ABSTRACT
The Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP) was an agency for the planning of civilian activity on a scale beyond anything attempted at any other time by a British government. At peak, over 1,800,000 workers were producing or repairing aircraft and other military equipment under the direction of the Ministry. Yet little has been written on how the work of planning their activities was done. There have been histories of war production by Postan and others which deal at some length with the aircraft industry. But they rarely touch, except in a rather hushed way, on what went on inside the Ministry, being more concerned with the final product and the use to which it was put in aerial warfare. No history of the Ministry is ever likely to be written, in view of the limited information on the machinery of planning which still survives. Of the records of the Planning Department, some files survive in PRO AVIA 10 which I preserved and deposited in the 1980s. The rest were put in a large sack in 1947 and handed over in 1949 on suitable assurances but appear to have been lost. In these circumstances I have thought it worth while to set down some of the impressions left on me by four years’ service in the Ministry.
