Armoured Warfare in the British Army, 1914–1939

By Richard Taylor and David Willey

This is the first volume in a three-volume illustrated history of the evolution of armored manoeuvre warfare in the British army, covering the period from 1914 until 1939. Author Dick Taylor’s tour de force covers the evolution of the tank and armored cars in response to the specific conditions created by trench warfare, the history of the use of tanks during the war, as well as the critical period between the wars in which the tank was both refined and neglected. He also looks in detail at the amalgamations and mechanization of the horsed cavalry which led to the formation of the Royal armored Corps in 1939. His detailed and absorbing narrative covers the social and human aspects of the story as well as the technology, and explains how the nation that invented and first fielded the tank in 1916 struggled to maintain the lead after the Armistice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399001199

Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor is an experienced and popular watercolourist, who regularly teaches and lectures on all aspects of painting. He is the successful author of several books, including The Watercolourist’s Year, Learn to Paint Buildings in Watercolour and Painting Houses and Gardens in Watercolour and was the Consultant and Contributor to The Art Course partwork. He writes for The Artist, Leisure Painter and Artists & Illustrators magazines and has also made several instructional painting videos.

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Introduction

History has assigned to it the task of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of ages to come.

Leopold von Ranke

This history proved to be both fascinating to research and difficult to write. Kenneth Macksey’s concise history of the Royal Armoured Corps ends in 1975, and I was therefore left with two options: to continue from that point, or to start from the beginning and attempt to compose a coherent history covering a busy hundred years or so. I chose the latter, in part to continue from Patrick Mileham’s companion volume on the pre-mechanized cavalry, covering an even longer period. Like Macksey’s earlier work, this is, in the main, a history of the Royal Armoured Corps. It is also, to a slightly lesser degree, a history of the British invention, development and evolution of the tank and its armoured fighting vehicle cousins and off-shoots, as used in other arms; I trust the reader will forgive me for the necessary brevity of the latter part, in which the infantry, Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers make up the supporting cast. The sheer range of the task, covering a century plus of complex history, meant that it could not be captured in one volume, hence the decision to break it into three parts, but it remains at heart a single work.

Why Find, Fix and Strike? This phrase, much used in modern military parlance, was taken from naval doctrine and describes the three main actions that a force must conduct in order to have a desired effect upon an enemy. Firstly, they must be found, and once found, must stay found. This implies reconnaissance. Secondly, they must have their freedom of action removed, in both time and space, in order to allow us to fight the battle on favourable terms. This can be carried out by both the reconnaissance and the main forces. And then they must be struck, with all the force necessary – plus a little more – in order to have the desired effect. (Guderian is said to have summed this up as ‘Klotzen, nicht kleckern!’ – roughly translated as ‘Spew, don’t dribble!’) This is the task of the main force. Finally, the pedants will remind me that the fourth term used is Exploit: after the main battle, exploit the victory for all it is worth, in terms of intelligence, follow-up and, in general terms, the pursuit. I would offer that this whole work is an attempt to exploit over one-hundred years of history of British armoured warfare, in order to understand the past and inform the future.

I also wanted this series to be as much a social history of the RAC as an operational one. Fascinating as they are, the campaigns and battles in which tanks and armoured vehicles have fought are only one aspect of the whole, and from the outset I wished to include also those essential but frequently unrecorded aspects of the tank crewman’s life; training, recruitment, pay, equipment, both vehicle and personal, and not least, how these have evolved or remained constant through the hundred years under investigation. As Wavell once said to Liddell Hart:

If I had time and anything like your ability to study war, I think I should concentrate almost entirely on the ‘actualities of war’ – the effects of tiredness, hunger, fear, lack of sleep, weather. . . . The principles of strategy and tactics, and the logistics of war are really absurdly simple: it is the actualities that make war so complicated and so difficult, and are usually so neglected by historians.

I hope that I have not completely neglected this aspect.

