For centuries wars were fought almost entirely with individual weapons wielded by hand. But when gunpowder came into use, the relative importance of hand-carried weapons gradually diminished, while that of the heavier weapons increased until they became dominant during the 19th century. None other than Napoleon acknowledged this, reflecting on St Helena that ‘artillery decides to-day the destiny of armies and peoples’.
However, siege warfare apart, the effectiveness of guns was constrained by their limited battlefield mobility, which, at best, amounted to being hauled by horses from one firing position to another.
Machine guns became an exception to this when they were developed during the latter part of the 19th century because, unlike other non-portable weapons, they were light enough to be mounted on and fired from horse-drawn carriages. This offered a way of making them more mobile, which was actually adopted during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. Horse-drawn carriages mounting machine guns, or tachankas, were then used during the Polish-Russian War of 1920–21 by the Red Cavalry Army of Budyenny, and they were retained as standard equipment by the Polish cavalry until 1939 and by the Soviet cavalry well into the Second World War.
But, whatever mobility they provided, horse-drawn machine gun carriages were very vulnerable to enemy fire and their utility was to a very large extent confined to engagements between formations of cavalry. Moreover, by the time they came into use, far better means of making machine guns, as well as other guns, more mobile already existed in the form of self-propelled vehicles. Guns mounted in them could not only be moved more rapidly and fired more readily, but they could also be fitted with armour protection, which allowed the guns to be deployed more freely under enemy fire.
The first step in the development of self-propelled vehicles was taken by N. J. Cugnot, a French military engineer who in 1769 built a three-wheeled, steam-powered vehicle that can still be seen at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Cugnot’s venture was supported by General J. B. de Gribeauval, the inspector general of French artillery, who laid the foundations of that arm that Napoleon later used so effectively. A second vehicle was built for further trials but no progress was made beyond this.1
The prospect of developing self-propelled vehicles for military purposes revived in the second half of the 19th century with the construction of steam-powered traction engines. It has been widely but wrongly believed that a traction engine fitted with Boydell footed wheels was already used by the British Army for towing guns during the Crimean War of 1854–56, the erroneous belief arising out of the confusion between Boydell’s traction engine and some horse-drawn carts with Boydell’s footed wheels that were used in the Crimea. In fact, the first steam-powered engine with Boydell’s wheels was only demonstrated at an agricultural show in England in 1855 and it was a Garrett-Boydell engine, which appeared a year later, which was first tried for pulling a siege gun at the Woolwich Arsenal. The Burrell-Boydell engine, which is generally believed to have been used in the Crimea, was not completed until 1857 when two were ordered for gun-towing trials, again at the Woolwich Arsenal.2
Steam traction engines were also used to tow guns on other occasions during the second half of the 19th century. In the meantime, prompted probably by the Crimean War, J. Cowan proposed another use of steam traction for military purposes in 1855 in Britain by taking out patent No.747 for a ‘Locomotive Battery for Field of Battle with a Steam Engine’ – a wheeled vehicle with a turtle-like iron carapace out of which protruded several guns and at the side of which were scythes for mowing down any troops that might attack it.
Cowan’s vehicle was never built, but during the South African War of 1899–1902 the British Army used about 50 traction engines for towing supply trucks and guns. In 1900 two of the engines built for use in South Africa by John Fowler and Co. of Leeds were armoured, as were the trucks they towed, to protect them against Boer attacks when they were used for carrying supplies. Eventually the number of the armoured Fowler engines sent to South Africa rose to four.3 The armour of the Fowler engines and of the trucks was provided with loopholes through which rifles could be fired, and a field gun could be hauled onto a truck instead of being towed. In principle, there was only a small step from this to a steam-powered, gun-armed armoured fighting vehicle. Such a vehicle had in fact already been envisaged by Cowan and was depicted in 1883 by A. Robida in a French journal La Caricature.4
The ideas of Robida, like those of Cowan, were never implemented, but 20 years later steam-powered armoured vehicles were the subject of a story by H. G. Wells, the science fiction writer, which was published in the Strand Magazine in December 1903 under the title ‘The Land Ironclads’. This story is often presented as a prophetic vision of future armoured vehicles and as having influenced, albeit indirectly, the development of the first British tanks several years later.5 In fact, Wells’ ‘ironclads’ did not represent an advance on Fowler’s armoured steam engines built three years earlier so far as their means of propulsion were concerned, and this was equally true of their armament, which still consisted of rifles. Nor did they foreshadow future armoured fighting vehicles in other respects, except for being envisaged to operate off the roads over broken ground. However, what was to make this possible was not very practicable, as it was based on the use by the ‘ironclads’ of Pedrails – another type of footed wheel devised around 1899 by B. J. Diplock. This wheel has been confused with the Pedrail track, which was not brought out by Diplock until 1910, and has led to the erroneous belief that Wells foresaw tracked armoured vehicles.
