MS [Military Secretary] through AG [Adjutant General]
Will you take up the question of disposing of this officer…
DCIGS [Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff] Gen Whigham
AG
The normal procedure would be to transfer him to the General List. Will this meet the case?
12.3.18 [signature indecipherable]
MS
What we want is to get him out of uniform – will your proposal do this?
14.3.18. [Gen Whigham]
DCIGS
No it will not. People at the Ministry of Munitions who hold commissions of any sort are allowed to wear uniform.
18.3.18. [indecipherable]
S. of S. [Secretary of State for War]
Do you agree to Col Stern being transferred to the General List?
20.3.18. [Gen Whigham]
If we can’t take him out of uniform there is not much object in making any change. The matter had better remain in abeyance for present. 21.3. 18 [Lord Derby].15
Stern called for the War Cabinet to appoint a special Council immediately to get a grip on the tank supply situation. He had warned in February that:
Unless a decision [on the 1918/19 programme] is taken in the very near future, say within two months at the latest, the chances of an overwhelming Allied Mechanical Army for 1919 will be frittered away and our superiority over the enemy in this arm lost for this war. Unless factories for the necessary guns and machine guns are immediately provided, a 1919 programme on a large scale will be outside the bounds of possibility.16
Lloyd George promised Stern that he would call a meeting of the War Cabinet if any group of ministers supported it and let him submit his views. Stern used political contacts to invite the Labour ministers of the coalition to see and hear about the tanks. They were duly impressed, promising to secure a War Cabinet meeting and to urge the building of tanks to the full capacity of the country. The meeting took place on 8 March. Churchill shrewdly circulated a paper two days before which quoted intelligence reports from prisoner interrogations suggesting that Germany was building tanks in quantity. He included Moore’s estimate that if the enemy had begun preparation of drawings on 1 January, they could have completed construction of 400 tanks by 1 August. Stern and d’Eyncourt attended the meeting, at which Churchill presented his vision for 1919 of 200,000 fighting men sweeping forward 10 miles in a day in an armoured armada of fighting tanks, personnel carriers, chasers, wire crushers, etc. He went on:
The resources are available, the knowledge is available, the time is available, the result is certain: nothing is lacking except the will… We have instead only carried out a series of costly experiments, each of which has shown us the chance we have lost and exposed our thought to the enemy. It surely lies with those who shake their heads to say on what alternative method of attack or on what alternative form of superiority they can rely to win a military victory in 1919… If there is an alternative plan let us have it. If not, let this one have its fair chance.17
Churchill carried the meeting with him, winning approval to jump-start an extended tank programme by drawing 1,500 tons of steel per week from the 80,000 tons held as Admiralty reserve. He was authorized to increase production from 3,400 tanks to 4,559 machines between February 1918 and March 1919, precisely as he had planned. The civilian pioneers and politicians were now imposing tank numbers on the army. It was a significant victory for Churchill and Stern, but the knives were out. When the meeting broke up Lord Derby, Gen Sir Henry Wilson (the new CIGS), Capper and Duckham met to plot Stern’s removal from uniform.
Within days of the decision to gear up production, GHQ exploded a demolition charge. Haig ordered a reduction of the Tank Corps from six to four brigades and the transfer to the infantry of some 2,600 trained tank personnel already in France. As the Corps was not yet up to establishment the affect of this severe reduction was all the greater. Elles threw up a series of quibbling points of order and successfully stalled its implementation. One might conclude that the C-in-C was bringing pressure to bear on a reluctant War Cabinet to release more men for the killing fields. Either that or he was losing his reason.
