CHAPTER 4

Technology and Military Operations

This is the point where the obvious must be argued to a position of precedence over the preferred options to which some critics resort, when offering their own solutions to the defects, mandatory in their opinion, of the conduct and thinking of the British General Staff responsible for the participation of Britain in the Great War. The application of advances in technology by the army receives little attention generally. The developments in just three aspects of warfare: artillery, air power and armoured fighting vehicles, allow an inference to be drawn, that all is not as it first appears to be.

First we all need to remember that armies of the time were not organised to produce original inventions. The armies of the day could only use the technology and equipment available to them from the industrial sources of their nation. They could also of course buy naturally occurring materials such as timber, coal, stone, meat, fish, cereals etc. as well as employ men and horses. The military organisation has only the most limited resources to originate, design or produce manufactured items, and it is not their job so to do. The army can specify a need, whether it can be satisfied is a very different matter. Once again the precept about war needing to be fought as it must, not as we would like.

To digress and provide an illustration of wishful thinking by some commentators, more than once I have found an opinion expressed in respect of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 that the infantry should have been provided with the body armour as protection, from which planet were such suggestions coming from? Metal (steel) body armour had been abandoned for soldiers in Europe in the seventeenth century with the advent of reliable (fairly) fire arms. The weight of the protection was too great when matched against a musket ball. Nothing changed in the next couple of hundred years or so, there was no viable protection for a soldier in the open. Not until the advent of ‘Keflar’, a light plastic material, in the last quarter of the twentieth century was there a material that could be utilised for personal protection (nb, plastics at the time of the 1914—18 conflict were confined to a limited range of ‘thermosetting’ compounds invented by the Belgian chemist and businessman Dr.L.H.Bakeland and independently in England by James Swinburn (later Sir James Swinburn FRS) the invention became known, unsurprisingly, as Bakelite). A few synthetic fabrics such as ‘rayon’ and the flexible nitrocellulose (celluloid) material used for the recently developed cinema films were also available. The latter invention was to be of great value for the camera roll films, although glass plate negatives continued to be widely used. Polymers such as Nylon and polyethylene were for the next generation, just.

The second issue for thought is concerned with the relationship between origination and application. Academe makes a clear distinction between pure and applied issues. The pure aspects of science are in the realms of abstraction and intellectual reasoning, such matters as Newton on gravity, Einstein on relativity or Faraday on the phenomenon of electro-magnetic induction and electromagnetic rotation. Whilst two of the three quoted examples help us to comprehend the influences affecting our universe there is no immediate practical use for the knowledge, after all, things have been sticking to mother earth for many millions of years and are likely to continue to do so. Michael Faraday and his understanding of the subject is a different matter, observation and understanding enabled theoretical considerations to become practical equipment with real utility in every field of human activity. Another platitude for consideration, invention is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

The intention of these early paragraphs is to emphasise the anomalous position of the military when it comes to the use of technology. As an extreme example the much loved science fiction device of the ‘Death Ray‘ was only feasible in the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the technology did not exist to provide the devices visualised however much the military and/or the naval authorities may have wished for them. The technology of manned, powered flight was a different matter, empirically this conundrum had been solved by the Wright brothers, on 17th December 1903, only a decade before the outbreak of war; their day job was more prosaic – they were bicycle mechanics. Between 1914 and 1918 the aeroplane as an instrument of war moved from the use of fragile single engine machines for limited spotting and reconnaissance tasks, to the creation of an independent fighting service capable of waging war on its own terms. This advance did not take place overnight and the substantial resources had to be allocated, including an intellectual commitment, to the development and application of the nascent opportunities before air operations became both technically and operationally effective.

On analysis it appears that there were for the British three main aspects of technology which they applied and expanded to achieve the defeat of the German Army; air operations, mentioned above, the use and improvement of artillery and the introduction of Armoured Fighting Vehicles (AFVs); tanks in non military terms. Chemical warfare, gas, never quite made it as a reliable weapon. The use of gas, certainly on the Western Front, although helpful as a shock tactic often got out of control because of climatic conditions and turned on the troops of the instigator; an outcome that is unhelpful for morale at the very least. Wireless (radio) was also a technology which did not advance military operations to the extent it might have been anticipated, although line based telephone systems were an essential part of army communications, wireless though was used at base headquarters despite concerns about security.

