SOMEWHERE IN The World Crisis, on the subject of the Navy handing over most of its rifles to the Army, Mr Churchill wrote that ‘in the last resort Jack will have to trust to his cutlass as of old’. It was, of course, a little Churchillian joke. The writer probably owed his existence, as he well knew, to the fact that before charging with the Lancers at Omdurman he had put his sword back in its case and had bought a serviceable automatic pistol. Like his great ancestor with the flintlock musket and socket bayonet he demanded the best weapon going.
By 1914 skilled engineers had made great battleships with guns throwing shells of a ton weight over a distance of several miles. Submarines had become highly efficient weapons of war. The prospect of Jack’s Captain laying his ship alongside an enemy and leading a charge of boarders was remote. In all armies, however, the old ways clung on. The most mathematically-minded gunners, the most skilful aeronauts and all the other technical men existed for one purpose only. Their job was to make it possible for the infantryman to walk up to his enemy and to push a metal spike into his weasand. The bayonet was a comfortable thing to have about one’s person and the flash of steel looked splendid on parade. It had its own mystique, with men of outstandingly savage aspect hurling themselves at straw-filled dummies, snarling madly and charged with the duty of instilling into newcomers the ‘Spirit of the Bayonet’. A line of steel bearing down must be an unnerving experience, but so long as the defenders are kitted out with a decent rifle – better still a decent light automatic – they are Hallowe’en turnip-masks.
The sword was an incubus even worse. French and German officers, like most continentals, carried theirs around with them everywhere. The sword was not merely a badge of office it was something mystic. Even Mr Asquith, who pretty certainly did not know foible from forte, could not resist making a speech about not sheathing it until various things might happen. When the BEF embarked, every infantry officer was under orders to carry his with him, fresh from the grindstone. Most people found it rather an embarrassment, especially the subalterns; their seniors had horses to ride and to carry their impedimenta. There is no reason to suppose that anybody in any army took hurt from thrust or cut.
Mons and Le Cateau began to explain the obvious. Whatever may have been the principles upon which ancient wars had been fought, the infantry was no longer a wielder of edged weapons. What mattered was fire power; a light machine-gun of the Madsen or Lewis type could make a couple of good men more serviceable than a platoon would be without it. A few hundred of these inexpensive weapons in the early battles would have altered history. There is a further consideration that took time to sink in. Killing an adversary is traditional but wasteful. A corpse demands no more than a hole in the ground, if it is lucky. A wounded man needs to be transported, doctored, nursed, fed, watered, clothed, documented and paid. The bayonet kills: the bullet more often than not, wounds. A far better bargain. So long as the war was being largely carried on by professionals these thoughts would have been dashed aside as unsoldierly. As time went by, and as the amateurs moved in, they became axiomatic. But the ‘Spirit of the Bayonet’ was too strong for them. In all the battles of 1914, 1915 and 1916 the infantry remained condemned to what Mr Churchill called ‘chewing barbed wire’. Old weapons and old ways were no longer enought to give attackers even a quarter of a chance. Something new would have to be found before the pick of the nation either rotted away or died on the wire.
It was not only new machines that were needed; it was new men. Most of the Generals had been born in the 1860s, with the officers of field rank coming along ten years or so later. They had grown up in a world innocent of anything more technical than a steam train and a high proportion had spent their formative years in India or other places where the internal combustion engine was almost unheard of. To be told in their middle age that they must unlearn all that they had acquired over the decades and start again from fresh premises was too much for many good but unimaginative men. Over the years this author has spoken with a good many people who took part in the retreat from Mons. On one point they were unanimous. The middle-piece officers and senior NCOs with South African experience were, generally speaking, useless. They seemed bemused by the whole thing and did not know what to do. It was the Second Lieutenants and the Lance Corporals who brought the Army through its trial. This pointed the next lesson. Youth was henceforth a quality more to be prized than experience. Already this was showing in the Flying Corps, with its very young Captains and Majors. It would have to leaven the entire Army before the business was over.
