Myths and Legends of the Second World War (22 page)

The peculiar geography of the Western Front after two years of trench warfare also greatly restricted the effectiveness of early tanks. The Mark I was constructed in the form of a rhomboid, with the tracks running around track frames larger than the hull situated between them. This design and track arrangement was intended to enable tanks to negotiate trenches and large shell holes, but at a weight of around 28 tons, tanks ditched easily in craters and trenches wider than ten feet, or bogged on soft ground, and were prone to ‘belly' on tree stumps or similar obstacles. The terrain in the trench zone, coupled with the lack of springing, meant that tanks made for very poor gun platforms, and usually relied on crushing enemy positions rather than hitting them with their 6-pounders or machine guns. During the latter stages of the war tanks were also found to be of limited use in villages, where they were unable to engage targets above ground floor height, and where their weak top armour was exposed to grenade attacks.

These various factors conspired to achieve a proportionally higher casualty rate amongst tank crews than infantry. Besides which, the conditions inside a tank in action were nigh on intolerable. Tanks had no springs, and crewmen were liable to be injured simply by being thrown about inside the cramped fighting compartment. Indeed during one particularly vigorous demonstration for King George at a ‘tankodrome' in France in 1917, all but one of the crew was knocked unconscious. Noise, heat and ventilation were also perennial problems. The basic tank of the Great War was little more than a steel box on tracks, with a large – and largely unshielded – 105 hp Daimler engine positioned in the middle of the cramped crew compartment. The deafening noise produced by the engine, tracks and guns meant that verbal communication between crew members was impossible, as General Elles discovered at Cambrai. Kicks and hand signals had to suffice inside the vehicle, while communication between tanks was reliant on semaphore and carrier pigeons until the first few wireless-equipped machines appeared in late 1917.

Punishing interior temperatures, which could rise as high as 48 degrees centigrade, coupled with the noxious petrol fumes and carbon monoxide produced by the engine, meant that tank crews were generally rendered incapable after four hours in action. Crewmen were also liable to burn themselves on hot machinery, and even soldered joints could warp, releasing further noxious vapours. The Mark V, introduced in March 1918, increased speed and made steering manageable by the driver alone, but by lodging the radiator inside the hull without compensating ventilation intensified the problem. The ludicrous result was that conditions inside the troop-carrying version of the Mark V, in theory capable of moving 25 men towards the enemy line in conditions of relative safety, meant that the lucky few ‘required a considerable time for recovery' before they could join the battle.

The oft-voiced criticism that Haig squandered the tactical and shock value of the tanks by committing them in ‘penny packets' rather than a vast steel armada is also misplaced. Production of vehicles remained painfully slow, due in part to the position of the Admiralty, who were reluctant to release the necessary quantities of steel plate. Haig had no choice but to field tanks in small numbers in September 1916. The tank was then still an untried experimental weapon, which had to be tested in combat before thousands were ordered. The weather, and therefore the ground, was likely to deteriorate as the autumn wore on. Without tank support, it was inevitable that infantry casualties would have been heavier, while the memory of 57,000 on July 1st was still painfully fresh. The alternative, which was to hold the tanks in reserve, was no alternative at all, and would have seen Haig condemned still further. The negative view expressed by the likes of Swinton, Churchill and Liddell Hart that Haig's decision to use a small number of tanks was ‘inexplicable' does not bear close scrutiny.

