HAVING HALVED THE ARMY ESTIMATES, the Government became afflicted by the condition known to soldiers as ‘wind up’. This was due more to the antics of Mussolini than to the really serious threat from Hitler. What was called ‘a limited degree of rearmament’ was suddenly ordained. There was little enough support from the electorate. In a by-election at Fulham they had put in a pacifist; a body of undergraduates announced loudly that on no account would it fight for King and country; even in the Public Schools the OTC was despised. It was a bad period for Government and governed alike, and no leader comes out of it with credit.
Hobart became Inspector of the Tank Corps and laboured mightily for improvements. The best he could achieve was the raising of one more battalion at home. With the tools available to him he strove to make an effective armoured force, but it was uphill work. The First Brigade was again exercised as an entity and pitted against an unarmoured force under Brigadier Lindsay. More lessons of a tactical kind were learned but as soon as it was over about a hundred of the best tanks were sent to Egypt, leaving only a few dozen veterans at home. Talk continued, as it had been doing for a long time, about sending the Cavalry finally to the knacker’s yard and turning troopers into tankers which would put some flesh on to the proposed Mobile Division. It achieved nothing. Mussolini’s smash and grab raid on Abyssinia gave evidence that tanks could perform well in the least likely places but the consequences were little more than articles in the service journals.
The War Office had other things to think about, the biggest single one being how to attract more recruits. It is not remarkable that promotion for officers was painfully slow. The retiring age for a General was 67 and for a Major-General 62; there was no shortage of either. Far down the ladder good middle-aged Captains waited glumly for somebody to die or go in order to create a Major’s vacancy. The barrack squares everywhere were thinly populated, even though some establishments were set up merely for the purpose of bringing under-nourished youths up to the not very exacting standards demanded for infantry recruits. Most of the new money went, very properly, to the Navy and the RAF. Democracies do not like opening their wallets for soldiers.
In November, 1935, the Secretary for War, Lord Halifax, bowed out. His place was taken by Alfred Duff Cooper, yet another of those from whom much was expected. He had risen in the social scale by his marriage to the famous Lady Diana. He had been an Ensign in the Grenadiers during the last months of the war and had won himself a DSO, something very rare for a subaltern. Though only 45, he was to the elderly Generals ‘one of us’. Unfortunately he was also lazy. Under his management little enough happened. There was, of course, one man among the King’s subjects who could have brought something formidable out of even a limited degree of rearmament. Mr Churchill, a giant amongst pygmies, was never seriously considered. Had He been appointed, the whine of ‘Gallipoli’ from some political quarters would have drowned the noise of machine-tools working day and night at Essen.
There is something about the atmosphere of that fine Edwardian building in Whitehall that seems to induce coma in most of those sent to the highest War Office positions. The office of the CIGS, though not exactly the place where elephants go to die, seemed only one remove from it. Sir George Milne had commanded great armies and won great victories; Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd had been Rawlinson’s Berthier. They left, neither having much to show for his having been there. Now, in 1936, came Sir Cyril Deverell, once commander of 3rd Division and commonly reckoned amongst the best officers of his rank in France. Each in turn fell victim to the inertia.
To sneer at these elderly, distinguished officers would be monstrously unjust. Each of them, and many others also, looked upon the Army as a landed gentleman might look out upon a noble landscape, known and loved not merely since boyhood but since the boyhoods of ancestors long dead. There must be changes, to be sure, but changes of a natural kind as trees die and others replace them. What cannot be suffered is vulgar commercial intrusion, the building of a factory or power station where the Folly used to be. The business of the tenant was to preserve all that was best on the estate, to keep up its good traditions and to hand them down to following generations. To contemplate pulling down the stables and replacing them by a garage was no part of the duty.
