Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  In addition to the artillery, meanwhile, each German infantry division fought with twenty-eight machine guns, whereas the British and French had only twenty-four per division.7 And in Britain in 1914, Vickers Maxim were only producing forty machine guns per month, by contrast to the vast output from the German armaments giant, Krupps, based in Essen on the Ruhr. Its 1914 workforce of nearly 80,000 produced 280 guns a month.8

  With the digging of trenches and the building of fortified lines defended by the use of artillery came stalemate on the Western Front, and several inventive minds tried to come up with ideas on how to break the impasse. Many people contacted both the War Office and the Admiralty with ideas for weapons that they were convinced would win the war for the Allies. There were endless cranks who came up with crazy schemes. But there were also serious inventors who applied their minds to solving the problems of overcoming the defensive nature of trench warfare. H.G. Wells, who had predicted the horrors of a modern technical war, wrote to The Times in June 1915 complaining that ‘available resources were not being used to the fullest extent’ and that the British were falling behind Germany in technical achievements.9 His outburst prompted members of the public to send in an avalanche of ideas.

  The Admiralty responded in a typically British way by forming a committee. Known as the Board of Invention and Research, its task was to assess the flood of proposals and to suggest new areas of investigation. Many of the great and the good in the world of science – including Sir J.J. Thomson, Professor of Physics at Cambridge and discoverer of the electron, and Sir Charles Parsons, inventor of the steam turbine and director of his own engineering company -were appointed to the board’s various sub-committees. Other luminaries also advised the Board, including William Bragg of Leeds University (father of young William Lawrence Bragg) and Sir Oliver Lodge, along with Sir Ernest Rutherford of Manchester University. Rutherford, originally from New Zealand, was another Nobel Prize winner who had just carried out his pioneering work on atomic physics and had discovered the atomic nucleus. But he put this research aside in order to work with Bragg senior on the use of underwater sound waves to locate enemy submarines. However, the most senior naval men at the Admiralty were constantly suspicious of the scientists, who despite their eminence were regarded as outsiders unfamiliar with the requirements of the navy. Thomson in his frustration later complained that top naval staff saw the board as an ‘excrescence rather than a vital part of Admiralty organisation’.10 The scientists were denied any contact with the young naval officers who were actually fighting the war at sea and, despite Thomson’s requests, the Admiralty never created a central laboratory or proving ground where experiments could be carried out. As a consequence, although the Admiralty was distinguished by its intelligence operation, the Royal Navy fell well behind in more practical developments such as gun control mechanisms and the advanced use of on-board radio.

  The War Office, too, was struggling to keep up with developments in the technical war. Colonel Louis Jackson, with the unlikely title of Assistant Director of Fortifications and Works, was in charge of new weapons for the army, while new forms of shells and explosives were the responsibility of the Ordnance Board and their experimental teams based at the Woolwich Arsenal. But in June 1915, as the Admiralty created its new board, so Lord Kitchener, the Secretary for War, set up a Trench Warfare Department that was to be responsible for both the research and supply of new weapons. The man in charge was Alexander Roger, an unusual choice as he was an accountant and the manager of an investment trust. It was clear that Kitchener wanted the new organisation to be run on financially sound principles and to be careful as to what new ideas it should invest in. Roger struggled at first to come to grips with the technical issues he faced but proved to be a good organiser and before long acquired enough authority to be successful in the post. The Trench Warfare Department also set up a Commercial and Scientific Advisory Committee, inviting many members of the Royal Society’s War Committee to join.

  At the end of May 1915, after The Times’ revelations about Neuve Chapelle and the subsequent collapse of Asquith’s Liberal government, a major change took place in the supply organisation for both the army and the navy. At the centre of the new coalition was a Ministry of Munitions that set out to reorganise the supply of war material on a more efficient footing. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, a flamboyant and popular Welshman, was the first minister appointed to sort out the shell shortage. He would set about transforming the supply of materials to the armed services. He also created yet another group in his new ministry, a Munitions Inventions Department, putting in charge Ernest Moir, a civil engineer who had constructed the defences at Dover harbour. Consisting of a panel of twenty engineers and scientists, the department started work in August 1915, sifting through ideas that had been submitted, calling for new areas of research and, in the wake of the first Zeppelin bombing raids, starting to investigate various forms of anti-aircraft weapons. Many of the members of this third group, including Professor J.J. Thomson, Horace Darwin, Richard Glazebrook and Frederick Lanchester, were also members of the Royal Society or were already serving on the other committees, while new faces included Sir Alexander Kennedy, the Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, London. The new Ministry of Munitions group were allocated proving grounds at Wembley along with a small staff to carry out experiments.

  The problem, however, was that with at least three different groups of scientists working in advisory roles for the Admiralty, the War Office and the Ministry of Munitions by the end of 1915, there was the constant risk of duplication of effort – although this could be reduced to a degree by the fact that the same men sat on several of the committees and mixed socially. And, though some of these groups were listened to and had the ability to carry out effective research, others were not and did not. The military classes were proving a tough nut for the scientific community, no matter how eminent and willing, to crack.

