BOOKS.

THE TANK CORPS.t

[COMMUNICATED.]

THE Tank Corps was one of the miracles of the war, and its

history was bound to be one of the best romances. It is ood to have the full story told so soon and by such competent chroniclers. The task was not easy. It is always difficult to write the history of one service in a campaign, for such a narrative is apt to be either a dull specialist chronicle or—if it tries to place the particular arm in its proper setting—a work of fatiguing prolixity. The authors have avoided both pitfalls. They give us all the technical information that is needed, and at the same time they fit the achievement of the Tank Corps into the

great movements of the campaign. The style is never for a moment ponderous or dull ; worn-out clichés, the besetting sin of the military historian, are sedulously avoided ; and there is

throughout a pleasant flavour of good sense, good humour, and —witness the most apposite quotations from Milton—a love , of good books.

The tale, like that of all great inventions, starts from small beginnings. There was a good deal of sheer comedy at the outset, and it required a strong faith in the pioneers to make their way through the scorn of the incredulous and the vexatious obstacles created by the half-convinced. We shall presently, no doubt, have an official finding as to who were the originators of the Tank, but the real credit will always belong to a group rather than an individual. The idea of a " land ship " was bound to occur to many minds as soon as the nature of the war revealed itself. A mobile armoured machine-gun was obviously what was needed to meet the German defence. The problem was how to find free power "—to devise a, machine in which a certain speed and adaptability were combined with a reasonable

amount of self-protection. The old Mark I., which made its debut on September 15th, 1916, on the Somme, had a long way to travel before it realized its inventors' dream. Arras taught us something about its weakness on wet ground, and Bulle court proved that it was not impervious to German "K " bullets. The Mark IV. type which followed was armoured with

steel which could resist these bullets, and the enemy was left with only one weapon of offence against it, apart from bad ground—direct hits from field or heavy guns. The " unditching beam " came into use about the time of Third Ypres. At Cambrai the trench-filling " fascincs " were first employed, to be replaced later by the more effective " cribs." At the beginning of 1918 the new Mark V. and the Whippets had come into being, and the big Mark V. Star, which could transport infantry. With a rapidly changing model the problem of production became complex. As Sir Hugh Elks puts it in his Introduction,

" the fighting man, conscious of the weaknesses of the earlier weapons, and visualizing development which he believed to be obtainable and knew to be necessary . . . oried aloud from France for rapid progress in design. In England the other aide of the picture was presented with equal force. . . .

Production once agreed to and embarked upon, a very complicated machinery is with difficulty set in motion. To stop or change this machinery results often in a loss of output which is in no way compensated by the improvements ultimately obtained."

The difficulty of course was present in every branch of war production, but it was specially bad in the case of the Tanks, whose design advanced with extraordinary speed from the first improvisations.

Nor were the true tactics for Tank fighting apparent at the start to everybody. It was not till Third Ypres that Tanks were used in "waves," and it was not till Cambrai that they had the chance to effect the surprise which was the essence of their value. A more unsuitable theatre for their debut than the Somme could scarcely be imagined. There could be no surprise after an artillery preparation lasting for days, and a countryside ploughed up by preliminary shell-fire handicapped them from the start. It was the same at Arras and in Flanders, and it was not till the summer of 1918 that they came into their own. But there was one man who from the outset saw wherein their highest possibilities lay. Whoever may ultimately be judged their progenitor, to General Swinton will always belong the

credit of being the pioneer in their tactics. His Notes on the Employment of Tanks remained to the end of the war the best thing on the subject. As Sir Hugh Elles says, " it is remarkable that one of the first official papers on the tactical use of Tanks, written by General Swinton early in 1915, should have

been almost literally translated into action on August 8th,1918."

The story of the doings of the Tanks is the story of the Western Front from September, 1916, onward. After their brilliant opening at Flers they had little chance during the tempestuous months which saw the close of the battle of the Somme. At Arras they did good work in reducing German fortresses like the " Harp " and the Railway Triangle." Third Ypres was their darkest hour, and the commander of the Fifth Army reported adversely on them, arguing that they could not negotiate bad ground, that the ground on a battlefield would always be bad, and that consequently they were no good on a battlefield. The major premiss was doubtful, and the minor false ; but if all our battles had been like Third Ypres the conclusion would have been justified. Then came Cambrai, which opened men's eyes. Major Williams-Ellis gives a vivid picture of the ingenious secrecy of the preparations and the atmosphere of tense expectation before the great experiment. On the morning of the attack Sir Hugh Elles brought the tradition of the Navy into land warfare, and, like an Admiral in his flagship, led his Tanks in person. The journalists' version of his special order, that " England expects every tank to do its damnedest," turns out to be fictitious ; the actual order, quoted in the book, is far better. It is reported that the General, while leading the attack, "did most of his observing with his head thrust up through the hatch in the roof of his tank, using his feet in the gunner's ribs to indicate targets."

