1,200,000 WAR WORKERS.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 110, 10 May 1916, Page 3

1,200,000 WAR WORKERS.

WHAT GERMANY IS DOING TO PRODUCE AMMUNITION. -

Senator Charles Humbert, in an article in Le Journal on the importance of keeping up the supply guns and munitions, says:—■

Krupp's employed 42,000 hands at Essen before the war, and this figure now reaches 115,000. But Essen is "only the principal factory. At the Germania works the*number of workers has risen from 6000 to 15,000, and last |ear from 14,000 to 30,000. Frederic Alfred's and Gruson's works, which employed, respectively, 6000 and 9000 men, now employ 30,000 and 27,000, while the Bochum and Gelsenkirchen works now employ 25,000 hands instead of 10,000 in time of peace. This is not all, for there also exist in Germany two other enterprises exclusively devoted to the making of artillery, namely, Thyssens', who employ 80,000 workmen, and the Ehrardt works, which employ 100,000

workpeople instead of 30,000' and 40,000 respectively in peace time. There is thus an army of over 420,000 men at work on the other side of the Rhine turning out war material, without counting the innumerable accessory workshops employing more than double that number in the manufac 1 ' ture of rifles, cartridges, shells, and explosives of every kind,, powder, and asphyxiating gas or a total number of over 1,200,000 men employed in the various war industries without including men who work in factories for the production of the raw material. Threatened as they are with shortage of effectives, the German people nevertheless give all those men to their military industries, and there can be no manner of doubt that they are more necessary in the workshops than in the trenches.