In terms of combat, it was never my intention to try to present a complete picture of any of the many battles or campaigns featured in this work; that would be foolhardy and would simply take up too much space as well as miss my point. Rather, I have selected those incidents and actions which can be used either to give a flavour of the use of armour and the parts they played, or to make a point about their effectiveness – or otherwise. Therefore, I hope to be excused if I devote as much time looking into the four-day Gulf War of 1991 as the whole of the Italian campaign which lasted nearly two years, or to cram the Second Battle of El Alamein into a couple of paragraphs. I have chosen, very deliberately, to devote a large proportion of the operational history to those periods that I deem to be of particular importance. These are, the First World War and the birth of the tank; the inter-war period in which the foundations for doctrine were laid; within the Second World War, the campaigns in France, 1940, North Africa and North-West Europe. In the Cold War era, I have elected to focus on Korea, Suez, Malaya and Northern Ireland, before moving into the modern era with the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. That is not to say that I ignore the remainder: I would be mortified to discover that there is an armoured theatre of operations that I have missed entirely, even if it has just been condemned to an endnote.

Throughout, what I have attempted to do is to highlight those parts of campaigns and battles that are of direct interest to those interested in armoured warfare, particularly but not exclusively members, past and present, of the RAC; and also to seek to identify enduring historical lessons that explain the past and inform the future – for example, from 1917, do not throw your tanks away on clearly unsuitable ground, and if you expect infantry and tanks to co-operate effectively, you must plan and rehearse. Whether I have succeeded in getting what Monty described as the ‘balance’ right will remain to be seen.

Part I

The First World War

Chapter One

Origins

The Navy’s Here!

Although a number of nations had produced experimental armoured car models in the decade before 1914, one of the first uses of a genuine armoured fighting vehicle in war occurred in September of that year, when the Royal Navy deployed a fleet of improvised armoured cars under the command of a swashbuckling naval officer called Charles Samson. ¹ Ordered there by Winston Churchill, his wing of the Royal Naval Air Service was based in Dunkirk and as well as a small fleet of aircraft tasked with intercepting German Zeppelins, he had twelve privately owned motor cars intended to be used to rescue downed crews, plus two lorries and eight ageing London bus chassis. The offensive possibilities of the cars were not lost on him, and he quickly fitted three of them with machine guns (two of which were scrounged from the French army complete with four gunners), adding locally sourced steel plate for protection following encounters with German cavalry – the first indication that traditional cavalry was about to be side-lined by technological advances. The design was imperfect, and the plate used was not even armoured steel, merely 6mm boiler plate from the Forges et Chantiers de France company of Dunkirk, and so requests were made to the Admiralty to supply sheets of armour; at that time the RN had the monopoly on armour steel, as it was extensively used on warships. It should be noted at this juncture that simply adding steel plates to vehicles does not make them armoured; unless the material used is of sufficient thickness and more importantly quality to stop the enemy bullets, preferably at point-blank range, it does remarkably little. Adding such ‘protection’ generally just reduces mobility and visibility and makes maintenance more difficult, whilst contributing nothing meaningful in terms of overall survivability. The boiler plate used by Samson is a case in point, as it was tested against the British .303in ball round which it could only keep out at a range of 500ft or greater; the plate could not stop the more powerful German 7.92mm rifle bullet unless the range was over 500yd, and the design offered only the most rudimentary protection to the crew and vital components.

Such early designs were clearly far from perfect, as to be expected when they were rushed into service to meet what in later years would be called an urgent operational requirement. Protection levels were low, and the ergonomics of the designs left a lot to be desired. The machine gun was mounted to the rear in a raised pulpit, meaning that the gun could only be fired to the rear and slightly to the sides. This led to the crews developing a technique described as frog-hopping, in which one car would turn its rear to the direction of the enemy, in order to give covering fire to a second car that drove forward one tactical bound, until it too reversed and the procedure was repeated. Needless to say, this was slow and complicated; one measure of a good driver was later reputed to be that he could drive the car, in reverse, at 20mph for 5 miles! Forward of the pulpit the crew were only protected below the waist, meaning that under fire they had to lie down, negating the effective use of the machine gun.

The reaction from the Admiralty was remarkably swift, and eighteen 40/50hp Rolls-Royce and twenty-one Wolseley Armoured Cars, each labelled as First Admiralty Pattern, were manufactured and deployed to join Samson’s force, and featured panels that could be bolted together onto the cars. The first three cars arrived in late September 1914. The armour used was 4mm of nickel steel backed by oak which gave much better performance than the boiler plate without adding too much weight; the special curved panels were made by Beardmores of Glasgow. Twenty-one Clement Talbot cars were also converted late in 1914 to bring the total in service to sixty. As well as this, a number of AEC ‘armoured’ lorries were made to allow some of the ageing Royal Marine reservist riflemen to accompany the cars, with about a dozen in the rear of each lorry who could fire through loopholes in the plate, which as before was boiler plate from the same French company. This force was known as the RN Armoured Car Section, later Division (RNACD); eventually twelve squadrons using the ‘Rollers’ as well as eight others formed using other types.

