomber command needs to do is come up with a more strategic way of doing things so find a target that can be attacked by a much smaller force but will cause maximum devastation to the nazi war effort the river valley of the roar is where many nazi war factories are based destroying them would be a big step towards winning the war for the allies they are supplied by seven great dams three of which are crucial targets because what the ruhr factories are powered by is hydroelectricity and that comes in these three great huge dams [Applause] so if these dams can be breached not only will the factories grind to a halt but they'll also flood the roar and they'll literally bog it down for months the only problem is where do you get something powerful enough to breach these really thick dams 1942 british high command wants to hit the industrial heart of germany the roar valley to do that they must take out the dams at the top of the valley but they don't have the right tools to target them yet even before the war the british air ministry has long identified the rue valley as a key strategic target you know because we know that what wins wars are factories and the factories of the royal valley are the key to hitler's war fighting ability so you've got these three great big dams around the valley and they're holding back these massive lakes and they are providing huge amounts of hydroelectric power and all that power is used for making steel therefore instead of taking out all of the individual factories if you take out the dams not only will they have no power to work but you can devastate the area with flooding as well but the problem is is these dams are 40 meters thick that is seriously thick they're going to withstand a few epoxy bombs so what the raf calculate is a direct hit with large bombs might just do the trick and it needs pinpoint accuracy the problem where do you get that one man is obsessed with the idea and will stop at nothing to achieve it his name is barnes wallace lance wallace is what would have been known at the time as a boffin he's the assistant chief a designer for vickers and on the outbreak of war he just comes up with idea after after idea on how britain could win the war using technology he's absolutely ideal because he's not somebody that looks at things in a conventional way barnes wallace and his team closely researched the biggest weaknesses in the dam structures the problem you've got with trying to reach a dam is it's designed to in fact resist thousands millions of tons of pressure and very importantly very difficult to bomb because it's a very very small thin target and a bomb bursting in water isn't very effective one solution would be a torpedo it works with ships but a torpedo won't work because the germans have already thought of that it's obvious so what they've done is string a traditional torpedo net in front of the dam so that if you do try that it will catch the torpedo and if it does go off it will be too far away from the dam to cause any damage so his thought is that he knows that an explosive force in contact with the actual dam wall will produce an effect that will push out the masonry and very importantly allow the millions of tons of water to then exploit even the smallest crack or fissure you don't have to blow it to bits you'd have to weaken it enough for all of that pressure to push the dam away wallis turns to his own interest in naval history and a friend's expertise in the sport of cricket for a solution the idea is and it is taken from nelson's captains they used to fire a cannonball so that it skimmed off the water and would bounce um and this is the principle to get the bomb to land right next to the masonry to blow its sky high and breach the dam but getting a bomb to bounce on water isn't easy early in the experiments with a bomb barnes wallace discovered a problem when it hit the water it sank but he had to have a conversation with a colleague who was a member of a local cricket club and he pointed out that if you impart a backspin on a cricket ball it will bounce across the grass the question was therefore if you could get a backspin on the bomb would it bounce across the water [Music] if you spin it backwards not only will it give it the momentum to get close to the wall but it will stop it from then bouncing too far away from the wall before it explodes so it's perfect so he needs to transfer that concept from a tiny little cricket ball to a whopping great big bomb in 1942 wallace presents his idea to the government's scientific advisors and gets the green light to conduct aerial tests initial tests aren't necessarily great they have some where the bomb breaks up on hitting the water they have somewhere it just sinks like a stone and then eventually they managed to launch this bomb exactly the right height exactly the right time he finally gets it right because on the 23rd of january 1943 the bomb gets dropped at almost 300 miles an hour an incredibly low altitude of just 42 feet and it bounces 13 times and lands right on target but to duplicate that in combat conditions is going to be a real challenge they needed to be able to release the bomb at a specific altitude and since this would be a nighttime raid they came up with a system of two lights directed down beneath the aircraft so that the crew simply looked down to where the two lights came together as one and that was the correct altitude for release but the particular nature of the bomb made transporting it difficult one problem with delivering the bomb is that there's only one aircraft that can do it all other aircraft available in the raf are too small to actually make the bomb rotate what you have to do is put a device below the bombay linked chains driven by a motor in the aircraft so that the bomb is rotating correctly at the correct speed only the lancaster had the capacity to fit this device the lancaster has a great long bombay so it can be adaptable to the longest and heaviest bombs so it can carry a huge load and deliver a huge load and it had one other unique feature which made it the perfect fit for the delivery mechanism this is the uh main spa which goes from wing tip to wingtip and passes through the center of gravity of the aircraft and it's speculation on my part but i would imagine the bomb would have been hung directly underneath the main spa because that would offer the greatest aircraft trim with which to carry the bomb safely so for the bouncing bomb to fly barnes wallace needs avro on his side so you have this key meeting on the 26th of february where wallace meets avro lancaster's designer roy chadwick and he asked him directly can you modify these lancasters without a pause chadwick looks at him and says you know what i can do it and all i need is vickers to handle the attachment arms and the driving