  Frank Heath, Secretary to the Board of Education, came up with another approach to the problem. Before the war Heath had done much to reform the organisation of London University and establish what eventually became the University Grants Committee, the body with responsibility for the public funding of the entire university sector in Britain. Aware, as were the members of the Royal Society, of Britain’s reliance on German industry for the production of certain manufactured items crucial for the war effort, including drugs, antiseptics, optical lenses and even tungsten for the steel industry, in early 1915 he proposed the establishment of a small group to advise the government on the co-ordination of scientific and industrial research. The following year this became the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Prominent amongst its members was once again Sir Ernest Rutherford. The small group of scientists who made up its membership were charged with identifying areas where scientific research was needed and parcelling the work out to university laboratories that were known to possess the necessary skills. The Department handed out grants and made postgraduate research awards to encourage work in areas deemed necessary for the war effort. In 1917, the Department established a Fuel Research Board and the following year a Food Investigation Board to examine options for healthy eating within a limited wartime diet.

  Meanwhile, in addition to his administrative duties as the first secretary of this new department, Heath also had a hand in improving the safety of every British soldier serving in the army. In 1914, British troops had gone to war wearing nothing more protective than their field service caps. German soldiers, on the other hand, were soon issued with steel helmets. Heath and officials at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington realised that a metal helmet was needed to protect soldiers from the high-velocity fragments of shrapnel and earth thrown up by artillery bombardments. Copying the style of helmet adopted by samurai warriors in the Middle Ages, Heath quickly came up with a shape for a British tin helmet that resembled an upside-down soup bowl, pressed out of a single piece of steel with
a rim to protect the ears and shoulders and a leather strap under the chin to secure it in place. Although the design changed and improved during the war, it would become standard issue to British soldiers for the next fifty years. By the summer of 1916, one million steel helmets had been produced and by the end of the war seven and a half million, including one and a half million for use by American troops.

  The next deficiency to be addressed was the lack of a suitable grenade. Armies had used grenades since the seventeenth century, when the French had called their elite troops ‘grenadiers’, but as the range of muskets improved, so the distance between combatants had increased and the use of grenade throwers declined. However, the advent of trench warfare revived the need for a small bomb that could be thrown at the enemy’s defences in skirmishes or raids, or as a prelude to an attempt to advance into his trench. The German army had anticipated the need for this and the infantry were well equipped with grenades, the most common being the stick grenade, known by British troops as the ‘potato masher’ as it looked vaguely like a kitchen implement. The thrower held on to a wooden handle that was attached to a cylinder containing the explosives. Just before he threw the grenade, the soldier pulled a cord, setting off a fuse that detonated the explosives within a few seconds. It was a simple but efficient device. The British Army had nothing comparable.

  In the first stage of trench warfare, from late 1914, British soldiers improvised a variety of devices to throw at the enemy. Most of them simply consisted of a high explosive with a fuse attached packed into an empty jam jar or tin can, often with a few bits of old metal or sharp stones included. The fuse burnt at a standard speed of about two feet per minute, so any length of a few inches could be attached depending upon the timing the user wanted to set. The user would light the fuse with a cigarette or match and throw the jar. Known as ‘jam pots’ or ‘hair brushes’ according to their shape, the bombs were decidedly risky to use when carried out and thrown from craters in the middle of no man’s land. Something better was clearly needed.

  A Belgian company had come up with a form of grenade with its own lever that, when released, began the process of detonating the explosive. It was safer and more reliable to use. The Belgian inventor was taken prisoner early in the war before his grenade had been fully developed, but in January 1915 an engineering friend of his met with English inventor William Mills. The son of a shipbuilder from Durham, Mills had gone to sea as a marine engineer repairing undersea telegraph cables. Having become fascinated by metallurgy, in the 1880s he had opened Britain’s first aluminium foundry in Sunderland. Keen to find new opportunities for utilising the metal, he put it to a variety of uses from golf club heads to castings for motor car and aircraft engines. But he had no experience of working with explosives when the Belgian engineer brought him the plans for the grenade.

  With his engineering background, Mills quickly redesigned the grenade, submitting it to the Inventions Branch of the Royal Artillery. They saw potential, and Mills worked at the Royal Laboratory in Woolwich for several months improving and refining his design. The first version proved inadequate; the lever had a tendency to spring off the grenade, which then exploded prematurely, often injuring the thrower. After further work, however, he arrived at its final form – a small pineapple-shaped device made of cast iron, easy to grip and weighing about one and a half pounds. When it was charged with a detonator the user held on to the lever, which was secured by a safety pin. The thrower would hold the grenade in one hand and remove the pin with his other hand. In throwing the grenade, the lever fell off igniting the detonator, which went off after four or five seconds scattering its charge of iron fragments in all directions. Simple, practical and safe to use, the Mills grenade was to prove an effective and popular weapon in the close environment of the trenches.

