II
The question of the place of Tanks in the next war has been answered with the greatest emphasis by some enthusiastic advocates of this arm.
The possession of a superior weapon, they say, ensures victory to the army which possesses it. In war, any army, even if led by a mediocre General, can safely meet an army of the previous century, though the old force be led by the greatest military genius of his age.
[108]“Napoleon was an infinitely greater general than Lord Raglan, yet Lord Raglan would, in 1855, have beaten any army Napoleon could have brought against him, because Lord Raglan’s men were armed with the Minie rifle.
“Eleven years after Inkerman Moltke would have beaten Lord Raglan’s army hollow, not because he was a greater soldier than Lord Raglan, but because his men were armed with the needle gun.
“Had Napoleon, at Waterloo, possessed a company of Vickers machine-guns, he would have beaten Wellington, Blücher, and Schwartzenburg combined, as completely as Lord Kitchener beat the Soudanese at Omdurman. It would have been another ‘massacre of the innocents.’”
In every case, they say, the superior weapon would have defeated the great tactician before he had had time to show his mettle. To repeat the words of the German journalist: “Their infantry would be opposed to an enemy to whom it could do little or no harm.”
We shall not discuss here the materialistic argument, except to say that if it were entirely true, savages and badly-equipped Tribesmen would never have completely beaten well-armed civilised troops. Yet they have done so on frequent occasions. Witness the First Afghan War, the Zulu Wars, the American-Indian Wars, and a host of minor actions. Material only wins hands down when the moral of the side possessing it is at least fairly comparable to that of its opponents. Otherwise Byzantium with its “Greek Fire” would have ruled the world.
According to this “material” school of thought, we have in Tanks our superior weapon. They will be developed upon more than one line, and we shall have cross-country equivalents for all arms and services except heavy artillery, the Navy and the Air Force.
Mr. Hugh Pollard, writing in the English Review of January 1919 states the case of the mechanical warfare and Tank enthusiasts, with great vigour and ingenuity.
“Even at present there is no effective answer to Tanks but possibly other Tanks, and in the Tank we have rediscovered a modern application of a very old principle. The Tank is the most economical method of using man-power in war, and it also affords the highest possible percentage of invulnerability to the soldiers engaged.
“The armament problems of the future will be limited to three fleets of armoured machines, in which a very limited highly specialised number of men operate the largest possible number of weapons in the most effective way. Armoured fleets at sea, armoured aeroplanes, and armoured landships, or Tanks—these will be our forces for war.”
Tanks of various speeds and carrying various weapons, will replace both infantry and cavalry, for one full size modern heavy Tank holding eight men has the aggressive power of a hundred infantry with rifles, bayonets, bombs and Lewis guns. The Whippet has about the same speed and radius as cavalry, and one Whippet holding two men “could withstand the onslaught of a cavalry regiment and kill it off to the last man and the last horse without being exposed to the least danger or inconvenience.” We shall soon regard the heroic tale of how men once exposed their defenceless bodies to machine-gun fire and shells, and depended for the élan of their assault upon the weight of human limbs and the endurance of human muscles as almost legendary.
“Most people think of a Tank as a rather ludicrous but effective engine of war. They look upon it as a mechanical novelty, and are content to assume that the Tank of to-day is not much of an improvement upon the earliest Tanks of the Somme battle, and that it is a war implement of indifferent importance. The real facts are entirely different, for the Tank of to-day is simply an infant, a lusty two-year-old, and there is no mechanical limit to its future. This may seem the remark of a fanatic, but it is perfectly true....
“The Tank of to-day is a little thing compared with the obvious developments which will result in the Tank of the future, but even as it stands to-day it is the most economical fighting machine yet devised. A Tank uses petrol instead of muscle, and it extracts the highest possible fighting or killing value out of the men inside it; they can give their blows without being exposed to injury in return, and, above all things, they can fight while moving—a thing outside the powers of the infantry or guns of the land forces.”
The arguments of those who maintain that the Tank must always be dependent upon the older arms are nearly all based upon the assumption that the Tank is already limited. “It is pointed out that they cannot cross rivers, that they are not proof against shell-fire, against mines, against special forms of attack. The answer is that the Tank of to-day may be subject to casualties, but all the skill and resources of the German nation have failed to produce an effective answer to Tanks, that river after river has been crossed, that line after line of ‘impregnable’ defences have fallen, that deeply écheloned artillery particularly arranged to fight Tanks has failed before Tank and aeroplane attack. We come to a war of sea, air, and land fleets acting in co-operation. Anti-Tank artillery is vulnerable to armoured planes. The big commercial freight-carrying planes of the future might even fly light Tanks into the heart of hostile territory. The unprotected men and arms of the present day must disappear.”
And here another question is suggested—a question upon which the civilian ought to satisfy himself. Let us for the moment assume that it is superiority in weapons, not better generalship, not a more stubborn “will to win,” that decides the fate of war.
What reason have we to suppose that it will be superiority in Tanks and not in some other weapon, in aeroplanes for example, that will decide the next conflict?
At present, when we try to imagine war upon a foreign army waged on one side by air alone, we encounter a dozen mechanical difficulties even in our attempted picture of the first stages: the enormous paraphernalia of bases, the ground-staff, fuel, weather conditions, difficulties of landing, and finally, what is perhaps the fundamental difficulty.
The aeroplane alone, like the big gun, is not an engine by whose means it is possible to come into decisive contact with an enemy who chooses to remain on the ground. The rabbits can always go to earth when they see the gliding shadow of the hawk.
Till both sides are equipped solely for air combat, Tanks or infantry will still be needed to play the part of ferret.
But these difficulties will almost certainly some day be overcome.
When they have been solved, then the day of the comparatively cumbersome Tank, with its dependence upon shipping and rail transport will be over. But that will not be in our time we are assured. To us, therefore, “War in the Air” remains of a somewhat academic interest. We have got to see to it that we survive the present.
For can the most optimistic of us truthfully declare, as he casts his eye over the world, as he looks from Middle Europe to the Far East, from Russia to Mexico, from the Balkans to Egypt, or from Asia Minor to the confines of India, that we need not even consider the possibility of a war within his own generation? Alas, no!
Now having for the moment dismissed the purely air war from our calculations, we can be pretty certain that a war between civilised countries fought within that period would not differ utterly from the war which is just over, and that a war between a civilised and an uncivilised country would differ from it only along well-known lines.
We have heard a good deal of evidence which makes it appear certain that, every other factor having cancelled out, the fact that the French and British possessed Tanks and the Germans did not, was just enough to win the last war for the Allies. Let us then sedulously cultivate the grub of the present that we may survive to see the more glorious butterfly of the future—perhaps the aerial Tank. Shall we neglect the Tank because it seems likely that in this (as please Heaven in most other affairs) our sons will go one better?
The British and French led, and in 1919 still lead, absolutely with Tanks.
If we like to carry on, we have such a start both in design and manufacturing experience, that we could easily make it impossible for any other nation to draw abreast of us during the period after which we are assuming the “Tank Age” in military evolution may conceivably be over.
It is, of course, impossible to be too discreet as to the new machines which have already been made and tested, or as to the new projects which exist.
Perhaps the position can be best indicated by saying that progress has been so rapid of late that those who know, would probably be delighted to sell any number of Mark V. Tanks to a prospective enemy.