mechanisms to spin up the bombs and then we can get it done tests of the new lancasters and the new bomb reveal the magnitude of the task ahead by the time it's ready to go upkeep the bouncing bomb weighs 9000 pounds it needs to be spun up to 500 rotations per minute before it leaves the aircraft and that's not all in order to work properly the bomb is going to be dropped over water at a height of precisely 60 feet from an aircraft traveling at precisely 232 miles an hour that's not a lot of wiggle room you know it's a really big ass on the air crews and don't forget they're not doing it over a nice peaceful lake they're doing it while being fired upon by the germans to carry out this herculean mission the raf taps its most famous pilot wing commander guy gibson you know he may be young he's only in his early 20s but he's very experienced and he's exactly what the raf needs and he's called in and he's asked to put together a squadron of the very best air crews in britain gibson assembles his squadron in lincoln shirt and he has them training on low-level flying in lancaster so first of all they're going all about the country at 200 feet and then perilously down to 150 feet which is not only exhilarating but pretty terrifying as well because there's no room for error right up to the last minute the crews are kept in the dark about their real target the ultimate test for the lancaster comes in spring 1943. on the 16th of may 1943 19 lancasters take off in three waves for operation chest eyes with the intention of destroying three dams in the rural valley to do that they take off from sampson in lincolnshire and they head out over the north sea and they're obviously going right into nazi germany for the raid to succeed accurate navigation was key we're in the navigators cruise station here and that navigator would have been shrouded in darkness behind a curtain and that's so that he could look at his maps with a light on internally in the aircraft but no light was emitted because that could be easily spotted by knight fighters coming up on the aircraft the navigator used dead reckoning so they're using map reading and compass bearings they'd have to fly at 200 feet right across the north sea basically below radar but anything else that goes wrong anyone makes a mistake there they're gone quickly okay where i'm stood this is where the flight engineers crew station is when he was facing forward he was looking after this half of the panel with which he was able to monitor flaps oxygen brakes that enabled the pilot the freedom to monitor his main instrument on what's known as the blind flying panel and they're all the instruments that the pilot needs to fly the aircraft safely such as airspeed altitudes is artificial horizon and the pilot cannot be distracted because the approach to the dams is extremely treacherous in one case it's a steep wooded valley the approach is absolutely staggeringly dangerous the nazis of course know something might happen they've got anti-aircraft guns ready to try and shoot down any aircraft coming in to succeed the lancasters must fly absolutely straight into the teeth of enemy fire as soon as the bombers arrive in the area of the dams all of the anti-aircraft fire jumps into action so what the pilots are faced with is a terrifying run they have got to keep steady and keep true they can't dodge or anything they've got to fly straight through a gauntlet in order to reach the point where they need to drop their bombs this is because the bomb aimer can only do his job if the plane is flying straight and level the bomb mode light in the prime position here and essentially lean on his elbows to operate all of the equipment in this position on the right of the bomb aimer's position you'll see that there's an instrument panel there and the bom aimer would essentially program all the information required to drop the bombs as accurately as possible into there and the bombing computer would perform the calculations the aircraft could not peel off and get out the target area instead it had to continue flying straight and level for a prescribed period of time normally in excess of 30 seconds and the bombing computer would tell the f24 camera to take the photograph so at the exact moment that they burst the picture that's developed would show the bombs of this aircraft detonating you can only imagine their crew and the relief they felt when they could finally peel off and get out out of that area and it's gibson himself you know real leader amongst men and he's the one making the first run makes the first run drops the bomb and it fails to breach the down at this point gibson is concerned that the next attempt is going to be again distracted by german fire so what he decides to do is run the gauntlet again and fly alongside in order to protect and divert some of the german fire away from the lancaster attempting to drop the next bomb i mean that's seriously brave you know he's already flown into the jaws of death once and now he's going to do it again the third and fourth runs don't work either and by this point 617 squadron are starting to think that these bombs just don't work the lancaster comes in just as the german gunners are running out of ammunition drops its bomb bounces goes all the way up to the dam sinks below the water line and then nothing happens and then suddenly the dam simply collapses [Music] the first one has gone upkeep has worked [Music] at this point a hundred yard breach opens up in the moan dam and water begins cascading down into the valley below but gibson knows the job is far from done two more dams have to be breached that night on the eder and sopa rivers it takes four runs to breach the either dam but the sopa proves an impossible nut to crack the third down the saw dam is different and was always doubtful it's an earthen structure and it's always been a concern that the bomb was not powerful enough to breach it it takes something like 10 passes to even get a target lock on it but even then it's unsuccessful when the dam isn't breached the two dams have been breached and millions of gallons of water are now roaring down the roar valley as planned basically the raid is a huge success and the floods are washing away roads and railways and bridges mines are flooded 11 factories completely destroyed more than 100 others damaged and you just got you know a huge devastating impact on steel production in the roar and that's dropped down to a quarter level of what it was before the raid by far the greatest impact of the raid is the loss of hydroelectric power you have two power stations wiped out and the germans admit that it hurts them i mean albert speer the armaments minister later admits that the sworper dam had been breached it would have been a complete disaster but even with just two dams down the