A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  The tank was developed through the efforts of a number of ingenious naval and army officers who saw that the stalemate of trench warfare would only be broken by technical or tactical innovation. The British War Office was sceptical when first shown the clumsy tracked vehicle, but with the support of the Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, the first forty Mark I tanks were ordered, and by May 1917 they were organized into the Tank Corps under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Elles. Doctrine for the tanks’ use emerged piecemeal, but all those involved in their development recognized that their impact would only be achieved en masse.

  That was not how the first few tanks were used. The new British commander-in-chief, General Douglas Haig, wanted them to support his massive assault on the Somme, which began in July 1916. A total of forty-nine Mark I tanks were used for the first time on 15 September in small packets, but despite the initial shock caused to the German defenders, the tanks were knocked out by shellfire or disabled by mechanical failure. Haig was sufficiently impressed to order 1,000 more, but it was not until the late summer of 1917, after the failure of the Passchendaele offensive, that they were used in larger numbers. On muddy, cratered ground the tanks had made little progress. They moved at only around 3–5 km/h (2–3 mph) and once immobilized were an easy target for enemy gunners or for German riflemen armed with new armour-piercing bullets. Elles tried to persuade Haig that tanks needed to be used en masse and on ground suitable for tracked vehicles. The new Mark IV tank was faster, with better armour, and had a more advanced track design. At Cambrai, near the River Scheldt in northern France, the ground was sufficiently firm and flat and the sector was held by seven weak German divisions. Elles suggested using the British 3rd Army to mount a major raid towards Cambrai with a large body of tanks supported by aircraft. Haig, desperate for positive news, finally agreed.

  This British Mark IV tank was destroyed by German fire during the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917. Tanks were still in their infancy in 1917 and could be disabled without great difficulty.

  A force of 474 Mark IV tanks was assembled in great secrecy on the Cambrai front. They were brought in by rail and concealed in woods and sheds. To be sure of crossing the wide trenches of the Hindenburg Line, each tank carried in front a huge bundle of wood, or fascine, to be dropped into the trench so as to allow the tank across. Elaborate tactics were worked out. Infantry would follow the tanks, and between them they would carve out a gap in the line for British cavalry to move through and capture the German forces from the rear. This bizarre mix of old and new had a symbolic feel to it. Tanks were slow and potentially deadly, but horses were fast and flexible; yet the tank had a military future to it, while the days of the cavalry were numbered. The operation was ready by 19 November 1917, after weeks in which every effort was made to prevent alerting the Germans.

  Thus the enemy was caught almost completely by surprise when, on the early morning of 20 November, columns of tanks lumbered out of the morning mist, led by Elles himself. All along the line the Germans sent up SOS rockets, adding their bright lights to the flashes of shells bursting from the tanks, and from the British field artillery firing over them at the retreating Germans. One tank would patrol a trench, firing at the soldiers inside, while a second one dropped its fascine into the trench. After it had crossed, this tank patrolled the far side of the trench while the first tank got across. The infantry followed, mopping up the few dazed German defenders. The dense walls of barbed wire were crushed by the tanks, some of which were tasked with rolling the wire into giant balls to clear the ground for the expected cavalry attack. Inside the tanks, the crews of ten struggled with the noise, the fumes, hot shards of metal from shell impacts, and the unbearable heat. A direct hit from a German shell could turn the tank into an inferno in which the men were roasted alive. Overhead the Royal Flying Corps, with 275 fighters, bombers and scouts, harried the small force of 75 German aircraft, many of which were lost in the poor weather as they tried to find the front line. Within hours the tanks had forged a salient 8 kilometres (5 miles) deep and 10 kilometres (6 miles) wide towards the town of Cambrai and had breached the Hindenburg Line, capturing 8,000 men and 123 guns. The scene was set for the first tank victory.

  In the end it was not to be. The Germans fought boldly back and were soon reinforced by reserves. Key geographical points proved difficult to capture, particularly the Flesquières Ridge overlooking Cambrai, where a legendary German artillery officer had single-handedly knocked out five tanks before being killed. Tanks broke down or were destroyed by accurate fire. By the end of the day, there were only 195 tanks left, many of these needing mechanical overhaul. Above all, the key lessons of tank warfare had been ignored. The infantry were not quick enough to exploit the breakthrough achieved by the tanks, while the cavalry were held too far back and failed to rush through the gap created by the tanks until it was too late.

  In London, news of the day’s fighting was greeted with jubilation. But the following day the advance slowed, losses mounted and German reinforcements began to appear. Over the week that followed, German forces reversed the British gains. A few of the remaining tanks, just 38 from the original force, prevented the British salient from being eliminated by a flanking attack – showing what potential the tank still had – but by early December most of the ground gained had been lost. Each side suffered losses of around 45,000 men, and the brave tank crews suffered casualties of 29 per cent of their original number. The battle, despite its eventual failure, marked the arrival of the tank as a battlefield weapon. On the same ground a quarter-century later, the German army demonstrated what it had learned from the lessons of Cambrai.