Before turning to the subject of mechanical developments it may be useful to consider the military state of mind in the early stages of the war. Inside the Army initiative was not encouraged. For almost every military problem there existed what was called a ‘school solution’ and such things were Holy Writ. The regimental officer who wanted to get on had well-established things to occupy nearly all of his mind. Company commanders were judged not by any apparent ability to seize initiatives and to exploit them; what mattered were Boot Books and Bath Books, Minor Offence Reports, Pay and Ration Returns, Musketry Returns, Imprest Accounts and half a hundred matters of the like kind. Ensure that all these were in apple-pie order, demonstrate that your Company had a high standard of turn-out, drill and march discipline and you would in due time get your reward, the command of a battalion bearing a famous name. It was the same in the Royal Navy. Nobody wanted Drakes or Rodneys any more. Obey every Regulation, every Standing Order and comply with every known whim of your seniors if you wished to get to the top.
Civilians were another matter. To the Army all civilians were men of a lesser kind, obsessed with the idea of making money by any means, lacking the virtues of discipline and bravery; some of them wore made-up ties, spoke of serviettes and cruets and were never to be trusted since they lacked loyalty. Worst of all were the politicians, a race of inferior men dedicated to the task of keeping the Army starved of everything it needed. Exaggerated, no doubt but there was a grain of truth in it.
When mechanical warfare first began it became, however regrettably, necessary to turn for civilian help. The first operations, it is true, were carried out under the White Ensign, but only just. Commander Charles Samson, RN, was a famous pioneer airman. When the RNAS was given the duty of protecting the homeland against Zeppelin raids it was natural that a base should be set up at Dunkirk. The base had to be defended and, in the absence of any troops for the purpose, Samson, its commander, had to make his own arrangements. With the assistance of his brother Felix, normally a solicitor but for the time being a Marine Lieutenant, he acquired several motor cars; one of them belonged to Felix Samson and was a Mercedes. The best always being good enough for the Navy they acquired several more, all Rolls Royces, and had them armoured after a fashion with boiler-plate fitted on by Les Chantiers de France at Dunkirk itself. The Admiralty found some Maxims to complete the adhockery and during that strange period of the war when the armies had moved beyond Belgium to the Marne and the Aisne the armoured cars made themselves extremely useful. They suffered one grave handicap in that they were completely road-bound but for the moment that did not greatly matter.
It soon became obvious that boiler-plate would not keep out anything much and Samson turned to his Chief, Captain Murray Sueter, for something better. Sueter, Director of the Air Division, formed up to Beardmores, the leading authority on armour, and enquired what they could do. Beardmores told him that they could furnish flat sheets of armour plate but neither they nor anybody else knew how to curve them. It took much trial and error before ways could be found. During this time Samson continued his little raids and General Aston’s Marines played the part of a stage army, cruising around empty Belgian roads in charabancs. The end of these exploits came when the Germans finally found out the antidote; all that was necessary was to remove the pavé and dig a trench across the road. Samson ran up some makeshift girder bridges but the armies came back in the autumn and the adventures of the first mechanized units were over.
It was, as Charteris said, the time at which men’s thoughts began to turn towards some form of armoured vehicle that could travel across country carrying with it either a small gun or at least a light automatic. Had not almost every officer in the pre-war War Office dashed off to France there might have been somebody in Whitehall who remembered that plans for just such a machine had been filed away in the building for the last couple of years. They had been prepared by a Mr Lancelot de Mole, an Australian engineer whose concern with such things had begun when he interested himself in the problems of transporting heavy loads through his native outback. His first design had been of a multi-wheeled platform with a steering system of considerable ingenuity; a model of it, picked up in a Brighton junk shop, is in the Tank Museum. Experts say that although the model seems to work well enough it is doubtful whether a full-size version could stand the inevitable strains and stresses. Mr de Mole moved on from it to a design of something easily recognizable as a tank, travelling on tracks and steered by them. This he submitted to the War Office in 1912. The plan was incomplete, for it shows no propulsion unit, but the best opinion is that Mr de Mole was undoubtedly working on the right lines. The War Office filed it. When the war began de Mole joined the AIF and rose to become a Corporal in the 10th Battalion. Some years ago his Colonel, in answer to a letter from the Museum, said that de Mole was an odd sort of chap and had to be given a job in the Orderly Room. Be that as it may, he had sketched out the first armoured fighting vehicle. The Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors spoke highly of his work, but in Australia his unusual name is completely forgotten. The men who produced the first tank never even knew it.
