battlefield salvage?

[Khaki]

I have read that during the war some generals insisted upon soldiers coming out of the line bringing with them 'salvage' ie; abandoned equipment for repair and reissue. I don't know how successful this was. I also understand that postwar cleanup for human remains and presumably equipment was made using POW's. Does anyone know if there are any books that deal specifically with battle field cleanups post war?

cheers!

khaki

[Michael Johnson]

I have a group to an Indian Army Reserve of Officers man who won his MiD with a Salvage Unit in Mespot.

[TonyE]

Salvage was carried out whenever possible after every large battle. There were specifically tasked salvage battalions.

I have the list of equipment salvaged by the Canadians after Messines as an example. Rifles, the subject I do know about., were collected and cleaned locally before being returned to the pool in France, but if damaged were returned to Enfield for repair. The decision was taken quite early in the war that RSAF Enfield would be the centre for rifle repair and by 1916/17 were repairing 20-30,000 rifles per month.

I do not know of any book though that deals specifically with this subject.

Regards

TonyE

[John(txic)]

There is a certain amount of coverage in "No labour, no battle" by Starling & Lee.

[Khaki]

thanks to all for the help, 20-30,000 rifles for repair per month is a huge amount for recovery and repair, the enfield factory must have been fantastic, when one considers all the other equipment including kit, the operation must have been a mammoth task.

khaki

[George Armstrong Custer]

As the above poster demonstrates, the BEF did indeed have a policy of salvage and recycle, including from the battlefield. They did not do this, of course, to establish their 'green' credentials, to 'save the planet' or to reduce their 'carbon footprint', but for the practical purpose of combating wartime shortages in raw materials and to aid the wartime economy. The Salvage Corps was under the command of Brigadier General E. Gibb, who as Controller of Salvage was based at GHQ and answerable to Haig. The purpose of the Salvage Corps and details of how they went about their business is set out in Frank Fox's GHQ (Montreuil-sur-Mer), published in 1920. Further, a wartime publication of the Salvage Corps, which Fox quotes, stated that:

"The world shortage of almost every kind of raw material used for war supplies makes Salvage an important Administrative Service. Without a well-organised and thorough Salvage system, the full maintenance of our Force in the Field would be made difficult. The co-ordination of all Salvage work is in the hands of the Controller of Salvage at GHQ. His duties include the inspection of executive Salvage work, the arrangements for the disposal of Salvage material, the investigation of methods for recovering bye-products, and keeping of statistical records showing the amount of material salved and disposed of and the resultant gain to the State."

This publication goes on to emphasise, however, that the existence of the Controller of Salvage and his organisation does not absolve other branches of the BEF from the requirement for "every supply department to recover for repair and re-issue its own articles and its own empties. [....] To this end it is necessary to arrange, in the first place, for the collection of unserviceable or derelict material, and, in the second, for its disposal so that it may be brought again into use with the least delay and to the best advantage."

Fox's book gives examples of how particular articles were salved and recycled:

Clothing: Cleaned and repaired locally. If beyond repair, sent to the United Kingdom as rags.

Sacking: Sent to the United Kingdom.

Entrenching tools: Heads cleaned and sharpened. If irreparable, disposed of as scrap.

Steel helmets: Cleaned and relined. If irreparable, indiarubber pads in lining removed and utilised for lining serviceable helmets. Chin strap sold as old leather, and helmet disposed of as scrap steel.

Rubber (gum boots, tyres, etc): Sent to Paris for classification and repair. If irreparable, sent to the United Kingdom.

Mess tins, camp kettles, field kitchen boilers: Cleaned in caustic soda, reblocked, resoldered if necessary, and retinned. If irreparable, disposed of as scrap steel.

Water-bottles: Old felt removed - bottles cleaned, recovered with new felt and recorked. Old felt sent to the United Kingdom. Water bottles not fit for re-issue as such are used for packing small quantities of oil or paint for the Front.

Boots: Classified, repaired and passed through fish-oil baths. The uppers of irreparable boots as far as possible made into shoe laces or heel lifts and used for filling.

And so the list goes on. How cost effective was the operation? Well, Fox quotes some figures from one Salvage Return as an example:

Swill for piggeries, value 16,000 francs; solder from old tins, value 91,000 francs; cotton waste, 14,000 francs; tin-plate (won by unrolling old biscuit tins, etc), 61,000 francs; old lead, 10,000 francs; various bye-products, 7,000,000 francs.

Fox concludes that by the end of the war, and despite often taking the mickey out of the salvage effort, "every soldier had brought home to him most urgently the wisdom of saving and the real value of what seemed to be waste bye-products. Many of them must have learned the lesson and carried it home with them to the advantage of the general community."

What the existence of General Gibb's department at GHQ also underlines is the vast infrastructure which grew up to support those elements of the BEF actually in the front lines. The scale of this infrastructure was stupendous, and in many ways represented the creation of a small state on French territory. One only has to look through the pages of thanks at the end of Haig's Final Despatch of 21 March 1919, to start to be taken aback at the sheer extent of the infrastructure which the C-in-C oversaw in France in addition to directing combat operations. Amongst those thanked by Haig are, of course, Gibb 'my Controller of Salvage', along with dozens of other specialists such as 'my Director of Inland Water Transport', 'my Director of Forestry', 'my Director of Railway Traffic', 'the Officer Commanding the Railway Operating Division', 'my Director of Engineering Stores', 'my Director of Docks', 'my Director of Works', 'my Director of Light Railways', 'my Director of Roads', 'my Director of Graves Registration and Enquiries', 'my Director of Agricultural Production', 'my Director of Army Printing and Stationary Services', 'my Controller of Labour'. And so the list goes on and on. The buck for the efficient performance of operations under all of these functionaries stopped on the C-in-C's desk. Grasping that fact starts to put the scale of what the job really entailed, and the management skills required, into some perspective.

