The Nissen Hut and Relatives

Housing an army on the cheap

*Nissen huts can be walked around at Imperial War Museum Duxford, a location we visit on our* **Britain at War Tour**
*(Photo: Author’s own)*

Where do you put your army during a war? The question may seem facetious at first glance, but it highlights some very real and serious logistical problems. Permanent bases can accommodate large numbers of people and equipment, but they tend to be far away from the front lines. Tents have been in use for millennia, and are cheap and quick to erect, but offer little protection against harsher climates and are not suitable for longer-term habitation. Quartering soldiers in private residences or various civilian facilities are an option in urban areas, but such lodging can't follow the moving frontline.

The high mobility of modern industrial warfare means that camps providing longer-term habitation than tents need to be established quickly and cheaply wherever and whenever they're needed. The iconic semi-cylindrical huts built by the Allies in World War II were one important step in the development of easily-erected military bases. Today's article is about the British Nissen hut and its American offspring and relatives.

*A row of Nissen huts at a training camp in England, still in use in 2019*
*(Photo: John Tustin)*

The Nissen hut's inventor

The story of these distinctive structures begins with one Peter Norman Nissen (1871-1930), the U.S.-born son of Norwegian immigrant Georg Hermanus Nissen. Georg Nissen was a mining engineer, and he invented an improved stamp mill that crushed gold ore into small pieces as part of the gold production process. His son Peter followed in his footsteps and decided to develop and sell his father's stamp mill. He collected all the money he could and took his wife Louisa and daughter Betty to England, the mining engineering capital of the world at the time, in 1910, arriving with only a few pounds in his pocket. He soon moved to South Africa, a part of the British Empire at the time, where enormous gold deposits had recently been discovered. He spent several years selling his Nissen stamp mill there.

*Peter Norman Nissen (left) in front of his invention in 1917*
*(Photo: Imperial War Museums)*

Though not a British citizen (he was naturalized in 1921), he returned to Britain when World War I broke out in 1914 and joined the army. Early next year, he was supervising the shifting of some timber when a Royal Engineer walked by and remarked that Nissen too had to be an engineer. The man arranged for Nissen to be transferred to the Royal Engineer a few months later.

The British Army had an acute need for huts in the muddy hell of trench warfare on the Western Front, but not enough wood was available locally to meet the demand. By April 1916, Nissen was working on a new type of hut that mostly used metal. He built three different semi-cylindrical huts which were then scrutinized by fellow officers. The final design was formalized and put into mass production.

The Nissen hut's structure

The Nissen hut, named after its inventor, was economical in its use of materials, and was easily portable, with a single disassembled hut fitting on a standard 3-ton truck. A construction team of six men could erect a hut in four hours with basic tools like hammers, wrenches and drills, with 1 hour 27 minutes being the record.

*British troops erecting Nissen huts during the Battle of the Somme in World War I*
*(Photo: Imperial War Museums)*

The hut consists of a set of ribs with the distinctive semi-cylindrical sheets of corrugated galvanized iron placed over them. (The sheets are corrugated, given their ridged shape, to increase structural strength while retaining a light weight.) The front and back of a hut consist of a wooden frame with weatherboards nailed to it on the outside. The floor is made from tongue-and-groove floorboards, with concrete as an alternative. The original version of the hut also had a wooden inner lining, but Nissen learned that soldiers often pried it up with their bayonets to use it as fuel for their stoves, and came up with an alternative design where the interior lining was also corrugated iron, only the corrugation ran horizontally. The Nissen hut came in several sizes, 16, 24 or 30 feet in width. (4.9, 7.3 or 9.1 m) Each sheet was six feet (1.8 m) long, and several could be joined together to create a hut whose length was any multiple of that number.

*Nissen huts used by U.S. soldiers in Northern Ireland during the war*
*(Photo: U.S. Army Signal Corps)*

At least 100,000 Nissen huts were built during World War I, and not all were used as barracks. Some 10,000 were turned into hospitals, while many others served as stores, workshops, mess rooms and even churches. They were noted to be drafty and damp (steel surfaces and relatively poor heat insulation led to condensation), but they were still far preferable to canvas tents.

Nissen patented his hut in 1916, and was paid some £13,000 by the British government after the post-war hut sales. He was awarded the Distinguished Service order and retired from the army at the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

*A Nissen hut at the Panzermuseum Munster, a site we visit on our* **Third Reich Tour**
*(Photo: Author’s own)*

Nissen huts after World War I

Construction of the huts waned between the wars, but picked up against during World War II, with Nissen huts also appearing in the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, where they were noted for being stuffy and humid in tropical conditions.

May Nissen huts were converted into civilian residences in peacetime, and a special, larger, two-storey version was also designed specifically for the purpose. Despite their low price, however, they never became popular housing. Their curved shape meant that furniture could not be pushed up against wall, leading to poor use of space; also, people associated the word "hut" with being lower status than a proper house. The huts still saw wide use in construction camps, and many were erected in Australia after World War II to house displaced European refugees building roads in the western half of the continent.

*A Nissen hut formerly used by road construction workers in Western Australia*
*(Photo: State Heritage Office)*

Variants and relatives of the Nissen hut

A solid design for cheap barracks (or almost anything else you might need in a quickly built camp), the Nissen hut had many derivatives, mostly during World War II. Here is a non-exhaustive list.

