Tanks began to appear on the world scene with the delivery at the beginning of June 1916 of the first British tanks, produced as the result of the order placed for them only four months earlier by the Ministry of Munitions. The tanks were simply designated Mark I and were virtually identical with ‘Mother’, except that their hulls were made of armour instead of mild steel plates and that half of them were armed only with machine guns. Like their progenitor they relied for sharp turns on a crude system adopted not on its merit but for the sake of using existing transmission components and thereby saving time and development effort.1 It involved putting the secondary gearbox on one side of the differential into neutral and applying a brake to the undriven track while the other track continued to be driven. This meant that four men were required to manoeuvre a tank: commander and driver at the front, who controlled the engine and applied the brakes, and two gearsmen, one on each side of the rear of the tank. There were also two gunners at each of the two sponsons, which brought the crew to a total of eight men.
The problem of steering the Mark I tanks and hence of manoeuvring them was aggravated by the difficulty the commander had of communicating with the gearsmen, as well as the gunners, because of the noise of the engine, which was located in the middle of the hull. The engine also generated heat and emitted noxious fumes, which could make the interior of tanks extremely uncomfortable for their crews. The crews also had to endure severe jolts caused by the absence of a sprung suspension when tanks operated over broken ground. Under some conditions the tanks were slower than the infantry with which they were co-operating, although on flat, hard ground they were capable of a maximum speed of 3.7 miles per hour and had an operating range of 24 miles.
These and their other shortcomings were bound to have an adverse effect on the performance of the first tanks. However, this did not hinder their adoption and was not allowed to delay the sending of the first tanks into battle only seven months after they were ordered.
The remarkably rapid production of the first tanks was accompanied by a decision taken by the War Office on 16 February 1916 to form the first tank unit and by an increase in April of the production order from 100 to 150 tanks.2 In consequence, by the end of June two of the six companies into which the tank units were to be organized, and each of which was to have 25 tanks, began to train.3 Moreover, having endorsed the production of tanks, the General Headquarters of the British Forces in France was keen to employ them as soon as possible.
The speed with which the British Army accepted tanks and set about employing them must be credited to some extent to Swinton, who returned to England at the end of July 1916 to become assistant secretary of what was called the Dardanelles Committee of the Cabinet. On his return he discovered the existence of the Landships Committee and its work on tanks.4 He then took advantage of his influential position to instigate in August an interdepartmental conference to co-ordinate the activities of the Landships Committee, the War Office and the Ministry of Munitions, and he went on to promote tanks wherever an opportunity arose. For his efforts he was rewarded in February 1916 by being made commander of the tank units that were being raised in England. As such he was responsible, among others, for the somewhat peculiar decision to arm one half of the 150 tanks that were being produced only with machine guns, on the grounds that such ‘female’ tanks would be needed to protect the ‘male’ tanks, although the latter were already armed with four machine guns as well as 57mm guns, against an onrush of enemy infantrymen!5
Swinton was also the first in the British Army to write about how tanks might be employed. He did so originally in a memorandum entitled ‘The need for machine gun destroyers’ that he submitted on 1 June 1915 to the General Headquarters in France.6 In this he suggested that ‘armoured machine gun destroyers’ should be used in a surprise assault on enemy positions with the object of destroying hostile machine guns and thus paving the way for the attacking infantry. He subsequently elaborated his ideas in a paper entitled ‘Notes on the employment of tanks’ written in February 1916.7 In this he again defined the principal role of tanks as clearing the way for infantry assaults by destroying hostile machine guns. He envisaged therefore a somewhat specialized, limited role for tanks and did not contemplate their employment beyond the confines of trench warfare.
In both cases Swinton warned against the premature employment of a few tanks and advocated 100 being used in a surprise assault.8 But even before the first tanks were built the commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, became keen to use some in the forthcoming offensive on the Somme. As it was, the earliest that any tanks could be made available was August 1916, when two companies were sent to France. Once they were there the General Headquarters decided to use them to bolster an attempt to revive the offensive on the Somme, which had by then stalled. In consequence the two companies were moved to the front and on 15 September 1916 took part in a large scale attack on German positions in what became known as the Battle of Flers-Courcelette.
