 |
| Glasgow Detachment, British Tank Corps, 1921. After the War the Tank Corps Was Quickly Reduced from 26 Battalions to 4 |
By Kendrick Kuo, Assistant Professor at the Strategic and Operational Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College
In popular imagination, for example, the German blitzkrieg was a revolutionary innovation in World War II that restored the possibility of decisive victory, which had eluded European armies since the Franco-Prussian War. What is less known is that the British also innovated in armored warfare yet performed poorly on the battlefield [in WWII]. While the German Army mechanized its combined-arms tactics developed at the end of World War I, the British deployed armored brigades comprised almost entirely of tanks and expected them to fight with virtually no help from supporting arms. . . In reality, rather than being a drastic departure from the past, German tactics and operations in World War II were an extension of the infiltration tactics that it developed to restore mobile warfare on the Western Front . . .
My central claim is that innovation is more likely to weaken a service's effectiveness when growing security commitments outstrip shrinking resources. This wide commitment-resource gap exerts pressures to innovate in ways that cannibalize traditional capabilities before beliefs about the effectiveness of new ones are justified. When wartime comes, not only has the service lost proficiency in those older capabilities, but the new capability underdelivers, thereby creating vulnerabilities for the enemy to exploit.
Editor's Comment: Professor Kuo fully expands this argument in his full article, which is highly recommended and available HERE.
For readers of Roads to the Great War, however, I have excerpted his description of the process and decisions of the postwar British tank innovators, up to the desert campaign of 1942.
The blitzkrieg myth complements another misleading narrative: that British armor innovation failed because conservative army leaders suppressed a small group of prophetic tank enthusiasts, which resulted in weak army performance on the armor-dominated battlefields of World War II. But in reality, Britain's interwar army favored reform and mechanization. Inspired by futuristic visions of mechanical warfare, the British Army relied too heavily on armor organized in tank-only brigades as the decisive arm on the battlefield.
The British Army's size and expenditure experienced unrelenting downward pressure for virtually the entire interwar period, despite a heavy mission burden and growing international threats to its security commitments. To resolve this wicked mismatch, the army innovated all-tank mobile assaults that allegedly improved its effectiveness in assigned missions while also economizing the army's limited budget and personnel. The innovation process was characterized by radicalism, wishful thinking, and rushed development, all of which downplayed criticisms that contemporary tanks were mechanically unreliable and that armored assaults were susceptible to anti-tank countermeasures if they lacked the support traditionally provided by other arms.
The British Army faced the challenge of bridging a wicked mismatch between expanding commitments and shrinking resources—a gap that persisted for most of the interwar period. The army had expansive imperial, domestic, and continental obligations at this time. It had to police and defend an empire at its territorial zenith, having grown from one-fifth of the world's landmass before World War I to one-quarter of the globe. At home, the army had to contain an Irish insurgency movement and quell what were perceived to be coordinated labor strikes that posed a political challenge to the government. Finally, the army had continuing obligations in Europe, most significant of which was upholding the Locarno Pact to guarantee the common borders between Belgium, France, and Germany.
 |
| Royal Tank Corps crew with their Vickers Medium (Interwar) |
To meet these wide-ranging security commitments, the army had fewer soldiers and less money than before World War I. . . CIGS, Field Marshal Sir George Milne (1926–1933), described how the army was operating at full capacity, with fewer infantry battalions than before World War I, while trying to match its Locarno obligations and respond to unrest in China, the swaraj movement in India, policing Palestine and Iraq, and an anti-British Egypt. “The Army is pared to the bone,” Milne warned, and “our army is so small that it is incapable of fulfilling our international obligations.
To resolve the wicked mismatch, the army found an innovative solution in a new capability that I call “armored maneuver.” The idea was that a mobile force, consisting almost entirely of tanks, could maneuver on the future battlefield with impunity and land a decisive blow against the enemy's rear areas. This new capability allegedly solved the army's wicked mismatch by improving combat effectiveness in great wars, small wars, and internal security, while requiring fewer men and less money than the army's existing force structure. But experimentation with prototype forces yielded worrying results, and critics raised plausible concerns about enemy countermeasures and mechanical unreliability. Nonetheless, the army remained wedded to a futuristic vision of armored warfare.
British armor innovators shared an overarching idea of armored warfare as mobile all-tank operations with little need for supporting infantry and conventionally towed artillery. Maj. Gen. J. F. C. Fuller and Capt. Basil Liddell Hart were the key spokespeople for armored maneuver, though other figures in the Royal Tank Corps—namely, George Lindsay, Charles Broad, and Percy Hobart—were the implementers. Together, they argued that tanks were the optimal combination of protection, mobility, and offensive power. As such, armored maneuver promised to be a panacea for the army's wide-ranging security commitments and a substitute for the traditional capabilities associated with the combined-arms offensives of the Western Front. Armor radicalism demanded a high degree of creative destruction.
