Gear Maker, Arms Maker, Car Maker
The Legacy of André Citroën
Gears and Munitions (1913-1918)
Chance was turning the wheels in a big way. It was now 1913,
and the first rumblings of approaching war were heard beyond the horizon.
Citroën's gear-cutting business would soon become an important strategic
asset. When the storm broke, André, a captain in the reserves, returned
to the colours as part of an artillery regiment equipped with the famous
French 75 mm field gun. But rejoining the army didn't stop his fertile brain
from thinking about engineering problems: his experience with Mors had shown
him that mass production ideas could be applied to cars as well as gearwheels,
and this common solution could be extended to all kinds of other things
still in short supply. Citroën probably knew as much as any man in
France about turning out small precision components by the million, and
he began to realize how this knowledge could be applied to something much
more directly useful in the bitter trench warfare of 1914: shells. Soon
after Citroën arrived at the front, his unit received a severe drubbing
by enemy artillery, a barrage they couldn't reply to for lack of adequate
ammunition. With the right kind of assistance to build an efficient production
system, he was confident he could boost output to totally undreamed-of proportions.
He drew up a report showing how he would turn out thousands of 75 mm shells
every day using the ideas he had put into practice in his gearwheel business.
Through his old school friend Louis Loucheur, now also an acquaintance of
Minister for Armaments Albert Thomas, Citroën's report found its way
to the desk of Army's Chief of Artillery, General Baquet, whose reaction
was spectacular.
André Citroën left the army so fast his feet barely touched
solid ground. He was told to go away and put his ideas into practice. With
the enthusiastic backing of the Armaments Ministry, he bought thirty acres
of waste ground on the Quai de Javel in Paris, where he set up an enormous
factory complex containing everything from production lines to shops, canteens,
and clinics for more than 12,000 workers. It was the first chance Citroën
had had to put all his ideas about paternalism and workers' benefits into
practice alongside his mass production system, and the combination proved
to be a winner. By the height of the war, the Javel factory was turning
out more than 35,000 shells every day, and other plants turning out another
20,000 a day had been brought under Citroën's direct control.
But after only three years of full production, the war was smouldering to
its end, and with it the bottom would fall out of the munitions market.
Citroën was heir to an enormous factory with all the tools and equipment
needed for precision engineering on a truly enormous scale. What could he
do with it? It was only now that his experience with Mors began to play
its most significant part in his thinking - what he had done for Mors so
successfully, could he not do here in his own factory? But he was still
no enthusiast, and car design remained something of a mystery to him. Automobiles
were still principally expensive, hand-assembled playthings for the rich,
and Citroën knew in his bones that this was wrong. Like Ford in America,
Austin in England, and Porsche in Germany, he knew the future lay in making
cars for the people, for the newly prosperous middle class rather than the
aristocracy. Chance produced a meeting with Henry Ford, and straightaway
the two men realized they were talking the same language. Citroën's
hunches became certainties, and he began to look around for a design which
would fit his requirements.
For André Citroën this was still no deep love affair with the
automobile. His attitude was that of a cool, practical businessman. Here,
he was convinced, was the next big mass market, and he was determined the
Citroën works would play its part in delivering the goods. So he looked
at the possibilities from the angle of a production expert - valuing robustness,
simplicity and ease of assembly more highly than sophisticated design ideas
or exhilarating performance. And it was precisely this detachment which
kept him clear of the constant problems encountered by many of his more
mechanically oriented competitors.
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