The Royal Navy Air Service (RNAS) has a claim to have started armoured fighting vehicle development in Britain, by adapting motor car chassis to become the nation’s first armoured cars.

However, by the end of the year, three models of a much-improved design known as the Rolls-Royce Admiralty Pattern 1914 had been built based upon the 40/50hp Silver Ghost Continental (sometimes referred to as Alpine) chassis model, and by the summer of 1915 sufficient were in service along with numbers of a Wolseley design, to equip four RNAS squadrons for service in France, each of up to fifteen cars – on paper, at least.² The 3½-ton Rolls-Royce armoured cars were well-protected and featured a revolving turret (with 8mm of armoured steel) mounting a single water-cooled .303in Maxim (later Vickers) machine gun.³ The turret was only supported by three rollers, meaning that it was easily dislodged if the car overturned, a not-unlikely occurrence.⁴ Building the armour onto the chassis was actually made easier by the fact that in the period Rolls-Royce only built the chassis and engine, allowing a number of selected coachbuilders to finish the car off to the customer’s requirements; the main modifications required for military use were to strengthen the suspension and fit two rims on each side of the rear axle, to account for the increase in weight. The crew of three were the driver, the co-driver who sat beside the driver on the move but helped feed ammunition when in action, and the commander who was also the gunner. The driver had no conventional seat but sat on a hard squab called the biscuit. His back was supported by a wide webbing strap that was clipped into the instrumental panel by quick-release hooks. Sub Lieutenant Gibbs RN, one of the car commanders, later wrote that ‘the officer personnel was chosen from the same type as those required for pilots and observers, and the junior officers were considered to be interchangeable as observers in aircraft’.

Despite the hasty design with some faults – the cars were uncomfortable to travel in, and when firing, the hot cartridge cases would cascade all over the driver, some inevitably ending up going down his collar and inside his shirt – these vehicles proved to be nothing less than excellent, seeing action not only in France but later in far-flung campaigns including Palestine and even Russia, and development work post-war saw the basic design improved upon. Although many rivals were produced, the Rolls-Royce was to remain the pre-eminent armoured car of the British forces for three decades, seeing service not only between the wars, but also, as we shall see, in the first half of the Second World War. Elsewhere, No. 1 Squadron RNAS went to German South-West Africa from April until July 1915, with twelve Rolls-Royces. At the end of the conflict the majority returned home but four of the cars were then diverted to East Africa, where they served under the new designation of 10th (RN) Armoured Motor Battery, before being transferred to Egypt in January 1917 and then disbanded. No. 2 Squadron was moved from France to Egypt in early 1916. Nos 3 and 4 Squadrons were also sent to Egypt, arriving there in March and April 1915 respectively; it was these two squadrons that each sent a section of four cars to Gallipoli, where they saw little or no effective use due to the nature of the campaign; eventually their MGs were dismounted and used in the traditional manner.

As well as the Rolls-Royce and other designs based on car chassis, the RN also developed heavier types; initially these were based upon the chassis of either a Seabrook or a Pierce-Arrow lorry and mounted a 3-pounder gun. These could be allocated to support the lighter cars or grouped together to form a harder hitting unit, but as they were not well armoured and lacked cross-country mobility, could only be used in limited circumstances. But despite some fast development work and often aggressive use of the cars, they were not universally popular. As we will see, the Fourth Sea Lord, Lambert, saw them as a side-show, going so far as to say that they were ‘not pulling their proper weight in the war’. As a result of the increasing lack of opportunities for action due to the entrenchment of the armies as well as such criticism, in August and September 1915 the RNACD squadrons in France were all ordered home; the majority if not all of their vehicles remained with the BEF and were subsequently taken over by the army in the shape of the Light Armoured Motor Battery (LAMBs) of the Machine Gun Corps (Motors) – see below. It seems that in total seventy-two RRACs with forty-four other types were handed over. In a final hurrah, in March 1916 for unclear reasons a number of reorganized RNACD squadrons were re-equipped and renamed as Light Armoured Batteries, with Nos 7, 8 and 9 all being sent back to France, but the opportunity for genuine mobile warfare had passed, and they were mainly involved in liaison details supporting the cavalry, on roads of course. All three batteries were once again withdrawn from France by October 1917 – ironically, the month before the Battle of Cambrai, when they could have proved extremely useful, particularly during the first couple of days of the battle when opportunities presented themselves, but which were unable to be exploited.

