During the trials Donohue raised with David Roberts ‘the desirability of designing a combined Tractor and Gun as one unit carried on one set of Chain Tracks, and fitted with bullet proof shields so as to make a complete fighting machine’.8 Roberts recalled this prophetic portrait of the tank some years later. It was the kind of authoritative ‘steer’ which a contractor might have been expected to grasp eagerly. Roberts ignored it. This was his fifth year of unrewarding caterpillar work for the military. Hornsby was paid for the trials machines from MTC experimental funds but this barely offset their development costs.
The No. 3 tractor went on to an artillery practice camp at Trawsfynydd in the mountains of North Wales where its haulage work was again matched against horses. It proved to be very slow and seriously underpowered. The Battery Commander had other objections, complaining that the tractor was
impossible in a column with other troops, its noise and smell are abominable and very few horses will pass it. The wooden blocks forming its feet are nearly worn away, and it is unable to carry sufficient fuel for itself for any time, and its machinery appears to be unreliable. The team of eight horses in my opinion is far superior under every condition.9
The MTC pointed out that mechanical transport should never be sandwiched between horse-drawn vehicles in a column as it would go slower uphill and faster downhill. The Hornsby’s loud noise was conceded – it was still unsilenced – but it had fuel capacity for 100 miles.
Matters came to a head in 1911. The No. 3 machine was converted to petrol, boosting power from 72 to 105bhp and doubling average speeds. The MTC reached precisely the same conclusion as the year before – that the crawler came into its own when the horse gave up. It proposed a competition between a horsed gun and one drawn by the tractor, the two guns to travel independently for a distance of 30 miles and then be brought into action in a difficult place. Time taken by both was to be noted. At this, Brig Gen Stanley von Donop, the newly appointed Director of Artillery, halted further trials and convened a conference to review the whole question of tracklayers and horse haulage. He questioned the purpose and value of the machines:
Before going on further with these trials it would be well to discuss the object of introducing this form of tractor into the service? What is it for? Is it to take the place of horses altogether … and if so, is it because horses are getting scarce or because it is thought mechanical draught is better? … the present seems to be the time to settle whether we are to aim at replacing the draught horses of heavy and siege artillery entirely by tractors, or whether we merely wish to have additional means at our disposal for helping the guns over long distances and difficult ground.10
The negative reaction of the new Artillery Chief came after five years of slow but productive development by Roberts and the committee. At the conference the MTC pointed out that their objective was to provide a means of draught superior to horses. The experimental work had already produced a flow of advances on the original test machine and an evolutionary process was well under way. Holden reminded the general of the greater distances and rate of travel achievable by machine, the economy in men and avoidance of forage and water, the reduction in road length occupied, and the ability to work in terrain impossible for horses. He considered that if the research continued, they could produce a fully effective tractor. It was an authoritative endorsement of chain traction. Holden was now president of the committee, but it remained an advisory group with few influential supporters. Von Donop reluctantly approved Holden’s request for another comparative trial between machine and horses – on condition that they managed without horses. The Director of Artillery deemed that horse haulage speeds and performance were already established and their presence would add nothing to the findings. The question of work with a horsed unit would be decided after the trials.
War Office interest in chain traction had been fading for at least a year. The MTC had sought approval in 1910 to purchase an American Holt crawler for evaluation alongside the Hornsby. Permission was refused despite confirmation that the MTC held adequate funds. It was forced to rely on the Military Attaché in Washington for whatever technical information he could glean. His despatches on the Holt were contradictory and almost valueless in the absence of a test machine. The War Office abandoned all chaintrack development a year later. Holden retired in 1912.
Hornsbys saw the decision coming. The company had been investing in crawler traction since 1904 with no sign of volume orders from any quarter, civil or military. The venture was no longer sustainable despite numerous initiatives including a 4-ton Rochet-Schneider motor car which Roberts fitted with light chaintracks in October 1906. It recorded 15mph in tests by the army and was the subject of a short movie commissioned by Hornsbys which is reputedly the first ‘commercial’ on film. In 1908 a tracked Mercedes car was produced for high speeds in the Egyptian desert. Members of the MTC attended its beach trials at Skegness where it achieved 20mph. Hornsbys formed Tractor Transport Ltd to market their caterpillars and a subsidiary offered the machines for contract haulage in Africa and South America, with little success.
