Amabel Williams-Ellis

THE EARLIEST TANKS—GENERAL SWINTON—ADMIRAL BACON—THE HOLT TRACTOR AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE “LAND CRUISER”

I

The War had only been in progress for a few weeks when the first idea of the first Tank was born almost simultaneously in the minds of General E.D. Swinton, Major Tulloch, Captain Hetherington and Mr. Diplock, and—if we are to believe rumour and their own account of the affair—of several hundreds of other gentlemen.

“Born” is perhaps not quite the appropriate word. At any rate it is to be understood, if not in a Pickwickian, at least in a Pythagorean sense.

For by 1914 the Tank had successively passed through several tentative and inconclusive incarnations.

In 1482 Leonardo da Vinci invented a kind of Tank;1 a wooden “War Cart” was used by the Scottish in the fifteenth century.2

There were designs for a Tank for the Crimea, but the project of this weapon was abandoned as being barbarous. Lastly, a really practical design for a kind of “Caterpillar” to be driven by steam was made in 1888. A trial machine was even constructed. But Fate decreed that all trace of design and model should be instantly lost, only apparently to be rediscovered after the modern Tank had been thought out afresh.

Why, if the Tank was constantly being invented, did it as constantly disappear? The reason appears to have been that, like the early aeroplanes, all these abortive machines had failed in one particular.

The engine was not powerful enough. The steam Tank had not in the least answered the riddle. The horse-power could, it is true, be almost indefinitely increased, but, like a kind of Old Man of the Sea, the engine weight would have increased proportionately and the “free” power have been no more.

Indeed till the invention of the petrol engine the Tank was doomed to be unpractical. Its three essentials—armour-plating, guns, and ability to surmount obstacles and traverse open country—demanded a large amount of this “free” power.

Only, therefore, when an engine was produced whose proportion of power to weight was about 100 H.P. to every ten hundredweight, did the Tank become a possible and effective engine of war.

Thus, till the time was ripe the Tank had been doomed to enjoy very brief excursions into the actual, and to sojourn, long forgotten, beyond the waters of Lethe.

Does memory survive transmigration? Were General Swinton and his co-inventors aware of the Crimea Tank and the 1888 Tractor? In any case the matter is not one of great importance, for—to put it briefly—ultimately their Tank went, and the others did not.

By October, 1914, Colonel Swinton and Captain Tulloch had independently worked out the details of an engine of war. Like the other early inventors, they imagined a machine that was to “arise” out of a cross between an armoured car and an agricultural tractor. It was to be slower, more formidable and far heavier than any armoured car that had yet been seen, a kind of “Land Cruiser” capable of plodding on its caterpillar feet across country right up to the enemy’s gun positions. Like the other early “mobile machine-gun destroyers,” it was to be strongly armed with guns and machine-guns, and so heavily steel-plated as to be impervious to shrapnel, H.-E. fragments and rifle bullets. It was to cross trenches with ease, and was to be capable either of cutting or of flattening the enemy’s wire in the mere act of its progress.

By November Colonel Swinton and Captain Tulloch were in close touch with one another, and the child of their fancy descended from the clear regions of pure thought to battle its slow way forward amid the fogs and thornbrakes of actual experiment and official memoranda.

Well-informed readers will perhaps wonder why the present authors have singled out Captain Tulloch and Colonel Swinton from amid “the press of knights.” Do they intend to lay the laurel on their brows? To declare that they alone invented the Tank?

The chroniclers pretend to no such judicial powers. Be theirs rather the genial rÔle of the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland, who at the end of the Caucus-race allotted one of Alice’s comfits to each of the competitors.

As far, however, as they can disentangle the complexities of the evidence, it does appear to have been through these two enthusiasts that the Tank idea first took tangible shape. The notion was in the air, perhaps it took unsubstantial form in other minds before October, 1914,—it seems probable that it did in Mr. Diplock’s and Mr. McFee’s, for example. Perhaps, too, in other minds it was later to take clearer and more practical shape.

But it does seem to have been Colonel Swinton and Captain Tulloch who, first of the band of pioneers, had the courage and the practical energy to forward a somewhat startling notion in official quarters.

For Mr. Diplock’s first “Pedrail” machine, whose plans he laid before Lord Kitchener and Mr. Winston Churchill in November, 1914, was a Gun Tractor, not a fighting machine. It was not till February 1915 that Mr. Diplock (in conjunction with a Committee appointed by Mr. Churchill) officially so much as contemplated the building of a “Land Cruiser.”

Fortunately one of the first of the Swinton memoranda was submitted through Colonel Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, who was an early and active friend to the idea of the new arm.

