Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  9

  Breaking the Stalemate

  Hiram Percy Maxim, the American inventor, took out patents on a large number of inventions from the 1860s onwards. These ranged from an elaborate mousetrap to the electric light bulb – the latter causing a dispute with Thomas Edison, who invented the incandescent light bulb. Maxim became chief engineer for one of the American new technology companies, the US Electric Lighting Company, and came to Britain to represent that company in 1881. The following year, during a visit to Vienna, he is supposed to have met an American who, dismissing the new technologies of the late nineteenth century, said to him, ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.’

  Heeding this advice, in 1884 Maxim patented a new form of machine gun. The key advance in his weapon was that it used the energy of the gun’s recoil to eject the used cartridge and power a spring that loaded the next round. Earlier weapons that were capable of multiple firing, like the Gatling gun that had caused havoc in the American Civil War, required the operator to turn a crank handle to feed the bullets into the firing mechanism. Maxim’s new weapon was a genuinely automatic machine gun. Early versions were supposed to be able to fire 600 rounds a minute.

  Like all inventors, having come up with his idea, Maxim then had to try to sell it. Initially, the reception must have disappointed him. The British Army, as so often with new devices, were unimpressed, commenting, ‘Why use fifty bullets when one will do?’ But the German army were more interested and placed an order, as did the Imperial Russian Army. A few years later even the British came round and ordered 120 Maxims which were used in various imperial wars. There was sufficient demand eventually for Maxim to merge his own business with the large armaments producer, Vickers, so that in 1897 the company became Vickers, Son and Maxim. The Vickers machine gun became the standard British Army machine gun for decades to come, while several versions were produced in Germany, France and elsewhere in the first decade of the twentieth century.

  Maxim went on to design a steam-engine powered flying machine that never flew and a far more successful amusement ride called a ‘Flying Machine’, an example of which is still in operation at Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach. He became a British subject in 1900 and was knighted the following year. Meanwhile, the impact of his new, easy-to-use, automatic machine gun began slowly to sink in. Theoretically, one relatively unskilled man equipped with a machine gun could halt the advance of hundreds of well-trained and well-drilled infantrymen. But it was not until 1914 that most military commands really began to learn this lesson. Leading military historian Basil Liddell Hart wrote in 1930 that Maxim’s name ‘is more deeply engraved on the real history of the World War than that of any other man. Emperors, statesmen and generals … found themselves helpless puppets in the grip of Hiram Maxim who, by his machine gun, had paralysed the power of attack.’1

  The mobile war unleashed by the German army in August 1914, as its troops marched in vast numbers through Belgium and across France, had been intended to achieve a decisive victory over the French army and the tiny British Expeditionary Force on their left. More than 120 divisions and three million men confronted each other in the battles of Belgium and France that month. After the German reversal at the Battle of the Marne in September, both sides tried to outflank each other, moving north towards the sea. As they spread out, the armies rapidly dug trenches to hold their positions. Soon the trenches were supported by barbed wire (an American invention to keep cattle inside vast grazing lands), and by machine guns. The Germans desperately tried to turn the Allied line by capturing the town of Ypres in Flanders and throwing back the British and Belgian armies, separating them from the French. But even quickly dug defensive trenches proved too powerful as defensive lines for the mighty German army to overwhelm. On 8 November, General von Falkenhayn, the Chief of the German War Staff, informed the Kaiser that it was no longer possible to maintain the offensive in Flanders because ‘the barbed wire cannot be crossed.’2

  Within a few weeks the British had come to the same conclusion. Lord Kitchener wrote to Sir John French in January 1915 giving his view that ‘the German lines in France may be looked on as a fortress that cannot be carried by assault and also cannot be completely invested.’3 The Edwardian British Army that had gone to war in 1914 had never envisaged a static, defensive battlefield. It had planned for a war of manoeuvre and of dramatic flanking movements. But Kitchener now saw an enemy front line akin to a fortress running for 450 miles from the sea to the Alps. For the first time in history, there was no flank to turn. The Allies could lay siege to the German lines, but they would find it nearly impossible to successfully assault them.

  And so, in this context, a few imaginative individuals started to think about designing something that would overcome the stalemate caused by the machine gun, trenches, barbed wire and the firepower of the enemy’s artillery. The eventual result was one of the few completely new and original machines to come out of the war. By 1918, it would finally deliver its promise on the Western Front, giving birth to an entirely new form of armoured, mobile warfare. Several people would share its parentage and the process of its gestation would be slow. And many of them would have to struggle against military authorities that were shockingly slow to pick up a new idea.

  In order to solve a problem, the first task is to define what exactly that problem consists of. This was where Colonel Ernest Dunlop Swinton came in. Swinton was the son of a judge in the Indian civil service who decided to become a professional soldier. He joined the Royal Engineers and served in the Boer War, where he won the DSO. But he was already known as something of an intellectual, and so he was marked out for an unusual career path in the decidedly unintellectual world of the Edwardian army. His role as author of the official history of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 had a profound influence on him as he studied the use of entrenched positions, the power of machine guns and artillery, the deployment of heavy siege weapons and the terrible impact all of this had on the casualty figures. He also wrote a novel, The Defence of Duffer’s Drift, in which a Lieutenant ‘Backsight Forethought’, straight out of military college, has to learn how to defend a river crossing; the book became a classic on military tactics. In 1913 Swinton was appointed assistant secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, the organisation at the centre of British thinking about the nation’s military role. His boss was Maurice Hankey, the all-powerful secretary of the committee and perhaps the most influential civil servant of the era. Hankey seems to have admired Swinton and the two men got on well together.

