CHURCHILL AS MINISTER OF MUNITIONS: A STUDY OF DOMESTIC DECISION-MAKING IN WAR TIME (FIRST WORLD WAR, DEFENSE PROCUREMENT, LABOR RELATIONS, STRATEGY

Concentrating upon the war months July 1917 to October 1918, this thesis analyzes the activity of Churchill as Minister of Munitions. It treats primarily of four parts of Churchill's work: the strategy he advocated; the arrangement of government institutions he proposed; the priorities of materials and manpower he sought; and his regulation of capital and labor. The story is told from the Ministry of Munitions papers, the Churchill papers, and from a number of other private and public archives.;As Minister Churchill maintained his opposition to the sort of offensive pursued on the Western Front in 1915-17. He argued that assaults upon the trenches could not succeed until they were driven by tanks and chemical shells, and supported by airplanes. He was able to nurture these weapons in the factories.;Churchill had to contend with acute shortages of manpower and materials. He had views as to how the scarce resources should be allocated. He argued for a single, unified Ministry of Supply to avoid waste and hoarding. He advocated more power for the Ministry of National Service, and he himself became a member of two important committees that allocated materials and shipping to competing Departments. He was successful in shifting resources away from naval and defensive purposes toward military and offensive purposes.;Churchill was, as Minister, the head of the largest business enterprise in history. He controlled the wages and the employment of more than three million people. He controlled the output, the prices, and the raw materials of more than thirty thousand firms. Churchill managed to establish a fruitful cooperation with the great majority of both employers and employed. But his department was also plagued with a number of serious "wildcat" strikes that challenged the very foundation of the government. His attempt to cope with these problems provides fertile ground for studying his views of labor policy.