George

[truthergw]

One wonders where he found the time for callous butchery.

[George Armstrong Custer]

Indeed.

[centurion]

Rubber was a strategic resource (and one of the main commodities that the Germans tried to slip through the blockade). Britain did have access to natural rubber both from within the Empire and from Brazil but there were many demands on shipping (and on foreign exchange) so saving and recycling rubber was still very important

[SiegeGunner]

"Listening breaks were instituted, during which all work stopped, even that of the sandbag carriers in their stockinged feet — they had no gumboots like the British; rubber was needed more urgently for the U-boats."

From 'The Miners in Flanders', memoirs of Oberstleutnant Otto Füsslein, commander of the German mining companies in Flanders.

[centurion]

"Listening breaks were instituted, during which all work stopped, even that of the sandbag carriers in their stockinged feet — they had no gumboots like the British; rubber was needed more urgently for the U-boats."

Yes and no. It wasn't the rubber that the U boats needed but Ebonite a very hard black substance (black keys on pianos were once made of it, as were cutlery handles, music rulers etc - a competitor of Bakelite) which was used for insulators in the U boat batteries and electric motors and which at one time was made from natural rubber. Later in the war the Germans succeeded in making a form of synthetic rubber (War Rubber) which could be used in tyres and from which Ebonite could be made (at about ten times the cost of using natural rubber). War rubber could be made using oil (which was also in short supply) or coal (using an horrendously inefficient process) but as it could not be vulcanised was useless for wellies.

[truthergw]

So basically, rubber was needed for U-boats after further processing? ( I happen to be an ex-employee of Ebonite ).

[SiegeGunner]

Although there were no gumboots for the sandbag carriers, Füsslein's miners apparently did have some rubber protective gear, as evidenced by this anecdote (in which Füsslein himself is the eponymous commanding officer):

"When the British began to drive into the firm clay at St Eloi and their tunnels progressively filled with water, they pulled on full-length rubber suits and installed powerful electric pumps. When the commander of our miners also demanded effective pumps, they sent an ever-so-clever gentleman from Berlin: “Are you sure you need such powerful pumps!?”. So our commanding officer took him first of all into a nice dry concrete-lined shaft, of the kind we had been sinking through the quicksand since 1916. “Beautifully dry” he enthused, apparently oblivious of the fact that it had started life as a muddy hole driven down through a morass. Then he was taken to a fifty-metre-deep timber-lined shaft. The fine gentleman in his fancy parade-ground uniform declined the offer of a waterproof suit, remarking that the shaft was “as dry as a bone”, and began to descend the wooden fixed-ladders ahead of our commander. Soon it began to rain, at first gently, then more heavily, until presently the gentleman announced that he did not want to go on. But our commander pressed him, saying that he had to get to the bottom in time for a pre-arranged listening session. And so he had no alternative but to continue climbing down, through a downpour which eventually became a torrent. Then he climbed all the way back up again, cursing and swearing, leaving our commander to crawl away down the gallery with a broad grin on his face. Shortly afterwards we got our pumps, and that was the last we ever saw of ‘experts’ from home."

[Dragon]

As the above poster demonstrates, ... Grasping that fact starts to put the scale of what the job really entailed, and the management skills required, into some perspective.

What a thoroughly interesting, cogent reply.

Gwyn

[centurion]

So basically, rubber was needed for U-boats after further processing? ( I happen to be an ex-employee of Ebonite ).

Depends on what you define as rubber and the date. Initially natural rubber did have to be processed to produce Ebonite but later "war rubber" was used, not everyone accepts that this was real rubber

(I happen to be an ex employee of Dunlop and put the control systems into Dunlop Rubber Goods that controled the machines that produced Ebonite)

[mebu]

Don't know about rubber, but brass from shells was certainly salvaged and recycled.....there are pictures of local ladies at Richborough Port off-loading used shell cases from barges.

Peter

[George Armstrong Custer]

A couple of pics which illustrate one aspect of the salvage and recycle process in action. Original caption describes a corner of a large workshop in France which renovated 30,000 pairs of boots a week. The photographs come from a large collection of press and official photos kept by Field Marshal Haig after the war. They were placed in the National Library of Scotland by his son, along with his Diaries and other papers.

[Photos reproduced with permission of the late 2nd Earl Haig]

[healdav]

There is a lovely story in the memoirs of one of the American ambulance drivers.

One day he was painting something on his ambulance and as all the bristles fell out he threw the handle away. Then he went to the store to get a new brush. They refused to give him one as he didn't have the handle to give back.

He had to go back to where he had thrown the handle, and was wandering around wondering where it had gone when a poilu jumped out a little hut and produced it saying, "I thought you would be back, so I kept it for you".

This guy thought it amazing that things were being recycled.

[truthergw]

A couple of pics which illustrate one aspect of the salvage and recycle process in action. Original caption describes a corner of a large workshop in France which renovated 30,000 pairs of boots a week. The photographs come from a large collection of press and official photos kept by Field Marshal Haig after the war. They were placed in the National Library of Scotland by his son, along with his Diaries and other papers.

[Photos reproduced with permission of the late 2nd Earl Haig]

With the amount of marching these lads did, I do not fancy doing it in ' re-conditioned' boots. Bad enough breaking in a new pair without retraining someone else's.