The tanks were distributed over the front of ten infantry divisions and were used in twos or threes to attack enemy strong points in support of the assaulting infantry. Forty-nine tanks were available but only 32 reached the starting line; nine then led the attacking infantry, engaging the enemy with their guns and machine guns, while nine others assisted in a similar way in clearing up pockets of resistance. Of the remaining 14, nine broke down and five became ditched.9
Overall, the performance of tanks in their first battle was not a great success and the contribution they made to the progress of the Somme offensive, which was limited to an advance of about one mile, was very modest. However, bearing in mind the primitive nature of the first tanks and their attendant shortcomings, the fact that they were, at best, only three months old, and the inadequate training of their crews, the participation of tanks in the Somme offensive was a very considerable achievement.
Nevertheless, the use of the tanks on the Somme has been widely criticized as premature, mainly on the grounds that more might have been achieved had their debut been delayed until more were available. On the other hand it has been argued in its defence that tanks had to be put to test in battle at an early stage to gain experience with them.10 However, it is not evident that some of the lessons that were brought out by the early employment of tanks, such as the need for adequate training of the crews, could not have been foreseen in advance of Flers-Courcelette.
Although tanks had not achieved what had been hoped of them, their first action was considered to have justified their existence in the eyes of Haig. In consequence, a meeting was held at the War Office only four days after the first tank action at which it was agreed that an order be placed for 1,000 more tanks.11 However, because of some confusion, the order was not confirmed until 14 October and it did not begin to bear fruit until March 1917, when the first of the new Mark IV tanks was completed. Eventually 1,015 tanks of this type were produced.12 In the meantime, to keep the factories going, an order was placed for 100 Mark II and Mark III tanks, which were very similar to the original Mark I type.
Following their debut on the Somme, the use of tanks was confined to a few small scale actions until the Battle of Arras in April 1917, for which 60 tanks became available. These were dispersed among the attacking infantry formations, and although they were successful in a few local actions many became bogged down in a terrain made impassable by heavy rains. Even worse conditions were encountered in the next major engagement of tanks, in the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele, in July to October 1917. This was fought in an area of reclaimed swampland turned into a sea of mud by a combination of artillery bombardment and heavy rains. The number of tanks available had risen to 216 and included some new Mark IVs, which incorporated a number of improvements on the Mark Is, including better armour.13 However, they were again dispersed among a number of infantry divisions and the terrain severely restricted their movement, which helped enemy artillery to knock many of them out while others became bogged in the swampy ground.
By the third day of the Ypres offensive the commander of the Tank Corps, Brigadier General H. J. Elles, recognized the futility of the further use of tanks in it and suggested that the remaining tanks be withdrawn for use en masse in suitable terrain.14 At the same time his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, came up with the idea of a ‘one-day tank raid’ – a surprise spoiling attack carried out over suitable ground without the customary preliminary artillery bombardment. Fuller’s memoirs imply that this led to the Battle of Cambrai, which became the first successful large scale tank attack.15 In fact, the Battle of Cambrai came to be a much bigger operation than Fuller had originally envisaged and others were involved in its conception, including the commander of the Third Army, General Byng, in whose sector of the front the battle took place.16
All available tanks were assembled for the battle, the total being made up of 378 fighting tanks, 54 older tanks carrying supplies, 10 radio and cable communication tanks and 34 other tanks for clearing the ground of barbed wire for the planned follow-up by the cavalry and carrying bridging for it.17 The assembly of the 476 tanks and of the supplies of fuel and ammunition required by them was carried out in great secrecy, and for the attack on 20 November 1917 the tanks were drawn up in a single line in front of seven miles of British trenches. As they moved forward, tanks crushed the barbed wire covering enemy positions and subdued enemy machine guns by fire, clearing the way for the infantry that followed them. The supporting artillery, which totalled 1,000 guns, did not open fire until the tanks began to move so as not to alert the enemy and the attack thereby achieved complete surprise.
