Contrary to Official Recommendations

Abstract

A problem which occupied a great deal of the management’s interest during the Battle of Britain was armament. For very different reasons Rolls-Royce had once previously become interested in armament manufacture during the First World War when Claude Johnson endeavoured unsuccessfully to interest the authorities in the production of the Madsen machine gun. The firm’s interest was again aroused in 1939. Rolls-Royce engineers who had visited the Hispano gun factory in France, the Oerlikon factory in Switzerland, the Royal Ordnance factory at Woolwich and the armaments section at the Air Ministry were struck by the advances which had been made on the continent compared with the slow progress of British factories. They were appalled by the complete dependence of the United Kingdom on foreign sources of supply for certain types of gun. ‘Our impression’, they reported, ‘after seeing the continental gun factories, compared with Enfield, is that it is long overdue for us as a nation to be employing more brains on armaments.’ The management had no intention of investing capital in the production of guns, but it was decided to establish a small section under the direction of an armaments expert, S. M. Viale, with the object of designing a 40 mm cannon and a 0.5 inch machine gun suitable for aircraft work. Rapid progress was made and the barrel and breech-block of the cannon were ready for testing within a few weeks of the outbreak of war. The first prototype was fully completed in November.