France actually produced more tanks than did Britain, although both the Schneider and Saint Chamond heavy types were failures, being under-powered, under-armoured and prone to catching fire. This is not to say that the British tank of 1916–18 was a white elephant, or that it did not play a major part in the final Allied victory. On the first day of the Cambrai attack on November 20th 1917, 378 combat tanks and 98 support vehicles (just three with wireless equipment) led an advance of 9,500 yards on a 13,000 yard front, at a cost of approximately 1,500 casualties. During the preceding campaign, Third Ypres, a similar advance by conventional means had taken three months and cost almost 400,000. Even when they performed poorly, the appearance of tanks on the battlefield reduced casualties and boosted the morale of Allied infantry, and often spread a good deal of alarm and despondency amongst the enemy. They also dispensed with the need for a prolonged initial artillery bombardment, which served to alert the enemy that an attack was due. Armour would become a decisive factor in countless battles during the next world war, and beyond. But assertions by German historians that ‘General Tank' was a decisive factor in the defeat of the Kaiser's army have more to do with the need to find convenient scapegoats, than with historical fact. Indeed Ludendorff and his General Staff drew specific attention to the allegedly unstoppable power of the tanks only during the Hundred Days between August and November 1918.

Before leaving behind the vexed subject of the tanks, an exotic contemporary myth recorded by Swinton is worth repeating.

There is one persistent myth of which I think I can dispose – that of the secret [of the tanks] having been wormed out of some member of the Heavy Section and betrayed to the Germans by the so-called Javanese dancer, Mata Hari, who was executed as a spy by the French at Vincennes. I have read everything I have been able to obtain about her life and career, and have found no confirmation of the story. In fact, I do not think it was possible for her to have discovered the secret. Nor have I been able to find any corroboration of the equally romantic tale that it was communicated by another woman spy, one Fraulein Doktor, to a German technical officer, who would not listen to her warning and afterwards committed suicide in remorse at his mistake.

A story current at the time of Mata Hari's death [in 1916] was that two officers were heard talking: ‘I say, old boy,' said one, ‘you know everything. Who was it really gave away the secret of the tanks?' ‘Why, the Japanese dancer – er – er – Hara Kiri, of course.'

The attitude of Douglas Haig to the tanks exposes the lie that he was a military Luddite, wholly uninterested in new weapons and technologies. On September 19th, four days after a single tank had reached Flers, Haig requested that a further 1,000 tanks be delivered to the Heavy Branch as quickly as possible. Following his experience in the Sudan in 1898 Haig was also an early champion of the machine gun, even taking two days out from his embarkation leave to visit the factory at Enfield, where he studied their manufacture and the mechanics of the Maxim. In August 1914 the allocation of a weapon frowned upon by some individual officers remained inadequate, at two guns per battalion, but this was hardly the fault of the generals. As early as 1909 the army had pressed for an allocation of six per battalion, but the proposal was rejected as too expensive by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George. As Director of Military Training at about the same time, an attempt by Haig to equip the army with other new technologies (grenades and trench mortars) was also refused. In September 1915, Haig pioneered the use of poison gas by British forces at Loos.

Legend holds that early in 1915 Haig dismissed the machine gun as ‘a much overrated weapon' saying that ‘two per battalion were more than sufficient', an accusation widely promulgated by Swinton and Liddell Hart from the 1930s onwards. However, the primary source, a memoir published in 1930 by the first commandant of the BEF machine gun school at St Omer, Brigadier-General Baker-Carr, is unreliable. Baker-Carr seems not to have directly identified Haig, and the original documents have never been available to modern historians such as John Terraine, who exposed the fallacy of many of the machine gun myths in
The Smoke and the Fire
. Far from being disinterested in automatic weapons, in September 1914 the War Office demanded that Vickers increase their production capacity five-fold, from 10 to 50 per week. In November the weekly figure was increased to 200, while in February 1915 another 2,000 guns were ordered from America, making a total order for almost 4,000. According to the mercurial Lloyd George, it took the generals ‘many months of terrible loss' to realise the worth of the machine gun, but these statistics expose that statement as untrue.