Led by tanks, the attacking forces broke through the defences of what was known as the Hindenburg Line and advanced up to 7 miles, which was more than the total advance made in the three months of the Ypres offensive and which was achieved at the cost of far fewer casualties. The attack demonstrated clearly how effective tanks could be as assault vehicles when used in numbers over suitable ground, even though 112 of them were destroyed by the end of the battle by enemy artillery fire.18
However, the success of the initial attack was not exploited, the tanks being too slow to do so and the cavalry too vulnerable to machine guns. Moreover, when the German forces counter-attacked ten days later they recovered most of the ground. The Battle of Cambrai ended therefore in deadlock and its outcome made the German General Staff consider tanks less of a threat than it might have done.19 But it did not prevent a further expansion of the Tank Corps from three to five brigades.
In the winter of 1917–18 the five brigades were spread out to form a defensive cordon some 60 miles behind the British lines in anticipation of a major German offensive. When that came in March 1918, the tanks were used piecemeal and in the ensuing retreat many were lost, having to be abandoned when they broke down or ran out of fuel. In consequence they proved relatively ineffective.
Most of the tanks used were Mark IVs, which, like the Mark I, were designed for assaults on enemy trenches and were too slow as well as having too short an operating range for effective employment under the fluid conditions created by the German offensive. However, there was a new British tank more suited to them, the Medium A or Whippet, which made its battle debut on 26 March 1918. It was lighter than the earlier tanks, weighing 14 tonnes instead of the 27 or 28 tonnes of the Mark IVs, and it had a maximum speed of 8.3 miles per hour compared with 3.7 miles per hour, as well as an operating range of 80 miles compared with 35 miles of the Mark IV. It was also more manoeuvrable as it was driven by one man who could steer it by changing the speed of its two 45hp engines that separately drove its two tracks – ostensibly a simple method of steering a tracked vehicle, but one which required very considerable dexterity on the part of the driver as the engines were easy to stall.
The Medium A also departed from the rhomboidal configuration of the earlier tanks, its tracks being surmounted by a fixed turret that contained a crew of four and mounted four Hotchkiss machine guns. Because of its greater mobility Medium A scored some local successes, but shared with the others the consequences of the ineffective, dispersed employment.
The fortunes of the Tank Corps did not revive until the Battle of Amiens, fought on 8 August 1918. This was the second major British tank battle and it was larger and more decisive than Cambrai. The whole of the Tank Corps was assembled for it, except for one brigade that was still equipped with Mark IV tanks. The other brigades had by then been re-equipped with the new Mark V tanks. These were basically similar to the Mark IVs but they had somewhat more powerful engines and could be driven by one man, as they had an epicyclic gear steering system instead of the crude method involving four men by which the earlier tanks were steered. In consequence they were much more manoeuvrable. In addition to the 324 heavy tanks there were 96 Medium A tanks, and with supply tanks and spare vehicles the total assembled for the battle amounted to 580 tanks.20
As at Cambrai, the tanks were assembled secretly and attacked en masse along a 13 mile front without a preliminary artillery bombardment. The surprise tank assault overwhelmed the German defences and led to a major breakthrough, during the course of which the German Army suffered heavy losses. General von Ludendorff, who was effectively the German commander-in-chief, described 8 August 1918 as ‘the black day of the German Army’.21
However, the breakthrough at Amiens was achieved at the cost of many tanks destroyed by the German artillery. As a result of the losses, by the second day of the battle the number of tanks available for further action was down to 145. Moreover, the success of the initial attack was again not exploited because the Mark V tanks were still too slow, being only marginally faster than the Mark IVs. The Medium A were faster but they were tied to the cavalry, which was expected to exploit the breakthrough but proved incapable of operating in the face of machine guns, as it did at Cambrai.
