On that single day,, 11,000 British casualties were sustained and it took three days to process the wounded through the Field Ambulances. No ground was won and no tactical advantage gained.

He was correct.īefore the ill-fated offensive at Aubers Ridge on, Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief in France, had assured the War Office that he had sufficient ammunition for the assault and he had written a letter to Kitchener on 2 May stating ‘the ammunition will be all right.’ But Aubers was an unmitigated disaster for the British army. His judgement was that his commanders in the field cried wolf too often and used the excuse of shell shortage to cover their own inadequacies. The second is that Kitchener refused to be influenced by agencies outside the War Office because there was no crisis. In truth, that was Lloyd George’s view, jaundiced by his antipathy towards the Secretary of State for War and bolstered by his selective use of information from the ghost-written History of the Ministry of Munitions. The first is that he obstructed the verve and purpose shown by Lloyd George as Chancellor, to ramp up the purchase of much needed munitions. There are two schools of thought governing Kitchener’s attitude to increasing the supply of munitions. Never in the history of warfare had so many resources been wasted on futile exchanges of explosives to such little effect, nor so much profit made by those who provided the ammunition. Whatever the preparations for war in Europe, no-one had anticipated its rapid descent into a stalemate of entrenchment accompanied by wasteful daily artillery barrages whose only purpose appeared to be stultifying proof that the enemy was still there. By November, the German gunners around Ypres were instructed to cut their daily barrage and their commander, General Falkenhayn reckoned that there were only enough shells for four more days of German bombardment in Flanders. The French army became acutely aware of the problem caused by lack of munitions as early as 24 September 1914. According to official histories of the First World War there was a great shell crisis in Britain in 1915.

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