As well as armoured cars, the RNAS used lorry chassis to carry heavier weapons than the cars could carry – these were in effect the world’s first close-support vehicles.

The contribution of the Royal Navy to armoured car warfare cannot be complete without a brief mention of the exploits of one RN officer, Oliver Locker Lampson. He raised his own squadron (No. 15) of the RNACD, but it arrived in France too late to find any useful work. Being hugely personally ambitious, he jumped at the opportunity to take a large unit of three squadrons (re-numbered as 1, 2 and 3) of mainly Lanchester armoured cars supported by five Pierce-Arrow heavy lorries to Russia. Leaving Liverpool in December 1915, his force remained in Russia for over two years, in which time they travelled and fought widely from the very north to the south, returning to the UK in early 1918 when most personnel were transferred to the army.

Enter the Army

The outbreak of war found machine guns few and far between in the British army, with only two guns in each infantry battalion and cavalry regiment. It quickly became apparent that the MG was going to be one of the decisive weapons of the war, making massed formations of infantry and cavalry extremely vulnerable, and if the weapon could be made mobile then it could be even more effective on the battlefield. As a result, in November 1914 the Motor Machine Gun Service (MMGS) was formed.⁵ Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Bradley of the South Wales Borderers and administered by the Royal Artillery, the MMGS comprised patrols using machine guns mounted on motorcycle/sidecar combinations. Royal Enfield, Scott and Clyno combinations were all used, with the latter eventually becoming the preferred type. Eventually eighteen batteries of the MMGS saw action in France, including at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915.

In recognition of the increasing importance of the machine gun in warfare, and due in part to the need to group guns together to multiply the effect, a separate Machine Gun Corps (MGC) was formed at Grantham in October 1915, with cavalry, infantryand motor branches. On formation the latter branch absorbed the MMGS and adopted the title Machine Gun Corps (Motors) and took possession of the vehicles from the recently disbanded RNAS Armoured Car Section. The MGC(M) operated a few Light Car Patrols (LCP, unarmoured car units) as well as forming a number of Light Armoured Motor Batteries which operated the armoured cars in a variety of peripheral theatres. By way of example, Nos 6, 7, 8, 14 and 15 LAMB served in Mesopotamia (Iraq), and only relinquished the armoured car role there in late 1920, formally handing over their task, cars, and some personnel to the Tank Corps on 1 January 1921 and then disbanding. The motor branch continued to use motorcycle combinations in France until 1916, when the batteries there were disbanded; they did continue to see service in Palestine, East Africa and Mesopotamia. The Heavy Section of the MGC formed in March 1916 and was central to the development of the tank, as we are about to see.

An artist’s impression of a Clyno motorcycle combination in action. By the time such vehicles were available, trench warfare had already reduced the options for such mobile action.

Prohemium

By the end of September 1914, the manoeuvre phase of the First World War was all but ended and would not be resumed for nearly four years. As the two sides exchanged less and less powerful blows due in no small part to both combat power and logistic exhaustion, the attempt by the German army to encircle Paris ground to a halt in the face of stiff resistance by the French and British armies. The small but all-professional British Expeditionary Force of BEF had stood up well to German numerical superiority at Mons in late August, and had then begun the so-called Retreat from Mons, in fact an exhausting but well-conducted fighting withdrawal that was in part caused by the need to conform to the retreat of the much larger French Fifth Army. Although II Corps was defeated at Le Cateau when attempting a delaying action, the BEF conducted the withdrawal in remarkably good order. In mid-October, the First Battle of Ypres finally prevented the Germans from reaching the Channel coast at Calais and Dunkirk, and both sides started to dig trenches in earnest. Initially this was no more than a series of individual and small group fire positions, but quickly they became connected, eventually becoming the enormous and complicated network that stretched from the Channel to Switzerland.

