THE ARMY WEAPON
Finally, what is the future of this alternative “punch” to the air attack? No future, assuredly, unless the army limb of the body military is thoroughly overhauled and inoculated with the serum of mobility, for the present type of army is suffering from chronic rheumatoid arthritis, its joints far too stiff to deliver an effective punch. The outstanding lesson of the Great War was the powerlessness of the high commands to attain decisive successes—a condition due to three main factors. First, the unwieldy masses put into the field allowed neither opportunity nor room for manœuvre; second, these slow-moving infantry masses were too vulnerable a target to modern fire-weapons; third, their numbers imposed so great a strain on the means of supply that offensive after offensive was stultified by the breakdown of communications—the commanders of the Great War were as unhappily placed as the proverbial puppy with a tin can attached to its tail.
The years 1914–18 show the “Nation in Arms” theory carried to its climax; numbers of troops and quantity of material had been the ruling ideas of the General Staffs of Europe for half a century. What was the upshot? That generalship became the slave of the monster it had created. The artist of war yielded place to the artisan, because we forgot the text preached by Marshal Saxe two centuries before, that “multitudes serve only to perplex and embarrass.” Watching it from across the Styx, Marshal Saxe can be imagined as uttering that favourite quotation of his: “War is a trade for the ignorant, a science for men of genius.”
What are the obvious deductions from the three factors we have mentioned?
The rear communications of existing armies are based on railways, the advanced communications on roads, both of which have proved inadequate to stand even the internal strain of modern warfare. In the last war they suffered little external interference from enemy aircraft, but in the future this is a certainty. Both these means of communication depend on fixed tracks, which cannot be varied save after a long period of labour and preparation; since they are shown on the map they are easily located and can be kept under observation from the air. If railways, because of their visibility and limited number of routes, are in themselves the more vulnerable, no more helpless target exists than long columns of slow-moving infantry on the march. A vivid picture of the chaos caused by air attack is to be found in Major-General Gathorne-Hardy’s account of the ghastly fate of the Austrian columns and transport after Vittorio Veneto in October, 1918. If they are not bombed out of existence, air-attack will at least force them to disperse and take cover so frequently as to slow up their rate of advance to a snail’s pace, while days of bombing by hostile aircraft will hardly be a tonic for their moral.
Thus the nation which continues to base its military communications on railways and roads is running for a fall. What is the alternative? The opposite method to tracked movement is trackless—by means of caterpillar track or multi-wheeled vehicles capable of quitting the roads at will on the approach of hostile aircraft, and of advancing on a wide front, instead of through a bottleneck.
If infantry, because of certain limitations on tank-action, may still survive for a time as a battle-instrument, it is the merest common sense that they should be transported to the battlefield, their 3–5 m.p.h. legs replaced by 15–25 m.p.h. mechanical tracks—not only because they may thus be kept fresh for their fighting rôle, but because otherwise they will never reach the battlefield at all.
The advent of aircraft has had another important consequence. Just as in the wider sphere, their power to hop over a hostile army enables them to strike direct at the political and industrial centres of the nation, so in the zone of the armies has it laid bare the life-line of the hostile army itself—its communications.
The obvious antidote to this new development is to make the communications fluid instead of rigid, and by putting the supply and transport of armies on a trackless basis, we not only revive their “punch” by endowing them with mobility, but extract much of the sting from the military form of the air attack.
Turning to the second factor, that of vulnerability in battle, here again a new weapon has revolutionized the methods of warfare by providing soldiers with a machine-made skin to offset the deadliness of modern fire. Not that armour is a new invention, but until the advent of the tank provided him with mechanical legs, man’s muscle-power was insufficient to move him when enclosed in an armoured shell. Navies changed long ago from muscle-power to machine-power, alike for hitting, protection, and movement. Armies had to lag behind until the invention of the motor because they could not ask the already over-burdened foot-soldier to carry armour—if he had been given it he could not have moved it. Now, however, that a means has been invented, is it not irrational to stand out against the lessons of national progress, to refuse to free the soldier’s mind and spirit—his real military assets—from the fetters imposed by his bodily limitations?