By the time Wells’ story was published a far more effective alternative to steam engines had already emerged in the form of the internal combustion engine, and the motor cars that they powered became a more practical basis of making guns more mobile. The first to recognize this appears to have been E. J. Pennington, a fraudulent American vehicle designer who came to England in 1895. Within a year of his arrival Pennington produced pictures of four-wheeled motor cars with low, boat-like armoured hulls above which protruded two Maxim machine guns with shields. What is more, he let it be known that such vehicles were being built in Coventry, which was becoming the birthplace of the British motor industry. There is no evidence of what inspired Pennington but, as one of his pictures showed armoured vehicles on a beach attacking a naval landing party, it could well have been the threat of cross-Channel invasion, which was seriously considered in Britain in the 1890s.
Pennington’s activities led the Naval and Military Record to declare in 1896 that ‘there is a great future for the military motor car’ and news of them was published in Austrian and French as well as British journals.6 However, in 1897 a French journal, La France Automobile, expressed regret that Pennington’s inventions only existed in the form of watercolours.7 In fact, Pennington never built an armoured vehicle, but the belief he created persisted and more than 60 years later he was still being credited with building one.8
While Pennington never put his armoured vehicle ideas into practice, a vehicle very similar, externally at least, to those he depicted was built by F. R. Simms, a German-born British engineer and entrepreneur who was involved with the same motor syndicate as Pennington. After producing the design of a ‘motor war car’ Simms persuaded the armament firm of Vickers, Sons & Maxim to put up the money for its construction, which they did, and paid him £750 for it, according to the copy of an order dated 20th July 1898 in the writer’s possession. A year later Simms exhibited detailed drawings of the vehicle he was building at a motor show in Richmond, Surrey. On the same occasion Simms also demonstrated a powered quadricycle fitted with a Maxim machine gun, which became one of the first self-propelled vehicles ever to be armed.9
Simms’ ‘motor war car’ was completed in 1902, when it was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in London. It weighed about 5.5 tonnes with an open-top hull of 6mm Vickers steel and was armed with two Maxim machine guns and a ‘pom-pom’ automatic cannon. Powered by a 16 horsepower Daimler engine, it was reported to be capable of moving at up to 9 miles per hour, but its steel-tyred wooden wheels restricted it to operating on paved roads. This was accepted as part of its proposed use for coast defence, which formed another link between Simms’ vehicle and Pennington’s ideas.10
The mobility of Simms’ vehicle was obviously limited, but it was the first self-propelled vehicle that was both armed and armoured, and even if it was not very practical the potential of vehicles of its kind was recognized by the technical press that reported on it. On the other hand no military officials came to see it, which provoked some very sarcastic comments on the attitude of the War Office in one of the motoring journals reporting on it.11
The evident lack of official interest in Simms’ ‘war car’ led to it being abandoned, and further efforts to make heavy weapons more mobile followed the more gradual process of mounting machine guns on motor cars and armouring the latter. The consequences of this process were foreseen by some when only one or two motor cars had been actually fitted with machine guns. One of them was A. G. Hales, a correspondent of The Times, who from the basis of his observations of the South African War wrote in May 1901 that armoured motor cars ‘were going to revolutionise affairs both in peace and war’. A similar if more measured opinion was expressed by Brigadier J. H. A. Macdonald who wrote in 1902 that ‘high speed motor vehicles, with bullet proof sides, would be of great value’.12
It was envisaged in both cases that the motor vehicles would be armed with machine guns, and an unarmoured motor car had already been fitted with one in the United States in 1898, a few months ahead of the appearance of Simms’ quadricycle. The vehicle was a Duryea three-wheeled passenger car on which Major R. P. Davidson of the Illinois National Guard mounted a Colt machine gun with a small shield.13 This vehicle was followed by a four-wheeled version, and according to a contemporary report it was being built ‘for city use against mobs’, which suggests that it may have been inspired by the disorders which afflicted US cities in the 1890s.14
A further step forward took place in 1902 when the Charron, Giradot et Voigt company exhibited at the Salon de l’Automobile in Paris a car with a circular shield of armour plate instead of the rear seats and within it a pedestal mounting for a Hotchkiss machine gun. A French Army commission carried out firing trials with it in 1903 but saw no need for such a vehicle.15
Nevertheless, Charron, Giradot et Voigt continued to work on the development of an armoured car in collaboration with the Hotchkiss company and Major Guye of the French Artillery, whose patented turret it incorporated. The resulting vehicle was still based on a passenger car chassis but it had a fully armoured body surmounted by a turret with a Hotchkiss machine gun. It came to weigh about 3 tonnes and was capable of a road speed of 45km per hour.
The new vehicle was ready by the beginning of 1906 when it was inspected by the French minister of war. This was followed by tests during the autumn manoeuvres of the French Army, but a commission that reviewed reports on the vehicle as well as other new developments concluded in May 1909 that armoured cars should not be considered further because they could not move over all types of terrain and because of their high production cost. Moreover, the French cavalry preferred unarmoured machine gun cars.16
In the meantime the activities of Charron, Giradot et Voigt attracted the attention of the Russian authorities, who are claimed to have considered ordering 36 vehicles but ultimately settled for one, which was delivered in 1906. Subsequently they ordered a series of ten, the last of which was still in France when the First World War broke out in 1914. It was immediately requisitioned by the French authorities and sent into battle but only to be quickly lost.17
While Charron, Giradot et Voigt were developing their armoured car in France, another armoured car was built in Austria by the Österreichishen Daimler Motoren company. It was designed by its technical director, P. Daimler, the son of Gottlieb Daimler the motor car pioneer, who started working on it in 1903, and it was completed in 1905. In the following year it took part in the manoeuvres of the Austro-Hungarian Army but the latter showed little further interest in it.18 By the end of the same year its constructors obtained permission to sell it to France, and at the beginning of 1907 it was tested at the Mont Valerien fort outside Paris. Its performance was described as ‘spectacular’ but this did not alter the negative opinion of armoured cars formed by the 1909 French Army commission.19
Like the Charron armoured car, the Austro-Daimler had a fully armoured body that was surmounted by a hemispherical turret with one or two Maxim machine guns. It was somewhat lighter, weighing less than 3 tonnes, and had a lower maximum speed of 24km per hour. But, unlike the other, it had four-wheel drive, which only a few armoured cars were to have until the 1930s. Although they differed in detail, the Charron and the Austro-Daimler cars had a similar general configuration, which foreshadowed the design of most armoured cars built during the next three decades. However, their example was not followed until 1912. The intervening years did not provide any incentives for the further development of armoured cars and armies did not foresee their future potential.
It took the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12 to prompt the building of two more armoured cars. Both were built at the Arsenal in Turin and were presented to the Italian Army for use in Libya by the Automobile Club of Milan.20 One of them was based on a Fiat motor car fitted with an armoured body surmounted by a small cylindrical turret with a machine gun. The other, which was generally similar, was based on a Bianchi or Isotta-Fraschini car chassis. The two armoured cars were shipped to Libya in the autumn of 1912, but by then fighting had almost ceased and their use was limited mainly to escorting columns of other motor vehicles.21 Nevertheless, they became the first armoured cars to be used in military operations.
Two more armoured cars are reputed to have been built in Italy in 1913 and they, together with the two earlier Italian armoured cars and the ten produced in France for Russia, were the only additions to the number of armoured cars constructed before the outbreak of the First World War.
