MANUFACTURING HISTORY – A look back in time

“LET’S MAKE IT OURSELVES!” PART 4 BHP’s back-room boys

1941. The desperate shortages in Australia exacerbated by World World 2 included a shortage of nickel which was urgently required for armourplate production. Was there an alternative to the inclusion of nickel for the manufacture of bullet-proof armourplate steel? The boys in the back-room of BHP – facilitated by Laurence - rise to the challenge.

Iwonder how many Australians appreciate the tremendous contributions of time, money and skill made to the war effort by the firms which co-operated with us at the Ordnance Production Directorate. Australian industry came of age during the war. The experience it gained in working on war projects fitted it for the industrial expansion that came afterwards. There were unsung heroes and heroines in our factories, too; men and women who worked around the clock to solve production problems we bowled up to them, with never a thought of payment or privilege. Their reward was the knowledge that they were helping to give the serviceman weapons, and at a fraction of the cost of other countries.

One of the most enthusiastic, dependable, dedicated men in the early team was Sir Colin Fraser, who was put in charge of materials procurement as Director of Materials Supply. He seems to have been overlooked in the histories of our war effort. In my own small way, I pay my tribute to Sir Colin and his work. It was his responsibility to identify the basic raw materials needed for the manufacture of the various supplies and to acquire them from within Australia - or from overseas if possible. Somewhere, somehow, by heaven only knows what method, he would invariably find the stuff for us. Without the supplies of basic raw materials that he acquired - copper, iron, zinc, nickel, carbon, lead and the rest - we could not have even begun the projects. Occasionally he'd have to say, "Hmm, this is a tight one. Not much of this left." Of all the “tight” cases we handled, the order for Bren-gun carriers was the tightest. The Bren-gun carrier was a mobile, manoeuvrable firing-platform for a Bren-gun. The carriers had been developed by Vickers in England, and Australia needed lots of them. They looked like a small, open tank, with two articulated tracks, driven by a Ford motor, with the crew protected by bullet-proof armourplate. When we examined the raw-materials content we knew we were going to have trouble; the armourplate would require big tonnages of nickel-alloy steel, and because Sir Colin had earmarked all our existing supplies of nickel for gun-barrel manufacture, we hardly had any nickel left in Australia. "You can't have both, I'm afraid," he told us. "You'll have to decide whether the nickel goes for the guns or for your armourplate." I knew of no alternative material for gun barrels, and we simply had to have them. So we set out to find an alternative for the armourplate. I had a fair working knowledge of metallurgy, but this was a job for the experts. I consulted Essington Lewis. ''Surely,'' I told him, “there must be some other way of making bullet-proof plate other than by using heat-treated nickel-alloy steel." Essington suggested we throw the project at the B.H.P.'s back room boys. He mentioned two men - Bishop, of B.H.P. and Clarke, of Commonwealth Steel - as being bright chaps who could get results, if results were possible. These two fellows came to Melbourne for a briefing, and then went back to Sydney to work on the task. And it was some task! They had to create a steelplate that could be welded, that could resist .303 bullets at relatively short range, that could be produced quickly - and that did not require nickel in its manufacture.

Australian War Memorial

Dec. 1942. One of the exhibits in a procession through Sydney of a display of Australian-made munitions and war equipment. Pictured here is a machine-gun (Bren) carrier atop a portable steel bridge. Both were wholly Australian-made. This is part of a procession featuring nearly 400 Australian-made vehicles, including tanks.

A couple of weeks later Bishop phoned from Newcastle. "I think we've got it," he said. "Can you come up and see?" He and Clarke had worked almost non-stop in their laboratories, cooking up new specifications of steel and testing them. Their first sample was promising, but it was not up to the standard we wanted. It was armourplate, but it didn't resist the bullets too well, and its welding characteristics weren't good. A week later they came up with another sample. This one had excellent welding properties, but its bullet-stopping ability was chancy. Some bullets would be stopped, but others would go through it. We turned our thumbs down again. Bishop and Clarke weren't a bit deterred. A couple of weeks later they had worked out another formula and again we went back to Sydney to sample it. It was a wizard. It was easy to produce, didn't require nickel and it was 100 per cent proof against rifle fire. I named it ABP 3-Australian Bullet proof Plate 3. I was so excited about this find. I was sure it was going to be a great contribution to the war effort. I sent the formula to Stanley Bruce, our High Commissioner in London, asking him to put it before the British Ministry of Supply. I took the precaution of cutting the formula-document in half and sending each half by separate couriers in case it was intercepted. I don't know if Bruce put it to the British or, if he did, whether it ended up in some pigeon-hole, as I never heard if they made use of it. But we did. We used it on all the Bren-gun carriers we made, and on gun-shields, and it served our needs perfectly. It was just one more example of the ingenuity of Australians producing the goods when they were needed.

To be continued…

AMT would like to acknowledge historian and author Dr Norm Darwin for his assistance in the researching and validation of the image.