Difficulties, however, abounded. Many were actual, some were imaginary.

For example, it was urged that to design and build such machines would take over a year. Surely the war would be over!

Then when the counsels of those kill-joys prevailed who believed that the war would “hold,” and it was decided to experiment with the “mobile machine-gun destroyers,” various technical difficulties arose.

It was difficult to procure some of the essentials without elaborate manufacture and the making of special tools, and makeshift parts were, therefore, substituted. Fitted with these makeshifts, the Land Cruisers were a disappointment.

The first tests were carried out in February 1915, when Captain Tulloch’s adaptation of the Holt Tractor was given a trial. It did not prove a complete failure, and much was learned from the experiment. For example, the machine was unexpectedly effective in rolling in the wire which it had been originally intended that its automatic “lobster-claw” wire-cutters should alone deal with.

In June Admiral Bacon’s Forster-Daimler Tractor of 155 H.P., fitted with a self-bridging apparatus, was experimented with.

This, too, proved disappointing, in so far as the device was to fulfil the proposed functions of a Land Cruiser. It refused to cross trenches, though it proved a practical Tractor, and it was later used in “trams” of eight machines for the transport of 15-in. guns.

The position, therefore, in June 1915, as far as the War Office was concerned, was as follows: Proposals had been put forward by Colonel Swinton, Admiral Bacon, and Captain Tulloch, and submitted to the War Office; certain trials had been made, the result of which was, in the view of the authorities, to emphasise the engineering and other difficulties. It was only in June that the War Office ascertained that investigations on similar lines were being carried out by the Admiralty.

For the Admiralty, with a large land force at its disposal, had been for some time casting about for means whereby the men of that force might go into battle more in Navy fashion, that is (to misquote the “heroic Spanish gunners”) with something better than serge, “joined to their own invincible courage,” between them and the enemy’s bullets.

Mr. Churchill had, as early as January 1915, written a letter to the Prime Minister expressing his entire agreement with Colonel Hankey’s remarks “on the subject of special mechanical devices for taking trenches.”

The idea of employing a large armoured shield on wheels, or of using ordinary steam tractors on which a small bullet-proof shelter had been fitted, had been considered. Mr. Churchill interested himself personally in the scheme, and he and his expert, Major Hetherington of the R.N.A.S.—the third independent inventor—worked hard to evolve and then “push” a practical machine.

In the early spring of 1915 a Committee, called the Land Ship Committee, was appointed,3 and many designs of wheel and caterpillar tractors were submitted to it. One of these designs was especially interesting not only for its astonishing appearance, but for the influence which it exerted upon the “profile” of the future Tank. The curious will find a brief account of it in the Note at the end of the chapter. It was Mr. Churchill’s Committee who called in Major Wilson, Mr. Tritton, and Mr. Tennyson d’Eyncourt as consultants, “when a design was evolved which embodied the form finally adopted for Tanks.”

Thus, while the honour of the first designs and experiments belongs to the War Office, it was to the enterprise of this Admiralty Committee that most of the credit of the evolution of the Mark I. Tank was due.

It was, as we have said, apparently not until the Admiralty Committee had been at work for some time that the Director of Fortifications and Works, on behalf of the War Office, ascertained that the Admiralty had designs for a “Land Cruiser” in hand.

The two Departments met at Wormwood Scrubs to witness the Admiralty’s trials of a Killen-Straight tractor. It was a remarkable occasion, for a number of men who were destined profoundly to influence the history of the Tanks now saw a foreshadowing of such an engine for the first time.

Among them were Lord Kitchener, Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. McKenna. Mr. Winston Churchill was also there, but to him an armoured tractor was no novelty.

After this gathering the Tank enthusiasts of the two Departments fell upon each other’s necks, swore eternal friendship, and in the middle of June formed a Joint Committee, of which Lieutenant Stern was Secretary.

Tanks—when any existed which would work—were to be a military service in the Department of the Master-General of Ordnance.

The Admiralty was to continue its work of designing, was to provide cash for experiments, and Mr. Churchill, its late First Lord, was to continue his invaluable work as a propellant. All seemed prosperous, for the representatives of the two Services appear to have worked pretty harmoniously, and the better informed and more progressive heads of Departments on both sides showed an interested benevolence.

But unfortunately—especially at the War Office—there appear to have been a certain number of obstructionists.

One senior Officer, fearing, one supposes, to be diverted from his ideal of the official attitude by the sight of these ungodly engines, refused so much as to attend the trials. The Adjutant-General (then no doubt, poor man, sufficiently harassed) rigidly refused a single man for the new arm. Fortunately, the Joint Committee was resourceful, and, after a preliminary appeal to Mrs. Pankhurst for militant suffragists,4 they induced the Admiralty to turn over to them the 20th Squadron of the Armoured Car Reserve, and to increase the strength of this unit from 50 to 600 men.