Elsewhere Lloyd George appraised the machine gun as ‘the most lethal weapon of the war', but this too is myth. Bullets from all sources accounted for only 38.98 per cent of British casualties, whereas shells and bombs accounted for 58.51 per cent. Each German 77mm shell shattered into 500 steel splinters, each a potentially lethal projectile. For the infantry it was therefore artillery which ranked as the principal terror of the war, rather than machine guns, mud, vermin or lice. Witness the diary of Sergeant-Major Frederic Keeling of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, in an entry written in December 1915:

In our brigade a man is damned lucky if he gets a dozen hours' sleep in three days in the trenches … It's trench mortars and whizz-bangs on and off all day and night in the intervals of bombardments. I don't pretend to have been through anything like as much as the men who have been out here 8 months and never missed the trenches, but I have been through enough to know what they have been through. And then people think it is mud and wet we mind; that is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared with the nerve-wracking hell of bombardment. Of course, people at home can imagine that more easily than the bombardments, so that is what they talk about.

Lloyd George distrusted – indeed detested – Haig with an unnatural vigour, and after becoming Prime Minister in December 1916 attempted several times to unseat him as Commander-in-Chief, but without success. An essential difference between the two men was that Haig and his generals wanted to win the war, and to win on the Western Front, whereas Lloyd George wanted merely to end it. In 1917 Lloyd George resorted to starving the BEF of replacement troops for its reserves and fighting divisions, despite the fact that by 1918 there were almost half a million fit and able soldiers in Britain. The result was that by January 1918 Haig's armies were 25 per cent understrength, which did much to contribute to the weakness of the 5th Army in particular, and the initial success of the German offensive in March. Indeed the Prime Minister was responsible for yet another enduring Great War myth, namely the idea that had the realities of trench warfare been known to the public at large, the war would have ended by sheer weight of public outrage. Lloyd George made explicit this opinion to C.P. Scott, the editor of the
Manchester Guardian
, over breakfast in December 1917:

I listened last night, at a dinner given to Philip Gibbs on his return from the Front, to the most impressive and moving description from him of what the war in the West really means, that I have heard. Even an audience of hardened politicians and journalists was strongly affected. If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know. The correspondents don't write and the censorship would not pass the truth … The thing is bloody horrible beyond human nature to bear and I feel I can't go on with the bloody business: I would rather resign.

It is undoubtedly true that most war correspondents conveyed to their readers little or nothing of the truth of the war on the Western Front. Censorship was imposed on August 2nd 1914, and correspondents barred from the continent until the spring of 1915. Instead Lord Kitchener appointed Ernest Swinton, then a colonel in the Royal Engineers, to the staff of the Commander-in-Chief to prepare official reports on the progress of the conflict. These were heavily vetted before being released to the fourth estate under the byline ‘Eyewitness', although many complained that ‘Eye-wash' would have been a more appropriate pseudonym.

Meanwhile Kitchener ordered that any press correspondent (‘drunken swabs') found in the field should be arrested, deprived of his passport and expelled. By early 1915 arrest warrants had been issued for a number of reporters mentioned by name: one such, the aforementioned Philip Gibbs, was kept under open arrest for ten days, then warned he would be shot if he returned to France. Haig blamed the shell scandal of 1915 on the presence of war correspondents in France and barred
The Times
' military correspondent Charles Repington from his 1st Army HQ. After it was realized that the stringent British reporting restrictions might have an adverse effect on public opinion in America, the first accredited correspondents arrived in France in June 1915. Nevertheless, by and large these men only reported what they were allowed to see (which was very little), and what they were permitted to write (which was even less). When in 1917 Repington published an article in the
Morning Post
criticizing Lloyd George and the Supreme War Council at Versailles, both writer and paper were prosecuted and fined £100. Indeed in the view of Arthur Ponsonby, the author of
Falsehood in Wartime
, there was ‘no more discreditable period in the history of journalism' than the four years of the First World War. This view is borne out in a passage by the notoriously fatuous William Beach Thomas of the
Daily Mail
from July 1916, who in reporting British casualties on the first day of the Somme painted a ludicrous picture:

The very attitudes of the dead, fallen eagerly forwards, have a look of expectant hope. You would say that they died with the light of victory in their eyes.

In November, after the Somme offensive had ended, Thomas still found comfort in the perceived superiority of British corpses: