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HISTORY
Big wheels & little wheels – the story of UK-born Australian Sir Laurence John Hartnett (1898 – 1986) Australia’s “Father of the Holden” and much more
PART 49
AN ALLY IS CONVINCED
WW2: Laurence has finally changed the US perception that offering Lend Lease war materiel to Australia would be a waste. Next stop is Canada!
I
was studying the latest American techniques and sending back detailed reports of everything I thought could be useful to our own munitions programme in Australia. I also became a kind a travelling public relations officer for Australia. During the lunch-hour breaks at a number of the plants I visited, I was asked to talk to the employees about Australia. In that way, thousands of American war workers, and the top executives, who usually stayed to listen, heard about the staggering production job Australia was doing with comparatively little labour - by American standards - and not very much equipment. My constant theme -"We'll do all we can to help ourselves and your fighting men"- won their friendship and help immediately. As an example of a good day, let us take the note I made of a visit to Bridgeport, Connecticut: Arrived from New York by car with police escort at 9.30 am; visited Bridgeport Brass; Vought Sikorsky Aircraft; Auto Ordnance; Remington Small Arms; gave a lunch talk to 600 at General Electric; off back to New York at 4 p.m." That day I walked at least five miles through factories and learnt a lot. I always made sure of giving the Americans tangible evidence of Australia's capacity to help. One particular triumph, which did much to dispel their doubts about our industrial capability, was the arrival by air of a shipment of urgentlyneeded optics for gunsights which I had had made to American specifications. I was at Frankford Arsenal when they arrived, and I experienced the great thrill of hearing the US Army ordnance inspector deliver his report. The Australian sights could not be faulted. They were assembled into American gun-sights and sent off very quickly to Alaska to help guard America's back door. The pay-off for this kind of help wasn't long in coming. Americans were at last realizing the truth of our claims that, although our population was small, our skills and organisation were equal to the best in the world. Their reluctance to give us equipment vanished once we proved it would not be wasted. One of the most valuable concessions was their offer to let us have a large quantity of machine-tools which had been ordered for France before the German invasion and was now in store, scattered over the US. These machinetools were all in metric measurement, but
1940 – 1942: A man operating equipment while manufacturing optical glass in Prof Hartung's Optical Munitions Lab, University of Melbourne
I grabbed all I could get hold of and had them shipped to Australia. They did a lot of valuable work for us. I believe I held the record for an overseas diplomat or visitor. I officially called on more than 500 factories making munitions in the USA. How nice it was for me, too, that two old GM colleagues were in Washington: Jim Mooney as a naval captain and Graeme Howard as a colonel in ordnance. I then headed north to Canada to take a close look at the Canadians' twenty-five pounder production set-up, which was just getting started. Another General Motors man, Harry Carmichael, managing director of GM Canada, had taken up a munitions job almost parallel to mine. As I have pointed out earlier, the Canadians were in a much more fortunate position than we in Australia: they were filling largevolume munitions orders for the British as well as for themselves; they never had our problem of having to make a little of everything. Their six-pounder productiontarget, for example, was something in excess of 4,000 and they were already making 100 a week. Our Australian requirement was for about 400, but our tooling-up programme to get our small order filled was just as complex as the Canadians'.
In Canada, I was able to give a lot of useful advice based on our experience of getting into production with makeshift tools. It helped, too, that, being an engineer, I could speak to the Canada technical men in a common language. The Governor-General, the Earl of Athlone, questioned me at length during a lunch about Australia's war work. In Australia, with our limited range of machine-tools, we had devised many techniques to get the maximum production from each unit. Some of the modifications we made had almost doubled the normal production rates of certain machine-tools. We had done much detailed research into cutting-speeds, feeds, the angle of tools and how the cutting-edges should be ground so they would cut more metal in less time. One of our most important discoveries was the use of a technique we called the "negative rake-angle" on milling-machine cutters - a discovery that had proved its worth by increasing production. I was able to tell the Canadians about this, supporting my demonstration with production figures we had achieved. The Canadians - and the Americans and British too - further developed the technique and made it standard machine-shop practice.
This is an extract from ‘Big Wheels & Little Wheels’, by Sir Laurence Hartnett as told to John Veitch, 1964. © Deirdre Barnett.
AMT JUN 2022
To be continued…
