British shadow factories

It was impossible for these facilities to be secret, though they were camouflaged after hostilities began. They were war materiel production facilities built in "the shadow" of motor industry plants to facilitate technology transfer to aircraft construction and run, for a substantial management fee, in parallel under direct control of the motor industry business along with distributed facilities. General Erhard Milch, chief administrator of the Luftwaffe, was in Britain in the autumn of 1937 inspecting new shadow factories in Birmingham and Coventry, RAF aeroplanes and airfields. Background Up until the middle of 1938, the Air Ministry had been headed by Lord Swinton. He had been forced by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to resign his position due to a lack of progress in re-arming the Royal Air Force, the result of obstruction by William Morris, Lord Nuffield. Swinton's civil servants approached their new boss, Sir Kingsley Wood, and showed him a series of informal questions that they had asked since 1935 on the subject, such as those posed to Morris Motors with regard to aircraft engine production capability at its Cowley plant in Oxford. As it turned out, the specialised high-output engines required by the RAF were made by Armstrong Siddeley, Bristol Aeroplane, Napier & Son and Rolls-Royce, all of which employed a high number of sub-contractors. Despite their new factories, protestations by Wolseley Aero Engines (Nuffield) and Alvis were ignored. Their products were not required. Engines were specified primarily by the designers of aircraft though the Air Ministry did sometimes specify the engine to be used. Nuffield did participate after Wood's appointment, providing the Castle Bromwich Factory and promising a thousand Spitfires by June 1940 but, after two years, management was so poor that when June 1940 arrived not one Spitfire had been produced there. Castle Bromwich was withdrawn from Nuffield by Lord Beaverbrook. the Minister of Aircraft Production, and placed under the wing of Vickers-Supermarine. Implementation The plan had two parts: • Development of nine new factories. The government would build and equip the factories. Motor car companies would be asked to gain experience in the making of engine parts so, if war broke out, the new factories could immediately go into full production. • Extensions to existing factory complexes to allow either easier switching to aircraft industry capability, or production capacity expansion. bombers was Standard Motor Co, Canley (Coventry) and de Havilland's own sites in Hertfordshire. Under the plan, there was government funding for the building of these new production facilities, in the form of grants and loans. Key to the plan were the products and plans of Rolls-Royce, whose Merlin engine powered many of the key aircraft being developed by the Air Ministry, as well as Bristol Hercules radial engine. Bristol Aeroplane would not allow shadow factories to build complete engines, only components. The exception was Austin. The first motor manufacturers chosen for engine shadows were: Austin, Daimler, Humber (Rootes Securities), Singer, Standard, Rover and Wolseley. In the event Lord Nuffield took Wolseley out of the arrangement and Singer proved to be in serious financial difficulty. The buildings were sheds up to long lit either by glazed roofs or "north-lit". Office accommodation was brick, and wherever possible faced a main road. These buildings were extremely adaptable and would remain part of the British industrial landscape for more than 50 years. One of the largest was Austin's Cofton Hackett, beside their Longbridge plant, started in August 1936. long and wide, the structure covered . Later a airframe factory was added, then a flight shed by was attached to the airframe factory. light bombers were built at Rootes Blythe Bridge and Speke. The new factory buildings were models of efficient factory layout. They had wide, clear gangways and good lighting, and they were free of shafting and belt drives. The five shadow factories in Coventry were all in production by the end of October 1937 and they were all making parts of the Bristol Mercury engine. By January 1938 two of those shadow factories were producing complete airframes. In July 1938 the first bomber completely built in a shadow factory (Austin's) was flown in front of Sir Kingsley Wood, Secretary of State for Air. It was said eight shadow factories constructing aircraft components were in production in or near Coventry in February 1940. As the scheme progressed, and after the death of Austin in 1941, the Directorate of Air Ministry Factories, under the auspices of the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP), gradually took charge of the construction of the buildings required for aircraft production. In early 1943 the functions of the directorate of Air Ministry Factories were transferred to the Ministry of Works. ;Scotland There were three waves of construction of shadow factories and only the third and smallest reached Scotland in the shape of the factory at Hillington producing Rolls-Royce's Merlin engines. Ferranti's factory in Crewe Toll, Edinburgh will have been secret. ;Empire Similar plans were introduced in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. ==List of shadow factories ==

Cofton Hackett and Castle Bromwich ==Strategic dispersal==

The White Paper on Defence published in February 1937 revealed that steps had been taken to reduce the risk of air attack delivering a knockout blow on sources of essential supplies, even at the cost of some duplication, by building new satellite plants which would also draw labour from congested as well as distressed areas. There were still areas of severe unemployment. London Aircraft Production Group bombers 5 November 1944 In parallel with the Shadow Factory scheme, the London Aircraft Production Group (LAPG) was formed in 1940 by combining management of factories and workshops of Chrysler at Kew, Duple, Express Motor & Bodyworks, Park Royal Coachworks and London Transport. The major activity of the group was the production of Handley Page Halifax bombers for the Royal Air Force, ammunition, gun parts, armoured vehicles and spare parts for vehicles. The group was led by London Transport from its works at Chiswick and Aldenham and the new De Havilland factory at Leavesden, Hertfordshire, which had a large purpose-built factory and airfield (construction of both was authorised on 10 January 1940) for production, assembly and flight testing of completed Halifax bombers. This includes LAPG members with factories at Preston, Speke and Stockport. . :English Electric in Preston :London Passenger Transport Board — made the centre section and installed fittings and equipment for the front part of the fuselage :Rootes Securities in Speke :Chrysler Motors — rear part of the fuselage :Express Motor and Body Works — intermediate wings and tail-plane :Duple Bodies and Motors — the shell and components for the front part of the fuselage :Park Royal Coachworks — outer wings :Fairey Aviation Company in Stockport At peak the group involved 41 factories and dispersal units, 660 subcontractors and more than 51,000 employees, Ultimately output rose to 200 Halifaxes a month and the group provided something like 40 per cent of the nation's heavy bomber output. Halifax bombers dropped more than 200,000 tons of bombs. Soon after the total destruction of the Alvis factory by enemy action in 1940 Alvis were operating eight dispersal factories and thus managed to resume deliveries of their most important products. They were allocated nine further dispersal factories following further enemy attacks and after Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 Alvis organised, equipped and managed a new shadow factory to make variable pitch propeller hubs. • Rover managed and controlled six shadow factories on behalf of the Government and ran eighteen different dispersal factories of their own. • When the Birmingham Small Arms plant at Small Heath, the sole producer of service rifle barrels and main aircraft machine guns, was bombed by the Luftwaffe in August–November 1940, it caused delays in productions, which reportedly worried PM Churchill the most among all the industrial damage during the Blitz. The Government Ministry of Supply and BSA immediately began a process of production dispersal throughout Britain, through the shadow factory scheme. Later in the war BSA controlled 67 factories from its Small Heath office, employing 28,000 people operating 25,000 machine tools, and produced more than half the small arms supplied to Britain's forces during the war.