The Devil's Chariots

by John Glanfield

  I was not altogether satisfied that the subject was being handled by strong enough elements and by strong enough personalities in the Armoured Car Division. I thought it was absolutely necessary to break new ground… Commodore Sueter… knew what was in my mind and the sort of thing I was trying to get done. He was a very energetic officer doing his best to meet my wishes in every respect, but he failed altogether to solve the mechanical difficulties connected with the production of tanks. He failed to find anyone who could solve them. It was because of this that … I turned to Sir Tennyson d’Eyncourt.22

  The hard-pressed Director of Naval Construction was about to find himself heading a landships project.

  5.

  THE SILENT SERVICE

  ‘How are our landships to be used if not by the Naval Brigade?’1

  Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, Chairman of the Landships Committee, 30 April 1915

  Col Crompton was stalled in a personal battle with the War Office. He had been trying since June 1914 to alert the army to the need for cross-country motor vehicles, but his shots were bouncing off closed minds. The 69-year-old steam haulage veteran was by then a leading voice in transport circles. He had been Vice President of the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland, now the RAC, in 1903 (when he had suffered the mirth of fellow members on being fined £3 for exceeding 12mph at Surbiton). After leaving the MTC in 1905 Crompton became the first President of the Institution of Automobile Engineers and Chairman of the Commercial Motor Users Association. His commercial ventures included the first contract spraying of British roads with gas tar, and his experiments with road dust inhibition and surfacing had led the government to create the Road Board in 1910 to improve highway construction standards. Crompton was appointed Engineer to the board.

  The army had no off-road motor vehicles save a handful of Hornsby crawlers. Its reliance on good roads for its motor transport was condemned by Crompton as misplaced optimism, but this was a situation of its own making which originated in 1910, when the War Office resolved to create a motor transport reserve. The choice lay between commissioning the design and construction of a fleet of purpose-built vehicles with their associated heavy ongoing costs of maintenance, replacement and development; or taking the cheaper ‘carrot and stick’ alternative of offering a subsidy payment to private hauliers for commercial vehicles which would be liable to requisition in time of war. The WO introduced a subsidy scheme, but it had to accept the fact that the vehicles were built for the less demanding use of commercial operators. The army lacked the funds, as well as the conviction, to develop its own specialist vehicles.

  Crompton now urged a radical change in the design of subsidy vehicles, including the adoption of larger-diameter wheels to cope with rough going. He also wrote that June to Gen Guthrie-Smith, the Director of Artillery, offering to design a chassis mounting for a heavy gun as a self-propelled unit on 6–8ft diameter driving wheels. Crompton waived any fee, proposing instead an honorarium of £500 and his name to be attached to the gun if successful. Six days after Guthrie-Smith wrote declining the offer, Germany invaded Belgium and Britain entered the war.

  After Crompton’s old MTC colleague Col Holden was recalled from retirement and appointed Assistant Director of Transport, Crompton tackled him head-on. They were both members of a small circle of serving and retired officers with expertise and progressive views on motoring matters. This influential group, which included Maj Donohue, orbited in loose formation around Whitehall and the motoring institutions. All three were council members of the Institution of Automobile Engineers. Capt Tulloch of Chilworth Gunpowder was another in that loop, incidentally supporting Crompton for re-election to the IAE council in 1913.

  Crompton repeated his offer to Holden. The colonel was a ‘big wheels’ man but he also wanted the other’s views on chain traction. Holden dismissed it at once, saying he had no time for crawlers because they were susceptible to track damage from stones. It should be remembered, however, that he had been retired and out of touch with new track technology since the days of Hornsby’s nutcracker problem, such as it was. The army still lacked detailed knowledge of Holt’s much superior system, the War Office having denied the MTC a sample machine. Crompton pulled no punches on the central issue. In an uncompromising letter of 7 September 1914 he told Holden:

