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HG Wells in his short story The Land Ironclads published in The Strand Magazine in December 1903, described the use of large, armoured cross-country vehicles, armed with automatic rifles and moving on early caterpillar tracks to break through a system of fortified trenches.
The British Army wanted to throw men against machines
On Christmas Day 1914, Maurice Hankey, secretary to the British Committee on Imperial Defence, sat down to wrote a memorandum. He set out the evidence of the previous three months in which the Germans had dug lines of trenches from Switzerland to the Channel and protected them with miles of barbed wire. It was not a new problem. Trenches had been used time and again in warfare since the 1850s. But the British army had not begun to consider how they should be tackled.
Above all, Hankey argued, what was required was a vehicle with caterpillar tracks that could cross rough terrain, crush the wire and climb over the trenches. The army had been offered the idea on at least three occasions before the war and had shown no interest in it. It was now high time to get on with its development.
Had the army thrown its weight behind the project in December 1914 it is possible that its attack on the German trenches on the Somme, eighteen months later, could have been spearheaded by a fleet of tanks. But, of course, the war office again turned it down. It wanted to throw men against the German machines. Oh, and horses.
Episode 03 - The generals never studied how to attack trenches
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Early 1916 'Mother' drove off over mud and shell holes on Lord Salisbury's golf-course.
'No steps have been taken and no preparations made'
When it came to new technology the British Royal Navy had two clear advantages over the British Army. One was a long history of technical innovation that had made it by far the most advanced navy in the world. It was, after all, new technology that literally kept it afloat. The other advantage the Royal Navy had was the First Lord of the Admiralty, the man in charge, Winston CHURCHILL.
Reading Hankey’s Christmas Day report, Churchill fired off a letter to Asquith, the prime minister. ‘The question to be solved,’ he wrote, ‘is … the actual getting across of [just] 100 or 200 yards of open space with wire entanglements. All this was apparent more than two months ago. But no steps have been taken and no preparations made. It would be quite easy in a short time to fit up a number of steam tractors with small armoured shelters, in which men and machine guns could be placed, which would be bullet-proof.’
Churchill now funded development of the tank THROUGH THE NAVY. But he wasted precious time trying to create huge LANDSHIPS - like in HG Well's The Land Ironclads. He imagined them carrying enormous numbers of men, tearing up train tracks, FORDING THE RHINE AND INVADING GERMANY.
But the technical problems with creating an armoured and motorized vehicle of that fantastic size were insuperable. It couldn't even clamber over shell-holes. A small prototype named 'Mother' was finally ready for a test run in early 1916 and proved she was potentially a trench-busting weapon. Kitchener ordered 100.
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None of the attacks should have been attempted until the British had worked out how to silence the German big guns.
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1914 poster: "Britons: Lord Kitchener Wants You. Join Your Country's Army! God save the King."
But even with tanks, the British would get nowhere without heavy artillery
Lloyd George, who succeeded Kitchener as Secretary of State for War (after Kitchener died at sea June 1916), warned that Kitchener's million men should not be wasted on futile attacks - against German big guns out of reach of British light artillery.
Once the Germans had dug themselves in, the British field guns with their shrapnel shells were of limited use. Barbed wire could be cut with shrapnel shells. But it required very skilful gunnery and the exact timing of fuses. And, as more and more wire was added, shrapnel became less and less effective against it. The Germans also sank their barbed wire into shallow trenches so that it was much harder to cut using shrapnel shells.
Meanwhile, they also built dugout shelters deep underground, using the British cement they had imported before the war. 25 feet down, their machine gun crews were safe. No shrapnel could touch them. As the Germans said, ‘sweat saves blood.’ The only way to tackle the German trench system was with heavy artillery – big guns. And the British had hardly any.
All this puts the fighting on the Western Front in a different perspective. No amount of walking or running towards German lines was ever going to get anywhere until the problem with artillery had been sorted out. But by the first day of the battle of the Somme, almost two entire years after the start of the war, the British had made next to no progress.
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German observation balloon with state-of-the-art camera, 1916
Heavy casualties? 'What the hell does that matter? There are plenty more men in England.'
In May 1916 Haig appointed Brigadier General Noel ‘Curly’ Birch, as his artillery advisor. Birch told the official army historian after the war that ‘the problem of siege-warfare’ (in other words attacking a trench system) ‘had never been studied by the Generals… nor by any of the leading gunners or gunnery schools.’ Birch remembered an engineer returning from the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 – where, you remember, both sides had dug into trenches and the Japanese had extensively used heavy artillery. The officer gave a lecture at the engineers’ HQ in Chatham. He explained the overwhelming value of heavy artillery and high explosive shells in breaking down entrenched defences. But, you guessed, as usual, he was completely ignored.
By December 1914 British artillery spotters on the ground were at last equipped with telephones. But of course these were heavy machines on a long wire. And, as you will imagine, in the course of a battle the telephone wires got cut. Wires got tangled. Some said that, when a wire was cut, certain spotters pinched other people’s to help mend their own. Besides, as you recall, the Germans had seized the best vantage points. It was the Germans who looked down from hilltops, towers and ruined farms.
What the British generals never admitted was that, without effective artillery, none of their suicidal attacks ever stood the remotest chance of breaking the German army, or even killing more Germans than British. But they actually did not care. One commander who took up the tactic of continual attacks was the notoriously foul-tempered Lieutenant General Edmund 'THE BULL' Allenby. When in 1915 an officer summoned up the considerable courage to raise with ‘the Bull’ the enormous casualties his tactics were causing, he got the now famous roasting in reply, ‘what the hell does that matter? There are plenty more men in England.’
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