By July Colonel Swinton—another of the Tank’s best sources of power—had returned to France. G.H.Q. was later to be more propitious, but now the taste of those inconclusive experiments was still in its mouth, and their chief technical adviser had begun to have horrid doubts about the whole affair. “Caterpillars,” he remarked, that he had lately seen “could only go at the rate of 1½ miles an hour on roads, were very slow in turning, and nearly every bridge in the country would require strengthening to carry them.” “It was necessary to descend from the realms of imagination to solid fact.”

Colonel Swinton explained and exhorted and expostulated.

II

Meanwhile the Joint War Office and Admiralty Committee system was too simple to last.

From August 1915 to August 1917, when the “New” Tank Committee was formed, the control and administration of Tank manufacture and design were extraordinarily tentative and shifting. Necessarily so. The home organisation had to expand very rapidly, and constantly to adapt itself to changed conditions of Tank tactics abroad and Tank manufacture at home.

Even the multiplicity of the authorities concerned seems to have been to a great extent inevitable. The Tank had, of course, initially complicated its early history by starting life in Infantry puttees and a south-wester.

At the point we have reached, its story plunges into a whirling quicksand of departments, branches, committees, and conferences, which were reorganised and rearranged—changed hats and functions with bewildering frequency. This tangle of activity Colonel Swinton throughout made it his hobby to understand and his business to co-ordinate.

The present historians, on the contrary, feel tempted to adopt the simple method of their Hebrew predecessor, who, having picked out one plum, so often blandly continues: “And the rest of the acts of the Trench Warfare Department and all that they did, are they not written in the book of the archives of the War Office?”

However, it is possible that the Hebrew historian honestly believed that the lost books of the Chronicles were really available to the inquiring reader. The present authors have no such illusion about War Office papers, and therefore propose to give at least an outline of the vicissitudes and fluctuations of early Tank control.

The chief persons of the Drama remain throughout:

The War Office: (1) In its capacity as Ordnance, and (2) in its capacity as General Staff. Later (3) as the Tank Department, War Office.

G.H.Q.: (1) In its main capacity, and as (2) The Experiments Committee.

Later, the H.B.M.G.C.

Finally, the Tank Corps.

The Admiralty: (1) In its capacity as the Land Ship Committee, and (2) as Squadron 20 of the R.N.A.S.

The Ministry of Munitions: (1) In its capacity as the Trench Warfare Department; (2) in its capacity as the Inventions Department. (3) Later, as the Mechanical Warfare Supply Department (really another Tank Committee). (4) Later still, as the Tank Supply Department.

The successive Main Tank Committees: (1) The Joint Naval and Military Committee (which did not survive Act I.). (2) The Tank Supply Committee, afterwards called the Advisory Committee of the Tank Supply Department, and divided into a main committee and a sub-committee. (It was this sub-committee which afterwards formed the backbone of the very active and occasionally criticised M.W.S.D., before referred to). Later, (3) after a gap, the First Tank Committee; (4) the Second reconstructed Tank Committee.

Grand Chorus of Directors General, Interdepartmental Conferences, Manufacturers, and Workshop Personnel.

III

We find that the period from August 1915 to February 1916 constitutes a kind of Act I. in the history of Tank administration and manufacture, for the 1914 and early 1915 period is too dim and legendary to serve as anything but prologue.

During the whole of the Act I. period it was the Admiralty and the Joint Land Ship Committee which played the “leads.”

It was the Admiralty which defrayed the whole cost of the extensive experimental work and provided the necessary personnel, and it was by members of the Joint Committee in consultation that the Mark I. Tank, “Mother,” was ultimately designed.

On September 11, two months after Colonel Swinton’s visit, the Experiments Committee, G.H.Q., laid down in an excellent and far-sighted memorandum what were the qualities which they desired should be aimed at in designs for the caterpillar cruiser and what were the tactical purposes which it must serve.

By September 28 the Joint Committee had so far perfected the design of “Mother” as to have had a wooden dummy (officially described as a “mock-up”) made, and on that day her counterfeit was inspected at Wembley by an Interdepartmental Conference, and approved.

Some weeks elapsed while the Joint Committee worked out the further details of their machine, and about December 3 Mr. Churchill wrote a Memorandum entitled “Variants of the Offensive,” in which he paradoxically accentuated the value of defensive armour as a preservative of mobility. There was to be a new form of attack. It was to be launched at night under the guidance of searchlights. Caterpillar Tractors were to breach the enemy’s line, and then turn right and left. The Infantry were to follow them closely under cover of bullet-proof shields.

