KS3 / KS4 / GCSE History: 1918 - How the British workforce helped in WW1

By June 1918 the balance of power in The First World War had shifted violently towards Germany.

Having made a peace with an exhausted Russia, Germany could now pour troops onto the Western Front.

They now outnumbered the allies by over 200,000 men and they were massing for an attack they believed would win the War.

In the first five hours of the great Spring Offensive over a million shells were fired into British lines.

In a conflict where success was measured in yards the Germans advanced forty miles in a single day. In his diary The Secretary to The British War Cabinet wrote, “The Germans are fighting better than the allies. I cannot exclude the possibility of disaster.”

The British Army Commander Sir Douglas Haig made one last desperate rallying call.

“Every position must be held to the last man, there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause we must all fight on till the end.”

The call to arms would be heard well beyond the trenches.

The Home Front couldn’t afford to buckle either, the country’s war machine had to be kept running.

Prime Minister Lloyd George had once called the British workforce the least disciplined in Europe. Could they be relied upon at this moment of crisis?

Anyone searching for cracks in the nation’s resolve might have come here to the South Wales Coalfield.

In 1918 this place was considered The Wild West of industrial relations. The Welsh miners had been a thorn in the government’s side throughout the War, calling strike after strike.

This, the finest steam coal in the world, was a vital part of the War effort.

It drove the foundries, the forges, the explosives factories, it powered the warships and it gave the men who extracted it tremendous power.

By 1918 there’d already been trouble in the pits over the practise of combing out, that was forcing men out of vital protected industries like this and into the Army.

With the country now facing the real possibility of defeat further industrial unrest could have been catastrophic.

In fact just the opposite happened. When it came to it even the most bolshie miner wasn’t prepared to see Britain lose the War. When asked to pull together for the sake of the troops the response of the British workforce was emphatic. In all industries strikes were suspended and people even turned out to work extra shifts.

On the Clyde thousands of ship builders gave up their Easter holiday to keep working.

Recruiting offices saw a rush from men in protected jobs coming forward to enlist.

The Minister for Munitions, Winston Churchill, could scarcely believe his eyes, “The response to our appeal to work over the holiday”, he said “was excellent, indeed almost embarrassing”.

At the very worst point in the War the Home Front had not only held, it had risen to the challenge. The forces didn’t lack for supplies, for ammunition or for weapons; this was one time in the nation’s history when we really were all in it together.

In Germany it was a very different story. With German ports blockaded by the British Navy the country was being slowly starved out of the War.

Angry crowds took to the streets demanding peace.

Anti-war strikes crippled German industry. When a horse dropped dead in a Berlin street the locals fell on it for meat.

On the battlefield the huge German Spring Offensive had failed to break the allies, if anything it had broken the Germans. Their plan had devoured men and ammunition, troops were left exhausted, demoralised and lacking supplies and as the German war machine began to fail Britain’s was at full throttle.

By the summer of 1918 weapons were rolling off the production lines in greater numbers than ever before.

The previous year The United States had agreed to enter the War; now American troops had at last arrived and were fighting with the allies. The tide had turned, though victory would come sooner than anyone imagined.