Armored maneuver allegedly increased the army's effectiveness in all its assigned missions, whether it be great wars, small wars, or internal security. In the next great war in Europe, armored maneuver would prevent another bloody Western Front. Battles would begin with an armored clash for “tank supremacy” in which infantry, artillery, and horsed cavalry would play “the part of interested spectators” and “do next to nothing.” Fast tanks would exploit into the enemy's rear and paralyze the enemy's communication and command centers, plunging the opposing army into psychological disarray. The traditional arms would come into play only after the battle had been decided: as armored forces moved forward “by a series of bounds,” the traditional arms would occupy conquered territory and garrison “a chain of fortified depots” established behind the advancing tank forces.
In small wars, the main challenges were that military garrisons were usually located far away from disturbances and rebels had growing access to small arms. But tanks could allegedly travel far without relying on supply lines, do so quickly across various terrains, and counter small arms fire. Mechanization functionally reduced the size of empire. Finally, for policing and internal security, tanks dispensing nonlethal chemical gases offered a discriminating and less escalatory way to disperse riots.
Armored maneuver could allegedly do these things at cheaper cost than the traditional capabilities developed in World War I. In the final year on the Western Front, the British Army was integrating infantry, artillery, and armor capabilities, with the aid of aerial spotting and surprise, to penetrate German defensive positions held in depth and to do so with acceptable losses. Heavy counter-battery artillery fire was followed by a tank-supported infantry advance under cover of a creeping artillery barrage that included both high-explosive shells and smoke shells to suppress enemy resistance. This became the standard way of war enshrined in British doctrine after 1919.
In contrast, innovators touted armored maneuver as an efficient substitute for the difficult and demanding tasks associated with implementing combined-arms principles. Fuller and Liddell Hart proposed a “new model army” in which mechanical vehicles performed all primary land combat functions. “The tank is likely to swallow the infantryman, the field artilleryman, the engineer and signaler,” Liddell Hart wrote, “while mechanical cavalry will supersede the horseman.” Moreover, light tanks, fast cruiser tanks, and heavy tanks could allegedly coordinate better than the current arrangement of inter-arm cooperation. Conversely, hitching tanks to slower elements such as infantry would be “tantamount to yoking a tractor to a draught-horse” and having them “operate together under fire” would be “equally absurd.”
By reducing troop requirements and mechanizing the remainder, a remodeled army could “produce, within the limits of the money available, a military organization of the highest efficiency and with powers of efficient development along the economic line.” With stagnant army budget estimates for the foreseeable future, “new mechanized units” were touted “in place of, not in addition to the old infantry and cavalry units,” or else there would be “no real reduction of cost, nor modern efficiency.” Substitution was not only economical, it would improve the army's combat power. In a great war, a new model division had equivalent fighting value to four or more current divisions and to “almost any number of present-day divisions” if fighting a small war.
 |
| J.F.C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart Revolutionary British Interwar Military Theorists |
The British Army experimented with armored maneuver during two training seasons in 1927 and 1928, which featured the world's first fully mechanized combat brigade—the Experimental Mechanized Force, later renamed the Experimental Armored Force. These experiments should have tempered excessive faith in the promises of armored maneuver, but they did not.
First, the experimental force failed to achieve assigned mission objectives despite being organized according to armored-maneuver principles. Col. George Lindsay, inspector of the Royal Tank Corps, actively lobbied for armor-centric formations to economize personnel and money, as opposed to a prototype all-arms mechanized division. CIGS Milne sided with Lindsay (“Colonel Lindsay is on the right lines and we have now to decide how to translate his ideas into action”) and offered command to Fuller (though he declined). The 1927 and 1928 training seasons culminated in large exercises that pitted the experimental force against a more traditional opponent. In 1927, opposed by an infantry division and a horsed cavalry brigade, the Experimental Mechanized Force failed to take a high-ground location. In 1928, the same infantry division, augmented by a tank company, an armored car company, a cavalry regiment, and an artillery brigade, successfully stalemated a combined force of the Second Cavalry Brigade and the Experimental Armored Force.
Second, given the tight resources, the mechanized formations lacked adequate and appropriate equipment, which limited the reliability of experimental data. Milne recognized that the army wanted “to make certain experiments and we have not had the money to do what we really intended.” The prototype units lacked suitable, reliable, and streamlined vehicles to conduct the desired exercises, and they struggled to field them in adequate numbers.
Third, the exercises were designed to highlight the vulnerabilities of armor. Maj. Gen. Sir John Burnett-Stuart served as the director of the maneuvers. He openly admitted that the armored force's 1928 exercises were “deliberately planned to bring out its limitations rather than to make a display of its powers.”
