Tank Battles of World War I

By Bryan Cooper

Failure to exploit the potential of an original idea is a recurring phenomenon in our national history. Few failures, however, can have been so costly in human life as that of our military commanders early in 1916 to appreciate that the tank was a war winning weapon. The slaughter of the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres salient had to be endured before accepted 'conventional' methods were abandoned and the tank given a chance. Bryan Cooper describes the early tank actions in vivid detail, with many eye-witness accounts. He tells of the courage and endurance of the crews not just in battle but in the appalling conditions in which they had to drive and fight their primitive vehicles. Scalded, scorched and poisoned with exhaust fumes, constantly threatened with being burned to death, these crews eventually laid the foundation for the Allied Victory in World War I. The book is well illustrated with many original photographs which give the present day reader a glimpse of the infancy of a dominant weapon of modern war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473855106

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Birth of the Tank

It would be very difficult to imagine a war today being fought without the use of tanks. They are vital to the armies of even the smallest nations, the spearhead force of any land attack, in many ways the epitome of modern warfare. Assuming a more or less even balance in other factors such as air power, an army without tanks would have little chance of success.

But that was precisely the situation which occurred in World War I. The tank did not exist before the war began. It was invented by the British and used for the first time in 1916, one of the most devastating weapons ever to be introduced during a war. For two years the British and the French, who to a lesser degree also developed tanks of their own, had a monopoly in the use of this new weapon. By the time the Germans came to realise the enormous potential of the tank and frantically started to build their own, it was far too late. Only 15 German tanks ever came into action, as against over 4,000 British and French. In the final battles of 1918, tanks were the most decisive single factor in securing victory for the Allies.

With such a clear superiority, it might be wondered why tanks did not make a greater impact earlier than they did. They would have done had it not been for the extraordinary reluctance to accept them on the part of tradition-bound military commanders who lacked the imagination to see that the nature of war had completely changed. It was only by the dogged persistence of a few far-sighted individuals that tanks became available at all to the British Army on the Western Front. Even then they were badly misused. The powerful element of surprise that could have been achieved by the introduction of such a secret weapon was dissipated by minor and inconclusive actions in the mud of Flanders. A very real chance of ending the war earlier was thrown away by generals who still pinned their faith on the cavalry and dreamed of a great sabre-drawn charge through the German lines, a costly dream that required 80,000 tons of fodder a month for the 400,000 horses maintained by the British Army.

The Germans also clung to outmoded ideas, although this was less apparent in the early years of the war. Their greatest weapons were the machine gun, largely responsible for the stalemate that existed on the Western Front after the race for the coast had become drawn, and long range artillery bombardment for which they possessed a clear superiority in munitions over the British and French. Their own answer to counter bombardment by the Allies was to dig in, creating in the Hindenburg Line the greatest defensive system the world had ever seen, four miles wide in places with huge electrically-lit and heated dugouts where a company of men could lie secure 40ft below ground until the shelling was over. They would then emerge and from their concrete machine gun posts annihilate the attacking infantry who were trying to claw a way through the massed barbed wire. Hundreds of thousands of unprotected troops were mown down in such suicidal attacks.

While the Allied commanders fought their reckless war of attrition, a policy of despair that sought nothing more than to wear the enemy down by swapping life for life, the Germans had reason to be confident that their defences were impregnable. Only when tanks appeared, armoured against the machine gun, able to crush through the barbed wire to make way for and give cover to the following infantry, were these mighty defences broken. The very trenches that had given such protection before became death traps as the tanks cruised up and down pouring a hail of fire into them.

The reasons for the stalemate on the Western Front were not surprising. There had not been a war between the major powers since 1871 and most people had no awareness of what war was like, still less the imagination to see how it might have developed from the time of the Franco-Prussian war. Each of the European nations which mobilised—and no less than six million men were sent into the first battles—was certain it was doing so in its own defence. Even the German advance through Belgium was part of a defensive deployment which became inevitable once Russia refused to demobilise. What had begun as a game of diplomatic bluff got so out of hand that no one knew how to stop it. But there was no shortage of slogans to sustain the momentum. The British, protected from invasion by the Grand Fleet and confident that it would all be over in a few months, decided it was going to be a ‘war to end war’, to make the ‘world safe for democracy’, themes that were later taken up by other countries. What very few realised, least of all the elderly commanders who owed their promotion to politics rather than ability, was the effect that modern technology would have, particularly in transportation.

