THE FIGHTING TANKS

Evening Star, Issue 20510, 14 June 1930, Page 20

THE FIGHTING TANKS

CREATION OF NEW ARM ACHIEVEMENT OF THE WAR REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENT. Tho lessons of the Great War have mechanised the British Army to a degree that would have been considered preposterous to the conventional mind of 1914. To-day ex-Lancers are driving armoured cars and tho Royal Tank Corps has become an impressive unit, and even with the powerful achievements that have taken place in improving the power and mobility of this arm there can be no question that it must continuously progress with the progress of mechanical science. . The tank appeared in 1916. It was a crude, slow affair. It was sent into the mud sea of Passchcndaele, and was promptly dubbed an idotic failure by the equine school, and caused ‘ the drawing room and smoking room experts of Mayfair and Pall Mall, for once united, to chant a solemn requiem over tho children of Swinton and D’Eyncourt’s fanatical brains: ‘Scrap them, scrap them; let us get down to clean Victorian soldiering.’ ” So says G. Murray Wilson, late senior chaplain to the Royal Tank Corps in “ Fighting Tanks.” The book is not so much a history of the tanks in tho war as a series of impressions gathered from a wide field. THE LOT OP THE PIONEER. Tho creators of tho tank “ encountered inevitably tho immovable mass of the crowd- with fixed ideas. The Higher Command was_ inevitably, if unconsciously, antagonistic to newfangled inventions,” for inventors are gamblers, and in war tho stake is lives. Others' “ belonging to the establishment of military conservancy damned in advance anything threatening a radical change in the rules of tho war game.** , f p , The adoption of tho tank they feared “ would destroy the glamour of war, unaffected by the aeroplane. _ Gone would be tho age-long co-operation of man and horse.” It fell to the lot of General 11. J. Elies, a sapper officer on G.H.Q., to uphold frith - in the tank, to train a personnel, mainly civilian, entirely lacking in tradition, and to develop the arm in spite of the results under impossible conditions in tlm early days of tho war. Under tins commander “ tho knight in armour was reinstated, his horse now a petrol engine, his lance a machine gun. i he tank, which had begun its career so inauspiciously, “ became an epic at Cambrai, a paean in the grand advance of 1918, culminating in the entry into Cologne of a Tank Corps unit as the advance guard of tho entire British forces.” THE GENERAL’S GESTURE. The s ithor-chaplain says that club critics were scandalised when •. they knew that General Elies had led tho

I tank attack at Cambrax in person, a step taken to help to banish the “ blues ” of the unit which had been the legacy from Passchendaele. It had this effect. “ Elles’s Cambrai gesture was no less dynamic than histrionic. One used to hear too often the simpleminded dweller in dugouts grousing about the staff and their cushy billets. This was largely occasioned by the tactless sartorial splendour of A.D.C.s, who represented the visible staff to the average subaltern. The 1 jitter was, of course, speaking rather from the head than from the heart. Still, occasional leading does make leadership more real than the uninterrupted directing from the rear. ‘ Come on, you fellows! Give ’em hell!’ brings your heart' out of your boots much quicker than all the rounded periods of lan Hamilton’s best-worded General Order, or even Kipling's ‘ Hymn Before Action.’

The tank “curtain-raiser” was the Somme, 1916, where tanks- with a, speed of three and a-half miles an hour went into action, their crews lacking experience of working with infantry, and infantry possessing no knowledge of tanks. “ There had been much whispering, much nodding of some heads, and shaking of other heads, and, on the whole, the shakers had it. This was the nebulous atmosphere in which the young dinosaurs came into, the battle world.” In the absence of guiding tapes. Captain Hotblack walked in front, and snowed them the way —and lived.

WHEN THE TANKS PREVAILED

How different a story two years later. At Villers-Bretonneux seven whippets went for a ridge, “ smoked out every neat” on the way, engaged two battalions and routed them, with a loss of 400 killed or wounded. The crews of these tanks totalled twenty-one men of whom five were wounded. “It was a case of rapidly-moving armourplated Hotchkiss guns, invulnerable to bombs and rifle fire, overwhelming the defences of an out-of-date warfare.” In this attack a “ mild-mannered pinkfaced padre, who had deserted mothers’ meetings for Mars,” went for a ride in a tank.

At Hamel the tanks obliterated over 200 enemy machine guns at a cost of thirteen men wounded. The Australians were with them on that occasion, and the effect was to change a feeling of lukewarmness on the part of the infantry to a cheerful glow of confidence. At Amiens, where the Fourth Army, mainly Australians and Canadians, cleaned up .22,000 prisoners and over 400 guns, COO tanks were engaged on the eleven-mile front. On this occasion an attempt was made to transport infantry by tank to the Mark V Star, but in the confined space the fume-laden air was too much for the men, and one party all became semi-asphyxiated. THE LONE-HAND WHIPPET. Outstanding among many tales of individual tank adventures is that of the “ Musical Box,” a Whippet that carried a crow of three—officer, driver, and gunner. After proceeding 2,000 yards between Aboucourt and Bayonvilliers this tank found itself alone, all its companions haying been “ ditched.” First it attacked’ a battery of field guns moving diagonally across its front so that both guns could fire at once, and then coming up in the rear. The German gunners fled and were shot down. Then the gallant tank “ cruised ” forward, dealing with odd parties of the demoralised enemy. It chased a party from a bridge, accounting for sixty of the enemy. The “ cruise ” continued through a sea of Huns. It harried them everywhere, put to flight the transport in an aerodrome, lay in wait for a German lorry and .rammed it. Next it knocked out two horse wagons. The tank had been continuously in action for twelve hours, mostly as a lone raider, before it was incapacitated and set on fire.

Lieutenant Arnold succeeded in pulling out his two men. One was shot by tho surrounding enemy, and he and the other were soundly kicked before being taken prisoner. It was an amazing exploit, not only on account of the valour and endurance of the crew, but also on account of tho tremendous aid rendered to the advancing infantry. It bad more than its share of luck, but it demonstrated the greatest dream of the tank creators.