It was just a short step from the Livens projector to the next British design, the Stokes or Newton-Stokes trench mortar. Versions of the Stokes mortar were adopted by every country in the world soon after its introduction because it was light, accurate, and versatile. And above all, it was cheap and easy to make in great quantities.
The new trench mortar was a smoothbore steel tube that rested on a separate steel base plate. The barrel was propped up on two legs, making the whole weapon a kind of tripod. On top of the legs was an elevating gear, making possible fine adjustments. Although it was a smoothbore, the mortar’s projectiles flew point-first and accurately, because they were stabilized by fins on their tails. The firing mechanism was simply a fixed firing pin at the bottom of the tube. To fire the mortar, the gunner merely dropped a shell down the muzzle and snatched his hand out of the way immediately. The shell slid down the barrel, and a powder charge, contained in what looked like a shotgun shell, struck the firing pin. The pin ignited the percussion cap on the end of the “shotgun shell” and the mortar round went sailing off to the enemy. Later, it became possible to vary the power of the propelling charge by adding increments in the form of rings of smokeless powder to the tail of the mortar shell. That gave the gunners two ways to vary the range — changing the elevation or adding increments to the propelling charge.
The trench mortar gave the infantry a weapon that could be carried by one or two men and was capable of firing a shell of significant size at the enemy.
The French in World War I also used a small, 37 mm cannon on a tripod, but that was a flat trajectory weapon mostly useful for countering machine gun nests, and its shell was far smaller than the trench mortar’s. Trench mortars come in a variety of sizes. The British in World War II used a 50-mm (2-inch) mortar that one man could carry and operate. The Japanese had a similar gun with a curved base plate. Some GIs called it a “knee mortar,” supposing that the curved base plate fit over the gunner’s extended leg. One or two American soldiers tried to fire it that way and ended up with broken legs. U.S. trench mortars in World War II were in calibers 60 mm, 81 mm, and 4.2 inches (106.6 mm). The 4.2 inch mortar was not limited to short ranges. It could send a shell 6,000 yards, or about 3 1/2 miles. It took the shell about a minute to go that far.
Using the 4.2 mortar, a good crew could put half a dozen shells in the air before the first one landed. The Warsaw Pact countries and some other nations used a 120 mm mortar. The Chinese and North Korean version was a superb weapon, as any veteran of the Korean War will affirm. NATO has since adopted a 120 mm mortar. Some modern mortars are rifled, a system that increases range and accuracy at the expense of simplicity and speed of fire.
The introduction of the trench mortar made it possible to lay unprecedentedly heavy fire on enemy positions. In World War I, the trench mortar was used extensively by German “storm troops” during Ludendorff’s 1918 offensive. In World War II, mortars were everywhere. And the trench mortar’s simplicity has made homemade mortars popular with guerrillas all over the world.
Chapter 36
Traveling Forts: Armored Vehicles
German infantrymen were ready for another assault by the English. The English had been attacking almost continually for the last two and a half months.
When they weren’t sending swarms of men at the German line, their artillery was pounding the trenches. Not a tree was standing. Not even a blade of grass.
Their guns had churned the fields of Flanders into a muddy morass. It looked like something Breughel might have dreamed up if he were painting a landscape of Hell. Then the Germans saw some things that looked as if they might have come from Hell. They were metal rhomboids with caterpillar tracks running all around them. They had no windows that anyone could see, but from a projection on each side, each of these monsters had machine guns or light cannons.
They fired as they waddled and wobbled across the mud, rolled right over shell craters and trenches. After a few moments of shock, the German landsers recovered their wits and fired at the strange machines. Their bullets bounced off.
This day, September 13, 1916, would forever change the way war was waged.
The tank had appeared.
It almost hadn’t. And this premature appearance did nothing to enhance its chances for a future role in war. The tanks did drive back the Germans, who knew of no way to deal with them. But one by one, the machines broke down for a variety of reasons, and the British had no vehicles that could tow them back, few mechanics who could repair them, and fewer spare parts with which to repair them.
The tank was the most promising British effort to break the unholy dead-lock that the Western Front had become. With their artillery, the Allies and Germans had been pounding each other to pieces. Infantry trying to break through the enemy trench lines had been hung up on barbed wire and mowed down by machine guns. Between attacking and repulsing attacks, the men in the trenches had to cope with such delights as poison gas and midnight raids. Worst of all, there seemed to be no way to end this horrible war. The tank was designed to mash down barbed wire, crush machine gun nests, straddle trenches, and cut down their defenders. If it could do those things, it could end the war.
In prewar days, when nobody thought pastures could be turned into cratered swamps and that the whole of Europe between the Alps and the North Sea could be divided by intricate trench lines, the more radical military thinkers advocated armored cars. (Most of the rest thought horses were still the essence of military mobility.) The Western Front, it turned out, became just about the worst possible terrain for anything with wheels. In some spots, horses sank into the mud up to their shoulders. It wasn’t too good for them, either. Armored cars did turn in sterling performances in the deserts of Palestine and Mesopotamia, but not in France or Belgium.
Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Swinton was an official British combat historian (an “eye witness,” was the Royal Army classification). In 1914, he saw tractors using an American invention, the caterpillar track, pulling artillery. The caterpillar tractors were not handicapped by the rough and muddy ground. Swinton proposed armored vehicles using caterpillar tracks to British headquarters in France. The generals there had the same reaction as King Archidamus of Sparta (see Chapter 9), although they didn’t express their feelings so honestly. They fervently believed that battles were decided by human valor. Use of machines was unworthy, underhanded, and dastardly. They rejected Swinton’s proposal.
Swinton sent a copy of his paper to a friend, Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Hankey, who was secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defense. At that time, all matters concerning military motor vehicles were handled by the navy, so the proposal ended up with the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill.
Churchill was impressed and got the support of the prime minister. By this time, Swinton, still in France, had managed to get some interest from the GHQ in France for his “armored machine gun destroyer.” There was more bureau-cratic battling, especially after the resounding failure of the landing at Gallipoli.