  Siegfried Sassoon provided a vivid illustration of the grenade’s use, describing an incident in the early days of the Battle of the Somme in which, infuriated by the death of a friend from a sniper, he devised an ingenious new way of throwing two grenades at the same time. Sassoon had a reputation among his men for daredevil deeds, and was known as ‘Mad Jack’. On this occasion, carrying a bag of Mills bombs across his shoulder, he charged single-handed into a German trench at Mametz Wood, from where the sniper fire had come. With a grenade in each hand, he extracted the safety pin from the one in his right hand and then pulled out the pin from that in his left with his teeth, before throwing the two grenades into the German lines and screaming out a hunting cry. When he reached the enemy position he saw the last German soldiers retreating along the trench. He is supposed to have single-handedly frightened off a troop of between fifty and sixty, who must have thought a substantial force was charging at them.11 Sadly, but probably sensibly, after wandering around alone in the enemy trench for a while, he decided it was wiser to run back to the British line; once there he leapt into the trench and collapsed, laughing hysterically in nervous exhaustion at what he had done.12 In this brave action Sassoon had briefly captured the enemy front line, alone but for his Mills grenades.

  The Mills bomb became the staple grenade of the British Army for the rest of the war. In trench fighting, as Sassoon had discovered, it was often more useful than a rifle for infantrymen in flushing out German troops from trenches and dugouts. Mills set up his own factory in Birmingham to mass produce the grenades, of which seventy-five million had been made by the end of 1918. After the war, the Royal Commission on Awards for Inventors awarded Mills the sum of £27,750, equivalent to a little less than £3 million today. The Mills grenade remained in use in the British Army right up to the early part of the Second World War.

  Another battlefield innovation, born out of the changing nature of the Great War, enjoyed a rockier path to acceptance. The Germans had observed how, during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, a Japanese attack on the fortress of Port Arthur with conventional artillery had made little impact on the heavy concrete and steel fortifications. It was only when the Japanese brought up huge llin siege howitzers capable of throwing giant 500-pound shells that they succeeded in capturing the port. Now, aware they needed to swiftly capture the forts in their advance through Belgium at the start of their war in the west, the German General Staff decided in 1914 to employ high-angled, short-barrelled heavy mortars in their assault upon the Belgian fortifications of Liège and Namur. Guns with high-angled barrels sent their shells high in a tight arc and, coming down at a near-vertical angle, they had extra destructive power in penetrating armoured fortifications.

  So Skoda in Austria produced a 12in portable mortar, while Krupp produced a massive 16.5in mortar known as ‘Big Bertha’. The latter fired a mighty 1800-pound shell, and was bigger than any British naval gun in existence at the time. The only drawback of this heavy, monster mortar was that it was very difficult to move and had to be transported in sections by rail. Both guns however contributed to crushing the vast Belgian forts, which instead of holding up the Germans for several weeks capitulated within a few days, barely delaying the German advance.

  With the advent of trench warfare, however, there was a need for smaller mortars that could fire just a few hundred yards on to the enemy lines. Both the German and Austrian armies were equipped with light mortars for this purpose, but neither the French army nor the British had anything suitable. During a visit to the front, the editor of The Morning Post learned of the lack of such a weapon and discussed it back in Britain with a friend, Wilfred Stokes, the manager of engineering company Ransome & Rapier. Stokes immediately got to work and designed a simple device consisting of a 3in tube mounted on a base plate and supported by an adjustable bi-pod. A 20-pound shell could be dropped down the barrel and detonated through a cap that ignited the charge at the bottom of the barrel. Stokes estimated it could fire up to thirty shells a minute over a distance of about 350 yards – certainly enough to persuade the enemy to keep their heads down if an assault was planned.

  Initial trials were disappointing and the army rejected the m
ortar. So Stokes went back to the drawing board and redesigned the shell to be more aerodynamic, and therefore more accurate in hitting its target. By April 1915 the mortar and its new shell had proved a success in trials – but the army still rejected the gun, claiming bizarrely that there was no demand for it. When a young captain who had been wounded at Gallipoli heard of the weapon, however, he was much impressed by it and managed to force Lloyd George and Churchill to watch a trial. They too were enthusiastic and Lloyd George agreed to recommend an order for one thousand mortars from the Ministry. The army were still hesitant but, after improvements had been made in the fuse that ignited the propellant used to fire the shell, the Ordnance Board finally gave grudging approval in September 1915.

  One of the advantages of the weapon was that it was easy to produce and could be manufactured by companies that were not already fully committed to armaments production. By this time Stokes had already approached several companies who were willing to manufacture the mortar, but the Trench Warfare Department now took over production of new weapons and insisted on arranging its own orders. Consequently there was a further delay. When the Stokes mortar finally reached the front line in March 1916 it was only used at first to lay down smoke screens. However, during the course of the year it became increasingly common in the British lines and acquired a reputation as one of the best weapons of the war. It added considerably to the firepower that could be thrown at enemy trenches.

  There were without doubt serious problems with the early versions of the Stokes mortar. But the slowness with which the army bureaucracy had accepted a weapon for which the soldiers fighting at the front had already expressed an urgent need, showed a marked reluctance on behalf of the military world to accept an idea that had come from outside.