  A few weeks after the declaration of war, Swinton was asked to go to France as an official war correspondent and write communiques on behalf of GHQ. These he composed in clear, unemotional terms, and they were released through the official Press Bureau as coming from an anonymous figure named ‘Eye-Witness’. The time he spent observing and reporting in France enabled Swinton to reflect on the nature of the fighting that, after the early battles, quickly settled into the trench warfare of the Western Front, a form of warfare he was already familiar with from his study of the Russo-Japanese conflict. Swinton discussed his thoughts with his boss, Hankey, who over Christmas 1914 wrote a short paper on the war and the problems of military stalemate. Hankey pointed out that in previous wars, whenever new problems had arisen a means had been found to overcome them. He argued that new ideas were needed to solve the problem of machine guns, barbed wire and trenches. His own suggestion, which probably came from Swinton, was of a giant bullet-proof machine, pushed from behind, with a roller in front that would crush the wire and advance to the enemy front line, where it would disgorge its soldiers straight into the enemy’s trenches.

  Swinton and Hankey’s idea was not entirely new. H.G. Wells had in 1903 written for the Strand Magazine – famous as the journal in which Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes first made his appearance – a short story
in which, with remarkable prescience, he had predicted the deadlock of trench warfare and had envisioned how to break through it. In his story, called ‘The Land Ironclads’, Wells described an imaginary war in which a correspondent watches as the enemy suddenly appears using a device

  the size of an ironclad cruiser, crawling obliquely to the first line of the trenches and firing shots out of port holes to its side … It might have been from eighty to a hundred feet long … its vertical side was ten feet high or so... The thing had come into such a position to enfilade the trench, which was empty now, as far as he could see, except for two or three crouching knots of men, and the tumbled dead. Behind it, across the plain, it had scored the grass with a train of linked impressions like the dotted tracings sea-things leave in sand.

  This extraordinary mechanical monster advances forward and crosses the trench moving on ‘thick stumpy feet, between knobs and buttons in shape – flat broad things reminding one of the feet of elephants or the legs of caterpillars’. Wells called these feet ‘pedrails’. Aghast at the spectacle he is witnessing, Wells’s correspondent reflects that it is a case of ‘“Manhood” versus “Machinery”.’4

  A machine like this was in 1903 purely an invention of its author’s fertile mind. However, machinery of this sort, particularly using some of the devices Wells describes, was already in development in the early years of the twentieth century. Robey & Co. of Lincoln, agricultural machine manufacturers, produced a heavy steam tractor fitted with a set of feet on its back wheels that enabled it to cross rough ground; the feet were designed by Bramah Diplock and were called ‘pedrails’. Wells picked up on this invention in a military journal. Another engineer, David Roberts, took this a step further and designed a track system to replace the wheels on a heavy haulage agricultural tractor.

  The development of tracks would be crucial to the story of the new machine, but in Edwardian Britain it attracted no interest at the time. British farms already had all the mechanical devices that farmers wanted. In America, however, where farms were much larger and huge tracts of virgin land were still available to be turned over to agricultural use, the new form of propulsion attracted far more attention. An American group, the Holt Company of California, bought the patent in 1910, registering the trade name ‘Caterpillar’ for the new tracks, and several American companies began to develop machines moved by such tracks.

  In a separate technological development, armour plating had been used to protect naval vessels at sea for decades. It had been developed by the big armament and metallurgical companies like Vickers and Cammells in Britain and Krupp in Germany. The steel plating they manufactured for warships was up to ten inches thick, far too heavy for any land machine to carry, but they also made armour plating a quarter of an inch thick, sufficient to provide a shield from bullets fired from a distance of one hundred yards. In purely technical terms, therefore, many of the elements needed to produce an armoured, tracked fighting vehicle already existed when war came in 1914.5 What was needed was the inspiration to draw these elements together.

  It was Winston Churchill at the Admiralty who took the project to the next stage. Churchill wanted to prevent the Germans from occupying the Channel ports in Belgium. Since the army was too stretched to provide extra men, Churchill committed the Royal Marines, who came under Admiralty command, to the continent to reinforce the port of Antwerp. He also instructed the Royal Naval Air Service to send a squadron to Ostend to attack German targets. As the RNAS developed differently to the Royal Flying Corps, part of its role became to defend Britain, and Churchill wanted it to fulfil this purpose by using it aggressively to bomb Zeppelin bases in occupied Belgium. The mechanically astute minds of the naval men now came up with the idea of fitting armour plating to some of their vehicles in order to send raiding parties against German troops.

