British Tank Development.

As a novice...what is the party line exactly?

 

Good commanders let down by bad guns.

All the best

Andreas

 

Yes this is my position pretty much. I think the RAC and the British Army in general were on the whole very good in the second half of the war, almost a different organisation to what they were in the first half. But it wasn't just the RAC that improved, it was the support services that armour required that were also transformed. You only have to look at the threadbare RAOC organisation in France 1940 and compare it to the REME in NWE in 1944 with its multiple echelon workshops, ARG, tank delivery squadrons, signals network etc.

So I thnk that the RAC/Army in the first half of the war were (much) worse than is generally perceived, and in the second half were substantially better than they are given credit for.

 

Ironically though the T-34 performed relatively poorly in its first couple of years of battle precisely because the Red Army's tactics were not up to taking on the Wehrmacht. Or the Finns.

The idea that if you create ideal weapon "X" then you automatically start winning does not play out in the real world.

 

I personally don't think that the tanks the British had up to mid-1942 (i.e. pre-Sherman) were worse than what the Germans had. There were certainly flaws in the likes of the Crusader and Matilda, but the Panzer III was not as good as its reputation suggests. For example, one month into Operation Barbarossa, almost the entire German tank force was mechanically clapped out on the Dnieper and unable to move for the next couple of months. German tanks simply did not have the durability for high mileage operations.

But otherwise I take your point.

 

I would say the reality was closer to "bad commanders led by bad doctrine let down by bad guns". I think Don Juan might disagree with me about the last point. I think the tank fanatics like Fuller and Hobart did a real job on British thinking about how to use tanks, i.e. they advocated tanks going into action separately from other units and in North Africa you do see that with the support infantry/artillery holding down a position or operating elsewhere. So how exactly were the tanks supposed to deal with German anti-tank guns? In any sane organization the artillery would be there behind the tanks ready to support them, and would bombard the anti-tank guns. That's not possible if the artillery have been sent off somewhere else.

But I don't remember whether pre-war tank doctrine actually indicated that the artillery would be on call to deal with that sort of problem or if the army just didn't think about it.

 

The issue about "bad guns" is that the British reckoned that the guns on German tanks were much more powerful than the 2 pounder, when in reality the penetrative performance of the 5cm KwK 38 L/42 and the 2 pounder were almost exactly the same. What was really happening was that the Germans had evolved an extremely devious ambush technique that fooled the British into believing they were being outgunned by German tanks ahead of them, when in fact they were being hit by anti-tank guns from the flank. You can see how this technique worked in point 4 ("Method of Fighting if Attacked on the Move") here:

Lone Sentry: Armored Force Tactics in the Middle East, German (WWII U.S. Intelligence Bulletin, February 1943)

The British fell for this tactic time and time again, and when they finally found out about it and realised what had been going on, they kept quiet and didn't admit it to the wider world because it was so embarrassing. However, they did radically change their tactics and the organisation of their armoured regiments. They then explained the drastic improvement in their performance by giving almost all the credit to the supposedly transformative power of the Sherman. Because this part of the story was so well hidden it is easy for historians to go awry when evaluating the relative quality of British and German tanks - the RAC actively wanted to build up a myth around tank quality to hide the fact that the Germans had been making fools of them.

 

Well, I HAVE been drinking [Foster's and Jaegermeister] and I agree.

 

This thread interests me, if only because it is dominated by people who are better informed about the subject than I am (not hard).

Until I read John Buckley's admirable book about British armor in Normandy I too had largely assumed that the problems with British armor (and American) were mainly technical. My researches for my own book were also something of an eye-opener. I will get Taylor's book from my library (promise) but I do have a couple of Kenneth Macksey's books here and he is one of the authors I grew up on. He does get into the tactical and doctrinal aspect, but he tends to lay most of the the blame for the early defeats on technical deficiencies. But as to my own researches...well, I don't think you can blame it all just on the RAC/RTC. Yes, that corps certainly suffered from the parochialism and doctrinaire attitude of a sometimes persecuted minority. But the RAC was just one corps in a large army. I looked mostly at the infantry and artillery of 50th Div and it quickly became apparent to me that the combat arms of the British Army barely talked to one another between the wars, much less trained together according to a common doctrine. Training above unit level was uncommon and training with other arms rarer still. As of 1918 the British Army was one of the most advanced in the world, with a battle fighting technique which incorporated all arms. But the whole army went radically backwards between the wars and underwent a process of systemic forgetting. All sorts of techniques which had been brought to near perfection by 1918 had to be re-learned in WWII.