Nevertheless, the Battle of Amiens led to the beginning of a slow retreat of the German Army that went on until the end of the war three months later. During this period tanks attacked successfully on a number of occasions but their attacks were generally on a relatively small scale, involving at most 40 to 50 tanks, because of their shortage after Amiens. This was aggravated by further losses inflicted by German artillery and by the increasingly mobile nature of the operations, to which the available tanks were not suited. About 175 were assembled at the end of September for the assault on the Hindenburg Line, but only 37 could be scraped together for the final tank attack on 4 November 1918.22
Three weeks before the Battle of Amiens, the French Army also carried out a large scale tank attack at Soissons, which became another major success for tanks. This was preceded by a series of smaller scale actions by French tanks, the first of which took place on 16 April 1917 as part of an offensive on the Aisne. By then 208 Schneider and 48 Saint Chamond tanks had been produced of the total of 800 ordered a year earlier, and 160 of the Schneiders were considered ready for action, although not all of them had been fitted with the additional armour found to be necessary because of the introduction by the German Army of armour-piercing machine gun ammunition in response to the use of tanks by the British Army.23
When French tanks began to be developed, it was thought that they would be used to break through enemy fronts by surprise assaults carried out without preliminary artillery bombardments. But by the time they were built the British Army had began to use tanks and the German Army responded to them by digging wider trenches that the Schneiders, let alone the Saint Chamonds, could not negotiate. In consequence it was decided that they should not be used to lead infantry assaults but to support the infantry beyond the effective range of the supporting artillery.24 In other words, they came to be regarded as mobile close support guns, which was in keeping with the designation given to the French tank units of ‘artillerie d’assaut’.
A total of 132 tanks was assembled for the attack on the Aisne, which failed, with tanks contributing little to the limited penetration of enemy positions. The tanks, almost all of which were Schneiders, had difficulty negotiating trenches and the shell-cratered ground, and 57 were destroyed by enemy artillery.25
The inauspicious debut of the French tanks was not followed by another tank action until October 1917, when 64 tanks took part in the Battle of Malmaison. This time they successfully supported the infantry, although they still operated in small groups, and only eight were knocked out by enemy artillery.26 No further action took place until after the German offensive in March 1918, in anticipation of which French tanks were held behind the front line for counter-attacks, the total of operable tanks amounting by then to 245 Schneiders and 222 Saint Chamonds.27 They were at first employed piecemeal in a number of local counter-attacks under conditions of mobile warfare for which they were no better suited than the contemporary British tanks, although they were more manoeuvrable than the Mark IVs, being driven by one man and having sprung suspensions. But the most significant of the counter-attacks, which was carried out on 11 June 1918 by a force of 144 Schneiders and Saint Chamonds and infantry in the Matz valley, was successful in halting an enemy advance, albeit at the cost of 69 tanks.28
In the meantime, in June 1916, the French High Command was informed of the British development of tanks and Colonel Estienne, who was about to be given the task of organizing the first French tank units, was sent to England to investigate. After being shown British Mark I tanks Estienne came back with the idea that there should also be a much lighter tank, which he saw as an armoured, machine gun armed infantryman who could operate over all types of terrain. During the following month Estienne put his idea to Louis Renault, who took it up with enthusiasm and proceeded to design a two-man light tank to meet it. By November 1916 Estienne was sufficiently confident of Renault’s design to write to the Commander-in-Chief, General Joffre, as he did at the inception of the development of the Schneider tank, recommending that as soon as a prototype of the light tank was approved 1,000 be ordered.29 Joffre was in favour of it, but the technical branches of the Army and the Ministry of Armament again raised various technical and bureaucratic objections and although in February 1917 Renault received an initial order for 150 tanks the follow-on order for 1,000 tanks was cancelled in April, albeit temporarily. To make matters worse, Joffre was then replaced by General Nivelle, who was less favourably disposed towards tanks, and it was only in October 1917 when he, in turn, was replaced by General Pétain that 2,380 tanks were added to the earlier orders for 1,150.30
Fortunately, Renault and his company continued to work on the tank, in spite of problems including that of the supply of armour plates, which had to be imported from England for lack of sufficient industrial capacity in France. As a result, a prototype was built in April 1917 but the first production tank was not completed until September.31
The light tank became known as the Renault FT, or simply as the Renault. It was very different from the French and British tanks that preceded it and in several respects represented a major advance on them. In particular, it was the first tank to have its armament mounted in a rotating turret. Moreover, its general configuration became and remains to this day the norm for most tanks. Its features included the location of the driver in the front of the hull, a weapon compartment surmounted by the turret in the centre and the engine compartment in the rear of the hull, separated from the crew by a bulkhead. As in most modern tanks, the track driving sprockets were also at the rear.