Mr Churchill had a clearer grasp of the future shape of war than had most men. So had his friend Admiral Bacon. Since he had been driven out of the Navy as a result of writing some ill-advised letters critical of his Chiefs, directed to the First Sea Lord but picked up by the Press, Bacon had been general manager of the Coventry Ordnance Works. As his Company produced a third of the turrets for the Navy’s guns, Mr Churchill had been at pains to keep it in business. Bacon wanted above all things to get back to the Service and he saw a way of achieving his heart’s desire. The war was only days old when he told the First Lord by letter that he had already designed a 15″ howitzer that could be transported by road. Mr Churchill took him up on it and in October, 1914, was shown pictures of the eight big tractors that would do the pulling. When asked to design something that could carry guns and cross trenches the Admiral obliged. An experimental machine was produced on 13 February, 1915; the First Lord ordered thirty of them. In May he proudly demonstrated the prowess of the sample machine to the War Office. It was turned down and the order cancelled. So ended the first attempt at a tank.
If Charteris is right, as he probably is on this occasion, a good many people were simultaneously busy inventing the same thing. Most were too far down in the military strata to do anything about it but one of their number had the entrée everywhere that mattered. Maurice Hankey, Lieutenant-Colonel RMA, had long been Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence and no door was closed to him. He, too, possessed what was always called a fertile mind. Amongst his closer friends was Ernest Swinton, a Sapper Colonel of considerable literary ability. From being Hankey’s assistant Swinton had been sent to France very early in the war as the official Eye Witness, a substitute for the war correspondents so loathed and despised by Lord Kitchener. His inventive turn of mind appears in his book The Green Curve and, at 47, it was still much in evidence. On 20 October, 1914, he visited Hankey at the CID office, spoke about the stalemate caused by machine-guns and wire and speculated about the possible military use of the Holt caterpillar tractor. They agreed that it was something not to be neglected; Swinton was given the unrewarding task of interesting the War Office, whilst Hankey would try his luck amongst the politicians. Swinton, unsurprisingly, was brushed off. Hankey received a hearing from Lord Kitchener but was unable to convince him that tractors could be other than a target for artillery. On Boxing Day Hankey put his thoughts on paper and sent them to, amongst others, the First Lord. Mr Churchill wrote to the Prime Minister, commending the document and saying that it was extraordinary that both the Army in France and the War Office should have allowed three months to pass by without addressing their minds to the problem. He was still thinking in terms of machines driven by steam, to be used by night, and coupled them with a simpler idea for man-pushed shields. As an afterthought he added a note on the use of smoke, the result of a communication from Lord Dundonald with his grandfather’s Crimean plan for the use of that ancillary.
As the armies sank into the ground, the war of movement being over for a long time to come, an important character enters this story. Albert Gerald Stern, ‘Bertie’ to his friends, was 36; about the age of most company and battery commanders. His father, James, was senior partner in the banking house of Stern Brothers which had originated in Frankfurt in 1807. Like the Rothschilds they had three separate establishments; Frankfurt, Paris and Angel Court, London, where they had been since 1834. After Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Bertie Stern had been sent to study the family trade in Frankfurt and New York and at 25 he had been taken into partnership. While still the age of a subaltern he had been charged with arranging loans to the Sultan of Morocco – this at the request of the Foreign Office – to the Young Turks in Constantinople and to various big commercial concerns in Canada. Everybody liked Bertie Stern, for he was the most clubbable of men, well known at the Garrick and elsewhere. His first taste of the war came at a meeting at the Bank of England just before the fateful Bank Holiday of 4 August. ‘Sir Edward Holden was the commanding figure. “I must pay my wages on Friday,” he said, “and we must have Bank Holidays until enough currency has been printed to be able to do so.” His advice was followed and all the impending disasters were averted. Here, I first saw (in the war) the advantage of a definite cure administered by a strong man.’
Foster’s 150 h.p. Daimler tractor, as used by Admiral Bacon.
