British Tank Development.

This is discussed in quite a bit of detail in Brian Bond's British Military Policy between the Two World Wars (Clarendon Press, ISBN: 019822464)

Having a quick read, leads me to think, that any issues of mechanisation for the Indian Government were based more upon budgetary constraints than the lack of desire to modernise. Archibald Rowlands, financial adviser to the Defence Department in India, said when returning to India in 1938:

(Bond, p. 116)

The British Government was, obviously, reluctant to 'put up the money', especially when one considers the reluctance to 'put up the money' for the mechanisation of the British Cavalry regiments during the same period.

 

With regards to the RAF and India, I think it was probably easy to see the potential for the "air policing" that the RAF tried to do, in the hilly areas of India. Those same areas made armored units less useful although I know they made use of tankettes (light tanks) there.

 

Bond details the RAF was also a more economical force compared with armour, cavalry and infantry.

 

The Army Records Society volume that covers Rawlinson's time in India after WW1 includes some letters on experiments conducted there with tanks - I'm guessing they were probably Mediums - my books are all packed up at the moment but once I can get to it I'll post up.

Regards

Tom

 

I appreciate that, no problem, and seconded!

Could I ask instead for a recommend for a book that describes the process by which the pre-war British tanks were procured - generation of staff requirements by War Office, response from suppliers (design, cost and time scales?) and then how decisions were made to go with company A's design of light tank, company B's design of cruiser and company C's design of infantry tank? Is there a book out there which does that? Or even a series of book which together gives a picture of the process which the War Office must have gone through looking at the tasks it was being set by the government of the time?

I'm thinking the political veer away from a Field Force between 1937-39 complicated issues but it would be interesting to read how much. Incidentally, I just noted this section in David Reynold's 'The Long Shadow' about Basil Liddell Hart's pre-war thinking about the strength of the defensive and that made me wonder on his influence on the politicians of the period:

p. 250
For British diplomats, therefore, the second German war was seen in 1939-40 as a continuation of or, more exactly, an improvement on the first – learning from the errors of the interwar years. British strategy was also shaped by Great War precedents, envisaging another long conflict in which Britain’s superior wealth, seapower and global resources would eventually wear Germany down. It was assumed that the Germans would stake all on an early knockout blow, by air on London and by land on the Western Front. But the general expectation was that in this war, as in 1914-18, defensive firepower would dominate the battlefield itself – a conviction held even by former exponents of tank warfare. The military pundit Basil Liddell Hart penned a series of articles for The Times in October 1937 entitled ‘Defence or Attack?’ which came down firmly on the side of the defensive. Privately he noted, ‘There is no sign of any development in [p.251] military technique so potent as to promise an attacking army a reasonable prospect of breaking through the front of a defending army of more or less equal strength.’ Liddell Hart judged that ‘the only serious chance of French resistance collapsing completely is as a sequel to a rash offensive on their part, and the crippling of their forces in it, as happened in 1914.’ Similarly Winston Churchill, although extolling the ‘glorious’ contribution made by tanks in the victory of 1918, expressed doubt twenty years later that they would ‘play as decisive a part in the next war …Nowadays, the anti-tank rifle and the anti-tank gun have made such great strides that the poor tank cannot carry a thick enough skin to stand up to them.’ And although renowned for apocalyptic warnings about strategic bombing, Churchill was complacent about tactical airpower. ‘So far as fighting troops are concerned,’ he wrote in January 1939 citing the Spanish Civil War, ‘it would seem that aircraft are an additional complication rather than a decisive weapon.’ [Note 7: J.P. Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903-1939 (Manchester, 1995), pp.291-2; Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill (4 vols. London, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 394-5, 424-5.]

Not everyone in Whitehall was so confident but nobody predicted the astonishing debacle of May and June 1940. […]

[p.253]
[…]
Afterwards Allied analysts such as Liddell Hart, trying to cover their embarrassment, explained the German victory as the result of a brilliant and coherent strategy of ‘Blitzkrieg warfare’ for which the [p.254] Nazi economy had been designed. This was a fiction, but a convenient one since it distracted from the military incompetence of France and Britain.

Has anyone seen that series of Basil LH articles?

Regards

Tom

 

This book is pretty essential I think.

If you want very deep detail into how one particular early war tank was specified and developed, then go for this one.

 

It should be the first book anybody genuinely interested in British tank development has in their collection. Early war British tanks did not descend from outer space on an Army that allegedly deserved better ones. They were deliberately designed to service that Army's rather eccentric ideas.

 

Thanks. I’ve got the Harris book which I clearly need to re-read. I’ll definitely pick up the ‘Cruiser’ book as that sounds like it provides a detailed description of how the military thought was translated into big chunks of metal! I’ve read Jeremy Black on the linkage between technology, doctrine and military procurement and it will be interesting to see how those elements combined in British tank development in the 1930’s.

Regards

Tom

 

So...the Army/RAC wanted things like the A9 and Matilda I and actually thought they were good? "Oh, just what we need, thank you."

 

What they actually wanted - a 28 ton, eight man tank with multiple machine gun turrets, an AA position on the rear engine deck, and intercommunication via primitve television screens, would have been worse than the A9 and Matilda (both of which actually performed fairly well in action).

 

If anyone thinks that if the British Army had been given all the money and resources they wanted, that they would have produced anything like the T-34 or KV-1.....er....no they wouldn't.

 

Was that laid out in a "staff requirement" from the War Office? Did they actually say they wanted a 28 ton tank? Or did they say they wanted a tank with a certain level of armour, armament and speed? Was the 28 ton thing a limitation set by military bridging, railway movement, road classification, shipping capacity?

Did they say what units would use such a tank? For the putative armoured division? For infantry support? For Europe or the Empire?

Regards

Tom

 

This was the RTC "ideal" tank requirement from May 1936 which was eventually whittled down to become the Crusader via a dogged campaign of passive aggression on the part of the Director of Mechanization, Alexander Davidson. The details are all in the A13 Cruiser Technical History book I mentioned above.

As you will find out, tank development was not some kind of clear, top-down process, but a series of factional battles in which various actors (and their tanks) were progressively sidelined.

 

I get a strong sense of wanting to fight the last war again.

 

Thanks, I'm definitely going to order the A13 book.

Regards

Tom

 

The only beef I have with the A13 book is that it doesn't cover North Africa.

Book Review: A15 Cruiser Mk. VI Crusader Tank – A Technical History

All the best

Andreas

 

My own sense is that there were lots of people with strong characters and strong ideas of what tanks should be like, but these ideas were not concordant, so that tank development became a kind of anarchic survival of the fittest, which is why there were so many prototype tanks around at the same time (basically A7 to A20 plus the Valentine). This is also why there was so much covert and overt hatred between the various protagonists. Of all the important players, who I would say were Hugh Elles, Alexander Davidson, 'Q' Martel, E.M.C. Clarke, George MacLeod Ross, John Scott Crawford and Percy Hobart, it was Alexander Davidson who ultimately shaped the tanks that went to war, despite the fact that he outwardly appeared to be the most inert and indecisive, and was viciously lampooned by all and sundry.

Unfortunately Davidson does not appear to have left any papers so we don't know if he was playing cunning 4D chess or whether he succeeded simply by his sheer passive impeturbibility.