Elles and his senior officers were already fuming at the inadequacies of tank supply and the laissez faire attitude at GHQ. Fuller, the thinking soldier’s soldier, had sent Churchill a very frank confidential memorandum shortly before the War Council meeting of 8 March. He spoke for all at Bermicourt:
The three main difficulties which confront us are:
1. GHQ is inert and will lay down no policy.
2. No efficient higher organisation exists in the Tank Corps.
3. Design and production are not assured.
As regards ‘1’ I am of opinion that it is sheer waste of time to continue attempting to convince the Inconvincibles. It is like trying to teach a Kaffir the integral calculus. Let us cease this folly. The firing line appreciates our value, so do the higher civilians at home, but these two are separated by a missing link – GHQ. If no suitable link can be found to fill the gap, then we must shorten up the chain by welding the civilian to the firing line. This means that the Cabinet must decide on the 1919 Tank policy, whether GHQ likes it or not.
As regards ‘2’ the present tank organisation is monstrous. It has three heads but no single controlling brain…
(a) General Capper works under the War Office.
(b) General Elles works under GHQ.
(c) Admiral Moore works under the Ministry of Munitions.
We want a Director General, one head, for preference a civilian unshackled by 1870 tactics, who has direct access to the War Office, GHQ and the Ministry of Munitions… The Headquarters Tank Corps in London to be done away with, and replaced by a General Staff Officer and an Administrative Officer at the War Office.
As regards ‘3’ we are now faced by a race for tank supremacy… This problem is a twofold one – design and production. Design requires a man who knows what we in France want. Production requires a man who is an expert in production.18
Fuller nominated Col Frank Searle as the only possible man to control design and production, which he said was the pivotal and most immediate requirement. He emphasized that he wrote for Elles as much as for himself – Elles would be in a more difficult position had the letter come from him. Churchill replied with an assurance that ‘production will carry all before it’, but that he could not make the personnel changes requested. Churchill was powerless to help on the first two points. He was not a member of the War Cabinet and his views outside munitions production were not welcomed by the Army Council.
The continuing failure of the staff at GHQ to formulate a policy for tanks was unforgivable. As late as 10 June 1918 Haig’s CGS told Capper that the General Staff could not lay down its performance requirements for future tanks because ‘the role of the tank is not yet definitely fixed’.19 So far as the tank weapon was concerned, another year was drifting by with no firm hand on the tiller in France. Meanwhile, the Armies bled.
The German offensive opened on 21 March 1918 in the British sector along a frontage of 43 miles. Ludendorff’s 63 divisions were supported by some 4,000 guns which had been brought up under concealment to shoot a pre-dawn hurricane of fire without prior registration. The onslaught struck the 14 divisions of Byng’s Third Army and 14 more of Gough’s Fifth Army. In the first few days Haig lost over 30 per cent of his infantry in France. The Tank Corps had grown from three to five brigades with 12 battle-ready battalions and others in formation. Knowing what was coming, Haig had earlier decided to treat his tanks as armoured keeps which could be dug into pits from which to emerge to provide defensive fire, a task for which they were totally unsuited. Elles’ advice was ignored and his tanks were thinly spread along a frontage of some 60 miles from Roisel to Bethune. They fought most gallantly, driving back or deflecting the onslaught in many limited actions with heavy loss in crews and tanks. The Germans were fighting to unfamiliar tactics; instead of advancing and digging in to
consolidate gains, pockets of resistance were simply bypassed by highly trained storm troops who led the attack, leaving strongpoints to following troops to clear. The dispersal of the tanks made a concerted armoured counter-punch impossible to organize. GHQ had deployed the machines essentially to stiffen local defences rather than concentrating them in two or three powerful response groups. Byng’s Third Army held the shorter frontage and resisted so effectively that no very serious penetration was made for the first 36 hours. Elements of the much more extended Fifth Army held on until widening breaches forced Gough to fall back behind the Somme on the 23rd, leaving many tanks abandoned for want of petrol or spares. The next day their crews – and the instructional staff of the Tank Driving School at Aveluy – formed Lewis gun teams and fought on. Tanks of the 8th Battalion held off the enemy long enough to enable one of Byng’s divisions to withdraw. Their action was repeated by other tank units that day and the next.
The Medium A Whippets first saw combat on 26 March when 12 machines of the 3rd Battalion were sent from Bray to plug a 4-mile gap in Byng’s front. They met about 300 of the enemy advancing on the village of Colincamps, but the Germans fled in disorder on seeing the strange machines. The Whippets moved on to disperse numerous enemy patrols before withdrawing without loss. They had done well in checking an enveloping movement at the break in the line.