The arrival and development of aerial warfare in this conflict was not to bring about significant material losses to enemy forces, any loss suffered in air combat operations was and would continue to be insignificant in comparative terms to the damage inflicted in the war on the ground, throughout the Great War. What was achieved was that rear areas and even civilian locations could become targets for interdiction. There was consequently an affect on the morale of the non combatants. The objective and indeed the eventual success of the Allies was one of control. The Central Powers, the Germans, were denied freedom of operations in the air including air space behind their own lines. The enemy were denied a vital initiative, their planning as the war entered its final year had to be based on the assumption that air superiority or even parity would be denied by the Allied air operations. Air reconnaissance, target and artillery spotting, bombing raids and aerial photography were used by Britain and France to modify and organise their offensive and defensive operations on the ground. The generals of the day accepted and developed the use of a brand new concept to the operations of war in Western Europe. The intrepid and visionary commanders, such as Major General Hugh Trenchard, John Salmond and Hugh Dowding risked their professional careers to establish the new resource of air power and made a signal contribution to the war in which they fought and should be allowed more credit for their achievements.

Artillery forms a neat counterpoint to the introduction of the aeroplane based on the new technology of powered manned flight. Artillery had been around in one form or another for many centuries. The Romans had their siege engines, the Chinese invented gun powder, and cannons had been used on land and sea but not always to the best effect. The Royal Navy, experts in the use of cannon, preferred to rely on massed, close quarter broadsides until the breech loading rifled barrel arrived and could be combined with newly invented hydraulic recoil dampers. These innovations were to be combined to produce a mounting system allowing a gun to return to a fixed alignment after firing; the accurate use of artillery weapons of various calibres on the battlefield in modern warfare became achievable.

Naval gunnery has suffered from a difficulty that technology strove to overcome. Ships on the move mounting guns, fired at the enemy on the move. Not so the army who fired from static emplacements. Ships would be following their own course but affected by pitch and roll at sea, to some greater or lesser degree. The target(s) also would usually be on the move following a different course and also changing position with the movement of the sea. To overcome this inherent disadvantage to accurate shooting, the technology of the naval construction industry, following the introduction of steam power, eventually favoured the use of several large guns in huge ships (the bigger the ship the more stable the gun platform, theory), who all sailed along in a nice tidy line, training their upmarket cannons on the enemy and hoping that the gods of war and some smart calculations would do them a favour and let a few of the explosive shells disable the enemy before the same fate befell them. That was the way the Royal Navy went about its affairs in 1914, almost but not quite oblivious to the introduction of sea going submarines equipped with Mr Whitehead’s torpedoes

In 1914 the Royal Artillery was divided into three groups, the smart, high profile Royal Horse Artillery (RHA) very dashing, lots of horses to make a fuss about and nice small guns to rush into action behind the PBI (poor bloody infantry). Firing their weapons at visible targets and correcting their shooting by observing the fall of shot, then making individual adjustments for each gun to hit the enemy target. Just to make sure everyone knew that the RHA were a cut above the common herd the buttons on the jackets of officers’ mess dress were round, almost like a musket ball, other gunners were referred to as ‘flat buttons’. A bit foolish really when all portions of the Royal Regiment were carrying out the same task of bringing confusion to the enemies of the sovereign.

The second group of gunners were the Field Artillery, much less glamorous, heavier weapons of larger calibre, pulled around by tractors or heavy horse trains, sweaty soldiers in shirt sleeves serving the guns which, generally speaking, were fired at targets on an area basis hoping that there would be a detrimental effect on enemy positions. The third part of the gunner’s empire was the Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA); these were the specialists who manned the guns of the fortresses in stations such as Malta, Gibraltar, Dover and so on. The guns used by the RGA were large calibre, eight inch was common, as much as twelve or fourteen inch sometimes, in fixed and reinforced emplacements. In most cases the only way for the gun teams to practice live firing was for the gunners to be embarked in capital ships of the Royal Navy and sent to ranges in the open sea and this is what they did each summer. Service in this part of the artillery was not much sought by ambitious officers. During the 1914—18 war these were the men who operated the giant ‘Railway Guns’, the siege guns used to reach far behind the enemy lines with their barrages. The Germans also used weapons of this type and famously during the Great War shelled Paris from positions located in the occupied portion of France.

The appreciation of the general principles of artillery work had progressed significantly as the technology of the guns and the explosives used had advanced over a fifty year period immediately prior to the outbreak of war in 1914. The technology that lagged was twofold, fire direction and control and secondly, ammunition and fusing.

