The Juggernaut
BY J. A. TERRAINE OU see them still, all over the country : cracked, chipped, decapitated, tilted, overturned or still upright amid the undergrowth beside roads and bridges and railway track: tank traps. They were never much use, and the emergency they commemorate is long past—the invasion that never came. But they serve to remind us of Europe's nightmare, when one woke daily to a new invasion or the fear of one, and of the weapon that was an intrinsic feature of the nightmare—the tank. It is just forty years ago, on September 15, 1916, at Flers-Courcelette, in the late stages of the calamitous Battle of the Somme, that tanks made their first appearance in war.
To our eyes they were strange contraptions, the old Mark Ones. We have to forget our knowledge of the weapon, and remember its genesis, to appreciate them. They were born out of the impasse of the battles of 1915, which proved con- clusively that no amount of valour or discipline could pene- trate barbed wire defences in the face of machine guns, unaided. So the tanks were produced, out of the need to protect soldiers from machine-gun fire, and circumvent the obstacle of wire. As far back as 1911 their need had been foreseen and an Austrian inventor had submitted designs to his government, which characteristically ignored them, An Australian inventor approached the War Office in 1912 with similar ideas—and was likewise characteristically ignored. A German inventor gave a demonstration in Berlin in 1913; his government was as unimpressed as the Austrians and British. But by 1915 • necessity was clamorous. Various independent efforts were made to find an answer to the insuperable military problem, all with the same basic thought—the use of caterpillar tractors to cross rough ground and flatten the wire, with armour to protect the crews.
It is, to us perhaps, as characteristic as any other clement in this story that, after several failures, success should have been due to a man whom it is scarcely necessary to name, since he is concerned in so many of the critical occasions of this century. The minutes of the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Awards and Inventions for the First World War record that : 'It was primarily due to the receptivity. courage and driving force of Mr. Winston Churchill that the general idea . . . of such an instrument of warfare as the "Tank" was converted into a practical shape.' The midwife was his `Landships Committee,' formed while he was First Lord, backed with an allocation of Admiralty funds, and draw- ing upon the experience of the Armoured Car Division of the Royal Naval Air Service. Co-ordination was achieved when Colonel (as he then was) Swinton brought the Army's requirements into line with the Admiralty's efforts and linked both with the Ministry of Munitions. And so the landships were born, and christened 'tanks' to conceal their purpose, because that was precisely what these great iron boxes looked like.
The baptism of fire of the new arm was the Battle of Flers- Courcelette. The Battle of the Somme had been raging for two and a half months, a grinding down of the German defences yard by yard, always on the edge of, but never arriving at, the anticipated break-through. By mid-September it was clear that the Germans were at a low ebb, and it really did seem that one more mighty heave might burst their defences open before winter came and trapped both contestants in bottomless mud. Acting on this belief, GHQ could hardly do otherwise than plan to use every weapon at its disposal, in spite of the insistence of Colonel Swinton that the new machines should not be frittered away in driblets. After- knowledge is apt to make us too swift to condemn, but reflec- tion forces the conclusion that, given what GHQ knew about the enemy (and time has shown how surprisingly accurate the picture was), it could hardly have acted otherwise. And so the tanks were committed to action when there were only forty-nine of them available, and of " these. only thirty-six reached their starting points on September 15.
But if we find ourselves forced to acquit GHQ of the charge of frittering the new weapon away strategically, the same charge holds good tactically. With so few machines available it was ridiculous to offer them to two armies and divide their puny strength between four corps. In the event, as one might now suppose after the experience of both wars, it was only at their single point of concentration that the tanks effected any outstanding success—Flers. Thirteen of them were in the operation : the result was the deepest British advance of the whole battle, with considerable demoralisation of the enemy, and it produced one of the most dramatic signals of the war, from a contact aeroplane to XV Corps HQ : `Tank seen in main street Flers going on with large number of troops follOwing it'—freely translated by the press to : `Tank walk- ing up the High Street of Flers with the British Army cheering behind'—which is certainly more vivid, and perhaps not too far wrong.
For on this day at least, the tanks put the British Army in a cheering mood. The troops did not realise how few tanks there were, nor how severe were the casualties they suffered. Of the thirteen involved around Flers, eight were destroyed on the first day, and two more the day after. The great push ended, as so many had done before, bogged down in mud, facing the inevitable wire, lashed by the inevitable machine guns. The Battle of the Somme dragged on, and the great secret was now known. But for some reason the enemy did nothing about it, so that when at last the tanks had their chance, at Cambrai in 1917, they were able, in their hundreds, to vindicate themselves and score a really big victory, Nevertheless, there were elements in this first appearance that were to endure through'the whole of British tank history. to our grave cost. Perhaps the key to our relative failure, having invented them, to use them properly lies in their very origins. Their own sponsors, the Swinton Committee, referred to the new weapons as 'primarily a machine gun destroyer, which can be employed as an auxiliary to an infantry assault' and concluded `as the tanks are an auxiliary to the infantry, they must be counted as infantry and in operation be under the same command.' From this concept stems the first big mistake, the tactical dispersal along a lengthy front, which broke up the tank organisation itself, and also interfered with the normal artillery programmes, without any compensating advantage. According to the official history, `of the thirty-six tanks which reached their points of departure . . . on the 15th, less than a dozen played a part in the capture of strong points and trenches. . . .' This mistake has bedevilled British tank tactics ever since, and was not corrected in the Second World War until El Alamein.
As a result, though we had invented it, and were the first to use it, and though its true use has had many British advo- cates, there has never been a really great British tank, nor a really great British tank general. This is a hard saying, but true. One has only to think of the all-purpose qualities of the German Mark IV and the ferocious reputation of the Tiger; of the Stalin tank which even frightened the Germans; of the difference that the Sherman made to the desert cam- paigns, and, indeed, all subsequent Allied operations, to see the point. One has only to think of Guderian and Rommel, Rokossovsky and Patton, for it to sink in deep. British tank warfare, tied from its inception to infantry roles, has never had the thrust, the weight or the flexibility that are really inherent in the arm. The picture of the old Mark I, waddling up the main street of Flers forty years ago, with the infantry cheering behind it, has had altogether too much significance; it is worth remembering now, in a spirit of tribute to the heroes of the past.
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