In August, construction of a prototype at last began at Fosters in Lincoln under the guiding hands of William Ashbee Tritton, the managing director, and engineer Major Walter Wilson, who was appointed overseer. More examples of tracked vehicles were brought over from America, and Tritton and Wilson made an inspired decision that the tracks should pass all the way around the body of the vehicle. In repeated trials the tracks kept breaking off and failed to work; if they could not be made to function, the whole project would fail. But the team working on the design were determined to succeed. Eventually, years of experience in solving mechanical problems enabled Tritton and Wilson to invent tracks that did finally work. They came up with pressed steel tracks riveted to heavy-duty castings that linked the track in a continuous loop.7 It was at last the crucial technical breakthrough.
Finally, in December 1915, the first version of the device, nicknamed ‘Mother’, was demonstrated in Lincoln. Swinton, Stern, d’Eyncourt and many of those who had been working on the project for nearly a year were delighted with what they saw. The machine consisted of a large steel girder frame with armour plating riveted to it, thicker at the front than at the sides. The idea of a gunned turret had been abandoned and 61b naval guns were fixed in sponsons on the side of the vehicle. Two sets of tracks, nearly two feet wide, went around the whole frame. ‘Mother’ was powered by a 13.5 litre, 105 hp Daimler-Knight petrol engine. The exhaust was directed up through the roof, but the small cabin area was both extremely noisy and dreadfully hot as every member of the crew was only a few feet away from the massive engine. Moreover, the petrol was stored in two tanks inside the vehicle, making it a highly dangerous place to be when under enemy fire. ‘Mother’ was 31ft long, nearly 14ft wide and 8ft high. The driver steered it via two tail wheels attached to the rear. It needed a crew of eight. There was some discussion as to what to call the machine. As its existence was top secret it had to be given a name that would not attract attention when it was transported around the country. Observers felt it looked a bit like a water carrier but Stern did not want to be known as secretary to the WC Committee, so someone came up with a more generic name, the ‘tank’. It stuck.
On 2 February 1916 the new ‘tank’ was shown off to a group of VIPs including the First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, the Minister of Munitions, Lloyd George, and the Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener. It passed through a variety of obstacles, traversed shell holes and crossed an imagined trench. Bouncing about slowly but heavily, it met the two main conditions of being able to climb a vertical face five feet high and cross a ditch eight feet wide. Everyone seemed impressed and an immediate order for forty of the machines was placed. Only Kitchener was unconvinced. As he left he was heard to say that the war would never be won by such ‘pretty mechanical toys’.8
Despite Kitchener’s scepticism, the next stage of the development of the tank progressed relatively smoothly. A range of companies around Britain started to manufacture tanks, and the nickname slipped into more general use. Before long the order was increased to 150, while Swinton was put in charge of managing supply and organisation. There was now a need to train commanders and crews for the new fighting vehicles. A unit was created called the Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps and men were drafted into it from across the army. Training took place in conditions of great secrecy on a private landed estate at Thetford in Norfolk. Armed guards were placed around the estate to keep observers out. There was a shortage of naval guns, so only half of the tanks were armed with the 61b cannons; the other half were fitted with a Vickers machine gun on either side. Starting to think about how the new machines should be used, Swinton wrote a paper calling for the use of massed tank formations on largely dry ground. He came up with detailed instructions for the tank captains on how to operate their vehicles. But everything was beginning to move at such high speed that most commanders barely had time to read the new guide. In mid-August the first tanks were sent to France covered with massive tarpaulins so as not to reveal what they were. The crews that went with them had only spent eight weeks in training for this entirely new form of warfare.