raid was a disaster for us for many months those months would cover a critical turning point in the war when the nazis desperately needed to replenish their forces and while the dam busters grabbed the headlines britain stole what lancasters would continue relentlessly with the unglamorous job of pounding germany's industry to rubble the german economy goes into a tailspin because now strategic bombing is beginning to shut down the german economy through transportation and fuel so if you add all those together it plays an extremely important part in winning the second world war all of this together in aggregate produces a rapid unraveling of german industrial capability they can't produce the factories because they're being bombed on a regular basis and more and more rolling stock is being destroyed it's irreplaceable hitler's armaments minister finally has to admit defeat in january 1945 albert spear ran the numbers on what the bombing campaign had done to his factory schedules in 1944 he reckoned that germany had produced 35 percent fewer tanks 31 fewer planes and 42 fewer lorries due to bombing than it should have done that year to him it's the transportation attacks it's the attack on the railways and and the ability to move coal you know to fire the power plants and to move things around the good he believes this is devastating and in the sense he's right it's spare who comes to hitler at the end of january 45 and he says to him the war is over in the area of heavy industry and armaments we're done we can no longer fight now that's a kind of crippling admission you know this is a man who boasted that he could increase german industrial production threefold basically the bombers led by the lancaster have utterly defeated him the lancaster bombers get one last chance to strike at hitler just five days before the nazi fura takes his own life so on the 25th of april 45 you've got another great lancaster headline grabbing raid and they head for the oba salzburg which is hitler's mountain retreat now you know some people suggest that the reason for this attack is simply to show the germans once and for all that they're absolutely trounced it's clearly a great propaganda victory look it's all gone hitler's country retreat dead with hitler defeated and the war over avro's massive factories must now find new markets similar to the first world war avro after the second world war still had you know a reduction in orders and contracts were stopped and so they had to look for commercial flight and passenger flight but it does take time to get into passenger aircraft there's no doubt about it but not long after the war um you know the cold war really gave another boost to the avro the avrov story if you like because the vulcan was being developed yes the war factory attitude held them in good stead avro's post-war jet bomber was the avro vulcan which relied a lot on the lessons that avraha learned during world war ii with the lancaster you think the lancaster has a big bombay you don't realize what big is until you stand underneath the vulcan and see the size of the bombay in that aeroplane so you've gone through an air-pressured nuclear-carrying delta wing aircraft that could fly at 57 000 feet and all that in less than 50 years from av's first flight in 1909 [Music] that is a testament to roy chadwick but roy unfortunately never saw the fruition of it um he was killed in 1947 in a crash just 300 yards from here in 1963 the avro name disappears as the company was absorbed into hawker sidley aviation but the memory of its vital contribution to the war lives on you only have to look at the statistics of the lancaster to realize that it was the kind of symbol of how brilliant british war factories had been and actually you know without the help of the trustee lancaster of course hitler's war factories would never have been destroyed this educational air franc is a tribute to 55 hundred and seventy three volunteer airmen were lost flying on bomber come on world war ii indeed could not have been won without the efforts of uh lancaster serving on bomber command which really sums up the reason why bulma harris called it a shining sword people always celebrate the spitfire and the hurricane but let's not forget the lancaster is surely just as iconic and actually in a way was more of a war winner than those other two planes the untold story of war production all wars are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph this is a war between the factories the real story of how the world wars were fought and won it may sound strange but modern wars they're not won by battles they're won by factories [Music] they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production and those factories would shape the modern world volkswagen fiat mitsubishi they're all household names now but they made those names as war factories on the 5th of december 1916 workers in a factory on the outskirts of leeds began their night shift minutes later a deafening explosion shattered the night a massive explosion took out an entire machine you have lots of bits of concrete falling out the sky fire fumes smoke horrendous dozens lost their lives and many more lay injured some of them were only able to be identified by the identity tags that they wore not a word of this would reach the outside world the victims were never acknowledged it was all hushed up no account of the incident was made in the national news but the people who lost their lives knew the risks that they were taking this was total war this was a war beyond their imagining far from the trenches and craters of no man's land raged an unseen war that broke tradition risked lives and rebuilt a nation you had to turn all of britain into one giant factory a war that saw millions answer the call if they'd not been there we would not have won the war august 1914 britain along with france and russia had declared war on germany and its austro-hungarian allies the british expeditionary force was mobilized and departed for the front we actually send overseas seven divisions it's about 150 000 soldiers it quickly became apparent that this was a war like no other much to the shock of all the nations fighting in the first world war the war they were fighting was a completely different one than they expected everybody had planned for a moving type of warfare and a mobile warfare but what happens when the war begins is that goes completely out of the window gone were the old tactics the cut and thrust of previous military engagements now every inch of land was hard fought and bitterly held what they found was a war in which they were digging into the ground and creating giant trench systems with millions of soldiers staring at each other over what athlete came to be known as no man's land soon a system of defenses grew to encompass