The carcass of a truly historic Hornsby chain tractor was discovered in British Columbia in 1974. It was in poor shape and the 80hp compound steam engine and boiler, by Wm Foster of Lincoln, were missing. The 25-ton machine was built in 1909 to the order of The Northern Light, Power & Coal Co. Ltd of London. It needed a prime mover in the Alaskan Yukon Territory for hauling a 100-ton wagon train of coal the 40 miles over summer swamps and frozen tundra to the railhead at Dawson City. As the company was sitting on coal, the vehicle had to be a steamer. The unique machine was shipped out in March 1910 and was worked in the Yukon for 15 years. It was probably Roberts’ only caterpillar tractor sale outside the army.
Hornsbys now withdrew from the field to concentrate on its profitable oil-engine business. David Roberts had been the first to produce a practical chaintrack machine powered by an internal combustion engine. For him and his company it was a bitter disappointment that the military and civil markets were not ready to share his vision and exploit the achievement. The company’s research lead in track technology was already slipping away when lack of business forced Hornsbys to pull out of the crawler market. Three years later the loss of its expertise cost the nation vital time in evolving the tank. As a final irony, the company was heavily engaged with Admiralty contracts throughout the war and had no spare capacity for tank construction beyond the supply of 225hp Ricardo engines. In 1911–12 Hornsbys sold most of its foreign patents on Roberts’ system to the Holt Manufacturing Co. of Stockton, California, for £4,000. The caterpillar name was registered as Holt’s trademark in October 1911 and the company later became The Caterpillar Tractor Co.
The overwhelming dependence of all armies on the horse in the last year of peace is well illustrated by the annual British Army exercise in September 1913. Five infantry and two cavalry divisions totalling over 45,000 men manoeuvred across central England. They were supported by over 17,000 horses, 2,220 horse-drawn vehicles and a trifling 192 motor vehicles of all kinds, including staff cars. There were no tracked machines. Motor transport was a growing feature of troop movement and supply in the French and German armies. The American War Department was no further ahead than its European counterparts. Prior to 1912 it had purchased only 28 motor trucks, though it knew that US manufacturers were supplying the French and Russian governments with as many as 125 lorries on a single order. A Holt tracklayer had been evaluated without enthusiasm by the Field Artillery Board in 1912. The following year Benjamin Holt tried to interest the military in a full demonstration of his machines. He received no reply. Repeated approaches were rebuffed until finally in May 1915 a machine underwent trials at the Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois, on condition that Holt’s bore all costs. By then Britain and her allies were placing substantial orders with the company.
The German War Department was also dismissive of tracklayers, informing Holt’s importer and agent Dr Leo Steiner, after a demo
nstration near Magdeburg in 1913, that the machine was of no importance for military purposes. The German Army had first used motor transport on an organized basis in 1908 when four light lorries were employed in support of a cavalry brigade. Steiner, a Hungarian engineer and farmer, had no more success at first with the Austro-Hungarian War Department which arranged a secret field trial in October 1912. This pitted his Holt against several European tractors in hauling heavy howitzers over sand and marsh. At the third such trial in Austria in May 1914 a Porsche tractor hauled a gun 500ft into a semi-swamp before sinking, while the Holt managed the full 750ft crossing. On reaching the far bank its driver raced the engine before throwing in the clutch and hauling the gun clear. Steiner recalled that he heard a crash like a gun shot and saw the Holt rear up and almost somersault. The next moment it returned to horizontal, lifted the gun wheels out of the ground and hauled it away. The troops cheered and members of the military committee waved their hats.11
It is not clear whether Steiner’s competition was wheeled or tracked, but the Austrians were sufficiently impressed to negotiate a local assembly agreement with Holt’s. When the war prevented shipments of components from the US the venture collapsed. Capt Davidson from the MTC had attended Austrian War Department subvention lorry trials three years earlier in 1911, noting that they operated 30 Daimler 100hp four-wheel-drive tractors for howitzer haulage.