In July 1916, Sir Douglas Haig, promoted to commander-in-chief of the British Army on the Western Front, launched his ‘Big Push’ on the Somme to help relieve the French at Verdun. After five days of intense artillery bombardment, tens of thousands of men went ‘over the top’ on the morning of 1 July. Most were from what was called the New Army, formed out of the volunteers who had responded to Kitchener’s appeal to do their bit for king and country at the beginning of the war. Army commanders thought the recruits would not be up to much and so ordered them to advance at walking pace in long lines across no man’s land. They thus proved easy targets for the German machine gunners, most of whom had survived the artillery bombardment by sheltering in bunkers dug deep in the chalk landscape. The opening of the attack turned into nothing less than a massacre. On the first day, the army suffered 57,000 casualties, including 19,000 deaths. Some battalions in the first wave were almost completely wiped out. Organised as they often were into groups of men from a single locality – the so-called ‘Pals’ Battalions’ – streets and sometimes whole towns across Britain and Ireland went into mourning. It was by far the worst day in the history of the British Army.
Haig wanted to use his new weapon as soon as he could. He grew as excited about the potential of the tank to achieve a breakthrough, as he had been about the use of poison gas at the Battle of Loos: ‘I hope and think they will add very greatly to the prospects of success and to the extent of it,’ he wrote to the Chief of the Imperial, General Staff on 22 August.9 He put great pressure on Swinton to get the tanks to the Somme as soon as possible, but there were very few available, and even fewer trained crews. Those that assembled in France became the centre of immense attention as literally hundreds of officers took time out to visit them and quiz their crews about how they worked.
The tanks were rushed into action in one of the later phases of the Battle of the Somme. At 6 a.m. on 15 September, they went into combat for the first time near the village of Flers. Only forty-nine tanks were ready for action that day, not enough to make much difference even if they had all performed magnificently. As it was, seventeen broke down or failed to reach their starting positions, while the remaining thirty-two rumbled forward as best they could.
They still had a ‘shattering effect’ on the front-line German troops. According to one German regimental history, the men ‘felt quite powerless against these monsters which crawled along the top of the trench enfilading it with continuous machine gun fire’.10 However, if there had been little time to train the tank crews, there had been even less to co-ordinate their use with the infantry. Everyone seemed to expect miracles. But they were disappointed. Not only did the crews struggle with the noise and clatter of their own machines, but for the first time they had to navigate across a shell-pitted battlefield and stand up to hostile enemy gunfire.
The tanks headed off twenty minutes ahead of the infantry. Nine did creditably well and dealt with the obstacles they encountered. Nine more made some progress, if so slowly that the infantry soon overtook them. The other fourteen broke down during the advance or became stranded in shell holes or trenches. Many tanks were hit by enemy fire, although most of them survived and managed to limp home. Ten were abandoned on the battlefield, remaining there as rusting hulks for the rest of the war. It was hardly the revolution that the enthusiastic proponents of this new arm of warfare had expected.
Haig and the army high command have frequently been criticised for throwing away the advantage of surprise by using this new military technology for the first time in such a limited way.11 There were definitely too few vehicles available, tools for maintenance were inadequate, the crews were not well enough trained and no one had worked out effective tactics. Swinton was deeply opposed to their use in September 1916, regarding it as premature. However, the fact was that Haig could equally well have been criticised if he had failed to use this new machine of
war when it became available to him, during one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war. And once they arrived in France, it would have been very difficult to keep their existence a secret for long. There would always have to be a first use, and the Battle of the Somme was not a bad opportunity to try for a breakthrough. The real criticism is that the military authorities had failed to perceive the need for a new machine capable of advancing across terrain dominated by the concentrated firepower of the enemy’s artillery and machine guns. It was not the tank’s initial failure to shift the balance of the battlefield from defender to attacker that was the problem. It was the delay in getting such a machine into use at all.
Haig at least was not downhearted with the performance of the tanks. He placed an order for a further 1000 machines. Others were less impressed, a memo from GHQ in October concluding that ‘in the present stage of their development’ the tank was to be regarded as no more than ‘an accessory to the ordinary method of attack’.12 Lessons were however learned from battlefield experience and improvements were made. The next generation of tanks were manufactured with thicker armour and more powerful engines. The pair of tail wheels were abandoned and the tank was steered by varying the speed of the tracks. The Vickers machine guns were replaced with lighter Lewis guns. A new training ground was established on sandy heathland at Bovington in Dorset to train the thousands of men needed to crew and maintain the tanks. In July 1917, a new formation, the Tank Corps, was created and tank crews began to develop their own esprit de corps. However, the weeks that followed marked the lowest point in the use of tanks.
