You know how this works
I mentioned in part three that the U.S. eventually outpaced Great Britain in steel production. The extent to which they outproduced Britain, and the rest of the world, around the WWI period is actually shocking.
As the table shows, steel production for other great powers followed the same trend as the United States. Historians consider steel and iron output as an indicator of military prowess,1 and at the turn of the century, with the heat turning up across Europe, it seems all major powers wanted stronger militaries.
Navies need ships, armies need jeeps, guns, helmets, and a myriad of other equipment. WWI created unprecedented demand for that equipment. It was the first war fought by modern, industrialized nation-states, with the biggest armies in history. Increased steel production was a necessity for any nation to compete.
Neutrality
On July 28th, 1914, Serbia declared war on Austria-Hungary, setting off a series of events that would draw the world's greatest nations into a 4-year blood bath.
The Germans referred to the First World War as “Materialschlachte”, which means battle of materials. This dead-on description highlights what few experts knew before 1914; That WWI would be won in the factories. Because of advancements in trench warfare, WWI came to a stalemate very early in the war.
By the end of 1914, the western front consisted of two facing trenches filled with soldiers just waiting for whatever would happen next. Newly invented machine guns beat back failed advance after failed advance, leading to the highest casualty rates in history. It became a battle of attrition. And in a fight like that, you need a lot of materials.
Before 1917, the United States prohibited steel companies from selling their products to either side of the conflict. A few manufacturers managed to find a way around that such as Charles Schwab of Bethlehem Steel. In 1914, Schwab received a secret message from the British war office asking him to meet with the Secretary of State for War. Schwab immediately hopped on a boat to Europe.
The British war office wanted to line up a massive arms deal with Bethlehem steel with one catch; They couldn't sell to any other country. They wanted $40 million dollars of weapons all to themselves. That's the modern equivalent of a $1.2 billion arms deal.
When the United States entered WWI, lawmakers disbanded neutrality regulations and steel production soared. In 1914, the U.S. produced 23.8 million tons of steel and by the time of the war's end, that number had doubled.
Tanks
Steel production fed the arms manufacturers. Those manufacturers produced new technologies like the early tank. Similar to our modern idea of tanks, men on the WWI front described them as "land ironclads" with "hides of steel and eyes of guns."
Tanks were one proposed solution to the grueling stalemate on the frontline. With the help of these crude armored vehicles, limited forces could advance towards the enemy's trenches without being mowed down by gunfire. They were effective, but only to a certain point. They were slow and broke down often. They could only carry or provide cover for a few people at a time and were so heavy and immobile they could only be used in certain environments.
All sides of WWI combined produced just under 7,000 tanks. Some had steel armor as thick as 30 millimeters and weighed as much as 33 tons. They took a ton of steel to build, but in the grand scheme of things, didn't make a dent in the global steel supply.
Shells
Demand for ammunition, mostly artillery shells, also drove steel production.
Shells were the new ammunition on the scene. Before the stalemates on the front, no one quite knew how essential a role they would play. They were useful in previous conflicts, but artillery technology had recently undergone many improvements that were not yet battlefield tested.
Generals and their planners still thought of artillery with a pre-WWI mind and had not yet realized its devastating potential. Generals were used to the old iron cannons which could not fire shells big enough to damage early 20th century fortresses. But newer, stronger guns that could handle the intensity of 20th-century shells without disintegrating soon became commonplace on the front.
Both sides used artillery to soften targets. Bombardments would often last for days, and even if no casualties were inflicted, an impact was still made. Bombardments drove soldiers underground into shelters and tunnels. Days of relentless concussive explosions felt through the soil, no sunlight, no sleep, the looming expectation of an enemy advance as soon as the shelling stops, all combined to take an immense psychological toll on soldiers. The enemy is a much softer target if they're exhausted and traumatized. Shrapnel-style shells also went a long way in destroying defense systems such as barbed wire.
Shell production increased as it became obvious artillery supply was essential to winning the war. The Germans increased shell production from 343,000 a month in 1914 to 11,000,000 a month by the end of the war. Germany and Austria-Hungary produced a total of 680,000,000 shells throughout the entirety of WWI. Allied forces produced a total of 790,000,000 shells.
Crazy enough, the almost 1.5 billion shells produced by both sides were not enough to sustain shell expenditure. The British, in particular, drastically underestimated shell demand, leading to a "shell crisis."
Also called the "shell scandal", the 1915 shell crisis threatened England's ability to fight the war. Britain's manufacturing industry could only support around 70,000 shells per month, but expenditures were much higher. By the summer of 1916, weekly allied shell expenditure was as high as 600,000. In May 1915, planners limited British guns to just 4 shells per day to avoid running out completely. Supplies were drying up faster than manufacturers had any hope of keeping up with.
Lloyd George stepped up to the position of Minister of Munitions and vowed to dig Britain out of the crisis. He managed to boost shell production from 70,000 to 1,000,000 per month. He also took machinegun production from 6,000 per year in 1915 to 80,000 in 1918.2
Conclusion
Tanks, shells, millions of steel helmets, millions of tons of steel used to build ships, small arms weaponry, jeeps, submarines, airplanes; All of the necessary equipment required to fight WWI consumed an astronomical portion of the globe's steel supply.
Without innovations such as the Bessemer process and later the open-hearth furnace, WWI would have been a much different conflict. The unprecedented demand for steel would never have been met without the factories, the laborers, and the enormous capital investment used to increase steel production capacity. Without steel, WWI would have looked more like the American civil war than the first clash between modern, industrialized nation-states which we now call conventional warfare.
Really, almost everything about modern life today would not be possible without the tinkerers and inventors of the mid-19th century and the industrialization of the early 20th century. It's the early steel industry that has shaped so much of today.
Kennedy, Paul M. 2017. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000. London: William Collins.
Figure obtained from Pugh’s biography: Pugh, Martin. “Lloyd George.” War and Peace, 1908-1916 (Munitions and Strategy). Longman Group UK Ltd. 1988. Page 87