Criticism of armored maneuver centered on enemy anti-tank countermeasures and unreliable tank mobility. Post-exercise assessments repeatedly emphasized the need for greater supporting fire in any tank attack on enemy defenses because armored maneuver was vulnerable to enemy anti-tank weapons and artillery. Similarly, a general staff memorandum on army training criticized the failure to secure proper fire support to suppress enemy anti-tank fire before assaulting a position, violating the “correct principles” established during World War I. It warned that mechanized forces must not be allowed to “upset all our preconceived notions of war.” Tank mobility was also a perennial issue. Burnett-Stuart cautioned that tanks could not traverse all terrain and that their mobility was still in the developmental stage. The experimental force lost many of its medium tanks from breakdowns even on short trips.
These criticisms were highly plausible. In World War I, British tanks were indeed vulnerable to German countermeasures in the form of field guns, anti-tank rifles, armor-piercing machine gun ammunition, and minefields. In the interwar period, British tanks could not survive a direct hit by the shell of even a small-caliber, high-velocity gun (technology that was already available). Moreover, much like the tanks in World War I, interwar models had trouble traversing difficult terrain and often broke down. When the War Office dispatched an armored “Mobile Force” to Egypt during the Abyssinian crisis, it had the newest light tanks, yet struggled with so many broken tracks that it was nicknamed the “Mobile Farce.”
Instead of altering the radical trajectory of British armor innovation, however, the experiments somehow confirmed the theory of armored maneuver. Instead of conceding that traditional capabilities of infantry cooperation and indirect artillery fire support were necessary, armor innovators argued that tank mobility sufficed as a form of protection. First, exercise umpires allegedly overestimated the effectiveness of anti-tank weapons. The representative white and green flags used to fortify defenses in the exercises were “cheap to provide and easy to wave” but “an effective weapon, complete with tractor and ammunition trailer” was “an expensive item,” such that no “infantry division could be provided enough to form the immense circular screen that would be necessary for its protection.”
Second, European armies in the next great war would allegedly be smaller than in the last one, and therefore would have exposed flanks. Even if anti-tank weapons were lethal, an armored force could use its incredible mobility to maneuver around obstructions, which in turn precluded the need for infantry cooperation to establish bridgeheads and clear localities. A few years later, when crystal sets (a rudimentary form of radio) made possible the tactical control of a mobile force, Liddell Hart declared the dawn of new “anti-anti-tank gun” tactics with which a “few scattered guns” could “easily be overrun by a tank force in its onward surge.”
 |
| Vickers Medium Tanks of the Experimental Mechanized Force |
Finally, critics simply needed greater faith in the principle that “he who applies a novel device by a novel method has oftenest attained revolutionary results in history.” Liddell Hart attributed the mechanized force's defeat in the 1927 training season to the commander's imprudent fear of enemy attack. The problem was not the enemy, but that the mechanized force was too concerned about security; its maneuvers were not bold enough. The 1928 exercises revealed nothing that reasoning—“the cheapest form of experiment”—had not already made self-evident: “that the present composition of the force is fundamentally unsuitable” and the “obvious truth that armored and unarmored vehicles do not coalesce.” The solution, Liddell Hart reiterated, was an all-tank force with streamlined vehicles. Whereas concerns about anti-tank weapons and unreliable mobility arose from the army's own practical experiences in World War I, armored maneuver was based primarily on deductive logic and theoretical leaps into an uncertain future.
Armor innovators quickly succeeded in entrenching their mechanizing agenda. Top army officers endorsed the ideas behind armored maneuver and empowered known armor radicals to design and train mechanized formations. The historian David French observes that “by the end of the 1920s the British had virtually abandoned the attempt to create permanent, all-arms formations incorporating a balance of tanks, infantry, and supporting arms.” Attempts to temper armor radicalism in the 1930s failed; and armored maneuver principles guided how British armor organization and doctrine developed in the lead-up to World War II.
In September 1927, Milne praised the Experimental Mechanized Force because he was “perfectly certain that we are working on absolutely the right lines.” At the outbreak of war, a mobile force designed to operate across hundreds of miles could deliver “a swinging blow to come around the flank” and “carry out big operations and big turning movements.” Normally, this force would remain entirely armored because infantry became a liability in combat. Milne later proposed to the Army Council a future armored brigade with essentially the same blueprint as Liddell Hart's all-tank force. He also tasked Col. Charles Broad, a known supporter of armored maneuver, to compile primers on armored warfare. These envisioned tank brigades achieving decisive victory with numerically inferior forces comprised of light tanks for reconnaissance and medium tanks for striking, but they excluded other arms. When Milne's successor, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, permanently established the First Tank Brigade in 1933, it adhered to an all-tank conception. The director of staff duties observed that it could “safely be said that the general consensus of Army opinion was in agreement,” that the armored brigade was a commander's “most powerful offensive agent.”