During the Third Battle of Ypres, better known as Passchendaele, which opened on 31 July, immense artillery barrages turned the fields of Flanders into seas of mud. The water table in this region of reclaimed swampland was always high and men and machines faced the horror of drowning in the mud. Many tanks, weighing 28 tons, simply sank in the quagmire. Everywhere movement slowed to a snail’s pace; at one point it took a group of tanks nine hours to cover a single mile. Passchendaele proved to be a tragic disaster. Nearly half a million British soldiers were killed, wounded or posted as missing. But the battle strengthened the case of those opposed to the use of the tank. If tanks could not operate in the real conditions of war, it was argued, then they were simply of no value.
The opportunity for the tank to show what was really possible came in the month following the end of the battle of Passchendaele. An original proposal by a staff officer in the Tank Corps, Colonel J. Fuller, for a series of tank raids was developed into a plan for a full offensive which was launched along a six-mile front at Cambrai on 20 November 1917. This time, the choice of well-drained, dry chalklands meant the terrain was at last right for armoured vehicles. Three hundred and seventy-eight tanks were assembled and readied for combat. In addition there were grapnel tanks for destroying swathes of barbed wire, supply tanks, bridging tanks and gun carriers, all manufactured in factories across England. At last the number of tanks and trained crews available had reached the level at which something resembling a massed attack could take place.
Cambrai was not just a tank battle, it was a full scale artillery-infantry offensive as well.13 However, this time the artillery adopted new tactics. With the extensive use of sound ranging and aerial reconnaissance to identify the major German gun positions, a brief artillery bombardment of only about ten minutes took place before the assault began and the gunners then adopted a ‘rolling’ or a ‘creeping’ barrage, moving forward at an agreed rate just in front of the advancing troops. The first day saw remarkable progress against German trenches that formed part of the Hindenburg Line. At times the advance was so rapid that the tanks had to halt to avoid driving into the rolling barrage. By the end of the first day, tanks and infantry had penetrated up to four miles and had passed through the first, second and third German defensive lines. The casualty rate was less than half that of a day’s average losses at Passchendaele, and the distance advanced was beyond that gained in three months in Flanders. Church bells rang in Britain to celebrate the victory.
As so often on the Western Front, however, insufficient reserves were available to exploit an early advantage and the enemy recovered quickly. Cavalry troops tentatively moved into one of the gaps in the German lines but soon withdrew when they came up against machine guns. The Germans, who had had more than a year to refine their anti-tank tactics, used artillery very effectively against the British behemoths. One lone gunner is supposed to have taken out nine tanks.
Within a few days the British offensive had stalled. More than 250 tanks were out of action, roughly one-third due to enemy action and the rest as a result of mechanical breakdowns or because they had just got stuck. After more than a week of intense fighting, the tank crews were exhausted. On 30 November, the Germans counterattacked in force, using small groups of stormtroopers to lead the assault after a brief, concentrated artillery bombardment – a tactic developed on the Eastern Front. By 7 December they had retaken most of the British-occupied ground, and when the fighting stopped the lines ended up pretty much where they had started. But Cambrai had shown that new tactics by both sides could work – with the artillery’s creeping barrage, the use of stormtroopers and of course the use of tanks to crush heavily defended positions. Many of these tactics would be used again effectively in the following twelve months. The Battle of Cambrai had hinted at what was possible, but the real heyday of the tank came in the latter stages of the conflict, if only after the most serious Allied reversal of the war.
