“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.”