Ludendorff’s wedge had attempted to split the British from the French before rolling them up to the coast and driving them into the sea. Having penetrated over 40 miles across the old Somme battlefields, his offensive outran its supplies. Ludendorff was driven back at Arras and before Amiens. By 4 April it was clear he had failed, but at terrible cost to Haig’s armies. The enemy had taken 80,000 prisoners and captured 975 guns.
The German High Command had accepted the value of armoured fighting tracklayers in November 1916 when a design group was appointed, in the Allegemeine Kriegsdepartement 7, Abteilung Verkehrswesen (General War Department 7, Traffic Section). It had put a Holt tractor through trials and, unlike Scott-Moncrieff’s committee, pressed on to adapt Holt’s system and produce the A7V tank, its name being a contraction of the department’s title. The 45-ton machine was powered by twin Daimler 100hp engines. It had the appearance of an armoured turtle, its high carapace being carried down over the underslung tracks almost to ground level, topped by a small observation turret. A single 5.7cm gun was mounted frontally with six Maxim machine guns distributed about its flanks and rear. One hundred were ordered, though only 20 were built, the first emerging in October 1917. Although it had a higher power to weight ratio than the British tanks and sprung tracks for greater speed, it proved a failure. Its high centre of gravity, fore and aft overhangs and short tracks made the Schwerer Kampfwagen A7V a poor cross-country performer and incapable of crossing trenches. Four A7V tanks and five captured Mk IV machines were employed in the opening phase of the offensive.
The historic first tank vs tank action took place on 24 April at Villers–Brettoneux during a small-scale German attack on a 4-mile front. It was led by 13 A7V tanks which had much the same effect on the defenders as when British tanks appeared at Flers in 1916. The village was taken and the German machines moved on, three of them running into an advancing section of the 1st Battalion, Tank Corps. The single male and two female Mk IV tanks had just been subjected to heavy gas shelling and some crewmen had been helped out and left behind. Capt John Brown MC, the Section Commander, rode in the male machine which was reduced to a crew of five. He dismounted to alert his other tanks and to direct the section on foot for the rest of the action despite the heavy fire, a regular and often lethal procedure for unit leaders.
Moments after engaging the German machines, the two lightly armed females were badly damaged by return fire, withdrawing with large holes in their sides. The remaining Mk IV commanded by Lt Frank Mitchell manoeuvred to present the nearest A7V to his left side gunner, Sgt J.R. McKenzie, who was working the 6-pdr single handed owing to the gas casualties. He himself was half blinded by gas in his right eye and was laying his gun from his left. At this point the tank was raked continuously with machine-gun fire from the A7Vs. An armour-piercing bullet wounded the rear Lewis gunner in both legs. McKenzie, cut about the face by bullet fragments, was firing repeatedly from a heaving platform at a moving target. Mitchell took a chance and halted the tank momentarily. McKenzie got in three direct hits, the German machine running forward out of control down a slight slope and overturning. Its crew baled out to become targets for Mitchell’s machine guns. The two remaining A7Vs turned towards the Mk IV and could have wrecked it with ease, but both were forced to retire under a hail of 6-pdr shell, the crew of one leaving their tank, possibly having stalled it, and fleeing. The victorious Mk IV was crippled later that morning when a shell blew off a track. Mitchell and his crew and John Brown all got back safely to the British trenches. Brown was awarded a bar to his Military Cross, Mitchell received the MC, and McKenzie was awarded the Military Medal.
Nearby, Capt Tommy Price’s detachment of seven Medium A tanks was alerted that morning by a message dropped from a reconnaissance aircraft that two enemy battalions were grouping in a hollow near Cachy. Mitchell saw the Whippets go in at full throttle, their machine guns flaying through some 1,200 panicking storm troops. The machines turned about and continued the attack, three Whippets finally emerging. Only 21 men had killed an estimated 400 of the enemy at the cost of 3 killed, 1 wounded and the loss of 4 tanks.