The use of trenches in warfare was nothing new. Medieval warfare made extensive use of saps during siege operations and, in more recent times, trench systems had been widely employed during the American Civil War, in the South African (Second Boer) War and, most recently, during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Some observers had detected in this a trend of entrenchment that was in itself a reaction to the increasing firepower produced by modern rifle, artillery and most importantly machine-gun (MG) weapons; Jan Bloch, a Polish banker and part-time military theorist, predicted the next war in 1898, stating that:

Everybody will be entrenched in the next war. It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle. The first thing every man will have to do, if he cares for his life at all, will be to dig a hole in the ground. War, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army is able to get at the other, threatening each other, but never being able to deliver a final and decisive attack.⁶

Despite the well-known history of such defensive works, no one had really considered the effect that such methods could have on tactics if taken to extremes, with trenches possessing great depth, and protected by barbed wire, strongpoints, artillery concentrations and, once again and most importantly, massed machine guns. In 1914 the BEF had gone to war with only two machine guns per infantry battalion. The Germans, partly as a result of being invited to witness a British MG demonstration ten years before, had seen more potential in their use than their hosts, and went to war with three times as many per battalion as the BEF. The German MG08 was capable of firing a near continuous stream of up to 500 rounds per minute over long ranges; they made good use of the technique of grouping numbers of guns together in order to concentrate firepower into specific killing zones, which greatly enhanced the effect. Later in the war the importance of the weapon in defence was again recognized when each German battalion was equipped with up to twenty-four guns, or six per company, and these MGs typically consumed about 90 per cent of the German rifle-calibre ammunition requirements.⁷

Therefore, the war which had started as a war of mobility had become a war of entrenchment, with three key obstacles preventing an Allied advance to regain the territory held by the Germans: machine guns, massed artillery and barbed wire entanglements. A fourth obstacle was created by the increasing reliance placed on defence in depth by the Germans, leading to the need to not only break in to a trench system, but also to break through before the ultimate aim, the break out, could be realized. In short, the use of engineering technology to enhance the power of the defence could not be defeated by conventional military means or tactics. An engineering problem required an engineering solution.

The use of body armour was considered by the British over the next two years, with the intention of armouring individual infantrymen with what in modern parlance would be called body armour, allowing them to cross no man’s land in order to close with the enemy. Examples included the Portobank Bodyshield of 1915, and the Chemico and Drayfield designs of the following year.⁸ The problem was that the technology of the day was not up to the task, and it proved impossible to give a soldier sufficient sheet metal armour in order to stop a bullet without creating a huge weight burden that robbed him of his mobility. In any case, such armour would only protect the chest, making him vulnerable to being hit elsewhere, and steel helmets were not employed until late in 1915 – and then as a response to the problem of overhead artillery fire, rather than rifle and MG bullets. Steel shields to attach to the rifle were also considered, with one design even predating the start of the war by some twenty years. Not least amongst the objections to such contraptions was the opinion amongst many commanders that the wearing of armour somehow represented a loss of courage and even manliness; the same argument later found favour in the Royal Flying Corps regarding the use of parachutes. Even as late as 1917, one year after tanks had first seen action, a proposal was made to create a man-powered armoured body cover, in which a prone soldier was meant to manually propel an armoured shell that completely encased his upper body, and which rested on an axle with two wheels. How on earth this was meant to take place over shell-damaged ground or through barbed wire was not explained, and nor was the inevitable exhaustion that would quickly follow such an attempt. In late 1914, whilst most generals persevered with attempts to break the stalemate by frontal assaults or variations thereof, other minds were seeking more innovative solutions.

In a display of initiative that can only be labelled as unusual, in August 1915 a committee was established by the Inventions Department of the newly created Ministry of Munitions to consider suggestions from the public; in the first year of existence, it received over 20,000. This followed the first twelve months of the war in which the War Office had been inundated with new and bright ideas, including ten or twelve for powered machines to destroy trenches. The ideas included both rollers and cutters to deal with barbed wire, water pressure hoses to destroy trenches and sandbags, and massive mobile forts, bristling with guns and containing as many as 200 infantrymen, a sort of modern Trojan Horse without the deception. None were practical.⁹ Maurice Hankey, the influential Secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence (CID), noted acidly that ‘for the most part the bright ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not bright’.

Conception

What happened next – the conception of the tank – is well-documented and yet still remains slightly unclear, as after the war many people came forward claiming that they were the inventor of the tank, and the story is difficult to tell in a linear fashion. In truth, success has many fathers and so it was with the tank. There were to be many irrational suggestions, false starts and dead ends before the first tank was produced in an amazingly short time – but which could have been shortened, as we shall see. The tale also jumps between the War Office and the Admiralty, as both were involved but were reluctant to