An interesting employment of experimental units to develop new approaches to war during the conduct of campaigns in World War I was the British Army’s creation of a tank force, which was to play a major role in the Allied victory in late summer and fall 1918. The tank did not exist as a weapon or even as a concept-at least in the minds of military men-before the outbreak of the conflict. It received its initial impetus for development from Winston Churchill in 1914, when Churchill was still First Lord of the Admiralty. [1]

The first tanks were developed by desperate innovation in the United Kingdom. The greatest difficulties the British confronted in employing were the harsh realities that

· no organization existed to employ or maintain such vehicles,

· no tactical conceptions yet existed for their employment in combat, and

· no means yet existed for tanks to cooperate with infantry, much less artillery.

Given the lack of reliability of a new technology and weapons system, just getting tanks to the battlefront in France from the factories and training facilities in the United Kingdom represented a considerable challenge.

Recent research has shown that the post-war view propagated by British armoured war advocates J. F. C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart-namely that Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig and the British High Command displayed little interest in tanks-was not true. In fact, Haig, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, was quite supportive of the development of the tank, along with a number of other weapons systems. [2] As Fuller grudgingly admitted after the war, Haig’s use of the first experimental tank unit at the Somme in September 1916 was an absolute necessity in order to examine the tactical utility of the armoured fighting vehicle as well as its mechanical limitations. [3]

Discovering the best way to employ such a radically new weapons system demanded the creation of an experimental unit. The establishment of the experimental tank unit in Britain received the initial title of “the Heavy Branch Machine Gun Corps”-the title undoubtedly an effort to provide security about the development of a new weapon. In July 1917, with the tank now having received considerable publicity in the British press, and undoubtedly known to the Germans by its use in battle, the experimental unit received a Royal Warrant constituting it as the “Tank Corps.” [4] The new title came at a time when the fortunes of the tank hardly appeared bright. Armoured fighting vehicles had proven of some use on the Somme, but in the Messines attack of June 7, 1917, out of sixty-nine tanks used, only nineteen proved of any use to the attacking infantry, while forty-eight of the tanks ditched (i.e., stuck in trenches) and seventeen broke down entirely. [5]

A number of factors contributed to the initial difficulties the British encountered in utilizing the new weapon:

· First, there was little commonality of experience between the tank crews and the front-line infantry, as there had been between the Stormtroops and the front-line German infantry.

· Equally important, the initial commitment involved the tanks in terrain that had been thoroughly chewed up by artillery bombardments, straining vehicles that were already mechanically unreliable.

Nevertheless, initial setbacks were not sufficient to end the British Expeditionary Force’s support for continued development of the weapons system. [6] Moreover, the experimental Tank Corps attracted and then nurtured a number of imaginative and innovative advocates for the further development and employment of the tank. Foremost among these was J. F. C. Fuller.

In November 1917, Haig supported a major blow by the Tank Corps against German positions at Cambrai. Here there was no long preliminary bombardment to alert the Germans and wreck the landscape. Rather after a short, sharp bombardment, over three hundred tanks struck out across no-man’s land, with fifty-four held in reserve. The attack succeeded in entirely rupturing the German front lines. The success must be seen as a sign of the emergence of combined-arms warfare rather than a singular success for the Tank Corps. [7] By now the crews in the Royal Tank Corps were learning how to work with the infantry, while the artillery bombardment, predicated on new techniques of indirect fire and off-the-map shooting, was able to make major contributions. Finally, the Royal Air Force rolled in with the first true use of massed close air support in the war.

The Cambrai success was such that the Tank Corps would have an even more important role in 1918. But it still remained very much an experimental unit. Above all, it still was not a regiment, the key mark of permanence in the British Army’s scheme of organization. Moreover, in the defensive fighting that marked the first half of 1918 on the Allied side, it remained of limited utility because of its lack of speed and mechanical reliability. Nevertheless, by 1918 the experimental force had reached quite respectable proportions. Reorganized after the Battle of Cambrai, the Tank Corps was to have two heavy groups and one light group, each heavy with two brigades, each with 288 tanks. The light group was to consist of 410 of a new, more mobile armoured fighting vehicle. In the first major British offensive of 1918, the Amiens attack beginning on August 8, 1918, the Tank Corps was able to make a substantial-if not decisive-contribution to a victory that Ludendorff later described as the “blackest” day of the German Army in the war. A sudden, massive artillery barrage, the skilful use of gas, and 430 tanks, working with infantry with whom they had carefully trained, destroyed six German divisions in a day. [8]

Succeeding British attacks over the course of the next three months were not able to utilize the tanks quite so effectively, due in part to losses suffered in the Amiens attack and in part to the speed with which conventional attacks now moved against a collapsing and defeated German Army. Nevertheless, the experimental Tank Corps made a substantial contribution to the successive British victories. It paid for its success in blood: of the 7,200 fully trained officers and men on the rolls of the Tank Corps on August 8, with a further 500 men in training, 561 officers and 2,627 Other Corps Ranks became casualties in three months of fighting. [9]

In the long term, the experimental tank unit was responsible for creating an entirely new weapons system and opening one of the avenues through which modern combined arms, mechanized warfare would emerge in the 1940s. From the beginning, British innovators confronted enormous difficulties:

· They first had to develop a new weapons system on a weak technological base;

· they had to figure out how to integrate that weapons system into an emerging and complex system of war; and

· they had to build up a support and training and logistics base to support the continued employment of a weapons system, the technology of which was also undergoing rapid change.

As one tank officer suggested with some pride shortly after the war: Taking it all in all, I doubt if there can be anything, even in the exceptional records of the war, to equal in extent and variety the growth of the technical, instructional, and supply branches of the Tank Corps during the last two years [of the war]. [10]

[1] The most thorough and careful reconstruction of the development of the tank in the British Army is J. P. Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903-1939 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995).

[2] In February of 1917, Haig placed tanks as his number three priority after the Royal Air Service-soon to become the Royal Air Force-and 188 locomotives to support the light railways behind British lines. With those exceptions Haig noted, “the prompt and continuous delivery of Tanks at the greatest rate at which they can be turned out and shipped to France should be ensured.” Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks, p. 73.

[3] After the war Fuller commented on the first use of the tanks on the Somme to Liddell Hart in the following terms: “The use of the tanks on 15 September [1916] was not a mistake. Serious mechanical defects [were] manifested. No peace test can equal a war test.” Quoted in Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks, p. 74.

[4] Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks, p. 101.

[5] Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks, p. 99.

[6] And that support, which placed tanks lower in priority than other weapons systems such as aircraft, must be seen in the light of the tank’s performance to that point in the war rather than in the light of what tanks proved able to do decades in the future.

[7] Which is how Fuller and Liddell Hart would see it throughout the interwar period.

[8] Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks, pp. 169-179.

[9] Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks, p. 186.

[10] Harris, Men, Ideas, and Tanks, p. 188