The 1934 trials with the First Tank Brigade represented the last serious attempt to temper armor radicalism. Hobart, now inspector of the Royal Tank Corps and commander of the First Tank Brigade, preferred an independent tank brigade concept, in which tanks would carry out deep penetrations with only the smallest attachments to avoid logistics problems and coordinating different arms. But Lindsay pushed for a mobile division concept that incorporated the tank brigade into an all-arms mechanized division. The two agreed to temporarily form a Mobile Force comprised of the First Tank Brigade, Seventh Infantry Brigade, a mechanized field artillery brigade, and other supporting arms—an armored division in all but name. The Mobile Force was defeated by the un-mechanized First Infantry Division, which prepared significant defensive arrangements and used motorized units to block the Mobile Force's retreat with mines and anti-tank guns. Again, a more traditional force defeated the more innovative one. The Royal Tank Corps blamed the Mobile Force's poor performance on Lindsay's command, not on armored maneuver, and, as a result, Hobart's independent tank brigade concept eclipsed Lindsay's mobile division.
Thereafter, the army designed its armored division for armored maneuver carried out by their main striking element—all-tank armored brigades. Tanks and infantry would be organized separately, cooperating only in particular operations and only at the divisional level. As the armored division evolved over the latter half of the 1930s, the already small representation of supporting arms shrank over time. In the final prewar model, the division contained only one infantry battalion, whereas four battalions eventually became standard in World War II. The Royal Tank Corps “dominated” the armored division, “committed to a machine-age vision that tanks by themselves could win battles.
 |
| A13 Cruiser, 5th Royal Tank Regiment, Libyan Border Jan 1941 |
The Desert Campaign
British armored maneuver and German combined-arms maneuver came head-to-head in the Desert War. Three months after Italy invaded Egypt in September 1940, Britain's Western Desert Force launched Operation Compass, a counterattack that resulted in a complete rout of the Italian Tenth Army as it retreated westward toward Tripolitania. In February 1941, the Afrika Korps under Lt. Gen. Erwin Rommel's command arrived in North Africa to make sure that Tripoli was not abandoned without a fight. Over the next two years, the Desert War unfolded across a 1,200-mile stretch of land between Tripoli in the west and Alexandria in the east.
British military performance for the first sixteen months was poor—the army repeatedly failed to achieve mission objectives at acceptable costs—but then noticeably improved at the First Battle of El Alamein, the Battle of Alam el Halfa, and the Second Battle of El Alamein. My theory of harmful innovation expects, and the evidence shows, that British armor innovation helped undermine military effectiveness. When the principles of armored maneuver held sway, British forces were ineffective, but as British commanders gradually unlearned armored maneuver and restored traditional capabilities—specifically those associated with the infantry-artillery team developed on the Western Front—performance improved. . .
British Army ineffectiveness can be traced to the radicalism of its armor innovation: the new capability failed to deliver on its promises, but the army could not rely on its traditional capabilities either. The central principle of armored maneuver was tank primacy—the mistaken idea that tanks would be war-winning weapons if they were unencumbered by the complicated tasks of cooperating with infantry and artillery. But British armored divisions conducting armored maneuver found that their tank numbers fell at an astonishing rate for the very reasons raised by interwar critics. Tanks' mechanical unreliability was a persistent problem throughout the conflict, as it had been in the interwar period. The chief culprit, however, was the German use of anti-tank guns—a plausible countermeasure that armor innovators downplayed by appealing to tank mobility and surprise attacks. . . But German combined-arms maneuver eschewed tank-on-tank engagements and instead emphasized anti-tank guns, as was done in World War I.
Turning Things Around
After the Battle of Gazala, the Axis forces' momentum weakened near a defensive line prepared by the Eighth Army that ran south from El Alamein. It was here that British forces began to show signs of improvement. . . What were the British doing that they had not done before? The evidence suggests that British military effectiveness improved as the army reversed innovation, unlearned armored maneuver, and restored traditional capabilities: an infantry-artillery team supported by tank forces. British commanders first restored traditional capabilities on the defense. The Eighth Army learned to coordinate and concentrate artillery fire to peel apart the all-arms organization of attacking panzer divisions. Infantry learned to defend themselves as they received more anti-tank weapons, and to act as forward infantry observers for artillery fire. And British armor learned to lure the enemy into combined-arms fire delivered by artillery, infantry, and tanks in hull-down position, as opposed to charging forward against attacking panzer formations.
Sources: "Dangerous Changes: When Military Innovation Harms Combat Effectiveness," International Security (2022); History of the Royal Tank Regiment; Research Gate
No comments:
Post a Comment