I ought to tell you frankly that your private arrangements with French as regards land forces is rapidly rendering my position and responsibility as Secretary of State impossible… I do not interfere with Jellicoe nor do I have a private correspondence with him [this sentence struck out]. I am suggesting to the P.M. that you should take the W.O. and let Fisher be 1st Lord then all would work smoothly I hope.17
While Churchill continued to dodge these thunderbolts, the Samson brothers and Warner, the squadron’s eye-blackened gunlayer, worked throughout the winter to devise means of getting the wheeled unit back into action. Anticipating a return to a war of manoeuvre in the spring of 1915, they built an awesome gunship on a heavily armoured 5-ton Mercedes chassis. On the flatbed behind the cab stood an armoured emplacement for six Vickers .303 machine guns topped by a commander’s conning tower. The battery could hose nearly 6,000 rounds per minute over a range of 2,900yd. With that firepower they could have gone into the timber felling business. A rear-facing secondary steersman’s position in the back of the vehicle was cable-linked to the driver’s steering assembly. If the crew came under heavy attack and there was no time for elegant turning movements, they could reverse out and away on full throttle using this modified French steering system which Samson also fitted to an armoured car. The roads were virtually impassable by the time the truck was completed and it never saw action. It was shipped home in the new year.
Winter brought other problems. The lorry engines in particular would fail to fire up on the starting handle. This necessitated the heating of rags tied around stove pipes; the rags were then rushed in a bucket to wrap round carburettors to aid vaporisation.
Other innovations included the conversion of a lorry-fitted gun mounting to permit vertical anti-aircraft fire. A towed mounting for a 3-pdr gun was also built – a pair of car wheels on a reinforced axle with gun and shield were hauled by a Rolls-Royce fully enclosed in customized armour. It was hoped this combination could tackle the roads better than the lorries. After a successful test firing on 10 December the 3-pdr saw some action before relegation to anti-aircraft duty on Dunkirk aerodrome, its trail sunk deep to secure a 70° elevation in a gunpit ringed with sand-filled petrol tins.
Samson brought his remaining vehicles and crews back to Wormwood Scrubs after handing over the Dunkirk sector to 1 Naval Air Squadron on 27 February 1915. The following week he took 12 aircraft and a squadron of 15 armoured cars to Tenedos for the Dardanelles campaign. In those few days in London en route from one war front to another, he was booked for speeding.
Kitchener’s dispute with Churchill rolled on unabated. Asquith again had to warn Churchill off. On 17 February he wrote to tell Churchill that Kitchener had been to see him ‘in a state of some peturbation. He has just received two letters from French in which he announces that you have offered him a brigade of the Naval Division and two squadrons of armoured cars. Kitchener is strongly of opinion that French has no need of either.’18 Asquith confided to Venetia Stanley (Clementine Churchill’s cousin), ‘I am rather vexed with Winston who has been tactless enough to offer to Sir John French (behind K’s back and without his knowledge) a brigade of his Naval Division and two squadrons of his famous armoured cars which are being hawked about from pillar to post.’19 He told her that most of Churchill’s new armoured cars had been lying practically derelict at Wormwood Scrubs for the past two or three months.
Churchill wrote a conciliatory note to Kitchener proposing the withdrawal of his offer of the naval battalions and reminding him:
You have known for months past of the armoured cars and the naval battalions and what was the intention with which they were called into being. It has always rested … exclusively with you when and how they shall join the army. So far as the cars are concerned I should be glad if you found it possible to [let me] send over two squadrons… It would be a great pity to have an argument on the turn of a phrase. If [Sir John French’s] letters had begun ‘I have heard that there are some armoured cars available which the Admiralty have prepared and etc.’ instead of talking about ‘the offer of the 1st Lord of the Admiralty’, this to me wearisome incident would have been avoided.20
Some armoured car squadrons went to East Anglia to help meet the threat of invasion. The remainder continued to train. Churchill eventually found work for them all, several ending up in remote theatres where they were out of sight of their critics and free to get on with the war. Wedgwood and his men were stalled and fuming with impatience at the Holkham airship station in Norfolk. In February 1915 Churchill offered the squadron to Gen Botha for service in South West Africa. Awaiting his reply, Wedgwood begged the First Lord to get his squadron to France. ‘Please don’t leave me in this country now. The squadron will mutiny, which I ignore, but I myself should be seriously incommoded – and I do want to get at them again.’21
Wedgwood’s 3 Squadron went instead to Gallipoli. Locker Lampson took three squadrons to fight with the armies of the Czar. Their remarkable exploits ranged across Russia into Asia Minor and down through Persia and the Danube delta. Lampson collected so many orders and decorations from grateful governments that he listed one of his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘refusing honours’. Since 1909 he had been, and remained, a director and company secretary of Duff, Morgan & Vermont Ltd, a firm of motor engineers in Norwich. The company later became contractor to the Admiralty for the design and supply of all its armoured cars until the end of the war.22 The Duke of Westminster’s 2 Squadron got to France before moving on to the Middle East. Other RN armoured cars went to East Africa, and six squadrons later fought in Flanders. All would distinguish themselves, but in France the bold improvisations of the RNAS had come up against the limitations of the wheel.