  German soldiers lie dead on the wooden duckboards of their trench following a British attack at Flesqières on 23 November 1917 during the Battle of Cambrai. The early British gains were not exploited effectively and much of the captured area was soon back in German hands.

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  No. 47 BATTLE OF FRANCE

  10 May – 17 June 1940

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  German victory over British, French, Belgian and Dutch forces in the Battle of France in May and June 1940 has often been seen as the inevitable result of heavy German rearmament in the 1930s compared to the late and insufficient preparation of the Allies. Yet on paper the balance between the two sides was much more even, while a large part of French territory was defended by a solid wall of fortifications, the Maginot Line. It is a commonplace that the attacker has to outnumber the defender by two or three to one to overcome the advantages of prepared defences. In the Battle of France this prescript was overturned. German forces demonstrated that it was battlefield innovation that mattered, not the balance of numbers.

  The battle is best remembered for the triumphant display of what was widely called Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, although the German armed forces did not use the term themselves at the time. They focused on the first effective use of a combined arms offensive, making the most of modern tracked and armoured vehicles, principally tanks, mobile motorized infantry and battlefield air power – fighters, dive-bombers and medium bombers.

  The roots of this lethal combination of striking power lay in the period immediately after the First World War when Germany was disarmed by the Treaty of Versailles. The German Defence Ministry set up a large number of study groups to learn the lessons of the previous conflict. Although they now had no tanks or military aircraft, the German armed forces worked out the effectiveness of enhanced mobility and aerial striking power as a battering ram to pierce the enemy front line and allow the mass of infantry to follow, encircling and annihilating the enemy. This was what they had wanted to do in 1914, but they had lacked the mobility and firepower. After six frantic years of rearmament, by the eve of the attack on 10 May 1940, German forces had mustered 2,439 tanks and 3,369 aircraft.

  On paper, the Western Allies still outnumbered the Germans. With the addition of Dutch and Belgian forces, which were attacked at the start of the campaign to clear one of the
avenues for the German approach, the Allies could count 4,204 tanks and 4,981 aircraft; they deployed 152 army divisions against the German 135. The difference between the two sides was the way those forces were exploited. Most of the British air forces were defending Britain or posted overseas; French aircraft were spread across metropolitan France protecting industrial zones or defending the French empire in North Africa. The British sent only 250 aircraft to northeastern France opposite the German line of attack, the French only 500. They faced 2,741 German aircraft concentrated in two air fleets to support the armies on the ground. French tanks were spread throughout their army units rather than concentrated in mobile armoured divisions, while some were posted to defend the Maginot Line of fixed fortifications.

  Concentration of force was not the only strength of the German campaign. The ten armoured and motorized divisions carried with them mobile anti-aircraft batteries to defend them against enemy air attack. Battlefield anti-aircraft artillery was significant in destroying the slow-flying light bombers of the RAF expeditionary air force. The Germans also had an effective means of radio communication, which meant that army units on the ground could contact the supporting air fleet for immediate assistance from bombers and dive-bombers, whereas the British army had to send requests for help via London, which could take hours. The rate at which German aircraft operated was also critical. German fighters averaged four sorties a day, the French fighters less than one. German tanks were mainly light and underarmed, but the secret of combined arms operations was to bring the mobile infantry, artillery batteries and engineers together in one integrated body, capable of exploiting a breakthrough, where the British, who did have armoured units, concentrated too much on a preponderance of tanks at the expense of infantry and artillery.

  The Battle of France was not a conventional battle lasting a day or two with a clear conclusion, but a series of operations that lasted six weeks, with regular large-scale fighting all along the line of German attack. Within five days the Dutch army surrendered; the Belgian army was pushed back rapidly until it met up with units of the British Expeditionary Force as it moved into Belgian territory, but Belgium surrendered on 28 May. German forces moved forward rapidly through the Low Countries, but this was not the main axis of attack. Large German mobile forces were concentrated in the region of the Ardennes Forest, north of the Maginot Line. Long considered impassable for modern armies, the Allies neglected the sector. The German plan was to use this area as the launch pad for a heavy armoured thrust at the French line to create panic and allow for the encirclement of much of the Allied front. On 13 May, the tanks of General von Kleist’s five armoured divisions rolled out of the forest; there had been long queues of vehicles and the rugged terrain and narrow roads made it difficult to manoeuvre. If the Allies had understood the threat and sent aircraft to bomb the vehicles, the outcome might have been different, but the air forces were too busy opposing the bulk of the German air force further north.

  Once out in the open, the armoured divisions poured across the River Meuse, opening up a wide gap in the French front. Within six days German armour, continuously supported by bombers and dive-bombers, had reached the Channel coast at Abbeville, surrounding the British forces, the French 1st Army and the remnants of the Belgian divisions. The British could see that the battle was lost and ordered an evacuation. A total of 338,000 men were shipped to safety from Dunkirk. The German army turned south again and destroyed what remained of French resistance in two weeks, using the same irresistible combination of ground mobility and air power. By 19 June, the forward units had reached the Atlantic coast. Two days earlier, the French had sued for an armistice.