  Antwerp fell to German forces in October but the development of armoured naval vehicles continued. A site was acquired at Wormwood Scrubs in west London where testing and further development continued. A real specialism developed here, and by the end of the year armoured cars with revolving turrets equipped with machine guns were in existence. In the static positional war of the trenches there was no real opportunity to use mobile armoured cars; however, the several enthusiasts continued to work on improved forms of armour plating, vehicle design and means of propulsion. Among their number was Albert Gerald Stern, a successful and wealthy banker who had taken a commission as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve. He donated his own Rolls-Royce to the venture and was recruited to the workshops at Wormwood Scrubs.

  The War Office now rather belatedly began to get in on the act. Two Holt tractors with caterpillar tracks, bought in the United States, were given a trial in February 1915 at Shoeburyness in the Thames estuary. The tracks proved effective at crossing rough, waterlogged ground but no one present could imagine how to turn a tractor into a fighting vehicle. It was agreed that the machine could prove useful as a gun carrier and a small order was placed, although most artillery officers thought that horses were far more flexible and manageable in hauling guns over almost any terrain. As the War Office pondered the future, the initiative still lay with the Admiralty.

  From Winston Churchill’s point of view, the war at the beginning of 1915 was mired in stalemate. What torpedoes and mines were to his sailors at sea, machine guns and barbed wire were to the soldiers on the Western Front. Churchill was fascinated by Hankey’s idea of using a giant roller machine to get men into enemy trenches. Realising that something entirely new to the arsenal of war was needed to penetrate the enemy lines, which grew in sophistication and defensive power as every month passed, he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith on 5 January suggesting that the army should take forward the idea of bullet-proof steam tractors with caterpillar tracks to cross enemy trenches. He made the further point that it would not cost much to manufacture such a machine and if it failed only a small amount of money would have been wasted.

  Asquith forwarded Churchill’s letter to the War Office and asked them to respond. Churchill was amazed when, after waiting seven weeks, he received a reply from the Master General of the Ordnance rejecting the proposal outright because ‘the project is not likely to lead to success’.6 So he decided to go ahead himself, and on 20 February he formed a Landships Committee at the Admiralty under the chairmanship of naval engineer Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, the Director of Naval Construction, who at first could not see what any of this had to with him. But d’Eyncourt would become one of the key drivers of the project over the coming months, while Albert Stern moved from Wormwood Scrubs to became the energetic and forceful secretary of the new committee.

  There were two alternative routes of development open to the Landships Committee. One was a vehicle powered by huge rolling wheels like a giant steamroller. The design the committee explored for this option had wheels 40ft in diameter, two at the front and one at the back. This colossus, known familiarly as the Big Wheel, would be able to fire 4in guns, the sort of weapons usually found on a naval destroyer. At 100ft long and 46ft high, it was closest to the monster imagined by H.G. Wells. The second was a tracked vehicle, smaller and possibly a little faster than the Big Wheel steamroller. But most of the experts were doubtful that caterpillar tracks were the way forward; they thought the tracks would break up or collapse under the pressure of crossing barbed wire or rough ground.

  While the members of the Landships Committee were considering the two alternatives, they received a third design: a machine that looked like a land submarine with a conning tower in the centre, steered with a ship’s wheel and using pedrail feet for propulsion. Like the other two designs, its purpose was to carry up to fifty men in bullet-proof safety across no man’s land to storm the enemy trenches. The committee members asked for models to be made and in March Churchill, off his own bat, authorised the use of £70,000 of Admiralty funds (approximately £7 million in 2014 money) to make prototypes. Churchill was taking a chance, committing naval funding for land vehicles t
hat were so speculative. But, stung by the War Office’s rejection, and feeling that someone needed to get the wheels rolling, he decided to go ahead. It was fortunate that he did.

  A small agricultural machine maker in Lincoln, William Foster & Co., started work on the Big Wheel option based on giant steam tractors they had built before the war, while the Metropolitan Carriage, Wagon and Finance Company in Birmingham was eventually asked to develop the tracked option. The land submarine idea became mired in disagreement and soon fell by the wayside. The committee asked another veteran engineer, Colonel Crompton, to pursue the different options, and with immense energy and vigour he pushed and cajoled each manufacturer to come up with the goods. When Crompton visited France in the spring of 1915, however, to see for himself what conditions at the front really looked like, GHQ refused him permission to travel there; he was, after all, working for the Admiralty. The army’s obstructiveness to the development of a machine to cross no man’s land and break the deadlock on the Western Front was becoming scandalous.

  When, at the end of May, Churchill was forced out of the Admiralty, one of the principal supporters of the first stage of the machine’s development no longer had a position with real influence. D’Eyncourt, however, kept the project alive. In July the new Ministry of Munitions took over research and development, which was now to be directed by Colonel Louis Jackson and his Trench Warfare Department, although the members of the Landships Committee continued to advise and Stern remained secretary of the new committee that was formed. Swinton once more entered the scene and succeeded in generating some interest from within the War Office. With more army involvement, it was resolved that the principal object of the new machine should be combat rather than the carrying of troops. This required a smaller construction than some of the more fanciful grand designs that had been bandied about. The Big Wheel version was abandoned and the committee decided that the future lay with tracked vehicles.