the whole of the western front 440 miles of trenches dugouts and barbed wire that stretched all the way from the swiss border to the north sea you can't go forward or push the enemy back so they begin to dig in their positions to hold as best they can once you move into that war of attrition the trench and warfare the way you prepare for the attack and then hold the enemy off if they counter attack is by use of artillery as the war ground to a standstill vast fortifications were constructed on both sides soon the only hope that any military operation had of success was to pound these positions into the mud what becomes clear to the authorities is that in order to give your men the best chance you really need to support them with as much artillery as you can muster which is when you get barrages coming prior to them going over the top you want the artillery to pound the living daylights out of the enemy before your men attack on foot [Music] this moment became known by historians as the guns of august the government of prime minister herbert henry asquith was woefully unprepared for this new type of warfare which was at the time the complete opposite of british military doctrine the main british force that went over to france to to start fighting world war one was the british expeditionary force and they were actually a primarily an infantry force that meant they relied on their rifles their accurate shooting and their individual soldiers to to fight battles they only had 29 million artillery shells stored and ready to go and while that sounds like a lot that actually was only about four big battles by the british government's reckoning and the feeling is that the war will be over by that point anyway when that doesn't happen britain has begun a war which really it's not a position to finish by the end of 1914 only five percent of the 10 million shells ordered for the british army had actually been delivered shell stores soon ran dangerously low and britain's war factories struggled to keep up before the first world war started britain had a fairly limited ability to produce munitions they had a small army they had enough production capacity to equip that army but they didn't have a lot of ability to expand that production quickly but also as well you have to remember that britain's had a liberal government several years before the war and liberal government didn't like spending money on war so traditionally the army shrinks armament shrinks the budgets go down this lack of preparedness for modern warfare was badly exposed when british high command ordered a major offensive at the front the british army had planned and mounted attack at a place called auburn's ridge in france on 9th may 1915. the offensive was intended to exploit germany's diversion of troops to the eastern front british artillery numbering over 500 guns was charged with knocking out german defenses before the big push but the lack of munitions meant shelling could only last a mere 40 minutes tens of thousands of shells are made available but actually the number of shells is inadequate some of the guns are rationed to 10 shells a day when they need 10 a minute and soldiers in trenches can survive particularly a weak barrage then you advance and all the enemy does is capture soldiers in the open with their own returning artillery fire the attack lasted only a day but resulted in over 11 000 british casualties the vast majority falling within yards of their own front lines it had been a catastrophic disaster the commander of the british army sir john french complained about that to the correspondent of the london times who was actually over uh with the british expeditionary force in france on the 14th of may 1913 the london times led with the devastating headline the public and parliament were outraged at the idea that the british soldiers didn't have the equipment they needed and they demanded answers it nearly destroys aswa's government it does destroy the liberal government in that he has to form a coalition going forward but the coalition would only last if it could deliver enough shells to the front to make a difference so what asquith did was turn to one of the youngest and most aggressive of the liberal politicians in the cabinet david lloyd george lloyd george was the chancellor of the exchequer and had gained a reputation as an apt politician earning him the nickname the welsh wizard lloyd george ask with thought had the kind of aggressiveness and intelligence that could turn this situation around the asquith government passed the 1915 munitions of war act and created the ministry of munitions david lloyd george was appointed its first minister he was now in charge of all the munitions production in britain the coalition and the nation could only survive if the shell crisis could be fixed his task was monumental the stockpiles in the uk are getting absolutely diminished there was a desperate scramble to start creating more production more munitions and more factories that would create the weapons they needed to fight the war to do this lloyd george not only had to remake an industry but revolutionize an entire society all the while on the front lines the guns of august kept firing [Music] on the 9th of june 1915 david lloyd george took charge of the newly formed ministry of munitions his mission was to solve britain's shell crisis and keep the guns firing we have insufficient shells of the correct caliber many of them are shrapnel shells which are very good against men in the open but if the enemy are behind a trench or a dugout well to be honest you might as well spit at them as trench warfare took hold germany poured in resources to secure its early advances the german positions are so strong and so effective i mean they're in concrete bunkers dozens of feet underground so you're going to have artillery blasting them off the face of the earth [Music] shrapnel shells couldn't pry the enemy from their dug-in positions british forces now had to rely on high-caliber high-quality artillery shells to blast them out and very very importantly a lot of those shells simply don't function because they've been produced by factories at the outbreak of war we're producing kitchen sinks or toys they are not really prepared for the job lloyd george's task was made even more difficult by britain's lack of industrial mobilization the problem with asked with governments was they felt it was not really their role to intervene in the running of companies so they left it to the individual companies to improve their ability to produce shells as they saw fit the results of this lack of directions that by the spring of 1915 only 50 percent of the small caliber artillery shells that had been ordered had been delivered and of anything above really the 16 shells about a third was actually