  At this war crisis it is necessary for everyone … to speak quite plainly irrespective of personal friendships. I cannot keep silent, feeling as I do the grave risks run by our Army of depending only, or principally on supply and ammunition columns composed wholly of small-wheeled motor lorries… As you have for the last twelve years been practically the only mechanical engineer on the Mechanical Transport Committee and have advised that Committee on all technical matters, I am forced to conclude that it is due to your advice that a class of transport has been provided which is certain to fail in bad weather or on broken up roads … you think that mechanical transport is only intended for use on hard roads and that our Army would find such roads everywhere on the Continent… To put it quite plainly to you, I think everyone will hold you responsible as technical adviser to the War Office for the type of wagon that is now in use and you will incur serious responsibility if you ignore what I now tell you is practically certain to take place under existing conditions.2

  Crompton urged Holden to modify the subsidy lorries by repositioning the driving axles above the chassis to allow the fitting of 6ft 3in wheels. He continued to press his case and copied the correspondence to Gen Horace Smith-Dorrien, Commander of 2 Corps in France. Crompton’s experience of Holden’s judgement and a certain lack of drive adds point to Tulloch’s warning a few months later when he cautioned Col Jackson that Holden would obstruct the Swinton/Tulloch scheme, as noted earlier in these pages.

  Crompton had been consulting engineer to the Pedrail Company since 1899 when he tested Bramah Diplock’s first four-wheel-drive steam tractor. Now Diplock showed him his latest tracklayer, the 1-ton Colonial wagon. It impressed the colonel sufficiently to make him consider switching his gun from wheels to Pedrail tracks. He noted in his diary: ‘It has a rather complicated set of double springs arranged between the chainway and the sleepers but runs with extraordinary small rolling friction over long and soft grass … difficulty is Diplock’s arrogance – nothing can be altered.’3 The inventor’s stubbornness and Holden’s rejection of chain traction persuaded Crompton to drop the idea. He later said that after caterpillars had been condemned by the artillery authorities he believed they would only accept the alternative of big wheels.

  After more fruitless lobbying of von Donop and others, an old friend alerted Crompton to Wg Cdr Samson’s road force and its mobility problems. The information came in November from Col Wilfrid Dumble, Crompton’s late adjutant of the Electrical Engineers. A Canadian from Cobourg, Ontario, Dumble had retired from the RE in 1907 to manage the London General Omnibus Company where he remained until 1913. The 43-year-old captain’s war began with a lightning recall, promotion to temporary Colonel of Marines, and attachment to the Royal Naval Division. Four days later he was in France following an urgent appeal for buses in support of Churchill’s naval units in Antwerp. London General supplied the vehicles and nominated Dumble to organize the expedition. He assembled the fleet, recruited their civilian crews and packed the buses with fuel, tools and spares. He and his 70 Associated Equipment Co. (AEC) ‘B’ Types reached Dunkirk on 24 September. Still in their red and white livery and with London destination boards and advertisements, they were the first of the ‘Old Bill’ buses to serve in France in many roles from troop transports to mobile pigeon lofts.

  Following the evacuation of Antwerp Dumble was given command of all RN Divisional transport, remaining at Dunkirk to regroup and repair the 45 surviving buses. He saw Samson’s armoured vehicles struggling on clogged and ruinous roads, and suggested that Crompton with his wide experience of overland transport might find an answer. Dumble was ordered home to enlist the Colonel’s help. (Crompton’s daughter rem
embers Dumble entering their drawing room still covered with Flanders mud and full of his instructions to speak to her father without delay.) The news confirmed Crompton’s fears.

  The two colonels attended William Tritton’s howitzer tractor trials in December. Next day Crompton sent Dumble a paper setting out ‘what I could do to help Admiral Bacon’. He badly wanted to join the party, but Bacon had just set Tritton on a new course of investigation, and in any case Tritton had a long-standing professional grudge against Crompton and would have resisted his inclusion. Crompton’s opportunity came two months later when Dumble joined him at Thriplands, his Kensington home and laboratory, on 15 February 1915. Dumble described Tritton’s bridging machine and asked Crompton’s opinion of it. They discussed Churchill’s instruction – it became a mantra – ‘I want something that will straddle a trench and enfilade it with machine guns, and then you let men out rapidly and you take the trench.’4 Crompton roughed out a scheme before writing on the 19th to Holden’s superior, Brig Gen S.S. Long, Director of Supplies with responsibility for transport, saying that he had completed a design and suggesting a meeting over lunch at the Royal Automobile Club: ‘I would take you away and deliver you safely back at your office after a proper interval for feeding and contemplative smoking accompanied by coffee and my instructive and entertaining conversation.’5