4.
PRELIMINARIES TO A DINNER PARTY
‘We must crush the trenches in DAD. We must crush them in. It is the only way. We must do it. We will crush them. I am certain it can be done.’1
Winston Churchill to Cdre Murray Sueter, Director of Air Department, Royal Naval Air Service, 18 January 1915
The demands of the armoured car squadrons generated intense activity at Wormwood Scrubs. Churchill was a regular visitor, constantly urging Sueter to devise new weaponry. In November 1914 Sueter put an observation balloon unit into the airship shed and Boothby moved out, establishing his armoured cars HQ nearby in the imposing (and still extant) Clement-Talbot motor works in Barlby Road. Land adjoining the works became a trials ground for RNAS fighting vehicles. The airship shed was severely damaged by a hydrogen explosion the following July, killing two men of the balloon unit and injuring many more.2
The possibilities of chain traction were first seriously raised at Wormwood Scrubs with the arrival in October 1914 of Robert Macfie, a 33-year-old Scots-Canadian aviator, engineer and adventurer who had flown with Hetherington at Brooklands in 1911. Macfie’s family had extensive interests in sugar production and processing. He had spent the next two years on plantations in the West Indies where he saw Holt tractors in action. He was so struck with their performance that he wrote to alert steam traction engineers Fowler’s of Leeds. Macfie’s final peacetime assignment was a six-month study of power ploughing in western Canada for a New York group planning to build tractors. It included an appraisal of Holts and other machines. He returned to England in August 1914 intending to enlist as a pilot, but determined first to promote tracklayers to the military. Through his RFC connections he met senior War Office officials who clearly knew nothing of crawlers and remained blankly unmoved. He turned in October to Lt Harry Delacombe who was working on the balloons with Sueter. Delacombe told the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors in 1919 that Macfie had urged him to press for the armoured cars to be replaced with fighting tracklayers, dismissing the cars as overmanned, overweight and overreliant on roads.
As Sueter was elsewhere, Delacombe sounded out his fellow officers. They showed little interest in Macfie’s ideas but Delacombe never forgot Hetherington’s reply: ‘If you are going in for a
landship on those lines why not go the whole hog and take a thing like the gasometer at the Oval and armour it, put on a couple of wheels like the Earls Court Wheel, put your mechanism inside and put in some decent guns like 12in. naval guns, then you can cross the Rhine.’3 It struck Delacombe as one of the best ideas of the war. The giant Ferris wheel at the Earls Court pleasure gardens was nearly 300ft in diameter.
Macfie, an RN-trained engineer, was commissioned into the Armoured Car Division as Hetherington’s Field Repair Officer. He had taken up flying in Chicago before returning home in 1909 to build his own monoplane in six weeks. A series of dramatic smashes followed. Two years later he built a biplane of advanced design in three weeks, secured pilot’s licence No. 45, and was noticed in the aviation press:
Of boundless energy, restless of spirit, occupied perpetually with vast schemes that will revolutionise the industry … fuming ever against absurd restrictions that hinder his activity. Withal, sound mechanical and engineering knowledge and an extraordinarily acute perception of the problems of flight. Above all, a mind original in every respect. Unquestionably one of the ablest men in aeronautics.4
Having joined the RNAS, Macfie began a chaintrack crusade. Its initial focus was on the benefits of tracked haulage rather than fighting machines. At Sueter’s request he produced a report which Boothby forwarded on 7 November 1914 with the comment ‘this officer is a thoroughly competent engineer and his report seems worthy of consideration’. Macfie set out the advantages of the caterpillar system for moving heavy guns, claiming that six Holts could haul guns of up to 85 tons over smashed roads. He described techniques for wagon-train haulage over difficult ground, and included a photograph cut from the Daily Mail that week showing a Holt at work with the German Army.5 There was no mention of fighting machines, though he later claimed the report was written with that purpose and that this was self evident. The paper caused Hetherington to recommend purchase of a Holt for recovery work. Sueter was dismissive, telling him the army was familiar with such machines.