Yet motor cars were already being used in large numbers. In Britain, for instance, their annual production rose from 10,500 in 1908 to 34,000 in 1913 and in the United States the number of cars built in 1914 was no fewer than 573,000. Nevertheless, armies continued to rely on horses. Their approach to motor vehicles was cautious, to say the least, and it was only under the pressure of events that they took up motor vehicles in earnest. For example, before the outbreak of the war in August 1914 the French Army possessed only 220 motor vehicles. The British Army had even fewer of them, its total of mechanical transport vehicles amounting to 100. But by the end of 1914 the French Army acquired 13,000, mainly by requisitioning civilian vehicles, and by the end of the war in 1918 had 95,000 motor vehicles.
Similarly, it was only after the outbreak of the war that armoured cars came into use. This happened almost spontaneously as a result of the use of motor cars for reconnoitring and for harassing enemy forces in the opening stages of the war.
One of the countries in which this happened was Belgium, where within the first month of the outbreak of the war armoured cars began to be improvised on Minerva car chassis and used to harass the invading German forces. Almost simultaneously improvised armoured cars also began to be used in France. Recognizing their potential, the French minister of war ordered 136 armoured cars in August 1914, and a month later the first unit of them was attached to a cavalry corps to provide mobile fire support. The original French armoured cars were based on a variety of motor cars, but their construction was followed by another order to the Renault company for 100, this time all built on the same standard 18 horsepower car chassis, and they became operational before the end of 1914.22
At the time Russia had virtually no motor industry but its one car company, the Russo-Baltic located in Riga, Latvia, built an armoured car soon after the war started, and subsequently produced a few more so that a unit could be formed that was sent into action in October 1914.23 More armoured cars were ordered by the Russian authorities from abroad and especially from Britain. The most numerous of the British cars were produced by the Austin company to a Russian design, which incorporated a very peculiar arrangement of two side-by-side machine gun turrets. Their total, including armoured cars built in Russia on Austin chassis, rose eventually to more than 200. More armoured cars were procured from other companies and some were also built in Russia using imported chassis, bringing the total acquired by the Russian Army to more than 600 in 1917.24
Improvised armoured cars also began to be used after the outbreak of the war by the British forces. However, in a bizarre twist of events, their use was taken up not by the Army but by the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). It arose out of the forward deployment in France of an air squadron of the RNAS charged with the defence of south-east England against attacks by Zeppelins. As a result of this, armoured cars were improvised to support flying operations by ground reconnaissance and to provide protection. At first there were only two of them, but in September 1914 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, authorized the procurement of 60 more. These were still of a fairly primitive type, with open-top hulls and based on three different motor cars. But the RNAS formed with them four armoured car squadrons and proceeded to develop better vehicles. The outcome of this was an armoured car of about 4 tonnes based on the Rolls-Royce ‘Silver Ghost’ car chassis, which was armed with a machine gun in a revolving turret and which was normally operated by three men. Its design proved to be the most successful of those devised during the First World War and became a model for other armoured cars built during the following two decades, while some of the vehicles originally based on it were still being used, albeit with modifications, by the Royal Air Force in Iraq in 1941.
The first three of the turreted Rolls-Royce armoured cars were delivered in December 1914 and soon afterwards RNAS formed a new squadron with 12 of them. The formation of five more such squadrons followed, as did that of others equipped with different types of armoured cars, the total number of which came to about 140, including 78 Rolls-Royce cars.25
Italy bypassed the use of improvised armoured cars as a result of not entering the war until March 1915. By then the use of the Belgian armoured cars had attracted the attention of the Italian minister of war, who ordered the armament firm Ansaldo to develop an armoured car for the Italian Army. The outcome of this was a turreted armoured car based on the Lanzia I.Z. car chassis. Deliveries of it began in June 1915, when the first Italian armoured car unit was formed.26 Eventually about 120 Lanzia I.Z. armoured cars were deployed by the Italian Army, which used them for the rest of the war. They proved as durable as the Rolls-Royce, as some were still in use in Africa in 1941.