Two pillars of the War Office hierarchy fell in those closing days of April. Lloyd George sacked Lord Derby for failing to promote the aims of the War Cabinet, appointing Lord Milner in his place as Secretary of State for War. Gen Whigham followed, to be replaced as Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff by Gen Charles Harington. Lloyd George had already dismissed Gen Willy Robertson in February, appointing Gen Wilson CIGS. The changes opened a new era of progress at the War Office for mechanical warfare. Milner supported Stern’s activities. ‘Tim’ Harington, former Chief of Staff of Second Army, quickly became a firm believer, telling Churchill, ‘We want a definite General Staff policy as to what nature of tanks we require and how we want to employ them and I intend to get this laid down at once.’ In Capper’s view, ‘GHQ Staff will need a lot of conversion still.’ He was right. At the end of May the reinvigorated War Office snubbed GHQ by increasing its demands to 6,940 tanks, of which there were to be 900 Mk V Two-Star, 2,400 Mk VIII (including the 1,500 at Chateauroux), 1,750 Medium C or D and 1,400 infantry carriers, all for completion by 1 June 1919. GHQ capitulated on 18 June and withdrew its cut in tank manpower.
The Prime Minister’s ‘house clearance’ at the War Office brought immediate results. The question was no longer whether the army would accept a great tank fleet, but whether one could still be built.
13.
… AND A BODY COUNT
‘I have had more difficulty in getting the hang of the tank question since I arrived [at the War Office] than all other questions put together.’1
Maj Gen Charles ‘Tim’ Harington, Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to Maj Gen The Hon. C.J. Sackville-West, British Military Representative, The Supreme War Council, 21 May 1918
The ‘High Speed Destroyer Tank’, otherwise known as Medium D, was the work of Maj Philip Henry Johnson, a gifted design engineer in the same mould as Walter Wilson. His interest in heavy traction stemmed from service in the South African War with the 45th Steam Road Transport Company RE, which coincidentally he and Col Crompton joined in the same month in 1900. Johnson had later worked for John Fowler of Leeds before rejoining the army and transferring to the Heavy Section in July 1916 as an Army Service Corps officer. He helped set up Central Workshops with Searle before promotion to major and command of D Battalion Workshops. Since December 1917 he had controlled the experimental work at No. 3 Advanced Workshops, Searle’s newly created experimental establishment at Erin. Johnson’s particular interest lay in developing a tank suspension and track system which would permit much
greater speeds than the present unsprung assemblies. The ‘D’ Type was to have the range, speed and firepower to replace the cavalry and penetrate deep into enemy territory following a breakthrough. It was thought that speed would also reduce vulnerability to anti-tank fire. German field guns were increasingly positioned in forward areas in concealed gunpits, from which they were quickly pulled to fire over open sights at approaching tanks. Tank losses from these tactics were to reach 50 per cent.
Attempts had already been made at Central Workshops to speed up the Medium A Whippet. Early in 1918 Johnson and Searle fitted a leaf-spring suspension between the track frames of an experimental machine. They replaced its twin 45hp Tylor engines with a single 175hp Rolls-Royce Eagle aero engine, and fitted a modified epicyclic transmission salvaged from a Mk V. At 8mph the standard Whippet was the fastest tank available, but the test machine exceeded 20mph in trials. It was a sensational advance. Tank HQ produced a performance specification and packed Johnson off to London in May to develop the new tank. His brief was to produce a machine not exceeding 20 tons with an operational range of 200 miles at speeds of up to 20mph, and with potential for amphibious use. He was promoted lieutenant-colonel and for the rest of that year he shuttled between Bermicourt and the MWD Experimental Station at Dollis Hill in north London. It conveniently adjoined the McCurd lorry factory, now dilapidated but still standing near Staples Corner. McGrath’s 20 Squadron had moved there from Wembley Park in July the previous year.
The Devil's Chariots Page 31