The paradox lay in the fact that although the age was still that of the horse and none of the armies had mechanical transport to begin with, it was still possible to bring troops into battle very quickly by means of the railway. Trains could speed reinforcements to any part of the Front where they were required. Once they reached the railhead however, the troops had to slog it on foot, moving no faster than in any century past and indeed sometimes much slower, such were the numbers involved. Before an attacking side could break through on foot, the defenders could more rapidly bring up reinforcements to plug the gap. The defence was mechanised whereas the attack was not, therefore the defence was always stronger. But the military authorities were all agreed that the only effective means of waging war was to attack. Thus occurred the appalling casualties as men were thrown without protection against strongly defended positions. Even when they did succeed in breaking through, they were always beaten back by a rapid build-up of reinforcements. This was the case time and time again until something could be found to change the pattern. And that something was the tank.

There was nothing new in the concept of combat vehicles. The use of chariots and wheeled battle wagons goes back to the dawn of recorded history. The fast two wheeled chariots of the Assyrians, used more as fighting platforms than as weapon carriers, dominated wars between the years 1100 to 670 BC. The armoured cavalry of the Middle Ages was a form of such warfare until its power was ended, first by the well organised used of the longbow and then the invention of gunpowder and the musket. From that point on much of the mobility was taken out of warfare until, ironically, it was reintroduced by tanks. The analogy goes even further with the development of the two tanks which played the biggest part in the battles of 1918, the heavy Mark V and the light Whippet, each with a distinctive role corresponding to that of heavy and light cavalry. The only difference was that now, instead of the thunder of horses’ hooves, the ground trembled with a new kind of thunder as fire belching monsters of iron and steel lumbered forward on grating tracks. But the affinity for horses was deeply embedded in the British character and even after the war, cavalrymen were ever ready to disparage the tank in defence of the horse. This attitude was prevalent up to the beginning of the Second World War in fact, gravely affecting the much needed modernisation of the British Army. The Germans made no such mistake. Having learned a painful lesson in 1918, they based the development of their new army on the tank, with devastating results in the early years of the war when their Panzer divisions swept all before them in Europe and the steppes of Russia.

From as early as the fourteenth century, various ideas for mechanical combat vehicles had been put forward. (One of the most practical designs was by Leonardo da Vinci, involving a shallow metal bowl with slits cut in the bottom to take the wheels which were to be hand-cranked by eight men through a system of gears.) During succeeding centuries attempts were made to harness this idea, but it was not until the advent of steam power that a means was found of driving such a vehicle. An assault vehicle was invented at the time of the Crimea War by James Cowan, a formidable machine similar to the da Vinci design with cannons fitted through loopholes in the sides and rotating scythes on the outside framework for mowing down the infantry. But Lord Palmerston rejected it as too brutal for civilised use.

It was the invention of the internal combustion engine in 1885, providing an economic mobile propulsion unit, that ultimately made possible the development of modern armoured fighting vehicles. An experimental armoured car was built by Frederick Simms and exhibited at Crystal Palace in 1902. Two machine guns were mounted in the turret and the driver steered with the aid of a periscope. The vehicle was not a big success because of its weight and low power, and this and other designs which followed were handicapped by the fact they could be used only on roads. They could not cross rough country and therefore offered no alternative to cavalry in battle. But an answer even to this problem was in sight. Soon after the turn of the century, chain tracks had been developed for use on tractors, mainly steam-driven in those days. The firm of Richard Hornsby & Sons was responsible for much of this work and in 1908 the War Office bought one of their tracked vehicles for experimental purposes. Interest in Britain waned however, although Hornsby and others continued their research. Eventually Hornsby sold the American and Canadian patent rights to the Holt Caterpillar Company of New York. That company went ahead with further development work on tracks and by 1914 they were being used extensively on farm vehicles in the United States. It was not until after the war that tractors became popular in Britain, as a direct result of how effective tanks had proved themselves at the Front.

These two developments, the internal combustion engine and chain tracks, provided the main ingredients with which to make a tank. And the possibility was indeed seen by a number of people. In 1908, a Major Donoghue had suggested that a gun could be mounted on a Hornsby tractor, protected by armour. In 1912, an Australian called E. L. de Mole filed a design for an armoured fighting vehicle that was surprisingly similar to those which eventually went into service. It was in fact superior in many respects, particularly its steering which was to be achieved by ‘bowing’ the tracks, a device ten years ahead of its time. But these and other ideas were pigeonholed and forgotten by an indifferent War Office. There was no interest in mechanical vehicles among cavalry indoctrinated commanders. Those closer to the Front were less hidebound however. During the first month or so of the conflict, as the Germans advanced across Belgium and then turned southwards through France in accordance with their prearranged plan and the French followed their own offensive plan