Stern had no mind to spend the war sitting on committees. His two brothers were both in the Yeomanry and would soon be off. A damaged ankle kept him from joining them, but he had an idea of his own. In November, as soon as his feet were cleared, he wrote to the First Lord offering to provide and equip an armoured car, with crew complete, to join Mr Churchill’s ‘Dunkirk Circus’. He was told that it would be more useful for him to present himself to Captain Sueter, Director of Air, ‘and offer the services of the Car and of yourself to the regular Armoured Car section which is being built up and organized under Commander Boothby at Wormwood Scrubbs (sic.)’. Mr Stern walked in. Lieutenant Stern RNVR walked out. Major Hetherington, the Transport Officer to the Division, ‘asked me to join his staff and to work under his Chief Assistant, Lieut Fairer-Smith. I agreed to do so’. The date was the second week in December, 1914.
Armoured cars were, at any rate for the moment, out. A squadron under Lieut-Commander Whittall went to German South-West Africa; ‘Bendor’, Duke of Westminster, after various misadventures in France, took one to the Western Desert to smarten up the Senussi; Commander Locker Lampson took another one to Russia. ‘The enthusiasm of both officers and men of the Armoured Car Division was unbounded. They searched the whole world for war. But war in France had already settled down to trench fighting. In France, Armoured Cars, always an opportunist force, found their opportunities gone.’
Nevertheless several armoured car squadrons remained, their London bases being at the Clement Talbot Works in Barlby Road, Kensington, and at the airship shed belonging to the Daily Mail at Wormwood Scrubbs, as it was then usually spelt. For immediate purposes they constituted the entire air defence of London, responsibility for this having been given to Sueter. The cars, most of them in fact being lorries, were an eclectic lot and the weapons even more so. They did, however, muster a number of trained mechanics in their ranks.
Those left behind in the airship shed without any specific duties took counsel amongst themselves about where the Armoured Car Division should go from there. They were young men and between them they mustered a considerable amount of miscellaneous experience. Stern, at 36, was the eldest. The Duke, one year younger, had some military credentials for he had been a Cornet in the Blues and still held a commission in the Cheshire Yeomanry. In South Africa, as ADC to Lord Roberts, he had been chagrined at not receiving a DSO. The initials were then taken as standing for ‘Dukes’ Sons Only’, and Bendor was a Duke already. He earned it a couple of years later with his armoured cars, beating up the Senussi in the Western Desert. Tom Hetherington, at 28, was the youngest member, but what he lacked in years he made up in other ways. Upon leaving Harrow he had declined going to a University but instead passed three years as an apprentice with the famous engineering works of Maudslay. With that behind him he joined the 18th Hussars and represented Great Britain at horse shows in San Sebastian, Brussels, New York and Chicago before deciding that horses were démodé. In 1911 he took up flying and at his own expense won the Aviator’s Certificate No 25. He had been a founder member of the Air Battalion RE and in 1912 obtained his Airship Pilot’s Certificate. Having been fobbed off with an appointment to the Armoured Cars he at once turned his powerful imagination towards more promising things.
The meeting of minds from which the whole tank idea flowed took place at Murray’s Club early in February, 1915; only three of the pioneers, Stern, Hetherington and James Radley, the racing motorist, were present. Most of the talking was done by Hetherington who was thinking in terms of that well-known attraction at Mr Kiralfy’s White City, the Big Wheel. Nobody contemplated the years of trench warfare that lay ahead; the thoughts of all three were concentrated on a crossing of the Rhine, presumably to take place quite soon, and for this the plan seemed to have something to offer. The Duke of Westminster was captivated by it and agreed to arrange another dinner with Mr Churchill present.
The same, serving its intended purpose.
The First Lord accepted and on 17 February sat down with Sueter, Hetherington, Stern and Commander Briggs of the RNAS. Hetherington warmed to his work. As soon as he spoke of a cross-country car Mr Churchill was, says Stern, delighted. He was too well-mannered to cry down his host’s immediate plan. The Big Wheel as a weapon of war had, as they admitted, first occurred to Mr Wells but they were working on it. It should be made into a huge tricycle, 100 feet long with 40 foot wheels and weighing 300 tons. There would be three turrets each carrying a pair of 4 inch guns and power would come from a Sunbeam Diesel engine of 800 hp that the Admiralty was developing for its new submarines. The armour would be 3 inches thick over the vital parts. The scheme showed much richness of imagination but was palpably absurd. More VSOP than RNAS. None the less men of imagination were few in 1915 and it seemed a pity to discourage them. To be on the safe side Mr Churchill spoke of it to Admiral Sir John Fisher who turned it down robustly.