The French chose a similar approach, deciding early in 1913 on a phased replacement of artillery horses by four-wheel-drive tractors. They began with their heavy 8.6in gun teams. Britain’s Commercial Motor acidly observed: ‘It is not to be expected that our own War Office will be the first to prove the practicability of such a scheme.’12
Hornsby’s caterpillar No. 1 was sold off by the War Office in 1913. All four crawlers delivered in 1910 were still on Army Service Corps inventory in 1919. The equally historic Hornsby No. 3 survived both world wars and is now preserved in running order at the Tank Museum, Bovington. It was trundled out in June 1914 for the Royal Military and Naval Tournament at Olympia. In those last days of peace it was an amusing novelty, nothing more.
That month the gunshots that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort in Sarajevo reverberated through the chancelleries of Europe and triggered the mobilization of armies. Germany invaded Belgium on 4 August, prompting a swift ultimatum from London. When it expired that night at 11 pm Berlin time, Britain found herself at war.
Col Holden was recalled and almost immediately appointed Assistant Director of Mechanical Transport Supply. He found that motor vehicle purchases for the army in 1913 totalled only 254 of all types. There were no crawlers. He began a search for tracked gun tractors, and with Hornsbys out of the running he turned to America. Some Holt engineers who had serviced Steiner’s Austrian trials were invited to demonstrate their machine in England that October. It was the first Holt to reach Britain, arriving at Woolwich Arsenal on the 26th. The army had two in service by January 1915. Ten more were ordered in March and by June 75 were awaited. By the Armistice the War Office had bought 1,651 US-built Holts, most of them the 15-ton 75bhp semi-track type. More than 400 were built under licence by Ruston, Proctor & Company, agricultural engineers of Lincoln. (They merged with Hornsbys in September 1918 to form Ruston & Hornsby Ltd.) Though the cross-country performance of Holt’s early machines was poor by later standards, the company’s tracked workhorses were outstanding machines for their day and made haulage history.
The belief persists in America that the first tanks were no more than armoured Holts, and the company appears to have been happy at the time to see the US press repeatedly make this claim. However, the tanks were entirely British in design and construction and Holt’s very properly sought neither recognition nor reward after the war. The story broke three days after the first tank action in 1916 when Murray M. Baker, Vice-President of the Holt Manufacturing Company, told reporters in Washington that the British government had bought 1,000 Holt crawlers and intended to armour some of them for employment other than gun haulage. Possibly as a result of genuine ignorance on Baker’s part, the myth took off. Benjamin Holt was acclaimed a national hero for inventing the tank and was ranked alongside Christopher Columbus, while his company received nationwide recognition and an avalanche of orders.13
To its credit the War Office ran pre-war competitions between motor lorry manufacturers to stimulate improved design and performance. It introduced subsidy schemes to encourage production of commercial vehicles adaptable to military requirements, so creating a transport pool for requisition in time of war. The MTC had worked conscientiously within its remit as an advisory body, though it was starved of the personnel, facilities and money to do the job adequately. It never secured its own workshops and engineers, and was pleading in 1912 for funds to set up an experimental station. The committee relied on ad hoc arrangements with unit commanders for all its field trials and experiments, which could be disrupted at any time. The Hornsby No. 3 completed only one day of its trials with horsed guns in July 1911 before the Brigade of Artillery limbered up and left Aldershot for exercises in Okehampton. The MTC team was only told on the morning of the Brigade’s departure.
In the higher reaches of the British and most other armies in 1914 the prevailing mindset was deeply suspicious of innovation, technical or otherwise. Cavalrymen predominated. Only ten years earlier the Army Council had agonized over a proposal to designate the rifle as the cavalry’s primary weapon in place of the sword and lance. The opinion of Lord Francis Grenfell commanding IV Army Corps was typical: ‘It would be a fatal mistake to permit the Cavalry to regard the rifle as their principal weapon. All spirit and élan would go with this new departure, and if engaged in a European war such an organisation might be fatal.’14 Lt Gen Sir John French (commander-in-chief of the BEF in 1914) agreed. Senior commanders had spent the formative years of their careers, and much of their later service, in an era before the automobile, powered flight and the quick-firing gun. The new century opened with a bewilderment of advances in military sciences from aviation to wireless telegraphy. They were viewed by many with a mixture of distrust and incomprehension. Here would be the tank’s first and longest battle; not in any shooting war but in men’s minds.
