Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE BASIC REFLECTIONS
- PART TWO THE CHANGING REALITIES OF WARFARE
- PART THREE WAR AGAINST NONCOMBATANTS
- PART FOUR POLITICIANS, SOLDIERS, AND THE PROBLEM OF UNLIMITED WARFARE
- PART FIVE MOBILIZING ECONOMIES AND FINANCE FOR WAR
- 18 War Aims, State Intervention, and Business Leadership in Germany
- 19 Lloyd George and the Management of the British War Economy
- 20 Better Late than Never
- 21 How (Not) to Pay for the War
- PART SIX SOCIETIES MOBILIZED FOR WAR
- Index
19 - Lloyd George and the Management of the British War Economy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE BASIC REFLECTIONS
- PART TWO THE CHANGING REALITIES OF WARFARE
- PART THREE WAR AGAINST NONCOMBATANTS
- PART FOUR POLITICIANS, SOLDIERS, AND THE PROBLEM OF UNLIMITED WARFARE
- PART FIVE MOBILIZING ECONOMIES AND FINANCE FOR WAR
- 18 War Aims, State Intervention, and Business Leadership in Germany
- 19 Lloyd George and the Management of the British War Economy
- 20 Better Late than Never
- 21 How (Not) to Pay for the War
- PART SIX SOCIETIES MOBILIZED FOR WAR
- Index
Summary
David Lloyd George was fascinated by the great improvisers, that is, the managers who brought substance to the rhetoric of “national organization” that guided the British war effort. In his War Memoirs, Lloyd George praised their response to a war that was dominated by artillery. After the establishment of the Ministry of Munitions in May 1915 he approached many of the British economy's “big men,” the managers of large-scale enterprises, with the proposition that “I will make you head of department.” In the aftermath of the shell crisis in the spring of 1915, these men accepted the challenge and agreed to oversee munitions output. Lloyd George should have told them that the unusual titles they now assumed, as deputy directors or controllers-general, placed them in the vanguard of his own departures from customary administrative practices in Whitehall. Thereafter, they were required to recruit personnel for their own departments, write their own job specifications, coordinate their activities with other ad hoc initiatives, maintain personal salary arrangements with their parent firms, and create instantaneous schemes to rapidly improve output.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Great War, Total WarCombat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, pp. 369 - 388Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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