On Christmas Day Sir Douglas Haig (who had lately taken over from Sir John French, and who as yet “knew not Joseph”) read the paper with interest, and pinned a pencil slip upon it, “Is anything known about the Caterpillar referred to in para. 4, page 3?”

No time was lost in finding out, and a few days later G.H.Q. sent an officer to England to inquire into the matter. This officer was Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Elles, who was afterwards to be the first Tank General.

By the end of January 1916 the experimental machine—no pasteboard simulation, but “Mother” herself—was complete, and on February 2 the official trial was held at Hatfield, before the Army Council and a representative of G.H.Q.

“Mother” made good, and G.H.Q. asked to be supplied with a certain number of the Land Cruisers. A small Executive Tank Supply Committee with much fuller powers than the old Joint Committee, was formed under the Presidency of Lieutenant (now Colonel Sir Albert) Stern, and orders were at once given to begin manufacture.

So ended Act I.

IV

The first scene of Act II. (March to mid-August) was occupied with one of the most dramatic achievements of the War.

This was the manufacture at Lincoln of the first 150 “Land Ships” ordered by the Government, in the space of six months, and in absolute secrecy.

The public discussed the phantom Russians who travelled through England by night. It discussed the Germans who nightly signalled to each other throughout the inland counties. But it did not discuss the large water-tanks or cisterns that were being made for Petrograd, Egypt, or Mesopotamia, or some such place.

That this vital secrecy was kept for months by hundreds of people was chiefly due to the happy effect of copious and imaginative lying.

There was no mystery about these grotesque armour-plated creatures! They were not really for Mesopotamia at all. Every one knew that.

The Russian Government had ordered them. They were ridiculous things? Of course they were. It was a Russian design. Was there not even an inscription in Russian characters on them? At least they might frighten the Germans if they served no other useful purpose.

Tradition relates that when the first drawings were brought to the manager’s office of the factory which had been selected for the manufacture of the “water-carriers,” the manager and his staff expressed themselves as being seriously concerned for the sanity of the designers, and of those who submitted such drawings to practical men like themselves.

They were, however, let into the secret of the real part which Tanks were to play, and though still profoundly incredulous, decided, like good citizens, to carry out whatever work was asked of them. The vital necessity of secrecy having been impressed upon them, they were asked—tradition continues—what arrangements they would like made about sentries and the isolation of their workpeople. After a little consideration they answered that they would only guarantee that the secret should be kept on condition that they were given a completely free hand and not interfered with.

They proposed to have no sentries, no “isolated area” to proclaim trumpet-tongued, “Here is a secret!”

They desired merely to propound a satisfactory system of lies, to give an “alternative explanation”—to put it more delicately—and to carry out their work with a disarming publicity.

After some hesitation the authorities consented to this strange system. We shall see how, on September 15, “wisdom was justified of her children.”

The factory where these curious interviews are reported to have taken place was that of Messrs. Forsters, Agricultural Implement Manufacturers of Lincoln. We almost literally beat our ploughshares into swords.

In London, changes in Tank administration were going on as usual. The trend as far as supply and manufacture were concerned was towards centralisation.

A Tank Supply Department was created at the Ministry of Munitions, and the Tank Supply Committee changed its name to “Advisory Committee of the Tank Supply Department.” In August this Committee—gradually, as it were—turned into the Mechanical Warfare Supply Department before alluded to. Lieutenant (by now Colonel Stern was at its head.)

In the M.W.S.D. were now concentrated three separate functions:

They were Tank designers; they were responsible for supply; they were responsible for the final inspection of machines. The future was to show that such concentration had some drawbacks as well as many obvious advantages.

Note.—The genesis of the “large-wheeled tractor” was as follows: Trenches with a parados and parapet about 4 ft. high were being constructed by the enemy in Flanders.

The engineers consulted by the Land Ship Committee gave it as their considered opinion that if these obstacles were to be crossed, a wheel of not less than 15 ft. diameter would be necessary.

Machines with these gigantic wheels were actually ordered, but the wooden model that was knocked together as a preliminary at once convinced even its best friends that the design was fantastic, and that any machine of the kind would be little better than useless on account of its conspicuousness and vulnerability.

However, the “big wheel” idea did not utterly die, for in the upturned snout of the Mark I. Tank we have, as it were, its “toe” preserved, the track turning sharply back at about axle level, instead of mounting uselessly skyward, as would have been the case had not the old wheel idea been supplanted by that of the sliding track.