The tank goes into action – with mixed results
No weapon was ever brought to the battlefield with more impressive speed and secrecy than the tank. After a year of trial and error with various caterpillar devices, on 20 January 1916 a prototype of the ultimate rhomboid-shaped design had been demonstrated to the Admiralty Landships Committee in Lincoln. A week later, the 28-ton machine, shrouded in tarpaulins and described on the bill of lading as ‘water tank for Mesopotamia’, was on its way by rail to Hertfordshire to be shown to the War Office and the cabinet – and Haig’s deputy chief of staff, Major-General Richard Butler, who, having watched the demonstration, asked simply: ‘How soon can we have them?’
The minister of munitions, David Lloyd George, at once loosened the purse-strings. By the middle of February, Fosters of Lincoln had been contracted to build fifty, and the Metropolitan Amalgamated Railway Carriage and Wagon Co. Ltd, Birmingham, fifty more, increased in April by a further fifty. On 15 September, barely eight months after its first outing in Lincoln, the tank – the name now officially adopted – would take part in what Haig hoped would be the decisive attack of his stalled Somme offensive: the battle of Flers-Courcelette, as it became known.
Finding ‘crews’ – a nod to the tank’s naval origins – was a novel challenge. Each tank was to be commanded by an officer, with a further seven men as drivers, gearsmen and gunners. Including supports and replacements, 150 officers and 1,000 other ranks would be needed for the initial 100 tanks. Secrecy demanded they be recruited without knowing what exactly they were volunteering for – so how were they to be found? A cover name for the organization was needed, and found: the ‘Heavy Section Machine Gun Corps’. Ernest Swinton, a Royal Engineers lieutenant-colonel who had been one of the first advocates of caterpillar traction, was given charge of raising and training the new force. He at once asked the War Office to ‘select and warn personally, good fighting subalterns of resource and courage, conversant with motor cars or motor cycles’, then set off round the officer-cadet schools and home-based battalions scouting for talent.
Similarly secretive arrangements were put in hand to find the other ranks. Advertisements appeared in Motor Cycle Magazine for men who could drive ‘light cars’; recruits in training for other arms were suddenly told that former plumbers and gas-fitters should report to the orderly room. The best drivers came from the stalwart Army Service Corps, whose superior discipline would prove significant.
Recruits began assembling in some mystification at Bisley in Surrey, among them a number of transferees from the Navy’s armoured car detachments; then, once a few training tanks were available, they moved to Elveden Hall in Suffolk, seat of the Guinness brewing magnate the Earl of Iveagh – 15 square miles of the best pheasant shooting in the country. When the Lands Branch of the War Office telephoned Lord Iveagh to tell him of its requisition, he had sighed resignedly and said that if anyone’s shoot was to be spoilt it might as well be his. Tenant farmers and labourers were uprooted, old retainers were displaced from their almshouses, and Elveden School was closed. Three pioneer battalions, many of them Welsh miners, began work creating a mile-and-a-half-long replica of the Western Front, complete with shell craters, barbed-wire entanglements, dug-outs and six lines of trenches. Security was tight. When Clough Williams-Ellis, the future architect of Portmeirion, and one of the Heavy Section’s first subalterns, arrived at ‘Elveden Explosives Area’ (its cover name), he found cavalry, Indian troops and territorials patrolling three concentric perimeters, the area ‘more ringed about than was the palace of the Sleeping Beauty’.
The first operational tanks appeared at the beginning of June. The ‘Mark 1’ came in two types: ‘male’, with two 6-pounder (57 mm) guns in side sponsons firing high explosive shells, plus three Hotchkiss machine guns; and ‘female’, with four heavier Vickers machine guns and a Hotchkiss. Each had 6–12 mm of armour – good protection against rifle fire and to some extent machine guns, but not much against HE. Motive power was from a 6-cylinder, 16-litre, 105 hp Daimler–Knight petrol engine driving the caterpillar tracks through three independent gearboxes. Steering required the tank to halt momentarily to disengage a track, and the first models had tail wheels to assist, though in action these proved ineffective and were soon abandoned. On level ground the Mark 1 could make 4 mph, with a range of about 25 miles before refuelling.
Crew conditions were appalling. The combination of engine heat, noise, exhaust fumes, and violent movement as the tank crossed broken ground made men violently sick even on short journeys. Injuries were common. It was difficult to communicate within the tank, and almost impossible without. The commander would have to dismount to reconnoitre a path through an obstacle, or to liaise with the infantry. The War Office specification for mechanical reliability was a mere 50 miles between failures, as the tank was meant to be a one-off weapon whose job would be done once the infantry broke through and the cavalry let loose. Unsurprisingly, therefore, given its weight, the inexperience of the crews, and the difficulty of keeping engine and gearbox lubricated when pitched at extreme angles, breakdowns were frequent.
Nevertheless, under Swinton’s direction at Elveden things slowly began taking shape, with four companies, A to D, each consisting of four sections of three tanks – two male, one female – and another tank in company reserve, formed by late July. C and D companies would entrain for the Somme on 16 August. Few of the crewmen had ever heard a shot fired in anger.
