MUNITIONS OF WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 December 1918, Page 6

MUNITIONS OF WAR.

IMPRESSIONS OF BRITAIN AT WAR, TANKS, GUNS, SHELLS AND AEROPLANES. I Impressions of the New Zealand Press Delegates during their recent tour of the war zone.) The New Zealand Delegates were afforded abundant opportunities of seeing Britain's great activities in the making of war munitions. Wo visited factory after factory in England, Ireland, and Scotland, and in these huge hives of industry wo saw thousands upon thousands of men and women, boys a,nd girls, engaged in the various and numerous phases of the industrial side <if the war. In .practically every part of the Kingdom the brains and ingenuity of the captains of industry were Sillied with the labor and enthusiasm of the workers in the task of producing n maximum quantity of war material in a minimum space of time. The result was that the Allies were being fully supplied, and the days when their operations in the field of battle could be brought to a standstill, or worse, through shortago of munitions were days of the unhappy past. The biggest of the factories were naiurally those engaged in producing ammunition. We visited shell factories covering many acres of ground and employing thousands of There was one factory at whciv thirty ikouuand "hands" were at v:ork day and night, not excepting Sundays. It is impossible to go into technical detail or to give the arithmetic concerning these factories were scattered all over England, Scotland, and Ireland, and that •their individual daily outputs of shell ran into figures that baffle the brains of man to realise.

The really wonderful thing is how Uieso works had been diverted from tieir peace-time operations into the new channels of industry. Plants of unormous size and capacity had been scrapped or Tecast or converted, as the liaso may be. Companies whose fields of enterprise were world-wide had risked their whole future, sacrificed present business interests, and jeopardised prospective interests, so that the full measure of their producing capacity might toe placed at the disposal of the State, uo that every ounce of weight which they were able to contribute might be thrown into the scale against the Hun. We met proprietors and directors of famous institutions who had, for the time being, abandoned their pre-war businesses entirely, converting their works and machines for the sole production of war materials. The largest linen-making factory in the world was at the time of our visit producing nothing but cloth required in the construction of aeroplanes. A company which before the war was engaged in making boilers and engines for steamships—a company whose name will be found stamped upon some part of almost every steamer's engineiooni in the world—was turning out thousands of big shells every day, and many aeroplanes every week. One of the big shipbuilding firms was producing, complete in every detail, bombing aeroplanes of the largest type known, and producing ,ncm at the rate of fourteen a week, or two a day—in addition to building •standard" ships and war vessels of all descriptions. At these works 19,000 persons were employed, and at neighbouring yards on the same river the number of workers was not much smaller. INSPIRING AND MIRACULOUS EFFORT. It was an inspiring and a wonderful sight, this pouring out of shells and guns and flying machines; this amazing change from peace to war activities. Pessimists used to think Britain decadent. Possibly there were grounds for the impression that the Old Country was lagging behind in the industrial race—that there was a tendency towards, not laziness, but a too-conserva-tive and self-satisfied frame of • mind. However that may be the war has unquestionably awakened the nation, galvanised into life and being the genius that was merely dormant. From the standpoint of industrial capacity, indeed, it looks as though the Hun has unwittingly but very effectively rejuvenated Great Britain. To the writer it seemed not much short of a miracle to see in a country hitherto devoted to the arts of peace such an overwhelming application of skill and labor to the one set purpose of defeating the enemy—to see practically the whole working nation engaged in making guns, or shells to feed the guns, or in filling the air with aeroplanes. And it must never be forgotten that all the time the bulk of Britain's manhood was at the war. The factory employees contained only a very small percentage of men fit for active service. The great bulk of the factory workers were women and girls and boys, and it was marvellous beyond description to see them at. work. One "room" of a single factory covered, say, ten acres. Think of it! Then acres of row after row of machines, tended for the moat part by women, pouring out, unceasingly, day and night, shells by the. score of thousands. It would probably be dimV cult to over-estimate how great a tribution these work. 1 ): and, : workers have made to. the success, of the 'Allied, armies'in ..the splendid vie-, tory which now has been,won. , We .visited great, aerodromes,.where machines were, received. irpm , the ;fac-. Tories, tested, armed, and dispatched to the war front. .... F;r.om.,.pne of these establishments—ono!..,, of; .several— we' learned that- from 250 to 300 machines were-'being sent to .France every montb!. And we saw the whole process of the construction of tanks, those weird and wonderful vehicles of war : which ensured the of many a great advance by. the Allied forces.:. ■ .*■■! #;§:;; BRITAIN' IN GRIM EARNEST. The abiding impression conveyed to the mind through visiting the war factories was a sense of the magnitude and the grim earnestness of it all. The demands of the war had, indeed, revolutionised the industrial mind and life of Great Britain, with the result that the Armv in the field was backed un by the combined efforts of several millions of people.engaged in supplying munitions. The output was so enormous that one was disposed to wonder if it were not being overdone—until one learned from a high military authority in France that in recent fighting the British forces were expending big-gun ammunition at the rate of 12.000 tons a day. No wonder the enemy was driven back—and his defeat was'caused no less by the British munition workers than by the Army itself. ' 'h:*V!!-