In 1915 the use of armoured cars spread outside Europe and in particular to India, where about 60 armoured cars were improvised to bolster the internal security forces depleted by the departure of British and Indian troops for service on the different war fronts. In 1915 the first armoured car was also built in the United States. Interestingly, it was designed by R. P. Davidson, the pioneer of the installation of machine guns on motor cars, and was based on a Cadillac car chassis. A year later the US Army deployed its first two armoured cars during the operations along the Mexican border against Pancho Villa.27
Thus armoured cars had come to be used in a number of countries. Most were armed with one or two machine guns, but a proportion of the French cars were armed with 37mm cannon, while some British as well as French vehicles carried 47mm cannon, and a few Russian armoured cars, based on American Garford truck chassis, even mounted short-barrelled 76mm guns.
Armed with these guns, armoured cars were what would later be described as mobile weapon platforms. As such they constituted a revolutionary advance in the employment of some of the heavier weapons by increasing their mobility well above that provided earlier by animal traction. They also provided a degree of protection for their crews, although this was an adjunct to their mobility: it enabled them to operate more freely under fire but was subservient to their basic function of being a mobile source of fire power.
All this meant that armoured cars had the characteristics that have come to be associated with armoured fighting vehicles. But they could only act as such in a very restricted sense because they were generally confined to operating along roads. In fact, for much of the time they were tied to roads almost as much as armoured trains were restricted to operating along railway tracks.
This did not handicap the armoured cars greatly on the Western Front at the beginning of the First World War, when there was no shortage of roads along which they could operate. There was therefore no lack of opportunities for the original Belgian, French and British armoured cars to skirmish along them. But when the opening, mobile phase of the war was followed by trench warfare, roads were cut or blocked and the conditions that allowed armoured cars to operate vanished. It was only three years later, in the final stages of the war when the fronts began to break, that they were used effectively again on the Western Front.
This happened in March 1918 during the final German offensive, when a total of about 130 armoured cars attached in small units to French cavalry divisions fought a series of delaying actions.28 Another opportunity occurred in August 1918, during the Battle of Amiens, when armoured cars of a British battalion equipped with 16 twin-turret Austins left over from the Russian orders drove through a breach in the enemy lines and wrought havoc behind them.29
In the meantime, when the opportunities for their use in France disappeared in 1915, squadrons of what had by then become the Royal Naval Armoured Car Division were sent to other theatres of operations where it was thought there would be greater scope for their employment. This included German South West Africa (present Namibia), German East Africa (now Tanzania) and Gallipoli, but in the event they provided few if any opportunities. There appeared to be greater scope for the employment of armoured cars on the Eastern Front, where there was more room for manoeuvre. In consequence a relatively large Royal Navy unit equipped with 20 or more Lanchester armoured cars, which were similar to the Rolls-Royce, was sent to Russia. It became best known after its commanding officer, Commander Locker-Lampson, and operated in 1916 in the Caucasus and then on the Romanian and Ukrainian fronts. In the course of its far-flung operations the unit overcame some very difficult terrain conditions, which spoke well for the armoured cars at this early stage of their evolution, but the military impact of its small scale actions was very limited. The same applied to the Russian armoured cars, which, although more numerous in total than all the others, were used in small units and could only claim some local successes.30
In fact, armoured cars could not have achieved greater results even if they had been concentrated in larger units because they could not spread out on the roads and could, therefore, only fight along them in ones or twos. In consequence, it was only in exceptionally favourable circumstances that they could move off the roads and act more decisively.
A rare example of this was provided by the British armoured cars sent to Egypt in 1915. In March 1916 a unit of nine of the Rolls-Royce armoured cars commanded by the duke of Westminster took advantage of the relatively hard, flat ground to dash at up to 40 miles per hour to surprise a large Arab-Turkish force at Bir Aziz south of Sollum in Cyrenaica, which the armoured cars charged, in line abreast, routing it completely.31, 32, 33
To act equally effectively under conditions less favourable than those of the Cyrenaican desert, armoured cars would have required the ability to operate over other, more difficult types of terrain. The need to provide them with this capability was in fact perceived in more than one country by 1915. The consequent pursuit of it led to the use of tracks instead of wheels and hence to the next stage in the evolution of armoured fighting vehicles, which was the development of tanks.