Meanwhile, at his headquarters just south of Boulogne, Haig was having to adjust his plans again. Having launched the Somme offensive six weeks earlier than planned in response to pleas from the French, under severe pressure at Verdun, in late August he began planning a climactic offensive-within-an-offensive to break the deadlock. His intention was to establish a defensive flank on the high ground north of the Albert–Bapaume road, which bisected the Somme battlefield, while pressing the main assault south of it with the aim of breaching the German rear line between Morval and Le Sars. In essence it was the same idea as that of 1 July, but on a narrower frontage (8 miles as opposed to 18 miles), with a shorter but more concentrated preliminary artillery bombardment – and now with the game-changing tanks, for which lanes 100 yards wide would be left clear of artillery fire.
There were growing concerns about loss of operational surprise, however. Once the tank was used, the Germans would gain the measure of it, adjust their tactics, increase the distribution of armour-piercing rounds which snipers already used to penetrate sentry shields, and – worst of all – develop tanks of their own. Indeed, there were fears they were already doing so. After watching a demonstration near Amiens, the Prince of Wales, a titular subaltern in the Grenadier Guards, wrote to his father, King George V: ‘I enclose a rough sketch of these land submarines or “Tanks” as they are called for secrecy. The Huns have no doubt got accurate drawings of them and have by now produced a superior article!!’
Edwin Montagu, the new minister of munitions (Lloyd George having become war minister after Kitchener’s death at sea in June), told the cabinet on 12 September, just three days before the fresh offensive was due to begin, that ‘there are rumours the Germans are making something of the same kind’ and that his French opposite number had told him that his own army had placed an order for 800 tracked machines and urged that ‘we should not put ours into the field until they were ready’.
The prime minister, Asquith, whose eldest son, Raymond, was serving on the Somme, had seen the tank for himself during a recent visit. Though unsettled by Montagu’s intervention he decided to leave the decision to the man on the spot – Haig. The CIGS, Sir William Robertson, agreed, though he himself believed the tank should not be used until there were many more of them, and had told Haig so.
Haig, however, was desperate for some sort of success. He told Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of 4th Army, who if not the actual architect of the Somme offensive was certainly its clerk of works, that ‘when we use them [the tanks] they will be thrown in with determination into the fight regardless of cost’.
The problem was not only of numbers, though, but of ground. The Somme was not Suffolk, certainly not after two months’ bombardment. The novelist John Buchan, serving as Times correspondent in France, likened it to ‘a decaying suburb … pockmarked with shell holes’. Although the tank was designed to cross broken ground, the more slowly it advanced the more vulnerable it became. Nevertheless, by the end of August fifty machines had arrived in France, and Haig decided that they would support the attack on 15 September, distributed more or less evenly across the three assaulting corps, with six held for the reserve army.
Their arrival in the forward areas just before zero hour came as a surprise to most of the infantry. Indeed, some did not see them until the attack had begun. Private Arnold Ridley of the Somerset Light Infantry – and sixty years later, Private Godfrey of BBC TV’s Dad’s Army – was severely wounded in hand-to-hand fighting that day. He recalled: ‘We in the ranks had never heard of tanks. We were told that there was some sort of secret weapon and then we saw this thing go up the right hand corner of Delville Wood. I saw this strange and cumbersome machine emerge from the shattered shrubbery and proceed slowly down the slope towards Flers.’
Some thought them comical, while others were impressed by the very thing that was perceived to be their weakness: ‘It was her slowness that scared us as much as anything,’ a territorial told a reporter afterwards. There was something unnerving about the tank’s steady, relentless advance in the face of fire. Others saw nothing at all, for only twenty-two of the fifty tanks actually reached the start line, seven of which promptly broke down.
Most of those that did get into action paid dearly. Lieutenant Basil Henriques’ tank came under intense machine-gun fire, forcing him to close the viewing slits:
Then a smash against my flap at the front caused splinters to come in and the blood to pour down my face. Another minute and my driver got the same. Then our prism glass broke to pieces, then another smash. I think it must have been a bomb right in my face. The next one wounded my driver so badly we had to stop. By this time I could see nothing at all.
When the glass shards were removed from his face at a dressing station, Henriques kept a piece to have mounted in a gold ring to give to his wife.
Where two or more tanks managed to advance together there could be distinct success. The defenders of the half-ruined sugar-beet factory at Flers were forced out by concerted 6-pounder and machine-gun fire. But overall, little ground was gained that day. Rawlinson wrote in his diary: ‘A great battle. We nearly did a big thing.’
The tank had at least demonstrated its potential, and production would now be stepped up. In November the companies were expanded into battalions, and in July the following year the Tank Corps was formed – some fifteen battalions. To some extent, the concern about the loss of surprise proved over-stated. Although the Germans would occasionally use captured British and French tanks, and eventually develop their own, they failed to recognize the worth of armoured fighting vehicles until after the war. They saw the tank as something to be defeated rather than emulated.
Flers-Courcelette cost the BEF another 25,000 casualties before Haig called off the offensive a week later. Perhaps the most significant casualty – in respect of its repercussions in public life – was not a tank man, however, but an infantryman. On 17 September, H. H. Asquith’s second wife, Margot, received a telephone call. ‘I went back into the sitting room. “Raymond’s dead,” I said to the servant. “Tell the prime minister to come and speak to me.”’