In 1914 the gunners still needed to see their targets, line of sight was vital to bring effective fire to bear on specific targets. (The Royal Navy also had to continue with observed fall of shot even on capital ships, equipped with fire control towers and high resolution range finders.) That is not to say that area bombardment was discarded, but the effect of this method of bombardment was more concerned with damaging morale or fixed installations such as railway junctions and important bridges, than ensuring that specific damage was achieved to a military formation or emplacement. Hence in 1914 the horse drawn gun batteries rushed into action behind the infantry, shelled the enemy who were foolish enough to show themselves, laid a bit of smoke then hitched up and nipped behind the nearest cover before they received repayment from the opposition, in kind6. Lovely horses, polished brass work on the guns and limbers impress the locals in a colonial outpost, but the procedures were not organised to operate in the context of the warfare of the trenches; hidden targets, well dug in and protected with earth works, sandbags, etc. Should the army have anticipated the need? Yes, most certainly it ought to have looked ahead and anticipated the need for indirect fire control. There was though one link needed to allow such technology to be introduced, instant communications, hence field telephones were brought into use.

A little excursion is needed to explain the idea of indirect fire. The first issue to accept is that artillery pieces (guns) are very valuable items of kit to the army, loss or damage to even one of a battery’s guns is a serious business amounting in some circumstances to disgrace. As the range of guns increased with technology the opportunity to damage and even destroy the guns of the opposition increased, guns therefore had to be adequately protected. This was done best if the enemy could be prevented from knowing the position of your gun emplacements, such as placing the battery on the reverse slope of a hill and firing the gun over the summit of the slope. The problem is, of course, the gunners are unable to sight their weapons. Now some of the gunners were a bit special, understanding subjects such as surveying and trigonometry. This knowledge allowed the gunners to calculate range and trajectory as well as making allowances for wind deflection and correct for the curvature of the earth. The guns of a battery could therefore be aligned with great care and when fired the shot would fall very close to the target, but not necessarily close enough.

The next step was to introduce a specialist officer called a Forward Observation Officer (FOO). The job of this intrepid man was to take up a position sufficiently far forward to be able to see the target at which the guns had been directed to fire. He would have a telephone link back to the Battery Commander and a routine, called registration, was introduced to make sure the guns were correctly aimed to the last yard. Early in the process FOO had to make himself comfortable in a suitably waterlogged ditch, tasks such as this one always lead to a close encounter with water, mud, manure and other undesirable materials. The telephone link is then cranked into action and all the guns set to the calculated alignment, the order would be given for one of the pieces to ‘fire for registration’. Initially two or three rounds, FOO observed the fall of shot and sent a message back to the battery, giving details of the amount of correction that should be made to the range, bearing and so on. A couple more rounds to ensure all was well and the aim was perfect, the remaining guns of the battery aligned to the revised data and then the whole battery would be ordered to blaze away for the stipulated number of rounds and destroy the enemy position. The registration procedure allows for adjustment to be made for other factors which affect accuracy such as barrel wear.

Easy when you know how, there was of course a catch to the execution of this cunning little plan. The field telephone link from the hapless FOO to his Battery Commander was a vulnerable piece of cable, passing along hedges, fences through an assortment of middens, pig sties, road junctions and so on, between the two points. Vulnerable to the destructive attention of passing vehicles, animals and irate farmers, if all else failed the opposition did not have to try too hard to break the connection by casual gun fire and then the system falls flat on its face. Not until the arrival of field radios was fire direction a more reliable procedure. It is unfair of me not to acknowledge that considerable effort was expended to bury the telephone cables, however warfare being what it is, even the best efforts were confounded and the wire damaged by one means or another. Additionally FOO had to hide himself very thoroughly if he was not to attract the attention of enemy snipers or machine gunners. Officers and their signalmen who undertook fire direction duties were men of courage.

