The Dardanelles expedition had been Churchill’s brainchild. He was ousted from the cabinet and his influence became negative.
Some machines were eventually built and passed tests for serviceability. By this time, Douglas Haig (see Chapter 27), who had lost hundreds of thousands of men to German machine guns on the Somme, was desperate for something to counter the guns he had once scorned. He demanded the armored machine gun destroyers, which were now officially called tanks: to confuse the Germans, they were said to be mobile water tanks for use in the desert.
Colonel Swinton, who had been promoted to command of the Tank Corps, opposed the premature use of tanks. He wrote a memo on the conditions that should be met before tanks were introduced. Terrain, weather, the availability of reserve tanks, repair facilities were among the conditions. The Somme battlefield in September 1916 met none of them. And there were too few tanks.
Haig’s staff appeared to have been delighted with the tanks’ failure. They wrote a scathing report that result in an order cancelling future production of tanks. That might have buried the tank for a generation if it had not been for Major Albert Stern. Stern, an important financier in civilian life, believed in the tank and was a friend of the prime minister. Stern visited his friend, and the cancel order was cancelled.
Haig dealt the tanks another blow when he demanded them for this offensive at the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. Shell fire and rain had turned the area into not only a swamp, but something just short of quicksand. The tanks were defeated by General Mud. Later, at Cambrai, the tanks, following a plan devised by a brilliant staff officer, J.F.C. Fuller, won a solid victory, although one infantry outfit, the 5th Highlanders, was not enthusiastic about tanks and did not follow them closely enough. Unfortunately, that sector was commanded by a General von Walter, an old artilleryman, who brought his field pieces close to the front and trained his gunners to hit moving targets. The Germans knocked out 11 British tanks before the Highland infantry arrived to silence their cannons.
Fortunately for the Allies, the German generals generally could see no value in the tank. The French, though, were enthusiastic. They built more tanks than the British. On August 8, 19l8, 600 French and British tanks attacked the Germans. Ludendorff later called it “the black day of the German Army.” It convinced Ludendorff and the kaiser that the war could not be won. They later changed their minds, but the rest of Germany did not. On November 11, 1918, the war ended. Germany lost.
One reason for that loss was the German contempt for the tank. The new generation of German officers changed that. When Germany rearmed, it concentrated on tanks, close air support, armored personnel carriers for infantry, and self propelled guns. These were grouped into panzer (armored) divisions.
The German generals devised new tactics for them, based, ironically, on the writings of Fuller and a British military commentator, B.H. Liddell Hart. Fuller and Liddell Hart advocated “torrents” of tanks, which would bypass strong points, sweep into rear areas and disrupt supplies, communications and the whole command structure. Using these tactics and with the aid of its then-ally, the Soviet Union, Germany conquered Poland in about two months.
After a lightning campaign (“Blitzkrieg”) in Denmark and Norway, the Germans turned on France, a nation reputed to have the best army in the world.
France had been joined by Britain, its ally in the last war. The allies had more tanks than the Germans, and some of them were bigger and had heavier armor, but they kept them scattered among all their troops. The concept was that tanks were “mobile pillboxes.” The German panzer divisions lanced through the allied armies on May 10, 1940. France surrendered on June 21st. Before that, the British evacuated their expeditionary force, which left most of its equipment on the beach.
The German Blitzkriegs were wars of movement, as far removed from the stalemate of the Western Front as could be imagined. The Blitzkrieg had to be modified, however. New weapons, the anti-tank land mine, infantry rocket launchers like the U.S. “bazooka,” recoilless guns and fighter-bombers armed with rockets all ended the comparatively carefree life of the tankers. But tanks permanently changed warfare and are still a most important part of any army.
Chapter 37
Air Power on the Sea: The Aircraft Carrier
Before the First World War, relations between Britain and Germany became strained when the two countries engaged in an arms race. The Germans felt that a great power had to have a great navy as well as overseas colonies. The British felt that survival on their islands required that they have a navy superior to any other in the world. So each began building more and better battleships.
Battleships, floating steel fortresses carrying guns far more powerful than any that could be used by a field army, were symbols of military might. They were called “capital ships.”
The arms race ended with World War I. At the end of the war, the mighty German High Seas Fleet — which spent most of the war in the Baltic and never reached a higher sea than the North Sea — was no more. Britain had more battleships than any other country, but many of her “battle wagons” were old, slow and had only 12-inch guns. A new threat to British sea supremacy was shaping up far from Europe. Two Pacific powers, the United States and Japan, decided to build new battleships. Unlike Germany in the previous naval arms race, neither country was thinking about Britain. The Japanese worried about the Americans, and the Americans about the Japanese.
In 1915, Japan announced a program to build 16 battleships and battle cruisers. The battle cruiser was a ship, pioneered by the British and the Germans, that looked like a battleship but had thinner armor. It was faster than a battleship but carried the same heavy armament. The U.S. Congress passed a law authorizing creation of a navy “second to none.” The United States began building 10 new battleships which, like those of the new Japanese ships, would carry 16-inch guns. In response, the British began building four enormous — 48,000-ton — battle cruisers and started designing battleships with 18-inch guns. A new, three-runner naval arms race was beginning.
At this point, the United States took advantage of two facts. First, Britain was broke and exhausted by the late war and could not hope to out-build the American shipyards. Second, Japan just didn’t have the industrial capacity to compete in an all-out arms race. The United States called on the other countries to join in a naval arms limitation treaty. The treaty, the Washington Treaty of 1921, imposed a moratorium on capital ship building and set limits for the world’s major naval powers. Britain and the United States were allowed to have the largest navies, Japan, the next largest, and France and Italy somewhat smaller fleets. France and Italy, like Britain, had been impoverished by the war and were happy to have an excuse for not spending a lot of money on battleships.
Japan, which had been one of the Allies, but which was untouched by the war, was less happy. The Japanese saw the terms, which let them have less than the Americans or British, as evidence of Anglo-American racial prejudice. They were right. But they couldn’t hope to compete with the Americans in an arms race. So they accepted the treaty, and the long-simmering Japanese-American rivalry grew hotter.
When the treaty was signed, the United States was building two battle cruisers, which would be the first such ships in the American navy. Both battleships and battle cruisers were considered capital ships. To keep from exceeding its capital ship quota, the United States altered the construction of two battle cruisers to make them into a new type of ship — aircraft carriers. The projected battle cruisers would make excellent aircraft carriers because they were so big and so fast. Size was important, because the larger the ship, the more space planes would have to take off and land. There was no way a ship could be built that was as big as the average air field, so all navy planes but the big patrol bombers had to be constructed to have a maximum of lift. That was also why speed was important. During take-offs, the carrier headed into the wind and proceeded at full speed to enhance the plane’s own take-off speed. The two former battle cruisers became the U.S.S. Lexington and the U.S.S. Saratoga, which for many years were the world’s biggest, fastest, and most powerful aircraft carriers.