2.
EARLY TRIALS – AND VERDICTS
‘I am fully aware that the Navy have the most of the credit for the tanks. It will not I hope be forgotten that some soldiers at least had a vision of possibilities.’1
Maj Gen Sir George Scott-Moncrieff, 4 November 1918
The author of the November 1915 report on the Kinlochleven ‘watergun’ trials was Lt Col Ernest Dunlop Swinton, Royal Engineers. It was a desperate idea which the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) quietly dropped. Swinton, aged 47, was a perceptive observer and writer on the military scene. He had been pressing the case for a tracked fighting machine for over a year and for much of that time his difficulty lay in finding anyone at GHQ or the War Office who would take him seriously.
The events that led Swinton to his own conclusions about how to overcome machine guns and wire began during the South African War 15 years before. He had commanded the 1st Railway Pioneer Regiment, a locally raised body of irregulars whose task was to keep open Lord Roberts’ rail lifeline to his force in the Transvaal. Swinton’s unit fought off many trackside skirmishes by Boer raiders. These encounters, for which he received the DSO, left him with an abiding respect for the devastating potential of the machine gun, which was still an unreliable novelty.
After three years as Chief Instructor in Fortification at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Swinton took charge of the historical section of the CID in 1910. (‘“Oh boy that was dry” I said to a soldier friend, “you make history, I write it, and no one reads it”.’2) He became immersed in preparing the Official History of the Russo-Japanese War which was marked by fearful carnage in the face of concentrated machine-gun fire. His fears reawakened, in 1911, Swinton co-produced A Handbook on Machine Gun Tactics with Capt R.V.K. App
lin, 14th Kings Hussars. Their thesis was the need to produce specialist machine gunners and to concentrate fire in batteries. The message was prophetic but ignored by the British Army in which it remained customary until 1915 to delegate responsibility and a couple of guns to an untrained regimental junior officer.
In 1911 Germany began secretly to amass a huge reserve of machine guns. Swinton heard of this from Capt T.G. (‘Tri-nitro Tom’) Tulloch, an explosives expert and former Chief Experimental Officer at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. He retired from the post in 1903 aged 35 to join the board of the Chilworth Gunpowder Company near Guildford, a subsidiary of Vereinigte Rheinisch-Westphalische Pulverfabriken, a German explosives firm. His appointment gave him direct and exceptional access to the German munitions industry. Tulloch’s nickname arose from his many visits to Germany during which he noted the military adoption of TNT, a new propellant superior to Lyddite. For six years before the outbreak of war in 1914 he repeatedly but unsuccessfully urged the British military and naval authorities to follow suit, handing them detailed information on German TNT production methods. His persistence earned him the tag from Adm Sir Gordon Moore, Director of Naval Ordnance. Moore was to become tank production supremo in the coming war.
Tulloch learned of Germany’s covert stockpiling of machine guns during a visit to Berlin in November 1911. He had been asked by Albert Vickers, whose company had a 40 per cent interest in Chilworth, to find out why Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken (DWM) had stopped paying royalties on the Vickers-Maxim machine guns which they had been making under licence from Vickers Sons & Maxim of London since 1901. Tulloch had just secured the rights from DWM to use German methods of block-filling shells with TNT but he found its directors evasive on the subject of royalty payments. With the scent well up, he went on to the company’s small-arms ranges at Koenigswusterhausen where over dinner and several bottles with the experimental officer, a Col Jacob, he skilfully trapped the luckless fellow into confirming that the Prussian government had imposed the royalties embargo to conceal the enormous increase in the numbers of machine guns it was then ordering.3 Alcohol seems to have featured regularly in Tulloch’s investigatory technique. In 1904 at a naval explosives factory at Duneberg an over-lunched officer confided to him that a pointed bullet was soon to be introduced throughout Germany’s armed services. As the spitzgeschoss, it would revolutionize prevailing thinking on small-arms ammunition. Tulloch alerted a surprised Gen Hadden at the War Office, which knew nothing of it, and produced a purloined sample.4
The Devil's Chariots Page 3