  They never met; Long had other concerns. Crompton recorded the outline design in his diary. His 24-ton machine would attack the enemy trench head on, driving half over the parapet to overhang it while machine guns in turrets raked the trench to either side before a storming party descended from a floor trap to mop up and hold the cleared section. He would take one of Tritton’s howitzer tractors or an equivalent from agricultural engineers Marshall’s of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, and greatly extend its 12ft length fore and aft to provide a platform 36ft long and 11ft wide. The fully enclosed armoured hull would house 48 fighting men and a crew of two. The 8ft driving wheels would be widened to 3ft and the smaller steered wheels to 2ft.6

  Like Swinton, Crompton wanted to adapt an existing machine to avoid long delay, but his design raised irreconcilable problems of stability and ground clearance. Churchill’s tactics required a substantial raiding party to be carried inside the machine. Crompton had to create 250sq ft of floor space for them alone, plus provision for machinery, armament, ammunition, fuel and crew. He needed a low centre of gravity for stability and a reduced hull profile against artillery fire. All this was achievable only as a trade-off with ground clearance beneath the vastly cantilevered platform extensions. The wheels lay so far back that with only 18in of clearance the machine would have grounded on inclines greater than 1 in 8, the equivalent of a wheelchair ramp. This weakness was recognized in Crompton’s suggested attack procedure:

  Points in our own trenches must be … bridged or filled … a route selected and levelled, shell holes filled etc. by using this armoured fort for the work, at night time or day time if preferred, up to a point sufficiently near the enemy’s trenches. After dark the fort will be manned by the garrison – machine gun, riflemen and working party. It will advance over the prepared ground and finally cautiously over the ground until the overhang of the front projects above the enemy trench so that it is open to machine gun fire. The flooring of the platform will be opened for a party to descend, finish off with the bayonet and then rapidly erect a framed tractor bridge or fill by faggots or similar means. The hauling rope will be carried forward and anchored as far in advance as possible. The hauling gear [winch] put in and the fort moved on.7

  The big machines would be easy targets for German 77s during the preparatory ground levelling. Even by night their noisy activity could be flarelit for the guns. This phase would alert the enemy to an impending attack and even mark the approach route of each carrier. Crompton’s crude design and cruder tactics were suicidal, but they must be set against prevailing circumstances. The range of mechanical solutions was limited by urgency to the handful of machines currently available and to their adaptability to fulfil the tactical brief. If the brief itself ignored these realities, failure was inevitable. Almost nobody at home, in or out of uniform, knew anything of conditions at the front at that stage of the war. It was from this baseline and these conceptions – or misconceptions – that Churchill’s landships venture would have to begin its uncertain progress.

  The landships project was launched from Churchill’s sickbed at 10.30am on Saturday 20 February 1915. Despite his influenza he had summoned five men to his room in the Admiralty building – Tennyson d’Eyncourt his DNC, Col Wilfrid Dumble, Capt Tommy Hetherington, and William Tritton of Foster’s accompanied by a representative from Coventry Ordnance Works, probably J.H. Mansell. Churchill began by telling the contractors that he was cancelling the order for 30 self-bridging sets (which he had placed the previous Saturday), leaving only the experimental machine to be completed.8 Tritton and Mansell then departed.

  Churchill turned to Hetherington’s scheme and discussed it at length with d’Eyncourt. The DNC was sceptical but Churchill appealed to him to apply the unique resources and experience of his ship construction department to the problem. D’Eyncourt, who had been responsible for design of the Royal Sovereign class of battleship and would later design Hood, Nelson and Rodney, was also immersed in the design and construction of naval airships. He could hardly refuse the First Lord’s entreaties, however, and was appointed President of a three-man Landships Committee with Dumble and Hetherington. The Canadian’s experience of managing London’s largest bus fleet and his contacts in the motor industry had impressed Churchill as much as his breakneck organization of the Antwerp expedition’s transport.