After the 1917 Revolution in Russia, a peace treaty was negotiated with the Bolsheviks. In that same year America entered the war. The Germans rushed troops from the East to the Western Front, sending west forty-four divisions, three-quarters of a million soldiers, during the course of the winter. On 21 March, General Erich Ludendorff, the joint commander-in-chief of German forces since Falkenhayn’s resignation in the summer of 1916, launched a huge offensive on the Somme. The Germans soon recaptured all the ground the Allies had gained so painfully in 1916. On 28 March, when the Germans attacked at Arras, the British line held. And when Ludendorff attacked in Flanders on 9 April, British generals were forced to abandon Passchendaele, taken at such cost the previous summer. The British Army lost 100,000 men killed or captured within a few weeks, and Field Marshal Haig, usually so calm and unflappable, came near to panic. On 12 April he issued his famous Order of the Day: ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight to the end.’14 Even as he wrote the words, he began to prepare for a British withdrawal to the Channel ports.
In the midst of the crisis, Marshal Foch was appointed overall Allied commander-in-chief, with the French, British and American armies reporting to him. On 27 May, Ludendorff attacked in the south along the Aisne river. His troops advanced ten miles in a single day. Soon the Germans were at the river Marne, as far as they had reached in 1914. Their long-range Big Bertha howitzers shelled Paris, barely more than forty miles away. On 15 July, they attacked near Rheims in the Champagne district. At each point of the Germans’ assault the Allied lines had fallen back. But nowhere had they completely broken. Just as Allied generals had found in 1915, 1916 and 1917, Ludendorff now discovered it was possible to make initial advances but nearly impossible to exploit the advantage. By the mid-summer of 1918 there were a series of salients where the German lines protruded into the Allied defences.
Then, on 18 July, as the German advance slowly ran out of steam, the French army launched a counterattack. Massive Allied reserves that Foch had held back were thrown into battle. On 8 August Haig attacked in the north at Amiens. The lessons of Cambrai had been learned. There was only a brief bombardment and 456 tanks were deployed. Haig’s troops advanced six miles in a day. It was the turning point. Ludendorff later described 8 August as ‘the black day of the German army’. The French army attacked in the centre on 10 August and again on 17 August, while the British launched a further attack at the end of the month. And on 12 Septe
mber the American army attacked for the first time in the war as an independent force, overwhelming a German salient at St Mihiel.
For its last months the war became, once again, one of movement. But this time it was thanks to a combination of science, technology and new tactics. Tanks made giant mechanised thrusts to punch their way through enemy lines. Once they had broken through in one place, they attacked in another. Rolling artillery barrages kept moving forwards just in front of the advancing troops. Aircraft flew thousands of sorties in support of the troops on the ground. The Ministry of Munitions oversaw the production of vast numbers of shells, machine guns, artillery pieces and tanks, more than enough to replace the losses suffered earlier in the year. By force of arms and the triumph of science, the huge British Army, the biggest ever sent into battle, along with the French, Canadians, Australians and Americans, forced the German army in the field into a full-scale retreat. In early November the Germans sought an armistice, and on 11 November the guns fell silent. Ludendorff blamed his defeat not on the Allied generals but on ‘General Tank’.
The British had not been alone in developing tanks during the First World War. The French had simultaneously developed their own armoured vehicles but, having had little luck with their ‘heavies’ in the offensives of 1917, they changed policy and built for 1918 much smaller and lighter two-man Renault tanks, fitted with a rotating turret and a 37mm gun. The Germans had tried to design and construct their own tanks from the beginning of 1917 but progress was desperately slow. The fifty British tanks they captured in the counterattack at Cambrai amounted to more than their own manufacturers had built by that time. And of course, in describing the tank, it must be remembered that the principal objective of these slow-moving, heavy monsters was to cross no man’s land, break through barbed wire entanglements, destroy machine guns and penetrate the enemy’s fortified defences. They were very different from the fast-moving tanks of the Second World War with their increased firepower and tremendous manoeuvrability. The concept of Blitzkrieg or lightning war led by mobile panzer groups was still twenty years in the future.
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