Wish I knew more about this – however, as a general observation, we should not be surprised at the production levels achieved in wartime without ‘automation’. Engineering in the UK was much less of a ‘cottage industry’ then than it is now.
We need to define ‘automation’. Robots, for example, do not replace ‘skilled’ labour, they replace people trained to repeat the same action over and again with an acceptable degree of accuracy. There were sufficient numbers of these in the UK to maintain the industry on a war footing.
I strongly suspect that there was far more skilled engineering labour (not to mention plant) available to cope with things like retooling then than there is now. All that was really needed was extra ‘human resource’, the way that Nissan would just buy double the robots now if they wanted to double production. This was achieved by mobilising the female workforce. OK, more floorspace, jigs and machinery were needed too..
However, if automation refers to the US production line ‘conveyor belt’ approach (not so much ‘automation’ as rationalisation) then there was no comparison with UK practice.
In danger of becoming political if I go any further!
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