Above all, shells were the weapons that won the Great War. After the great ‘shell shortage’ scandal of 1915, the Government grasped the need to manufacture munitions of a mass basis, and thousands of workers - most of them women - were recruited into the great munitions factories turning out the ordnance that eventually wore down the enemy. This book, written by two engineers and illustrated with photos and diagrams is an instruction manual for such workers, which tells the story, in plain language, of the production process that turned the raw components of iron, steel, brass, glycerine and explosive into deadly HE, shrapnel and gas shells for those who could not originally tell one end of a lathe from the other.