In battle order, the Renault weighed 6.5 tonnes but, in spite of its light weight, it had hull armour 16mm thick and even 18 or 22mm thick turret armour, which was thicker than that of the much heavier British tanks and sufficient to defeat the armour-piercing bullets of the German machine guns. It was also marginally faster than the British Mark V, having a maximum speed of 4.8 miles per hour, but it was not as fast as the Medium A.
Although the Renault was conceived as a machine gun tank, in April 1917 Estienne decided that some should be armed with a short-barrelled 37mm cannon instead of the Hotchkiss machine gun.32 Such a cannon was being used by the French infantry as a close support weapon and after modifications it was successfully mounted in the Renault, a proportion of which were subsequently armed with it. The cannon fired a full range of ammunition, including armour piercing and canister as well as high explosive rounds, and the tank could carry up to 240 of them.
The rather odd calibre of the cannon mounted in the Renault and later adopted for tank and anti-tank guns produced in several countries originated with the 1868 St Petersburg Convention that, on humanitarian grounds, defined the minimum permissible weight of high explosive shells. This led Benjamin Hotchkiss in France to design a cannon that fired shells of the prescribed weight whose calibre came to be 37mm.33 The cannon was adopted by the French and several other navies for the defence of large ships against the contemporary threat of high speed torpedo boats, and although after a time the naval use of 37mm Hotchkiss cannon declined, other cannon of this calibre came to be used on land.
Originally the intention was not to use the Renaults until they could be employed in some number. However, a German offensive against the French front in May 1918 called for the deployment of all available resources. In consequence two battalions of Renaults were rushed to the front at the end of May, although the formation of the first was only completed earlier in the month. As soon as they reached the front in the region of the Retz forest, 21 tanks charged the advancing enemy to gain time locally for the defence. Following this hasty debut Renaults were confined to assisting the defence of the Retz forest by a series of small scale counter-attacks, which were carried out at the cost of 70 tanks destroyed or severely damaged out of the total of 210 initially held by the three Renault battalions involved in these counter-attacks.34
The Renaults did not come into their own until the counter-offensive launched by the French Army in the region of Soissons on 18 July 1918. All the available French tank units were assembled for it, their strength amounting to about 225 Schneiders and Saint Chamonds and six battalions of Renaults with a nominal strength of 432 tanks, or a total of more than 600 tanks. This was even more than the total number of tanks assembled four weeks later by the British Army for the attack at Amiens, but the French tanks were generally lighter.