For all that, 1936 saw the beginnings of change. It began with Martel’s visit to the Red Army manoeuvres in the suite of the Russian-speaking General Wavell. This was terra incognita for everybody and it caused eyes to open wide. Over a thousand battle-worthy tanks – five times as many as the British Army’s entire stock – took part and they were certainly not made of cardboard. Ever since the Five Year Plan of 1928 the Soviet engineers had been working away and they had much to show for their pains. The backbone of the force was a big machine looking uncommonly like the Independent and carrying a 76 mm gun along with several machine-guns in its four turrets. Even more impressive was the performance of a lighter machine called a cruiser; it had faults, but Martel reckoned the suspension to have been designed by a genius. It had been the poor design of suspension that had damned the A 9. On his return home Martel, just appointed to the War Office for duties of this kind, took the matter up.
The name of the genius, he had been told, was Mr Christie, and he was an American. Martel sought out Lord Nuffield, with whom he had worked on the aborted A 8, and arranged for his people to get hold of a Christie tank by whatever means he could find. Nuffields ran it to earth. It seemed that, suspension apart, the Christie tank was so bad the the US Ordnance Department had refused it. Nuffield bought the only surviving specimen by means of a telephone call to New York. Then the trouble began. Christie was hard up and somebody had a lien on his machine. Nuffield paid off the mortgagee but his difficulties were not over. As a result of the Spanish Civil War the US Government was sensitive about the export of war material and a tank was indisputably that. Christie rather ingeniously converted the thing into a tractor and as such it was shipped to Nuffield’s works with patent rights included in the bargain. It had all been uncommonly quick work. Martel arrived home on 26 September: by 17 November the soi-disant tractor was at Cowley. This was the last demonstration of how things could be done quickly, for much slow work lay ahead. Christie’s suspension system became familiar to all newspaper readers from 1940 onwards. The pairs of big wheels around which the track ran – early models had been made to work without any track at all – were unmistakeable. The idea promised speeds previously thought unattainable, but suspension was the tank’s only virtue. Steering and transmission were not of the same engineering brilliance. For a power unit Nuffields acquired a number of 1919 Liberty engines and worked them over. They served surprisingly well.
Martel looked around for somebody capable of putting these things to rights and the task fell to Dr H. E. Merrit of Woolwich Arsenal. As some sort of guide he was given a design, made by Wilson some years previously but never developed, of a double differential system. It was something to work on but Merrit made it very clear that a mass of detailed work was going to be needed before results could be expected. It took him three years and was considered rather quick. One man who could have been of great use was missing. In December, 1935, Sir John Carden was killed in an air crash. His death was a serious loss to everybody concerned with mechanized warfare in Britain.
Early in 1936 the Army once more handed back to the Navy its interests in tank design. Engineer Vice-Admiral Sir Harold Brown, lately Engineer-in-Chief to the Fleet, had been snapped up on retirement and appointed Director-General of Munitions Production. Like Admiral Moore before him, he was no landship expert, but he was a ready learner. Martel was given charge of the department dealing with tanks under the Director of Mechanization, General Davidson. All this promised well, but the Treasury still remained as senior partner.
Before 1936 was out Germany had re-occupied the Rhineland and most of the tanks in England had been sent to Egypt. The Army’s total stock consisted of 209 light and 166 medium machines, nearly all of them obsolete. Things were, however, beginning to move at last. In February, 1937, Mr Baldwin screwed up his courage and announced a rearmament programme that would cost the enormous sum of £1500,000,000. In May Duff Cooper vacated Kitchener’s chair at the War Office and Leslie Hore Belisha, of beacon fame, moved into it. Hore Belisha is the rebuttal of the common assertion that personalities matter less than policies. It is difficult to do justice to him for he was his own worst enemy. To the elderly Generals he was emphatically not ‘one of us’. Sir Henry Pownall, Director of Military Operations and Intelligence, called him ‘an obscure, shallow-brained, charlatan, political Jew-boy’. This was a superficial, if widely shared, judgment. Hore Belisha was certainly not obscure; his talent for self-advertisement had seen to that. That he was a Jew proclaimed itself; that, at least, he had in common with General Sir John Monash. All Ministers were, of necessity, politicians. ‘Shallow-brained’ is hardly the description of a graduate of both Oxford and Heidelberg, let alone of a man who, like Haig, had been at Clifton. There might be a stronger case for ‘charlatan’, for Hore Belisha delighted in playing to the gallery. He was accused of knowing nothing at all about the Army and he made no effort to deny this. In fact he had known a good deal, joining up in August, 1914, serving two years in France and another two in Salonika, rising to the rank of Major at 25 and earning himself a mention in despatches. His service had, admittedly, been in the unexciting Army Service Corps but it was entirely creditable to him.