Military conservatives are prone to talk of “Men v. Machines,” as if they were conflicting ideals, whereas in reality neither opposition nor comparison is possible. We should not fall into the absurdity of comparing man with a locomotive or a sculptor with his tools, and mechanical weapons are but the instruments of man’s brain and spirit. The reactionary who opposes the inevitable course of evolution forgets that the question of muscle-force versus machine-force was settled away back in the Stone Age when the prehistoric fighting man discovered that a flint-axe was a more potent weapon than his bare fist. Moral depends ultimately on confidence, and even the finest troops will lose their moral if they are reduced to the rôle of mere human stop-butts, powerless to hit back.
The layman is apt to feel mystified by the fog of technical controversy that surrounds the merits of the various arms. To dissipate this by a breeze of common sense, let us put the simple question: How can the old-established arms combat the new—tanks and aircraft?
First, infantry—whose weapons are machine-guns, light automatics and rifles. They cannot attack the tank, because even if they had weapons that could penetrate the tank’s armour, the latter’s speed would enable it to avoid conflict at will. Similarly, infantry have no power to hit the aeroplane unless it swoops very low, whereas it can remain at a moderate height and bomb its helpless foes.
For defence against either, infantry are dependent on the help of other arms or on going to earth like rabbits—in which case their offensive value in war is nil.
A business which retained the aged and infirm as the bulk of its employees would soon be bankrupt; it may find use for a few as caretakers—and that is the only feasible rôle for infantry in mobile warfare of the future.
It is needless to consider cavalry, for they suffer all the disabilities, save one, of infantry, and in greater degree because they offer a larger and more vulnerable target. The sole exception is that they can run away faster!
Then, with regard to field artillery—though moderately effective against the sluggish tanks of the Great War, its chances would be infinitely less against a modern tank zigzagging at over 20 m.p.h., and infinitesimal against them if launched in masses. If it cannot hit, it will be hit. In any case, its value depends on the tanks coming to meet it; its rôle thus becomes purely defensive. Only by being fitted in a tank—the obvious solution—can it compel the tank to come to action, and resume its offensive rôle in a war of movement.
Though the tank is not yet perfect—it is only as old as the automobile of 1902, or the aeroplane of 1910—the fact that it combines in itself the three essential elements of warfare—hitting power, protection, and mobility—makes it clearly superior in normal country to any of the existing arms, which are deficient in one, or all, of these elements. To anyone who has experienced the sense of helplessness caused by the sight of the modern tanks racing towards one at 20 m.p.h., sweeping over banks and nullahs, swinging round with amazing agility in their own length, the question arises: “Can flesh and blood, however heroic, be persuaded to face them?” It is a sight to freeze the blood of a witness with imagination to grasp the demoralizing effect if their guns and machine-guns were actually spitting forth death.
The tank has its limitations; there are certain types of ground on which it is handicapped—hills, woods, and swamps, and certain defences against which it is helpless. By taking advantage of such partially tank-proof terrain, infantry may survive for a time. But the limitations of the tank are exaggerated by the fact that its tactics have not been thought out and adapted to its qualities and limitations. Regarded as a mere prop to an arm—infantry—too helpless to look after itself, it has been frittered away in driblets or under unsuitable conditions—as in the swamps of Passchendaele.
To discover its true use let me suggest an historical parallel:
The military bulwark of the Roman Empire was its legions, for six centuries the “queen of battle,” defying all efforts to oppose them by like means. On the 9th August, 378 A.D., on the plains of Adrianople, they met a new challenge—the cavalry of the Goths. “The Goths swept down on the flank of the Roman infantry, so tremendous was the impact that the legions were pushed together in helpless confusion.... Into this quivering mass the Goths rode, plying sword and lance against the helpless enemy.” When the sun went down that evening, it set not only on the great Roman Empire, but on the reign of infantry—the instrument and token of Roman world-power. The age of cavalry was ushered in.
Fifteen hundred years later the German army was, in turn, the traditional symbol of military power. For four years, her machine-gunners, heirs of the Roman legionaries, defied all the efforts of orthodox tactics to overthrow them.
On the 8th of August, 1918, the German infantry legions were overrun and slaughtered by the onset of the British tanks, almost as helplessly as their forerunners at Adrianople, exactly fifteen hundred and forty years before. Let the story be epitomized in the words of the enemy, of Ludendorf himself:
“August 8th was the black day of the German army in the history of the war. The divisions in line allowed themselves to be completely overwhelmed. Divisional staffs were surprised in their headquarters by enemy tanks.” On the final phase of the war the verdict of Ludendorf was “mass attacks by tanks ... remained hereafter our most dangerous enemies.”
