This week was the centenary of the first use of massed tanks in battle. At first light on 20th November 1917, four hundred machines went “over the top” towards Cambrai on the Western Front1. The results were remarkable. Without the need of a preparatory artillery bombardment, which always alerted the Germans to an imminent attack, the tanks achieved complete surprise. On a six-mile front, checked only at Flesquières, the infantry of General Sir Julian Byng’s 3rd Army were able to penetrate five miles into the defences of the Hindenburg Line – further to date than anywhere on the Somme or in Flanders. By early afternoon, only a half-finished fourth line stood between 3rd Army and open country, and here there was a wide-open gap for several hours.
An advance of five miles, even a relatively easy one, was tiring, however. By now the tanks were crewed by men exhausted by noise, fumes and concussive vibrations, or were out of action because of breakdown or enemy fire. The infantry, also weary, could make no further progress without them. The hoped-for breakthrough didn’t happen. The Germans rallied, and ten days later mounted a counter-offensive which pushed 3rd Army back to their original line. German casualties in the fortnight’s fighting were around 50,000; the British Expeditionary Force’s were 45,000 (of which 10,000 were dead), yet with nothing to show for it, just the sense of a “near miss”, a demonstration of what the tank could do in the attack if well handled.
After the war there was continual debate as to how tank warfare should develop – if at all. There were those who saw the tank primarily as an aid to helping the infantry advance. These were further divided into those who wanted as heavily armoured and heavily armed a machine as possible, and those who were prepared to sacrifice a certain amount of protection and firepower to gain more mobility. At the other end of the scale were those who wanted the tank to be capable of wholly independent action, to fight in grand fleets like warships. In the prevailing atmosphere of pacifism in the interwar years, however, nothing was resolved, and therefore very little was funded. The Germans, on the other hand, developed the concept of “Blitzkrieg”, originally a British idea, and would apply it with spectacular success in 1939 in Poland, and then again in 1940 in France2. Dunkirk ensued.
The problem of identifying future threats, both in nature and geography – as well as recognising critical technological shifts and then backing the right counter-technology – continues to dog Britain’s armed forces. And just as in the inter-war years, continuing retrenchment makes it doubly problematic. At the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, Britain’s defence spending was over 5% of GDP; today it is just short of 2%, and further cuts threaten, including entire capabilities such as amphibious assault. There is no margin for error.
Military purblindness
The services themselves have not always been very intelligent about their equipment programmes. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a defence review took place – “Options for Change”3 – the object of which was to remove as much money as possible from the defence budget. It mirrored the so-called Geddes Axe of 1922 (which was in part responsible for ‘industrial action’ nine years later by a thousand sailors in the Royal Navy’s Atlantic Fleet, the ‘Invergordon Mutiny’.) The services’ object during “Options”, on the other hand, was to preserve as much as possible of the status quo, and then to replace it at the point of obsolescence. There was no truly strategic rethink by either government or the forces. Thus the Eurofighter programme continued at pre-“Options” specifications in capability and numbers; the Navy continued with its warship designs for high-intensity conflict of the type anticipated in the Atlantic in the event of war with the Soviet Union; and the Army continued with a number of expensive Cold War projects, most of which were later abandoned as events elsewhere demonstrated their lack of general utility, while at the same time cutting manpower, its primary asset.
When Labour came to power in 1997 a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was carried out to try to shake off the remnants of Cold War thinking and reshape the forces for the future4. This was generally welcomed by the ‘defence community’, but the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, doggedly refused to fund the outcome. The forces therefore saw more cuts, either intentional as part of SDR restructuring, or when equipment became obsolete but the money to replace it was refused. The one area in which Brown was willing to spend, however, was warships, including two aircraft carriers, which would be built in Labour, largely Scottish, constituencies. Knowing this, not surprisingly the Navy massively upped their specifications for the carriers. What was originally envisaged by the chiefs of staff committee as a like-for-like replacement of the modest Harrier VTOL (Vertical take off and landing) force became instead a programme for “carrier-strike”, in the same league as the Americans, one in which we had never previously played, and nor in which the chiefs collectively had seen any reason to play.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe