John Glanfield

Picked up at the WWI museum in Kansas City. This makes a good trio with previous discussions of American and Italian armor development and doctrine, except it’s about the Brits in WWI, not WWII. The conventional wisdom about the development of tanks is that the military high command had to be dragged kicking and screaming into armored warfare by the troops in the field; in actuality, it was an interesting three-way struggle between the high command, field troops, and manufacturers.


The idea of “landships” goes back quite a ways, with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells nibbling around the edges. The Devil’s Chariots credits the idea of a tracklaying armored fighting vehicle to Lancelot Edwin de Mole, an Australian road surveyor who noted the utility of tracked vehicles in the course of his job. In 1912 and 1913, de Mole submitted a series of increasingly sophisticated designs to various War Office committees, all of which politely ignored them. De Mole was eventually awarded £987 for his ideas, which were admitted as essentially the design of the first tanks.


This is not to say that the powers that be were totally resistant to motor vehicles in warfare; in 1911, tractors had been investigated as artillery prime movers (but not adopted, as there was a sufficient supply of horses). Trench warfare, however, quickly brought a lot of serious thinkers and major loons out of the woodwork. Most of the early proposals were for almost literally “landships”; giant vehicles up to 200 feet long, equipped with ploughs to cut through trench parapets and carrying up to a battalion of infantry that would debouch and assault once the trenches were breached. These were wheel borne, but with very large (40 feet diameter) wheels. Some proposals suggested the landships would not charge the trenches, but run parallel to them – rather like a naval line of battle – and shell and machine gun the defenders while acting as shields for infantry deploying behind them. On the other end of the size scale, a wheelbarrow-like manually propelled infantry shield was proposed, as were larger shields intended to be pushed by larger units.


The first actual armored vehicles to enter WWI combat were Rolls-Royce armored cars, attached to the Royal Naval Air Service and deployed to Belgium. Ostensibly, the armored cars were supposed to be for base defense and recovering downed aircraft and crews, but their crews enthusiastically began using them for “uhlan hunting” – shooting up German cavalry reconnaissance patrols. This, of course, would never do, and the War Office quickly forced the withdrawal of the armored cars lest the Royal Navy intrude on Army responsibilities. The armored cars were quietly shipped to the Middle East where they did excellent service and nobody particularly complained about them shooting the enemy.


Eventually, the exigencies of trench warfare demanded somebody do something, and the various ideas were narrowed down to a lozenge-shaped tracked vehicle armed with 6-pounder cannon and/or machine guns. The term “tank” was intended to hide their function; the cover story was that they were some sort of mobile water supply for the Mesopotamian front. At one point, they were called “WCs”, for “Water Carriers”; it’s probably just as well for the morale of the armored forces that never caught on. The initial military resistance now dramatically reversed, and rather than waiting for a large force to be assembled (as recommended), the first few Mark I tanks shipped to France were quickly pressed into service at the Somme, where most broke down before reaching the front and the few that did make it into battle were mostly ineffectual. They had enough effect, however, that more and better tanks were quickly demanded.


What happened next is surprisingly one of the most interesting parts of the book. Field formations in France demanded modification to tanks and the production line and new types, including supply and troop carrier variants. These were all good ideas; however, the supply, logistics, and engineering officers back in England concentrated on building as many tanks as possible to as few designs as possibly, arguing that a lot of pretty good tanks now were better than a few perfect tanks later. This wasn’t such a bad idea either, and the tank builders in England generally go their way over the tank users in France, often going so far as to falsify records to show that they were complying with War Office directives. Many improvements were made, but they were mostly to running gear, engines, and power transmission rather than external appearance – making it difficult to tell a Mark I from a Mark II from a Mark III from a Mark IV, and so on.


The very early vehicles really did need improvement. Although the Mark I is most famous for having a wheeled trailer for steering, it was usually steered by differential track braking or power, just like later tanks. Driving one of the things was nightmarish; the “driver” had a throttle, brake, clutch, and primary gearbox but could not actually steer the tank. The commander had two steering brake levers, and a hammer. Since the main transmission couldn’t handle the load by itself, each drive axle had a secondary gear box and a “gearsman”, who was signaled to shift by the driver or commander – that’s what the hammer was for, since it was too loud inside to hear a verbal command. If the trailer and steering brakes failed, the gearsmen could steer the tank by the commander signaling a different gear ratio on each drive sprocket or by applying power to one track alone. Usually the tank had to be stopped to do this, otherwise the drive shaft could be twisted off. In the mean time, of course, the gunners in the sponsons were merrily pounding away with their machine guns or six-pounders.


Eventually sufficiently robust transmissions were developed to allow doing away with secondary gearboxes and enough tanks were built to allow the massive assaults that were originally envisioned. Unfortunately, by this time the Germans had developed a number of countermeasures – armor piercing bullets, antitank rifles, and most notably wider trenches. Latter tank models became longer and longer to be able to cross the trenches without bogging down – by the end of the war the joint British-American Mark VIII was 34 feet long (and thus really difficult to steer by track braking because of the long ground surface contact).


The Germans developed their own tank – the A7V – but not in sufficient quantity to make a difference (they also made use of captured French and British tanks). There was one tank versus tank battle in the war, with three A7Vs taking on three Mark IVs (less even than it sounds, since two of the Mark IVs were the machine gun only version). However, the single gun-armed Mark IV scored three hits on one of the A7Vs, and it overturned in a ditch. The remaining two retired. The crew of the victorious Mark IV latter claimed prize money, since they were “landships”; it was disallowed.


The same political battles started anew after the war, with cavalry officers claiming “The circumstances that called it (the tank) into existence were exceptional and unlikely to reoccur. If they do they can be dealt with by other means.” When WWII started, the old tank design teams were recalled, but the vehicles they proposed were more suited to trench warfare than the blitzkrieg. The British army went through WWII without a reasonable main battle tank.


Excellent references, and outstanding drawings of the principal tank types. It should be stressed that this is a work on WWI tank development, not tank battles, except for occasional anecdotes.… (más)