produced and available it was a catastrophe at the time britain's munitions industry only had three dedicated state-controlled war factories to supply its armed forces there is a gunpowder factory at waltham abbey there's a small arms factory at enfield lot but the overwhelming amount of work is done at woolitch arsenal and that has been britain's premier site for artillery and munitions and armaments since the 17th century these war factories were supplemented by a range of private ventures but as the war progressed demand quickly outstripped supply the government needed to ramp up to millions of shells rather than thousands of shells factories in the country just couldn't keep up with the amount of munitions that they were being asked to produce they didn't have enough staff they didn't have the facilities you've got to remember it was the first fully industrialized war if lloyd george in the ministry of munitions was to succeed he had to move quickly lloyd george ran his ministry with a mixture of cunning and head breaking the first thing he did was to call in all of the factory owners all of the industrial producers and start getting them to work figuring out how to improve munitions productions if they didn't want to cooperate he threatened them with serious consequences but he also schmoozed them and made them want to cooperate and through this combination of good cop bad cop he managed to get most of those factory owners on his side and on the side of the british war effort but the factory owners were the least of lloyd george's problems by 1915 germany's advance into france had been checked but at a terrible cost the original expeditionary force had been virtually wiped out suffering a monstrous 90 000 casualties what remained was divided into two new armies both in desperate need of fresh recruits from 1914 to at least 1916 when you get conscription the loss of male labor was massive a lot of the skilled mechanics and producers who they needed in the factories were actually already on the front lines fighting that war so the only way to really replace that was to bring women in to do these roles before the great war a woman's role was in the home jobs in society were mostly the preserve of men and any woman in full employment was considered to be neglecting her domestic responsibilities the employment of women in factories is an issue at the beginning of the war with trade unions then it's another thing that needs to be negotiated because as well as restricting people on bringing a less skilled person to do their job there's also restrictions on bringing in a woman to do their job trade unions had been dragging their feet about putting women into factories if women could do it then it wasn't a skilled job therefore the wages didn't need to be as high therefore men returning at the end of the war wouldn't need to be paid as much it would have devalued the whole system factory owners also believed women weren't ready to join the workforce in 1915 the government created the initiative of the women's war register to see who would be willing to work in industry and nursing and things like that a month later 79 000 women had signed up and said we will work in industry and this was something that lloyd george championed because he knew that they had to have these schemes to show that women were willing to work to kind of force the rest of the government to come in line and get these women into the factories it was a gamble but it paid off yes there was chaos uh yes it was disorganized it's very much like everything in this war it's off the cuff it's learning on the go and evolving on the move but to be fair to lloyd george yes he did create a more smooth running and upscaled manufacturing process in britain to get the munitions made new practices and techniques also boosted britain's war factory production so what you have in the first world war is the advent of the assembly line this allows a number of relatively unskilled people to carry out a process in a repetitive way producing a linear production line giving you results at the end this breakdown of skilled to semi-skilled labor was known as dilution dilution is necessary because before the war maybe it was okay you'd have one highly skilled guy that could do a whole process that would take an entire day to achieve one bit of output if you suddenly need 50 times that output are you going to find 50 of these guys no so what you do is you go and recruit a load of minions and you bring them in and you put them in a line and instead of the one guy doing everything to the end of the line he teaches each minion to do a little part of the process so that means that you can multiply your production capacity massively without finding huge amounts of people that are as skilled as that one man who used to do the job all the way through the key thing is you don't need a small tiny team of highly skilled people you need lots of semi-skilled labor trade unions were far from happy with the idea of women taking men's work for lesser pay loy george knew all too well what these grievances could spell boy george had to worry about the people who were going to work on those assembly lines and and most important from his perspective was he had to stop the kind of strikes and general worker unrest that it so marked the british economy before 1914. the defense of the realm act and other powers that parliament gave him actually gave him the ability to legally forbid workers from going on strike and generally to take control of the workforce in the way that he thought most effective to build the munitions that the british needed still to keep the unions on side an agreement had to be reached women could only be trained to a semi-skilled level and must work under supervision lloyd george now had his labor force but to get the factories he needed he adopted a two-pronged approach some of it relied on private industry on the factories that already existed that were owned by heads of industry and could produce more than they were but some of it also relied on increasing government production and in this area he started what was called the national factory scheme where the government actually started building its own factories to produce munitions of all sorts the national factories are a completely new innovation this is government basically directing industry in a way that that's never been seen before nothing like this has been attempted because what it's doing is basically making the needs of production subordinate to the needs of the state a lot of lloyd george's tactics were kind of harsh but one of the things you have to keep in mind is that every day new casualty reports were coming home from the western front every day lloyd george was being reminded of how many thousands of british soldiers were being