The Iris hut
During the rapid expansion before World War II, the British military wanted something similar to the Nissen hut but larger, for use as storage buildings and workshops. The Iris hut had a similar shape, but upscaled to 35 ft (11 m) wide and 60 to 96 ft (18 to 29 m) long, with the large corrugated steel outer skin supported by a frame of tubular steel ribs. On some airfields, two or more Iris huts were built end-to-end to make even larger stores or workshops, and even hangars. The Iris hut had a serious design flaw, however: its roof was weak and could collapse under snow.

The Romney hut
The Romney hut was designed to address the Iris hut's roof collapse problem. It was identical in shape and very similar in appearance, and, in fact, there were even some "Iris-Romney" hybrid designs. Many Romney huts were repurposed after the war for use as industrial storage, factories, workshops or housing.

*A Romney hut at RAF Eye, used by the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II*
*(Photo: Evelyn Simak)*

Blister hangars
A collective name for many different sizes and specific shapes, blister hangars were British aircraft hangars following the general Nissen hut design but writ large. They originally had wooden ribs supporting a cladding of profiled steel sheets, but were later changed to steel lattice ribs and corrugated steel ribs. Unlike the smaller huts, the hangars' arches were not horizontal (or near so) at the point of contact with the ground.

*An old blister hangar at former RAF Culmhead*
*(Photo: Mike Searle)*

The Quonset hut
The best-known American derivative of the Nissen hut, the Quonset hut was born in 1941, when the U.S. Navy requested a light-weight all-purpose building that could be shipped anywhere and erected by unskilled labor. One hut could be assembled by a 10-man team in a day using only hand tools.

*A Quonset hut being emplaced for use as office space in post-war Japan*
*(Photo: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)*

The hut got its name from Quonset Point, a peninsula at the Davisville Naval Construction Battalion Center on Rhode Island, where it was first built. The word "Quonset" means "small, long place" in the Algonquin language, which originally referred to the location, but could arguably also describe the hut named after it.

*U.S. troops marching past Quonset huts in Northern Ireland. The photo was taken in 1942, near the end of the period when many American soldiers still wore British Brodie helmets*
*(Photo: U.S. Army Signal Corps)*

Like the Nissen hut, the Quonset hut also came in several sizes and designs. The original version was 16 ft by 36 ft (4.9 × 11 m). The most common design was 20 by 38 ft (6.1 × 14.6 m). Even larger versions, including one 40 by 100 ft (12 × 30 m) were designed as warehouse models. One particular redesign solved the Nissen hut's long-standing problem of not having vertical walls to place furniture against. The bottom four feet were straight corrugated steel walls, and the distinctive arch only began above those. This design also managed to be 60% less expensive and 35% lighter than its predecessor.

Some 170,000 Quonset huts were built during World War II, and some still remain as outbuildings, businesses or homes. Several companies sell various designs under the collective "Quonset" name to this day. Surplus Quonset huts became popular housing in Hawaii after the war, where they're known as "kamaboko houses" after a similarly-shaped Japanese food. One is left of the Quonset Hut 33 at Pearl City close to the sites of our Pearl Harbor Anniversary Tour.

*A Quonset hut used as a tavern in Dodge City, Kansas*
*(Photo: John Margolies)*

The Pacific hut
The Pacific hut was an all-wood version of the Quonset hut, appropriately designed for the Pacific. Steel rusts quickly in humid tropical condition, and this wooden structure both avoided that problem, and also eased pressure on the limited supply of steel. It turned out that the wooden construction also worked well in Arctic climates due to having better heat insulation than any metal structure.

*An all-wood Pacific hut*
*(Photo: quonset-hut.blogspot.com)*

The Jamesway hut
The Jamesway hut was an Arctic version of the Quonset, with wooden ribs covered by a soft skin of insulated fabric: blankets combined with glass fiber, flameproof muslin, and plastic-treated, vermin-, water- and fire-proof cotton. The hut is rather small at 16 × 16 ft (5 × 5 m), and the wooden packing crates double as the floor.

The hut earned recognition during the campaign to liberate the Aleutian Islands off Alaska from the Japanese. It was also used during the Korean War, and is still used by the U.S. Antarctic Program to this day.

*2000 photo of a Jamesway hut in Greenland*
*(Photo: Ingo Wölbern)*

The Armco hut
Built by the Armco International Corporation, this version was built with heavy steel that allowed it to be buried in six feet of dirt without collapsing. It was usually used as a bunker or an ammunition storehouse.

*Ordnance stored in an Armco hut in Australia*
*(Photo: Australian War Memorial)*

The Italian Chapel: a hut of reconciliation
While not a type of hut, this unique structure deserves separate mention for its symbolic importance. 550 Italian prisoners of war captured in North Africa were brought to the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland in 1942, with 200 of them placed in a POW camp on Lamb Holm, one of the islands of the archipelago. The commandant agreed with the camp's Catholic priest that the prisoners should be allowed to build a Catholic church for their own use. Two Nissen huts were joined end-to-end and given to the prisoners to decorate. The facade was built from concrete, candle holders fashioned from corned beef tins, and the baptismal font made from a car exhaust. One of the prisoners, a talented painter called Domenico Chiochetti, painted most of the interior with help from his comrades.

*The exterior of the Italian Chapel, with the Nissen huts visible behind the façade*
*(Photo: Michael Maggs)*

The prisoners were released shortly before the end of the war, when the chapel was not yet complete. Chiochetti decided to stay behind and finish decorating the already consecrated chapel. The locals set up a committee for the preservation of the chapel in 1958, and Chiochetti himself returned on two occasions to help renovate the building. Some of the other former prisoners returned in 1992 to commemorate their arrival to the island. The chapel is still used for worship today, is a popular tourist destination, and is one of the best-known symbols of post-war reconciliation in Britain.