Hetherington’s off-the-cuff reference to an armoured gasometer which had so impressed Delacombe had been made half jokingly. But as its awesome implications sank in, Hetherington became captivated by the idea and he roughed out a design for a ‘land battleship’ which he put to Sueter in mid-November. Designated ‘The Hetherington Proposal’, it was to be a strategic super-weapon on three giant wheels and mounting a 12in naval gun weighing 67 tons. The machine would smash its way across country, fording rivers, destroying enemy batteries and dragging up railway lines with ship’s anchors as it ploughed into Germany. The idea was timely if nothing else. Churchill was now harrying Sueter whose drive and engineering skills he respected, to produce a radically new weapon to break the siege war.
Sqn Cdr Wilfred Briggs, who had supervised the armour-plate trials for the cars, and Mr Harris Booth the RNAS senior technical adviser, calculated the Hetherington machine’s structure, armament, armour, radius of action, speeds, power train, fuel, ammunition, stores and battle-ready weight. They decided on banks of submarine diesel sets to power electric motors geared to the wheels. When allup weight approached 800 tons Sueter called a halt. Hetherington agreed they should restart on a more rational basis. Design of the ‘Revised Hetherington Proposal’ continued into the new year. It was still a monster of 300 tons on three 40ft wheels. The hull sported twin 4in guns in each of three standard naval turrets.
On Sunday evening 15 November 1914 a strikingly handsome armoured Rolls-Royce pulled into the Talbot works yard. Its arrival from Glasgow merited special mention in the daily report from Boothby’s office.6 The Silver Ghost chassis had been part-plated to a new design at Beardmore’s Dalmuir works where the company’s Mr Scott had solved the problem of shaping light armour. The engine, driver’s and fighting compartments were all armoured. To save weight the open rear body was a shallow wooden tray with lockers, pick-up style. The car was topped by a rotating gun turret, a typically naval touch, with an elegantly dished roof. It mounted a single water-cooled Vickers-Maxim. Refinements included a pair of driver-operated steel doors shielding the radiator, Scarlett’s full-width top-hinged visor plate fronting the driver, and a secondary starter in the cab to avoid the need to get out for hand-starts under fire. There were ample side lookouts and revolver ports. Fully laden for action the 4-tonner with its three-man crew could still reach 50mph.
Six more turreted cars had arrived by 10 December, at which point Sueter raised the order from 114 to 120 to equip all eight squadrons then in formation. Around 80 were to be Rolls-Royces, and basically the same hull was built on to three Clement-Talbot chassis and some 36 Lanchesters. None went to Samson in France; winter and vile road conditions made an allocation pointless. The first cars were plated in a special 8.5mm nickel chrome alloy developed by Beardmore’s. It stopped an ordinary German bullet at 10yd, but if the bullet was removed from the cartridge and reinserted point first, only a 10mm plate would resist the reversed round, as the Germans were discovering.
After the first inadequately armoured Wimborne/Macnamara cars, Sueter had expanded the design team to include Nickerson, Hetherington and Briggs – the latter became the light armour specialist. The turreted Rolls-Royce influenced armoured car design around the world for a generation and was still in service with the British Army in 1936. At this time Sueter also produced an armoured truck mounting a 3-pdr Hotchkiss on a 5-ton chassis. As most British lorries in this class were steam powered, he chose the Detroit-built Standard’s petrol chassis with chain-drive, marketed in Britain as the Seabrook. Thirty-six were ordered.7 Portholme Coach Works Ltd of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, undertook the conversion. It was a struggling firm modestly distinguished by the possibility that it had introduced the first motor hearse to England. Sueter would have been more familiar with its parent company, seaplane makers Portholme Aerodrome Ltd, founded by James Radley who held pilot’s certificate No. 12 which he gained in 1910. He broke the world air speed record that year, reaching 75mph. Robert Macfie also knew the place well – he flew a pusher biplane of his own design from Portholme Meadow in May 1910, days after the Earl of Sandwich opened it for aviators.