At this point the nascent Royal Flying Corps (RFC) found ways and means to come to the aid of the gunners. Before the war was very old it became clear that airmen could see what was going on below and spot the fall of artillery shot as well as identifying targets in advance when the enemies’ guns had a pop at the British or French positions. This, it was realised, must become part of the fire control procedure for the gun batteries. To begin with communications were, to say the least, haphazard: messages dropped in weighted bags, Morse lamps, hand signals and later the first airborne Morse transmitter, able to send simple messages to gun batteries tuned to the transmitter’s frequency and corrections made enabling indirect gun fire to fall on a predetermined target. How was the target identified? The RFC recognised the opportunity for aerial photography as their skill in reconnaissance work developed and the techniques were quickly developed to match maps with photographs and then use aeroplanes with trained observers to correct the shooting until the target no longer presented a threat. Problem was of course, the Germans did the same thing. Solution, shoot down the reconnaissance planes, using other planes, fighters, or anti aircraft fire from ground batteries. Then it all gets complicated with fighters flying as escorts to reconnaissance planes as well as other fighters trying to shoot down enemy reconnaissance planes escorted by more fighters; a very confusing introduction to warfare for the fledgling RFC. It was the fulfilment of the adage ‘cometh the hour cometh the man’. The previously mentioned Maj. Gen Hugh Trenchard, in 1914 holding the rank of colonel, was the man who took the forty-eight planes that went to France in 1914 and inspired the RFC to greatness. The enemy had within a short time better aeroplanes but the RFC and the French air corps had more planes. The policies and techniques that were developed as the war progressed by Trenchard enabled the Allies to gain superiority in the air and impose their authority on the Germans, this despite such ‘aces’, as von Richtoffen. The Germans were again tempted down a cul-de-sac, priority went to the destruction of enemy planes not the development of the reconnaissance and fire control role emphasised by Trenchard. A decision it has to be said that cost the RFC dear in human terms. In April 1917 aircrew casualties in some squadrons were exceeding 100% in the month.

Ammunition and fusing is yet another vast subject for specialist analysis, the casual observer, you and I, need to remember that an artillery shell has in addition to the fuse two main components: the projectile, the pointed bit that should damage the King’s enemies, and the casing that contains the propellant material. Both components are required to go BANG but not at the same time. The explosive in the casing is detonated by a percussion cap in the base which contains a very uncertain material, Mercury Fulminate or something similar, even the boffins who make this stuff treat it with care. When the percussion cap is detonated by loading the shell into the breach of a gun, closing the breach and administering a smart tap with a pointed steel rod the main propellant charge in the casing is exploded, this generates a lot of hot gas and the projectile is forced up the barrel of the gun towards its target where the fuse will be activated and the resultant second explosion will do damage to the enemies of the Crown. The essential part of this routine is to make sure that when the shell is fired from its gun the fuse is not activated and a premature explosion take place on home ground; all a bit tricky and in 1914 even more so because Britain did not have sufficient manufacturing capacity for one of the essential explosives. The dilemma was resolved however by the arrival on the scene in the nick of time of Dr. Chiam Weitzmann, yes that’s right a German, of Jewish origin who was able to offer an alternative manufacturing process for the production of acetone, a solvent necessary to the manufacture of the explosive Cordite, essential for the Allies’ war effort.

As with all newly established manufacturing operations there were some problems, initially the artillery had a nasty outbreak of ‘prematures’, ‘shorts’ and ‘duds’, until all the manufacturing problems were resolved, not I am sure without much grief in the factories. At the Somme in 1916 the estimate was that about 30% of the shells fired were affected by one of the shortcomings. The design, manufacture and use of artillery fuses were the cause of many problems to all the national armies in this war. Artillery fuses are items of precision engineering in which the components have to be machined to exact dimensions, within 0.0001” (one thousandth of an inch). Now put this requirement into the context of the rapid expansion of the armaments’ industry and the introduction of workers, unfamiliar with the manufacturing operations, but required to work to these exacting standards and the problems become more apparent. Small wonder there were difficulties. The trouble is that an artillery shell is fired once only, recovery and repair are not options and guess who gets the blame for failure, the poor sweating ‘squaddie’.

This was not a problem for Britain alone, both the French and German gunners, it is reported, had at least the same number of defective rounds. Never though is there a word of such shortcomings by others allowed to dilute the virulence of the critics of the British achievement. There is also the issue of the ammunition type to be used in a particular operation. Shrapnel, named after the eponymous colonel, no use against fortifications, high explosive works OK against fortifications, but has limited radius of effectiveness against soldiers with their heads down. So the complications mount.

As we have now introduced the fearless FOO to our narrative this is probably the place where it is appropriate to look at the non appearance of radio. At the time this equipment was known as wireless, we will for the remainder of our deliberations use the current term, radio. Radio was a practical operating system by 1914, the navies of the world including our own Royal Navy were well equipped to take advantage of the new technology. There were two aspects of the systems available that militated against widespread use by the army. Size was the first and this included a requirement for gigantic amounts of power, requiring noisy generators for the current with attendant fuel supplies, plus the cumbersome aerial displays needed for transmission and reception of signals. There was no suitable installation for trench warfare. In 1918 an experimental army radio ‘set up’ needed seven men to transport the components.