Comedy was not absent from that wild day. One of the Tank crews lost his wig as his head emerged from the manhole, and the official mind was racked for months with the problem whether this came under the head of " field equipment," " loss of a limb," " clothing," or what. Hardly less stirring is the tale of the Tanks in the March retreat from St. Quentin, when their instruc tions, in the words of their General, were to lie in ambush and emerge " like savage rabbits." At Hamel in early July they had their revenge, when, along with the Australians, they

scored a brilliant success, and fifty-seven out of the sixty in action went through the day without a scratch. Mark V. was triumphantly proved, and thereafter there was no looking back. Haig's advance of August 8th, which, as we know from Luden. dorff, convinced the enemy that his knell had sounded, was built up tactically on the Tanks, 430 of which went into action ; and, if we seek for romantic enterprises, I do not know where in all the campaign records we shall find a better than that of the Whippet " Musical Box," admirably narrated in these 'pages. For open warfare both the Whippet and Mark V. were just a

little too slow. But they did magnificent work, and they put the fear of God in the enemy, whose battery of new anti-Tank weapons proved futile in action. Up to the last day the Corps fought as if the war were to last for ever, and when the Armistice came it was pretty near the end of its resources in men and machines. On November 5th there were only eight Tanks that could be sent after the retreating enemy. Since August 8th two thousand Tanks and armoured cars had fought in a practically continuous battle. The Tank Corps, as Sir Hugh Elles says, was a citizen force. " Of the 20,000 odd souls that went to compose it, perhaps not more than two or three per cent. were professional soldiers." It was a new force, without traditions behind it, so the units were apt to take the impress of the personality of their commanders. Much was due to their General, and much to the officers, who were among the keenest and ablest young men in the British Army. It speedily established a very real tradition of its own— a tradition of alert intelligence and complete devotion. Performances like that of Major Hotblack at the battle of the Ancre, as the authors truly note, " set the tone " at the start, and the really wonderful exploit of the same officer on September 29th last year, when with a handful of men he took and held the Quennemont. Ridge, showed the superb confidence which officers and men had in themselves and in each other. But what is too often forgotten is the steady ortitude required for the day-today business. It was no breezy, dashing cavalry charge, this fighting " in the heart of an eight-day clock." At the best it was abominably stuffy, and in hot weather the inside of a Tank was slightly worse than the Black Hole of Calcutta. Sometimes a whole crew became unconscious through the fumes from the engine ; the heat caused ammunition to swe'l so that it jammed the guns and occasionally exploded ; while guns, and even the steering-wheel, became too hot to touch. The infantry carried in the Tanks, if the trip was of any length, were apt to be "delivered flushed, feverish, and either vomiting or extremely faint and quite unfit for duty until they had been given at least a couple of hours' rest."

The authors give some interesting details about the Tanks of the other forces. The French machines were in the end very good, especially the light Renaults, and in General Estienne they had a brilliant commanding officer. The German type were poor, and, when they had a wonderful chance at Villers Bretonneux, signally failed. They were heavier and larger than anything we or the French possessed, and could do eight miles an hour on smooth ground, but they were hopeless across rough country. Their crews, too, were of inferior quality, for the Germans in this as in most spheres blundered in their propaganda. In order to hearten their infantry they painted such a picture of the uselessness and vulnerability of our Tanks, and the short and brutish lives of the men inside them, that they could not recruit for their own machines when they got them.

The Tank, as Marshal Foch has testified, was the weapon which broke the apparently invulnerable strength of the modern defence. It provided the extra margin of fightingpower between evenly matched combatants. All war is a hunt for new tactics, and tactics are based on weapons ; it was our good fortune to discover and perfect in time the new weapon.

The Tank did two things, and on these the final strategy of the great Commander-in-Chief was built up ; it showed us how to overcome a defence in depth, and it enabled a new attack to be " mounted " rapidly and so achieve surprise. In an epilogue the writers advocate the retention of a strong force of Tanks in whatever many we decide upon in the future, and this for many sound reasons, not the least of which is that they are a weapon peculiarly suited to the British temperament. Our men dislike standing on the defensive, they detest digging, and they hate carrying things on their backs. They are also uncommonly good at handling a mechanism. Our commanders have a constitutional love of the offensive, and they dislike a large butcher's bill. " The Tank is essentially a mobile weapon of offence. It is the weapon for the nation that does not fight willingly, but when it fights fights to win, and to win quickly with as little bloodshed as possible. It is the weapon for men who, if they must fight, like to fight like intelligent beings, still subjecting the material world to their sway, and who are most unwillingly reduced to the roles of mere marching automata."

Joan BucHAN.