The armoured open-top hulls in 8mm plate reflected the earlier Admiralty pattern Wolseleys and were built to Hetherington’s design. The engine compartment was fully protected, while the driver had the option of no roof or an armoured hood which he could slide sideways for head cover. The semi-automatic 3-pdr behind on the flatbed had a full traverse, providing the driver remembered to slide the hood out of its way and duck his head. Alternatively, a Vickers-Maxim could be mounted at each corner. Full-width ammunition lockers filled the stern.
If the lorry had to withdraw hastily under fire, a full-throttle departure in reverse gear was possible if the driver took his steering instructions via an ingenious arrangement of cables and pointers. A steersman sat at the back of the truck peering rearwards over the ammunition lockers through a slot in a hinged plate. He communicated steering requirements by reference to a quadrant painted on the plating in front of him. A metal pointer could be moved over the quadrant by a hand lever which was cable-connected to a pointer on the driver’s dashboard. The driver had to align a white marker on his steering wheel with the moving pointer while accelerating in reverse. Sueter’s heavily armed Seabrooks carried a substantial punch, but with a fighting weight of 10 tons the cart-spring suspension was heavily stressed.
The first chassis fitted with a gun was driven down from Huntingdon to Wormwood Scrubs on 15 November, arriving the same evening as the first turreted Rolls.8 The Seabrook was not armoured and was probably en route to Glasgow for trial plating after test firing. The first armoured lorries reached Boothby in mid-December and by 13 January 1915 he had 20, but trials were revealing serious suspension problems. The order was reduced to 30. No Seabrooks went out to Samson but three joined the Duke of Westminster’s 2 Squadron which crossed to France in March. The Kitchener/Churchill stand-off left the unit stalled at Dunkirk awaiting a forma
l War Office request for its services. This was not good enough for ‘Bend’Or’ Westminster who pulled strings and got his cars and Seabrooks into the Neuve-Chapelle action which opened on the 10th. Churchill wrote Kitchener a sardonic letter of apology for the participation of this ‘irregular’ force, adding that the lorries did very useful work, pumping 75 shells into a fortified house despite receiving heavy return fire and casualties. Westminster soon had 12 Seabrooks, telling Churchill:
[We] shell these various fortified houses that are full of Maxims. We go and lie out at night and commence operations at dawn. We have had about eight of these expeditions and manage to get within about 600yd. But now I find that the Germans are strengthening these forts with sandbags and cement etc. and we now want a 6-pdr firing Lyddite, if you have any of these guns to spare we could fix up the mountings and armour out here. Our interviews with the various Military authorities are now most touching, there is generally not a dry eye when we take leave of each other – and they talk with reverence about these 3-pdrs… Now all this fuss and bother that we had to contend with is over, things run smoothly, but I don’t mind telling you that I had the devil’s own time getting under weigh…The Rolls-Royce with the Maxims are being rubbed into them now and they are softening to them all right.9
Sueter’s output of road-fighting vehicles ended with the Seabrooks, though in September 1915 he formed a mobile anti-Zeppelin brigade for London based on lorry- and trailer-mounted 3-pdr guns. The Portholme work had been supervised by Hetherington who was showing considerable mechanical flair. He was joined by Lt Walter Gordon Wilson RNVR, an outstanding automobile engineer. Wilson, then aged 40, would profoundly influence the direction and ultimate success of tank development. He had served as a midshipman before leaving the navy in 1894 to gain a mechanical sciences tripos with first-class honours. In 1898 he joined forces with Percy Pilcher, an aero engineer, to form Wilson-Pilcher Ltd. They intended to produce the world’s first purpose-built aero engine. A prototype was designed a year later and was about to be constructed when Pilcher died in a gliding accident. Wilson turned to automobile design, creating the Wilson-Pilcher motor car with an advanced epicyclic transmission. The Newcastle armaments firm of Sir W.G. Armstrong, Whitworth & Co. took up Wilson’s designs, incorporating them in its own cars. He joined the company in 1904.
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