Traveling Forts: Armored Vehicles

^{National Archives from Marine Corps}

^{U.S. troops take cover behind a tank during a firefight near Hongchon, Korea, in 1951.}

German infantrymen were ready for another assault by the English. The English had been attacking almost continually for the last two and a half months.

When they weren’t sending swarms of men at the German line, their artillery was pounding the trenches. Not a tree was standing. Not even a blade of grass.

Their guns had churned the fields of Flanders into a muddy morass. It looked like something Breughel might have dreamed up if he were painting a landscape of Hell. Then the Germans saw some things that looked as if they might have come from Hell. They were metal rhomboids with caterpillar tracks running all around them. They had no windows that anyone could see, but from a projection on each side, each of these monsters had machine guns or light cannons.

They fired as they waddled and wobbled across the mud, rolled right over shell craters and trenches. After a few moments of shock, the German landsers recovered their wits and fired at the strange machines. Their bullets bounced off.

This day, September 13, 1916, would forever change the way war was waged.

The tank had appeared.

It almost hadn’t. And this premature appearance did nothing to enhance its chances for a future role in war. The tanks did drive back the Germans, who knew of no way to deal with them. But one by one, the machines broke down for a variety of reasons, and the British had no vehicles that could tow them back, few mechanics who could repair them, and fewer spare parts with which to repair them.

The tank was the most promising British effort to break the unholy dead‑lock that the Western Front had become. With their artillery, the Allies and Germans had been pounding each other to pieces. Infantry trying to break through the enemy trench lines had been hung up on barbed wire and mowed down by machine guns. Between attacking and repulsing attacks, the men in the trenches had to cope with such delights as poison gas and midnight raids. Worst of all, there seemed to be no way to end this horrible war. The tank was designed to mash down barbed wire, crush machine gun nests, straddle trenches, and cut down their defenders. If it could do those things, it could end the war.

In prewar days, when nobody thought pastures could be turned into cratered swamps and that the whole of Europe between the Alps and the North Sea could be divided by intricate trench lines, the more radical military thinkers advocated armored cars. (Most of the rest thought horses were still the essence of military mobility.) The Western Front, it turned out, became just about the worst possible terrain for anything with wheels. In some spots, horses sank into the mud up to their shoulders. It wasn’t too good for them, either. Armored cars did turn in sterling performances in the deserts of Palestine and Mesopotamia, but not in France or Belgium.

Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Swinton was an official British combat historian (an “eye witness,” was the Royal Army classification). In 1914, he saw tractors using an American invention, the caterpillar track, pulling artillery. The caterpillar tractors were not handicapped by the rough and muddy ground. Swinton proposed armored vehicles using caterpillar tracks to British headquarters in France. The generals there had the same reaction as King Archidamus of Sparta (see Chapter 9), although they didn’t express their feelings so honestly. They fervently believed that battles were decided by human valor. Use of machines was unworthy, underhanded, and dastardly. They rejected Swinton’s proposal.

Swinton sent a copy of his paper to a friend, Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Hankey, who was secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defense. At that time, all matters concerning military motor vehicles were handled by the navy, so the proposal ended up with the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill.

Churchill was impressed and got the support of the prime minister. By this time, Swinton, still in France, had managed to get some interest from the GHQ in France for his “armored machine gun destroyer.” There was more bureau‑cratic battling, especially after the resounding failure of the landing at Gallipoli.

The Dardanelles expedition had been Churchill’s brainchild. He was ousted from the cabinet and his influence became negative.

Some machines were eventually built and passed tests for serviceability. By this time, Douglas Haig (see Chapter 27), who had lost hundreds of thousands of men to German machine guns on the Somme, was desperate for something to counter the guns he had once scorned. He demanded the armored machine gun destroyers, which were now officially called tanks: to confuse the Germans, they were said to be mobile water tanks for use in the desert.

Colonel Swinton, who had been promoted to command of the Tank Corps, opposed the premature use of tanks. He wrote a memo on the conditions that should be met before tanks were introduced. Terrain, weather, the availability of reserve tanks, repair facilities were among the conditions. The Somme battlefield in September 1916 met none of them. And there were too few tanks.

Haig’s staff appeared to have been delighted with the tanks’ failure. They wrote a scathing report that result in an order cancelling future production of tanks. That might have buried the tank for a generation if it had not been for Major Albert Stern. Stern, an important financier in civilian life, believed in the tank and was a friend of the prime minister. Stern visited his friend, and the cancel order was cancelled.

Haig dealt the tanks another blow when he demanded them for this offensive at the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. Shell fire and rain had turned the area into not only a swamp, but something just short of quicksand. The tanks were defeated by General Mud. Later, at Cambrai, the tanks, following a plan devised by a brilliant staff officer, J.F.C. Fuller, won a solid victory, although one infantry outfit, the 5th Highlanders, was not enthusiastic about tanks and did not follow them closely enough. Unfortunately, that sector was commanded by a General von Walter, an old artilleryman, who brought his field pieces close to the front and trained his gunners to hit moving targets. The Germans knocked out 11 British tanks before the Highland infantry arrived to silence their cannons.

Fortunately for the Allies, the German generals generally could see no value in the tank. The French, though, were enthusiastic. They built more tanks than the British. On August 8, 19l8, 600 French and British tanks attacked the Germans. Ludendorff later called it “the black day of the German Army.” It convinced Ludendorff and the kaiser that the war could not be won. They later changed their minds, but the rest of Germany did not. On November 11, 1918, the war ended. Germany lost.

One reason for that loss was the German contempt for the tank. The new generation of German officers changed that. When Germany rearmed, it concentrated on tanks, close air support, armored personnel carriers for infantry, and self propelled guns. These were grouped into panzer (armored) divisions.

The German generals devised new tactics for them, based, ironically, on the writings of Fuller and a British military commentator, B.H. Liddell Hart. Fuller and Liddell Hart advocated “torrents” of tanks, which would bypass strong points, sweep into rear areas and disrupt supplies, communications and the whole command structure. Using these tactics and with the aid of its then‑ally, the Soviet Union, Germany conquered Poland in about two months.

After a lightning campaign (“Blitzkrieg”) in Denmark and Norway, the Germans turned on France, a nation reputed to have the best army in the world.

France had been joined by Britain, its ally in the last war. The allies had more tanks than the Germans, and some of them were bigger and had heavier armor, but they kept them scattered among all their troops. The concept was that tanks were “mobile pillboxes.” The German panzer divisions lanced through the allied armies on May 10, 1940. France surrendered on June 21st. Before that, the British evacuated their expeditionary force, which left most of its equipment on the beach.

The German Blitzkriegs were wars of movement, as far removed from the stalemate of the Western Front as could be imagined. The Blitzkrieg had to be modified, however. New weapons, the anti‑tank land mine, infantry rocket launchers like the U.S. “bazooka,” recoilless guns and fighter‑bombers armed with rockets all ended the comparatively carefree life of the tankers. But tanks permanently changed warfare and are still a most important part of any army.