  It is worth reflecting that this battle was effectively won in six weeks for the loss of 29,640 German servicemen and 1,200 aircraft. Hitler was one of the many who had served for four years in the First World War, when the German army lost almost two million men and could make no progress in France for most of those four years. His air force adjutant, writing on 29 May, celebrated the ‘unheard-of pace’ of the campaign and the triumphant combination of tank and bomber; when the armistice was requested, he observed a Hitler ‘overwhelmed with emotion’ and it is not difficult to see why this common soldier turned generalissimo could scarcely believe his luck. The innovation in operational performance had been there for every power to emulate, but in 1940 only the Germans had learned the lessons of the First World War. Over the next three years, the British, Soviet and American armies and air forces each had to learn the hard way, but by 1945 they were all fighting as the Germans had done in 1940. Innovation could win a battle but it could not win the war.

  A squadron of Junkers Ju 87 ‘stuka’ dive-bombers in flight over Poland. The use of dive-bombers in the invasions of Poland and France was an important innovation in army support and one that neither the British nor French air forces had developed by 1940.

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  No. 48 BATTLE OF BRITAIN

  July – October 1940

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  In the late summer of 1940, one of the most important battles of the Second World War was fought out between the British Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe in the skies over southeastern England. Since the start of the war in September 1939, the German armed forces had defeated and occupied seven European states – Poland, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Britain had sent an army to France to help defend against a German attack, but it was defeated and expelled from continental Europe in late May and early June 1940. German forces occupied northern France and the Low Countries and prepared for the next war of conquest against Britain. The German leader Adolf Hitler, who was also the supreme commander of the German armed forces, planned to invade southern England with Operation Sea Lion, but first he needed his large air forces, stationed in northern France and the Low Countries, to defeat the RAF so that the Channel crossing and the capture of beachheads in Kent and Sussex could be achieved with a reduced threat from the air or from the Royal Navy. Upon the outcome of the air battle depended the future of democratic Europe. A British defeat would mean a German hegemony in Europe; a British success would not defeat Hitler, but it would keep resistance alive. The battle hinged on whether the new technology available to the RAF would work effectively.

  The Battle of Britain did not resemble a land battle with a clear shape and a definitive day on which victory was secured. It was a battle of attrition that went on throughout the summer and autumn months. The German aim was to destroy RAF Fighter Command in a few days and then to deploy the large German bomber force to knock out military and economic targets in southern Britain before attempting a landing. The day chosen by the Luftwaffe commander-in-chief, Hermann Göring, for the start of the campaign, codenamed ‘Eagle Day’, had to be postponed because of poor weather, and the date eventually chosen, 13 August, was less than ideal for flying. Half the force was called back, and in the end the full weight of the German air attack was brought to bear only on 18 August against Fighter Command targets, and particularly the fighter stations of Air Vice Marshal Keith Park’s 11 Group in southeast England. For the next two weeks repeated attacks were made on fighter stations but despite repeated bombing only three were closed, and then only for a short time. Every day RAF aircraft took a heavy toll on attacking fighters and bombers. Although German air intelligence regularly reported that the RAF was close to collapse, the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters appeared every day ready to meet the incoming German aircraft.

  The air defence of Britain in the Second World War relied on a modern web of electronic communication and detection. Here WAAFs in the Operations Room of 10 Group Headquarters at Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire plot the flight paths of incoming aircraft.

  The Supermarine Spitfire was the iconic aircraft of the Battle of Britain. Armed with eight machine guns, it had great speed and manoeuvrability and became the mainstay of RAF Fighter Command throughout the war.

  The Germans never guessed that the secret of the RAF’s success that
summer lay in a complex network of communication based around the use of radio direction finding (RDF or ‘radar’), which had been developed in Britain from 1935. Other countries developed it too, but none applied it so systematically to aerial defence. By 1940, a chain of twenty-one radar stations had been set up around Britain’s southern and eastern coastlines for detecting high-flying aircraft, and thirty-six so-called Chain Home Low stations to detect aircraft flying lower than 300 metres (1,000 feet). The information from the stations was fed to a central Fighter Command operations room at Bentley Priory just north of London, where the commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, had his headquarters. It was sent on to the Fighter Group headquarters and from there to individual sector stations. Information had to be transferred in a matter of minutes to give fighters time to scramble into the air to intercept, and it relied on a strategic set of telephone cables, laid by the General Post Office, that held the whole communications structure together. The system did not always work perfectly, but it ensured that the RAF could use its fighters sparingly. They would be in the right place rather than flying long patrols with no knowledge of enemy movements. The Luftwaffe assumed that RAF fighters were tied inflexibly to the area around their bases, and never realized that the presence of British aircraft was achieved through a vital scientific breakthrough. Without the system of central control and early warning, Germany’s air fleets might well have inflicted irreparable damage.