wounded and killed and that drove him to make sure that they had the kind of equipment that they needed to fight the war a total of 107 factories were established throughout england one of the brand new purpose-built factories was at barnbow just outside of leeds it would go on to become one of the most productive shell factories in the whole of britain [Music] as the war in europe escalated britain's stockpiles of ammunition were drastically reduced lloyd george and his recently formed ministry of munitions had to keep the country in the fight and fix its production shortfall near leeds one of the new generation of war factories was constructed bamboo was a purpose-built factory and it was part of the network of shell factories that came about as a result of the the shell crisis the national filling factories were a particularly specialized kind of factory they were responsible for essentially everything to do with making the explosive shell actually explosive built on a 400 acre site the giant war factory had its own railway system complete with an 800 foot long platform that allowed swift access to and from the site the railway line came right into the heart of the battery and it also went all the way around the battery as well they would offload all the goods into the center of the site and they would be distributed to the different sections of the battery railways were critical for the national factories and barnbow had its own 13-mile line that connected it to the national rail network the national factories relied on a steady and immediate supply of raw materials if the iron and steel didn't come in the factories couldn't produce what they needed and the only way to get what they needed into those national factories was through the railway there's no suggestion in the great war of putting ammunition on lorries taking it to a railway station and loading it again you take it straight from the workshop put it straight on the train off it goes down to the coast so that it can be put on a boat and sail to france [Music] along with the shell filling works and cartridge stores bamboo also housed a tin smith for renovating cartridge cylinders a workshop that converted empty propellant boxes into packing cases a laundry a garage and it even had its own fire brigade bamboo wasn't just a factory on its own it's like a city within a city but the threat of war was never far away and the royal defense corps ran around the clock security with workers made to wear ids and carry permits [Music] 93 of the workforce were women and 130 000 women actually applied to work at bamboo they took on about twenty thousand nineteen twenty thousand fifty of them went down to woolitch arsenal to be trained and they came back and disseminated the training to to the other people within months barnbow was producing fifty thousand shells a week and each shell had one single purpose munitions factories in the great wall produce a range of projectiles and this is just one of them this is the standard british 4.5 inch howitzer shell it's called 4.5 inch because that's the diameter of the shell and what we've got here is the main body factory filled with explosives but to actually get it to go through the air to fire it you need to have the shell case pre-prepared with charges we've actually got a little percussion cap which is struck by a firing pin that will cause our cordite to burn explode in the weapon forcing the propellant to actually push this projectile up the barrel it will then fly through the air to whatever range you've already designed it to go but when it strikes the ground then the fuse at this end is crushed and the crushing action causes the detonation of the main body of the shell in detonating it then causes all the explosives inside our projectile to themselves detonate causing the casing to break into fragments hundreds if not thousands of red-hot jagged pieces of steel shells were assembled 24 hours a day in a three-shift system the demands of war meant no let up for barnbow workers working hours were extremely long on average eight-hour shifts 12-hour shifts on a sunday just doing the same repetitive work over and over day in day out there were no holidays because these women were crucial to the war effort every hour was dedicated to shell production you can't leave your machine without permission if you're late in the morning the machine is disabled and you get no money at all for that shift so you have to be on time do what we need to do and frankly you know if you need to go to the loo you've got to time it pretty damn carefully full employment was insured by high wages far above average women's rates the basic pay was 28 shillings a week but they could earn up to three pound bonus these working-class women were now able to act like upper-class women they were able to buy fur coats having money to spend on taxes having money to lend for once they were the ones supporting their families and they were the ones with this spending power that they would have never had before that spending power gave them a new freedom but such behavior was often frowned upon they enjoyed a lifestyle that they could simply never have thought of having these working-class munitionettes were definitely kind of acting out of their normal behavior there are anecdotally stories about how boisterous the girls were it was said that if a lone man got into a carriage full of bamboo girls he did so at his own peril and certainly there's a story of a man who was going to york and by the time he arrived at york he had been debacked this newfound autonomy was sometimes ridiculed in the press in newspapers there was a massive sense that munitions workers were acting above their station quite a lot of the time they discuss munitions workers in quite derogatory ways but good wages weren't the only reason these women took up roles in britain's war factories they also felt that they could help support their men folk who were fighting at the front line there was a great sense of patriotism these women they were not there solely for the money they wanted to win the war and they wanted to do everything that they could in order to do that along with high earnings a number of innovations were also incorporated into the factory's design you want these workers to spend night on every waking hour at this factory that to some extent they have to want to be there there were three canteens they had a medical department a dentist they provided leisure facilities the management were certainly very conscious that they had to look after the workforce soldiers were expendable unfortunately but these women were not so expendable because without the shells that they were producing we just would not have won the ball not far from the main shell factory a separate factory was also constructed its production