Less creditable was his demeanour. Duff Cooper had been rude, but more stylishly so than Hore Belisha. Comparison between the two men is interesting. It was Duff Cooper who had come late to the war, had performed a rather showy act of bravery and been decorated for it; one cannot somehow picture him sweating out dreary years in the ASC, but it is easy to imagine Hore Belisha having done what Duff Cooper did. Both had excellent brains. Cooper’s idleness prevented him from any display of intellectual superiority when among slower-thinking elderly Generals; Hore Belisha made no allowances. His demeanour and habits were not of the kind to which they were accustomed and they liked neither. Sir Edmund Ironside was fascinated by his cloth-topped boots with zip fasteners and reminded himself that ‘French had never been able to work with a man who wore Jemimas’.
On policies he did better. Time promotion for officers – eight years to Captain and seventeen to Major – came as a blessing to many. In other respects he was, as everybody knew, the mouthpiece of Captain Liddell Hart, late of the Army Education Corps and a mighty writer about all things military. For a time this did no harm, for there were senior men quite willing to listen to new ideas. The novelty wore off quite soon. General Deverell, CIGS and a very experienced commander, came to loathe the name of Liddell Hart. Pownall eventually confided to his diary that ‘He needs to be shot dead, a sinister influence who has done the Army much harm’. This was a little hard. Many foreign Generals have proclaimed their debt to Liddell Hart’s teachings. No such acknowledgment was to come from Field-Marshals Alexander, Slim or Montgomery. Possibly not all of them had heard of him. Ideas that might have worked wonders with the huge Red Army – now busily engaged in purging itself white – were of little value to the War Office of the late 1930s. The combination of Hore Belisha and Liddell Hart was too much for General Deverell; putting him into the same room as the Secretary of State was tantamount to mixing the two halves of a Seidlitz Powder. One of them had to go. Sir Cyril Deverell bowed out and was succeeded, as much to his own surprise as anybody else’s, by the Military Secretary, Viscount Gort, VC. A mere boy of 51, grumbled Sir Philip Chetwode from his Club.
From the tank standpoint it was a change for the better, as Deverell was known to be seriously considering disbandment. In fact the saviour of the Corps was probably not Gort but Mussolini. After Waterloo the Duke had preserved the Army by hiding it in the Colonies. The greater part of the Royal Tank Corps was already in Egypt with practically every serviceable tank to its name. Obviously these could not be withdrawn and to keep them in being some sort of establishment at home was essential.
The Corps could, in fact, look forward to better days; the final row that had driven Deverell from office concerned it intimately. On paper there was a Mobile Division. It had at last been agreed that the time had arrived for it to become a reality. Other regiments had joined the Sparrow Starvers and were learning to drive armoured cars; the remainder of the Cavalry of the Line would soon have to go the same way. After all, the Germans already had four demonstrable Panzer Divisions. A commander had to be chosen for this new formation; Deverell thought it only fitting that he should be a horse-soldier; the Secretary of State saw no such necessity. They quarrelled, and the CIGS lost. The command went to a Gunner, Major-General Alan Brooke.
It was in October of 1937 that the great decision was taken. The 12th Lancers were already mechanized; in 1935 the 3rd Hussars had suffered the indignity of becoming ‘mechanized mounted infantry’ because there were not enough tanks or armoured cars to go round. The nth were now well acquainted with the Rolls Royces they had been driving for the past ten years. The Royals and the Greys were to be exempted on grounds of seniority; all other cavalry regiments would be mechanized as soon as opportunity offered. There were mixed feelings at all levels but the inevitability of it was generally accepted. The tone of war was lowered for ever.