Peter Beale - Fallen Sentinel - Australian Tanks in World War II

• a Headquarters Armoured Corps Training Centre be established, together with the nucleus of two Armoured Corps Training Regiments and an Army AFV school

• a suitable area be acquired for AFV manoeuvre and for gunnery training. 66

It is not clear whether the ‘technical reasons’ relate to the formation of the division or the production of tanks, but it clearly indicates a delay of almost five months before meaningful action was taken to form the division.

On 14 December Percy Spender, now the Minister for the Army and, presumably, acting on the Military Board’s recommendations arising from General Northcott’s proposal of 27 November, submitted Supplement 2 to Agendum 150/1940 to the War Cabinet. 67The title of the Supplement was the same as the DCGS’s proposal, but there were some additions to the content. The principal additions related to the production of tanks:

The matter of tank production has been the subject of several discussions with the War Office regarding the type of tank to be produced in Australia; and the General Staff specification for a cruiser tank has now been circulated. The manufacture of AFVs by the Ministry of Munitions has been the subject of correspondence and frequent conferences with the Director of Ordnance Production and the Director-General of Munitions.

Regarding the production of cruiser tanks in Australia, the Ministry of Munitions has advised that an organisation can be set up in Australia to carry out the design and production of prototype tanks. The production of carriers is proceeding, and to date 139 have been accepted from the contractors.

Colonel Watson has been in the USA investigating tank production, and is now on his way to Australia. Arrangements are also being made with the War Office for a senior officer of the Royal Armoured Corps to be made available for instructional duties in Australia.

On 28 December, Major R.A. Perkins, Australian Staff Corps, was appointed Acting Commandant of the AFV School, which had the initial function of training instructors who would then become the staff of the School. 68

At the end of 1940 Australia had been at war for fifteen months. There had been some stirrings to create a tank force in the early months of the war, but it was not until the second wake-up call, the German conquest of France, that the War Cabinet began to take action.

The Minister for the Army, Geoffrey Street, was the protagonist in this action and, on his recommendation, Agendum 150/1940 was presented to Cabinet. The original agendum was conditionally approved by Cabinet Minute 375 on 2 July 1940 and Supplement 1 on 10 July by Minute 407.

The impetus behind this thrust was lost when Street was tragically killed on 13 August and it was not regained until November. In that month Cabinet requested action on the armoured division which had been proposed in Agendum 150 in June. This request was reinforced by General Blamey’s view that the Australian Army needed two armoured divisions to complement its four infantry divisions, thus creating a balanced national force. A formal agendum (Supplement 2 to Agendum 150) was submitted to Cabinet on 14 December.

Steps were taken in December to create a training school for tank soldiers of all ranks and, by then, the feasibility of producing a cruiser tank in Australia had been confirmed. Colonel Watson, with his tank design expertise, had arrived by the end of the year.

Thus, when 1940 came to an end, the three strands of action, namely formation of the armoured division, production of cruiser tanks, and training of tank crews, had all reached the start line. It had been a leisurely process, but preliminary plans were now in place. There was still a long way to go, and the time-frames for most of the plans were extremely optimistic.

The creation of Australian armoured formations placed a significant demand on national manpower in two ways. First, troops were required to man the armoured units. Added to this was the need for ancillary and supporting troops, training schools and establishments for the maintenance and repair of equipment.

The second demand for manpower arose from the manufacture of tanks. War Cabinet Agendum 150/1940 recommended that 859 cruiser tanks be produced in Australian factories to an Australian design. 69The manpower required for such a project would include a large number of skilled tradesmen to operate machine tools of some complexity. This demand was not only for quantity, but also for quality.

At the beginning of the war, manpower was not regarded as a problem, and it had not become a problem when Minute 375 was recorded on 2 July 1940. It was not yet a problem at the end of 1940, just before the decision was formally taken to create an armoured division.

But, as time went on, the manpower requirement gradually began to overtake the level of manpower available. In 1942 and 1943 the demand was such that the Government had to cut some of its programs. One of the major losers in this reduction was armour. It is thus important to understand how the procedures for manpower allocation developed and the progressive nature of the situations with which they attempted to deal.

This postscript reviews the manpower problem until the end of 1940. Subsequent chapters will follow the changing manpower situation and examine how it affected the development and use of Australia’s tank forces. This situation would eventually have dire consequences for the tank forces.

The Commonwealth War Book was the planning bible for pre-war preparations for a possible conflict. While such a bible was fine in theory, it was evidently not very practical. Butlin writes that ‘pre-war plans were imaginative literature; wartime conditions were hard fact.’ 70

Fortunately, there appeared to be little need for manpower planning in the early months of the war. A National Register had been established to measure numbers by age-groups, and a List of Reserved Occupations was used to allocate manpower between conflicting claimants.

In the first two years of the war, manpower problems were not acute because the scale of war effort relative to the population was small. 71This meant that most of the required transfers into wartime occupations (services or munitions production) could be achieved by voluntary action. There were large reserves of unemployed and there was a high level of patriotic motivation.

Manpower reallocation to meet the war effort could thus be achieved voluntarily within ordinary market processes. This was very much the mood of the general population. Labour supporters in particular were strongly opposed to any form of compulsion and the political balance was such that their views had to be taken seriously by the Menzies Government.

For the first few months of the war this attitude towards volunteering was also supported by the belief that Australia’s contribution to the fight against Hitler would parallel that of the 1914–1918 war. In that war the contribution was a voluntary expeditionary force (the AIF), some modest munitions production, and a substantial supply of food and raw materials.

In this first phase of the control of manpower in World War II, the control tools were the National Register and the List of Reserved Occupations. It was not long before a second phase began, around mid-1940. While there was still a high level of unemployment, at the same time, a growing shortage of skilled men for the specialised war industries was beginning to bite. As Butlin adds:

But behind these two factors there were taking shape conditions for an overall scarcity of labour which would force a drastic re-assessment of the relative claims of the Services, war industries, and the scarcely-touched range of civilian employment outside munitions in the narrow sense. At any time this scarcity might have become immediate and acute. In the event this third phase was delayed until mid-1941. 72