was top secret one of the innovations that the national factories created was a new kind of shell filling they actually started using something called amitol which was a mixture of ammonium nitrate and tnt to fill the shells that they were producing there it was much more efficient it was much more stable than what they had done previously it's usually in an 80 20 percent ratio obviously at the bamboo factory they were kind of experimenting to see what would make it more efficient and effective the amatole section was entirely separate to the rest of the factory and it was also protected by barbed wire and guards because the two sets of employees were not allowed to mix they had ladies in red dresses outside the doors of the canteen who prevented anyone who wasn't an at all worker going in this was because of the cross-contamination from chemicals that they were working with these workers handled deadly toxins and for some the effects were immediately visible when you worked with amital when you worked with the explosives a fair amount of it migrated under your skin and turned you quite an impressively bright yellow color this earned them the nickname the canary girls the bright yellow skin is actually not really a joke it had serious health consequences and it gives you a form of jaundice it probably kills over a hundred women others are very very sick as a result of it one canary girl later said you expected to feel poorly our skin was perfectly yellow right down through the body legs and toenails even the ministry of munitions realized these health problems and they fairly quickly introduced sets of protective clothing for the factory workers to wear and that worked to reduce some of the health consequences the need to improve health led to one surprising addition at bambo its own farm housing 120 cows producing 300 gallons of milk per day it was a vital resource the girls were involved in running the farm producing produce for the canteen and the milk because they were encouraged to drink the milk to counter affect the effects of the tnt poisoning the farm also produced fresh vegetables and meat with its own on-site slaughterhouse and butcher the girls were fed extremely well certainly did far better than the average one in the street because they had a lot of things on hand the well-being of barnbow employees was important but in a factory full of explosives danger was never far the problem with mass producing explosives is if you run the assembly line 24 7 that means that at any one time you have enormous amount of extremely dangerous material in the factory you can only limit that danger as much as you can there is always going to be some risk involved the ministry and great britain were winning the arms race but this success did not come without sacrifice [Music] in the first few months of the war shell production was a mere 500 000 artillery rounds by 1916 that figure had risen to a staggering 16.4 million it was clear that war factories like barnbow had played a major role in turning around britain's fortunes after 1915 and going into 1960 britain had overcome to a large extent the problem of not producing enough shells this rush to remake and re-arm didn't just cost lives in battle but also in war factories at home there are some catastrophic accidents during the first world war probably the one that springs to mind for me is silvertown which is over in the docklands area it was a classic example of what goes wrong when you're trying to purify tnt in the middle of london there was an explosion which killed workers on site the explosion claimed 73 lives including many children and injured over 400 but it also had a catastrophic effect on the local community what happens at silvertown is the explosive had to be got into the shells and that job was done manually but because of problems with melting the explosive you have that risk that if you get it wrong if there is a spark then it would explode everybody's windows for a certain radius were blown out you could feel it all the way into essex so and and what it did the king went to see the site as soon as he got back from sandringham and he said it's like a little bit of the western front in east london the ministry of munitions tried to reduce these risks and barnbow was built with a number of special safety measures they built rather than one assembly line a range of huts widely separated from each other in each of these huts some of the shell production would happen because of the separation if one of the huts blew up and there's a lot of damage it wouldn't extend to all of the rest of the huts that didn't protect someone inside from getting blown up that just meant if that person got blown up the bits of them and the bits of the wooden hut they were working in would be contained so the factory could keep going with production even if there was an industrial accident practices like these were the forerunner to modern health and safety war changes the nature of industry in many ways it brings in a series of acts which to do with health and safety which means that actually it's safer to be in a factory at the end of the first war than at the beginning of the first world war purely because during the course of the war we can't afford to lose labor and people and machines to accidents sadly precautions could only do so much and the threat of tragedy haunted every working moment inherently producing munitions and dealing with explosives and shells and fuses and all types of paraphernalia involved with destroying things is going to be dangerous if anything goes wrong then it's going to be really a very very bad situation in the factory for bamboo it was only a matter of time before risk became reality sadly on the 5th of december 1916 there was an explosion at the factory in hump 42 what happened was an operator had six shells she'd put fuse into two of them and tightened them up she put the third one on and it exploded this set off a chain reaction and detonated five other shells the ceiling came down there were fumes there was smoke it must have been horrendous the entire room was devastated there was between 170 and 175 operators working in that room some people were absolutely blown apart others were very very seriously injured and we've heard stories of people running away screaming he was absolutely complete what was the devastation in the mayhem that followed one passing worker dared enter the ruined hut a mechanic was walking by called william parkin rather than run away from the incident he actually ran towards it and he entered the hut at least 11 times and he came out each time with an injured girl on his shoulder i think if william hadn't done what he did more people would have died he saved at least 11 lives that night sadly 35 women perished from the accident some of