The lesson to be drawn from this historical analogy is that the tank attack is the modern substitute for the cavalry charge, the supreme value of which lay in its speed and impetus of assault, and the demoralizing effect of its furious onset. The deadliness of modern fire-weapons brought about the extinction of the cavalry charge, and with its disappearance warfare became lopsided and stagnant. The stalemates of recent campaigns are to be traced to the lack of any means of delivering and exploiting a decisive blow. If, instead of regarding cavalry as men on horseback, soldiers thought of it as the mobile arm, the main cause of the interminable siege warfare of the Russo-Japanese and Great Wars would be apparent. The practical view of history lies in projecting the film of the past on the blank screen of the future.
Once appreciate that tanks are not an extra arm or a mere aid to infantry but the modern form of heavy cavalry and their true military use is obvious—to be concentrated and used in as large masses as possible for a decisive blow against the Achilles’ heel of the enemy army, the communications and command centres which form its nerve system. Then not only may we see the rescue of mobility from the toils of trench-warfare, but with it the revival of generalship and the art of war, in contrast to its mere mechanics. Instead of machines threatening to become the master of men, as they actually did in 1914–18, they will give man back opportunities for the use of his art and brain, and on the battlefields of the future may be expected the triumphs of an Arbela, of quality over quantity. “It is the Man, not men, who count in war.” The tank assault of to-morrow is but the long-awaited re-birth of the cavalry charge, with the merely material changes that moving fire is added to shock, and that the armoured cavalry-tank replaces the vulnerable cavalry-horse. Thus, to paraphrase, “The cavalry is dead! Long live the cavalry!”
The last war was the culmination of brute force; the next will be the vindication of moral force, even in the realm of the armies. From the delusion that the armed forces themselves were the real objective in war, it was the natural sequence of ideas that the combatant troops who composed the armies should be regarded as the object to strike at.
Thus progressive butchery, politely called “attrition,” becomes the essence of war. To kill, if possible, more of the enemy troops than your own side loses, is the sum total of this military creed, which attained its tragi-comic climax on the Western front in the Great War.
The absurdity and wrong-headedness of this doctrine should surely have been apparent to any mind which attempted to think logically instead of blindly accepting inherited traditions. War is but a duel between two nations instead of two individuals. A moment’s unprejudiced reflection on the analogy of a boxing match would be sufficient to reveal the objective dictated by common sense. Only the most stupid boxer would attempt to beat his opponent by battering and bruising the latter’s flesh until at last he weakens and yields. Even if this method of attrition finally succeeds, it is probable that the victor himself will be exhausted and injured. The victorious boxer, however, has won his stake, and can afford not to worry over the period of convalescence, whereas the recovery of a nation is a slow and painful process—as the people of these Isles know to their cost.
A boxer who uses his intelligence, however, aims to strike a single decisive blow as early as possible against some vital point—the jaw or the solar plexus—which will instantly paralyse his opponent’s resistance. Thus he gains his objective without himself suffering seriously. Surely those responsible for the direction of war might be expected to use their intelligence as much as a professional pugilist?
The first gleam of light on the military horizon appeared in the closing stages of the Great War. Recent publications have revealed that in 1918 the Tank Corps General Staff put forward a scheme, originating, it is understood, with its chief, Colonel Fuller, to strike at the nerve centres of the German army instead of at its flesh and blood—the fighting troops. Reflection on the disaster of March, 1918, showed that its extent was due far more to the breakdown of command and staff control than to the collapse of the infantry resistance. A scheme was evolved to launch a fleet of light fast tanks, under cover of a general offensive, which should pass through the German lines, and, neglecting the fighting troops, aim straight for the command and communication centres in rear of the front. By the annihilation of these, the disorganization and capitulation of the combatant units was visualized—for without orders, without co-ordination, without supplies, an army is but a panic and famine-stricken mob, incapable of effective action.
This plan, adapted as the basic tactical idea for 1919, had the war lasted, heralds the dawn of scientific military thought in its grasp of the truth that even the military objective is a moral one—the paralysis of the enemy’s command and not the bodies of the actual soldiers.
“The wheel has come full circle,” for this blow at the hostile command was the method of Alexander, one of the greatest captains in all history—and who, unlike Napoleon, attained his ultimate political objective in its entirety. It was thus at Arbela that Alexander, with a small but highly trained force, manœuvred to strike through a gap at Darius, and with the flight of its chief the huge Persian army dissolved into a mob, its superior numbers but an encumbrance.