As at Cambrai, the attack was carried out by surprise, without a preliminary artillery bombardment, and succeeded in disrupting the enemy front. It took place over the fronts of two French armies, over one of which it was led by almost all the available Schneiders and Saint Chamonds, while the three Renault battalions allotted to it were held in reserve for the exploitation of a breakthrough. On the front of the other army, the attack was led almost entirely by the three other battalions of Renaults with about 200 tanks.35
From then on Renaults were used increasingly to lead or to support infantry attacks by a series of small scale actions rather than in massed assaults. In spite of tanks lost in battle, the number of Renaults in use grew rapidly as a result of the large scale orders placed for them, which had risen to 4,000 tanks and resulted in the actual delivery of 3,177 tanks by the Armistice of 11 November 1918.36 The numbers of tanks that were being produced made possible the formation of an increasing number of tank units, which were being created in the last four months of the war at the astonishing rate of almost one new Renault tank battalion per week. As a result, by the end of the war the French Army had as many as 24 battalions of Renaults in addition to equipping two US tank battalions with them.
The large number of tanks that the French Army came to use during the war contrasted sharply with the few the German Army deployed. The difference resulted in part from the late start of the development of tanks in Germany, which was only taken up after the appearance of the first British tanks in 1916.
Yet a Holt tractor similar to those that later became the basis of the development of tanks in Britain and in France was demonstrated to Austro-Hungarian and German military authorities in 1912 and 1913 respectively. The demonstrations were arranged by L. Steiner, a Hungarian engineer and land owner, who in 1910 ordered a Holt tractor for use in farming but then demonstrated its ability to haul heavy guns as well as becoming a Holt dealer. The gun-hauling demonstrations were successful and the Austro-Hungarian authorities acquired some Holt tractors before the outbreak of the war in 1914, but the German authorities dismissed the tractor Steiner demonstrated as of ‘no importance for military purposes’.37
It was only in November 1916, two months after the debut of the British tanks on the Somme, that the German War Ministry purchased a Holt tractor from the Austro-Hungarian War Ministry and invited Steiner to Berlin for discussions with J. Vollmer, who was to become the designer of the first German tank.38 By then, in October 1916, the German War Ministry had set up a committee to draw up the specification of a tank, which was then designed with remarkable speed by the end of December. Earlier that month an order was also placed for the production of 100 tanks, the first of which was ready for use by October 1917.
The tank was called A7V after the designation of the committee that initiated its development. It consisted in essence of a large box hull mounted on a tracked chassis based on that of the Holt tractor acquired from Austria. The hull was riveted from plates 30mm thick at the front and 15mm at the sides, which was considerably more than the thickness of the plates of British tanks, but also made it heavier, its weight in battle order being 33 tonnes. In spite of this, A7V had a relatively high maximum road speed of 8 miles per hour, but, like that of the French Saint Chamond, its obstacle crossing ability was very limited. It was armed with a captured Russian 57mm gun mounted in the front of the hull and two machine guns in each side and the rear of it. Otherwise the most noteworthy feature of A7V was its large crew of 18 men, which set up a record not surpassed since by any other tank.
As tanks were produced, three detachments of five A7Vs each were formed, and they took part in the German offensive that broke through the British lines in March 1918. One of the detachments went into action for the first time at St Quentin on 21 March and all three were engaged three days later at Villers-Bretonneux, where they spearheaded infantry assaults with considerable success.
At Villers-Bretonneux, the A7Vs were also involved on 24 April in the first ever tank versus tank battle when they ran into some British tanks. The latter were initially two Mark IV ‘female’ tanks armed only with machine guns that were forced to withdraw, damaged and unable to fight back, when an A7V fired its 57mm gun at them. Then a Mark IV ‘male’ arrived on the scene firing its 57mm guns, causing the A7V to run onto a side slope and overturn.39 This historic incident provided an early illustration of the need to arm tanks so that they could fight other tanks, as well as an indication of the indifferent performance of the A7V over uneven ground.
The three A7V detachments continued to be employed right up to the end of the war, but their impact was very limited because of the small number of tanks they could deploy. Although they absorbed the whole of the production of A7Vs, this only amounted to 20 tanks of the 100 originally ordered. The shortage of indigenous tanks made the German Army use captured British Mark IV tanks, with which it formed six detachments of five tanks each by the end of the war and was planning to form six more.40 However, even if these plans had been implemented the number of tanks the German Army had would only have been increased to about 75.