  Hetherington was obviously an imaginative live wire and the DNC was utterly bankable. The committee’s needs would be serviced by Murray Sueter’s Air Department, but d’Eyncourt would report directly to the First Lord. On their way out Hetherington asked Dumble if he could identify a leading authority on heavy traction. Dumble at once named Crompton, and the three met that afternoon at Dumble’s flat in Sackville Street where Crompton agreed to attend the first meeting the following Monday.

  In seven days of sometimes surreal activity Churchill had ordered and then cancelled Tritton’s bridge-layers, inspected and rejected a novel track system together with Sueter’s 25-ton machine, and instead approved Hetherington’s proposal for a 300-ton gunship on 40ft wheels. The army’s Holt trials had failed and any further interest from that quarter had died with it. Finally, the navy’s master shipbuilder had been talked into a seemingly impossible commitment to produce a fleet of landships.

  Wary of Kitchener’s wrath if he discovered yet another attempt by Churchill to expand his ‘circus’, the First Lord did not inform the War Office or, indeed, the Board of Admiralty. He knew of von Donop’s decision to cease military experiments with chaintracks. He also knew that if word of his initiative got out the War Office would block it, tacitly supported by most of his own Sea Lords. Churchill resolved to lie low until a machine was ready for demonstration. Crucially, the Treasury must not get wind of it: ‘I feared that they would in the ordinary course ask the War Office their opinion on the expenditure and I apprehended that the answer would be that the expenditure would not be useful to the Army, and that in any case it was not a matter for the Admiralty or for the First Lord.’9 Perhaps wisely, Churchill struck out this sentence when, as Secretary of State for War in 1919, he was drafting his statement of these events for the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors.

  The committee first met on Monday 22 February in d’Eyncourt’s office. He was joined by Dumble, Hetherington, Crompton and Macfie, the Holt enthusiast. Hetherington’s giant three-wheeler was first considered. The respective merits of wheels and tracks were next examined at much length. Crompton, who confirmed that he had little knowledge of American tracklayers, was so impressed by Macfie’s account of caterpillar haulage in the US that he decided to switch to tracks for his machine. He noted in his diary that d’Eyncourt
favoured ‘moderate wheels’.

  Crompton tabled a slightly revised design of the wheeled fort which he had wanted to show Gen Long, Director of Supplies. He dropped all reference to preparing a path before an attack. An interesting proposal was added for winching the machine forward over bad ground under fire: from a powered cable drum behind the engine a wire rope was taken back as far as possible over the rear platform before passing through sheaves and being led forward beneath the machine to an anchor. The machine would winch itself forward almost its own length before the crab-like cycle was repeated, the anchor being repositioned by the crew each time from inside the hull. Rollers beneath the forward platform would ensure the anchor’s flukes bit into the ground. A double set of winding gear could provide continuous ‘drive’. Width was increased to 13ft and weight was cut to 23 tons. The hull would be clad in 8mm chrome steel. For transport on ship and rail the machine could be broken down for re-erection in six hours.10 An alternative 126-ton superheavy version would carry 5in armour, proof against field artillery, with an increase in width to 18ft. It would require five times the power of the lighter machine with its single Daimler 105hp engine.

  The committee decided at first to build two small models – one wheeled, the other tracked, to determine which system should be adopted. Before the meeting ended these were scaled up to 25-ton machines to carry 50 men. Tritton would build the wheeled version based on his howitzer tractor (to be designated Self-Moving Cupola Type ‘A’), while a lightly armoured crawler version of Crompton’s design (Type ‘B’) was to be produced by a specialist in chain traction. Crompton’s 126-tonner was noted (Type ‘C’). Churchill approved, minuting ‘As proposed & with all despatch.’11