them were only able to be identified by the identity tags that they wore it was the first major loss of women civilian workers in the war and a heartbreaking loss for barnbow local historians recount one story of a young employee who like so many underage soldiers had lied about their age to sign up it is sykes was only 15 years of age at the time she shouldn't have been in the factory that night she worked with her sister her elder sister agnes agnes had the flu at the time and agnes should have been working but edis took her place and as a result she was caught in the explosion she didn't die on the night but she did die two or three weeks later there was a lady from europe she was killed my husband walked the 20 miles from york to identify her body and then they gave him a cup of tea and a bun and sent him on his way back to his family and she left 10 children losing 35 people it was tragic for a lot of the people that happened and some people did never return to the site after that night but in the grand scheme of things much more was happening on the western front the war was far from over so barnbow had to continue its production was just too vital they cleared out the factory and the room was immediately put back together and the management asked for volunteers to go back and work in there and they were inundated with volunteers within 24 hours hut 42 was fully staffed and back in operation once more people were straight back into work because they knew that they had a job to do when explosions happened it was kind of just collateral damage to the bigger picture of the war effort there's just this spirit of this is our war these girls can't put on a uniform and hold a rifle in the trenches that's what their brothers are doing their fathers are doing their boyfriends their husbands their sons this is what they can do and their commitment to this cause is therefore absolute due to the secret nature of barnbow's production the outside world received little notice of the incident the victims of the explosion were never ever really acknowledged he was all hushed up completely hushed up the only clues to the tragedy were a short article that appeared in the local paper which did not name barnbow and the death notices posted the following days with cause of death given as accident or suddenly they didn't want news to get through to the front to the boys of the front they didn't want to put people off from coming to work in the munitions factories workers at the barnbow plant had their own ideas about what happened in hut 42. my grandmother works in the factory at bambo and her job was to put the fuse onto the 4.5 inch howitzer shell that we have here delicate job because you've got to locate the casing with a pin built in the machine and then the rotating element of the machine puts another pin in this and then rotates the whole thing down bearing in mind at this point that we've now got a shell full of high explosive with a cap going onto it a fuse which if it goes off will set the whole lot off on the day of the accident in december 1916 my grandmother was meant to start work at 10 p.m she wasn't feeling well so she wasn't going to go to work she was going to stay at home so someone else was operating her machine which caused explosion my grandmother always said that the woman that replaced her was known to be clumsy she was often sold off for over tightening the fuse so the explosion was caused by the woman operating my grandma's machine who over-tightened one of these fuses however despite the personal opinion of andy's grandmother the official inquiry found a faulty fuse was to blame this accident was horrendous but it wasn't the only one it was happening in other parts of the country other lives are being lost but if you're in the middle of a war you have to carry on you couldn't not provide the shells to the boys at the front by the end of the war barnbow was one of britain's premier war factories its workers had filled nearly 25 million shells almost 15 percent of the total shells fired during the war by the british forces i think the people who worked there were all extremely proud of what they'd done and very conscious of how much part of the war effort that they had been after the armistice many who helped britain to victory soon found themselves unwanted after the war everything went back to normal women went back to their usual roles and they were kind of pushed out don't talk about what happened all these women who'd given their all were discarded there was nothing for them there was no provision made for them to go to work anywhere else understandably the men were coming back from the front and they had to go back to their jobs all they got was a little certificate the size of a postcard which said this person worked at bamboo during the war and that was it women workers saw their opportunities decline and by 1919 over 600 000 women were registered unemployed but the war years had left their mark on those who answered lloyd george's call [Music] i think it definitely changes women's opinions of themselves however i don't think that in many ways you can say that it fully liberated women because a lot of women didn't get the right to vote until 10 years after the end of the war but i definitely think that it kind of pushed for a step in the right direction to actually say women can do the same things as men and they'll do it just as well the legacy of the barnbow workers and all munitions workers was the remarkable change in britain's fortunes during world war one the ability of the british to create these war factories quickly to to remake their entire economy to rebuild their munition production from the ground up was perhaps the central reason why the british won the first world war they equipped not only their army but the american army with munitions with machine guns with artillery and with shells and that underpinned all of the fighting that defeated germany i think because the decisions taken in 1915 that model paves the way for what we see particularly after the second world war in a way that you don't see in other nations britain makes a bold decision that victory will depend upon the means of production and if that means central government taking control that's the way it is

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 3,619,101

Keywords: Air power, Archive footage, Battle strategies, British history, British war machines, Engineering feats, History buffs, Lancaster, Military logistics, Military vehicles, Netflix for history, Strategic bombing, Timeline - World History Documentaries, Vickers, War economy, War factories, War history enthusiasts, War resources, War strategy, Warplanes, Weaponry innovation

Id: 6ZnfmaGC3Lg

Length: 130min 22sec (7822 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2022