The First Lord already had ideas of his own of a more modest kind. Sueter had introduced him to the Pedrail machine made by an eccentric engineer named Bramah Diplock, owner of the Diplock Caterpillar Tractor Company of Fulham. The Pedrail was not much to look at, being merely a builder’s skip mounted upon a single track. Its power unit was a horse and it could travel only in a straight line without being hauled round by brute force. The RNAS had borrowed a horse and arranged for a demonstration of the Pedrail on the Horse Guards Parade on 16 February. Mr Churchill stationed himself between the shafts and found himself able to pull a ton weight without difficulty. It was not the only thing on his mind for the Fleet was due to begin bombarding the outer forts of the Dardanelles within a matter of hours.
The First Lord, though carrying a load of responsibility that would have crushed most men, continued to ponder on what he had seen and heard; already he was working towards the idea that there must be some better way of attacking a fortified position than by walking towards it under such cover as the artillery of early 1915 could provide. There were men other than Hetherington and his friends with ingenious minds and knowledge of mechanical engineering. February, 1915, was an eventful month for Mr Churchill. On the 13th he had, on his personal responsibility, ordered thirty of Bacon’s machines. On the 16th he had inspected the Pedrail. On the 17th he dined with Hetherington and the others. On the 19th the Navy, of which he was political chief, began to bombard the outer forts of the Dardanelles. On the 20th he ordered the setting-up of what would be called the Landship Committee. One may as well end here the story of Bacon’s tractors, though it upsets chronology. After they had been shown to Sir John French and Lord Kitchener on 13 February a report went to the War Office. On 16 May Colonel Capel Holden, the retired officer brought back to be Director of Mechanical Transport – a subject which in nearly 40 years service had never come his way – rejected it because it could not perform impossible feats. Thenceforth nothing mattered but the Landship Committee.
Its brief was to study the entire question of getting men through wire and across trenches by means of armoured mechanical vehicles. It did not matter whether they would be scaled-down big-wheelers, lashed steam-rollers or forms of the caterpillar tractor. The Committee had the entire responsibility. The War Office would not be invited to have any part in the business, at any rate for the time being. Its Chairman, suitably enough, was to be the Director of Naval Construction, Mr Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt. It would not have been reasonable to expect d’Eyncourt to devote all his time to landships; his speciality was the big, fast submarine. In 1913 he had designed one driven by steam and displacing 1700 tons, bigger than many destroyers and unmatched for size until recent times. It had never got beyond the model stage. In January, 1915, he followed it up with plans for another, using three Diesel engines with 36 cylinders between them. At the time of joining the Landships Committee he was at work on the most spectacular plan of them all, the huge steam-driven ‘K’ boats. Six of them were to sink and one was to disappear without trace. Nobody could accuse d’Eyncourt of lack of imagination. Only Mr Wells or Jules Verne had more. His Committee’s Secretary, appointed a few days later, was Lieut Albert Stern, RNVR. From the beginning he admired d’Eyncourt greatly, later writing that he alone was the tank’s true father.
On the following day the First Lord wrote an Appreciation of the war situation. It was a thorough tour d’horizon and had strong views about the Western Front.
‘The Anglo-French lines in the west are very strong and cannot be turned … We ought to welcome a German assault on the largest possible scale. The chances of repulsing it would be strongly in our favour.’ Sir John French took a different view. On 10 March fourteen British battalions attacked at Neuve Chapelle, with the object of pushing the cavalry through to Lille. The wire and the machine-guns claimed 13,000 men. On 22 April, around Ypres, came the German counter-attack. It was not Neuve Chapelle in reverse. IG Farben, chemists to the world, had worked out a plan for dealing with the twin killers of infantry. Clouds of greenish-yellow chlorine gas swirled around the British wire and engulfed the men behind the Vickers guns. Only the steadiness of the Canadians, most of them going into their first battle, prevented the secret weapon from winning a mighty success. Once the secret was out, however, the tool turned in the makers’ hands. Gas of all kinds would be a valuable ancillary; but it would not breach a trench-line.
The Landship Committee got seriously down to the work with which it had been entrusted. Perhaps between all their experts they could come up with something better. The War Office remained quite indifferent. If Mr Churchill wanted to waste the Navy’s money it was nobody’s affair but his.