Cooper - Tank battles of World War I

CHAPTER ONE

Birth of the Tank

It would be very difficult to imagine a war today being fought without the use of tanks. They are vital to the armies of even the smallest nations, the spearhead force of any land attack, in many ways the epitome of modern warfare. Assuming a more or less even balance in other factors such as air power, an army without tanks would have little chance of success.

But that was precisely the situation which occurred in World War I. The tank did not exist before the war began. It was invented by the British and used for the first time in 1916, one of the most devastating weapons ever to be introduced during a war. For two years the British and the French, who to a lesser degree also developed tanks of their own, had a monopoly in the use of this new weapon. By the time the Germans came to realise the enormous potential of the tank and frantically started to build their own, it was far too late. Only 15 German tanks ever came into action, as against over 4,000 British and French. In the final battles of 1918, tanks were the most decisive single factor in securing victory for the Allies.

With such a clear superiority, it might be wondered why tanks did not make a greater impact earlier than they did. They would have done had it not been for the extraordinary reluctance to accept them on the part of tradition-bound military commanders who lacked the imagination to see that the nature of war had completely changed. It was only by the dogged persistence of a few far-sighted individuals that tanks became available at all to the British Army on the Western Front. Even then they were badly misused. The powerful element of surprise that could have been achieved by the introduction of such a secret weapon was dissipated by minor and inconclusive actions in the mud of Flanders. A very real chance of ending the war earlier was thrown away by generals who still pinned their faith on the cavalry and dreamed of a great sabre-drawn charge through the German lines, a costly dream that required 80,000 tons of fodder a month for the 400,000 horses maintained by the British Army.

The Germans also clung to outmoded ideas, although this was less apparent in the early years of the war. Their greatest weapons were the machine gun, largely responsible for the stalemate that existed on the Western Front after the race for the coast had become drawn, and long range artillery bombardment for which they possessed a clear superiority in munitions over the British and French. Their own answer to counter bombardment by the Allies was to dig in, creating in the Hindenburg Line the greatest defensive system the world had ever seen, four miles wide in places with huge electrically-lit and heated dugouts where a company of men could lie secure 40ft below ground until the shelling was over. They would then emerge and from their concrete machine gun posts annihilate the attacking infantry who were trying to claw a way through the massed barbed wire. Hundreds of thousands of unprotected troops were mown down in such suicidal attacks.

While the Allied commanders fought their reckless war of attrition, a policy of despair that sought nothing more than to wear the enemy down by swapping life for life, the Germans had reason to be confident that their defences were impregnable. Only when tanks appeared, armoured against the machine gun, able to crush through the barbed wire to make way for and give cover to the following infantry, were these mighty defences broken. The very trenches that had given such protection before became death traps as the tanks cruised up and down pouring a hail of fire into them.

The reasons for the stalemate on the Western Front were not surprising. There had not been a war between the major powers since 1871 and most people had no awareness of what war was like, still less the imagination to see how it might have developed from the time of the Franco-Prussian war. Each of the European nations which mobilisedand no less than six million men were sent into the first battleswas certain it was doing so in its own defence. Even the German advance through Belgium was part of a defensive deployment which became inevitable once Russia refused to demobilise. What had begun as a game of diplomatic bluff got so out of hand that no one knew how to stop it. But there was no shortage of slogans to sustain the momentum. The British, protected from invasion by the Grand Fleet and confident that it would all be over in a few months, decided it was going to be a war to end war, to make the world safe for democracy, themes that were later taken up by other countries. What very few realised, least of all the elderly commanders who owed their promotion to politics rather than ability, was the effect that modern technology would have, particularly in transportation.

The paradox lay in the fact that although the age was still that of the horse and none of the armies had mechanical transport to begin with, it was still possible to bring troops into battle very quickly by means of the railway. Trains could speed reinforcements to any part of the Front where they were required. Once they reached the railhead however, the troops had to slog it on foot, moving no faster than in any century past and indeed sometimes much slower, such were the numbers involved. Before an attacking side could break through on foot, the defenders could more rapidly bring up reinforcements to plug the gap. The defence was mechanised whereas the attack was not, therefore the defence was always stronger. But the military authorities were all agreed that the only effective means of waging war was to attack. Thus occurred the appalling casualties as men were thrown without protection against strongly defended positions. Even when they did succeed in breaking through, they were always beaten back by a rapid build-up of reinforcements. This was the case time and time again until something could be found to change the pattern. And that something was the tank.