At this stage of development ships were ideal users, ‘man pack’ sets were a dream for the war of 1939—45. And before anyone says how ridiculous the situation was that the bright boys of the new telecommunications industry could not do better, remember please neither could their peers in Germany, France or Italy. The problem was the power needed to transmit signals on the wavelengths then used and the efficiency of the newly invented thermionic valve, many of which were the size of an inverted flower vase of reasonable capacity and rather more fragile. Aerials also were large and obvious, as noted above, look at the wire festooned from the masts of any ship equipped with radio systems, you take my point. As also did the enemy who would have a jolly time with machine guns and other trench weapons cutting the masts down to the ground, foot by foot as target practice.

This goes some way to explain the dangerous nature of communications between formations, in particular the troops holding the front line trenches. The men at risk were the ‘runners’ who had to rely on good luck as they dodged through the broken ground of the battlefield to relay a message back to a commander, field telephones’ cables were so frequently broken, pigeons got lost, dogs and men who were wounded or killed. Please explain, what are the alternatives missed by the men on the ground?

The third example of new technology that found its way to the battlefield as a consequence of the Great War was the Armoured Fighting Vehicle (AFVs) aka tanks. As with artillery the basic idea had already received some attention. In the fourth century BC the Persian King Senacharib devised a mobile, wheeled cart in which bowmen could be pushed closer to the enemy under protection from arrows fired by their opponents. Leonardo da Vinci left records in his notebooks of his suggestions for an equivalent machine. These early propositions suffered from two significant disadvantages, though mobile they were cumbersome and they depended on the muscular effort of a crew of men who were at least equivalent in number to the bowmen to make progress. In simple terms, as an equipment for mobile warfare, they were none starters.

Come the Great War technology had moved on, the internal combustion engine had arrived and was used in various haulage applications, including continuous track drive systems for heavy work and agricultural tasks on adverse terrain. The proposal to develop a ‘land ship’ came to the attention of that energetic, maverick politician Winston Churchill and before you can say “Attention this day” Britain was leading the field to invent a vehicle by combining tracks, armour and engines with a gun or two for good measure. In the light-hearted way the military has with these things they were developed at the instigation of the Admiralty under the cover of a project for the Russian Army to transport water, hence ‘tank’.

The development of this machine was by no means straightforward; carried out under the pressure of events and casualties on the Western Front. Companies, their design teams, production engineers and the specialised tradesmen all had to find solutions to a range of new problems for this innovative equipment, without the assistance of computers. Enter the armchair critic, again equipped with hindsight and preconceptions, “Ah,” say the critics, “obviously the generals got it wrong, they should have thought of the problem and the solution before battle commenced.” Well perhaps they should but if that is the case what were the generals in Germany and France doing? It really is very unrealistic to point fingers of accusation at the generals of the British Army without acknowledging that others much more concerned with large force, high intensity conflict had also failed to get to grips with the problem, before the first shot was fired.

In the end it was the British Army and its commanders who sought, found and introduced to the battlefield an innovative machine, incorporated it into their order of battle and devised ways to supply, maintain and use the new weapon.

The received wisdom is that the British command structure, rooted in its affection for horses, rejected innovation and when forced into accepting new equipment wasted and misused the opportunities so created. The examples above suggest that this is not the case. Rather it seems more probable that those looking for scapegoats are prepared to overlook the complications that accrue when an impasse is reached for which the solution is innovative. Think again about the difficulties of ensuring that the use of gas as a weapon of war was effective.

The general outcome of reading and analysis of information on the use and development of new technology is that when a system was seen to be realistic and effective the generals would take it into use and make the most of the advantages provided. The point of failure or neglect in technology terms is, I think, to be found in the low technology aspects of life, in particular the support and care of the soldiers in the line. Much more should have been done to make conditions bearable in the trenches. Primus type cookers available at platoon level to ensure that a hot drink and basic meal, such as a stew, could be supplied during the day; waterproof wrap over sleeping covers; prefabricated trench support and footway systems; grappling iron systems attached to hand operated winches to pull away enemy wiring systems, all these and many more would have made the life of Thomas Atkins that little more bearable.

From whichever way the issues are considered, the front line soldiers in the fighting zone, and his officers, had conditions in which to operate several degrees of magnitude worse than any rear area soldier of whatever rank and nothing should be too good for those whose task it is to prevail against the enemy in the name of the sovereign.