 

That's why I spent quite a bit of time and effort on evaluating the comparative technical aspects of the M3 Stuart and the Panzer III in my Scientia Militaria article.

They did however understand this from mid-December 1941 onwards, but were presumably too hide-bound to come up with the right conclusions.

There's a PhD in going through the enemy tactics notes and how they did or did not enter the training pamphlets.

All the best

Andreas

 

Yes, the bad doctrine comes in as well, but particularly in the Middle East the commanders had a lot of leeway to amend it as they saw fit.

All the best

Andreas

 

As shown by Hobart's work with what would become the 7th Armoured Division, but which was stymied by those over him.

 

One of the arguments that is often made regarding the early desert war is that the British had a plethora of tank types with the Crusader, Stuart, Valentine and Matilda, whereas the Germans had sensibly concentrated on a standard main tank in the Panzer III. However, I recently watched an Edward Luttwak video where he suggests that standardisation can also be a disadvantage as it doesn't give you any redundancy i.e. if your one standard weapon is inadequate then you are stuffed. The Germans could really have done with a fuel-efficient high mileage tank like the Valentine, which would have been able to go on at least twice as far as the Panzer III. A problem with the British is that they didn't really take advantage of their tank reduncancy - they didn't ask themselves what was the best way to use their various tanks to take advantage of their strengths and minimise their weaknesses.

 

A senior officer once told me that implementing a c oncept needed the right technology, procedures and training. Applying the internal combustion engine to land warfare needed all three at all organisational levels. It was not enough to have a good tank or even battlion of tanks, the army needed to work out how to make a brigade division corps and army make use of tanks.

The tank enthusiasts saw tanks as a way to avoid the mass slaughter of the Great War battle's of attrition. In a rather British way the enthusiasts made the assumption that the rules of war had fundamentally changed, and we had the idea of every sioldier in a tank. The Germans, perhaps following Dead Karl's comment that the nature of war is eternal, though the characteristics change, seem to have just added armour to their existing tactics.

Much RAC doctrine largely ignored the other arms. As late as 1942 the training film on the tank Regiment showed co-operation with the RAF but not with the infantry artillery or engineers.

 

Good stuff.

It'll be interesting to see if he manages to intuit that the 'crisis' fitted in very nicely with Churchill/Alanbrooke's unwillingness to commit to the invasion of Europe until 1944 at the earliest. Which is why there was no hurry in sourcing the American machine tools for ramping up Meteor production. If he's really clever, he will have figured out that the Ministry of Supply was covertly being run by Sir James Grigg rather than by Andrew Duncan.

 

If we are talking about Dick Taylor's book, I have just purchased a copy, along with the most recently published volume, Armoured warfare in the British Army, 1914-1939 (ISBN: 9781399001182), I am extremely pleased to read that it does not appear to be a regurgitation of apologia.

 

Coming late to this... I have the view that British armoured policy suffered from a familiar set of issues (c.f. British military history before and since) - rigid/unimaginative regular army misapplication of (originally, maybe,) good tactics, equipment and doctrine, political/supply situation skewed by out of touch advisers fighting the last conflict, plus lack of concentration on support services.
The legacy of pre-war imagination was some good kit - e.g. 2pdr & 25pdr - however focus on flexible use, quick repair, coordination, and such didn't survive regular army bull. Faced with problems they lacked everything needed to adapt and move forward. This inevitably leads to heroic last stand actions against the odds. My (ridiculous) analogy is - The A team, however they are a group of accountants and H&S advisers who forgot to bring the van and ran past the workshop to hole up in the office. About the RAC- it reflects the Army in general - like previous conflicts, it took the fresh view and straight talking of civilians in uniform (TA and new recruits) to bring fresh analysis, imagination and application -e.g. the Yeomanry and new RTC Bns. The archives show this well - the hand that fills in the War Diary/Standing Orders/after action reports loses the formality for efficiency and gains a positive voice with time and experience.

 

'Much RAC doctrine largely ignored the other arms. As late as 1942 the training film on the tank Regiment showed co-operation with the RAF but not with the infantry artillery or engineers'.- Sheldrake above.
18th Infantry Division spent April to the end of October training for the desert, even though they did not finally go there. They had tropical kit in store the whole time and some units were even painting desert camo on some equipment before they left. In that whole time one brigade only spent about five days working with tanks up on the Yorkshire/ Lancs border. Most of the time the Churchills had broken down. The lessons of May 1940 had not been absorbed. No division in training in Western Command up to June 1942 saw an aircraft working with them, bar two days when a Lysander dropped flour bombs.