One of the oddities of history is that the tank, the ultimate weapon of land warfare, was originally developed by the British navy. Under the goading of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who was eager to find a way to break the stalemate of the Western Front, the Royal Navy began experimenting in early 1915 with steel-plated “landships” built on a tractor chassis. They were first referred to as “tanks” as part of a cover story which held that they were merely portable water containers.
On November 20, 1917, the Royal Tank Corps launched the first large-scale tank offensive in history. Four hundred and seventy-six British tanks shattered the Germans lines at Cambrai to a depth of six miles. Stupefied German soldiers fled in terror before these movable, smoke-belching forts. But the British were not able to keep going, because too many of their fragile machines broke down. The Germans mustered their courage and drove the slow and ungainly tanks back with an artillery barrage. The French also built many tanks and employed them in offensives that were equally inconclusive, largely because the tank was not yet a very sturdy or reliable contraption.
When the war ended in November 1918, the British and French were planning to field thousands of tanks in a massive blitz in 1919 that would have anticipated many of the innovations employed by the Germans twenty years later. The architect of these plans was (in the words of the Tank Corps’ official historian) “a little man, with a bald head, and a sharp face and a nose of Napoleonic cast, his general appearance, stature and feature earning him the title of Boney.” Colonel J. F. C. “Boney” Fuller was chief of staff of the Tank Corps, a career infantry officer, graduate of Sandhurst, and veteran of the Boer War who, in the estimation of the corps’ official historian, “stood out at once as a totally unconventional soldier, prolific in ideas, fluent in expression, at daggers drawn with received opinion, authority and tradition.”
Fuller, who titled his autobiography Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier, positively reveled in his reputation as “a heretic.” Before the Great War, he had been a disciple of Aleister Crowley, a cult leader who advocated drug use, sex rituals, Satanic worship, and the occult. Fuller even wrote a 327-page book expounding the principles of “Crowleyanity.” In 1911 Fuller finally severed ties with Crowley, whose behavior he found increasingly destructive and megalomaniacal. He did not abandon his interest in the unconventional, but it was not as an enthusiast for yoga or Kabbalah mysticism—both subjects on which he wrote books in the 1920s and 1930s—that he would make his mark on history. It was as the high priest of the cult of armor.
Fuller thought the tank was a wonder weapon that would render obsolete not only the horse but also the infantryman. He envisioned tanks supported by airplanes knifing through front lines to destroy command and communications centers in the rear. Having been “shot through the brain,” the enemy’s body—the mass of its army—would then collapse into a leaderless, demoralized rabble that could easily be rolled up. Fuller hoped that this strategy could be used to avoid the ghastly stalemate of the First World War: “To attack the nerves of an army, and through its nerves the will of its commander, is more profitable than battering to pieces the bodies of its men.”
This was, in essence, the theory that the Wehrmacht put into practice in 1939. But in the 1920s the British army did more than any other to make it a reality. In 1927, at a time when Germany did not have a single tank, Britain set up the Experimental Mechanized Force, the prototype of the armored division, equipped with medium and light tanks, armored cars, self-propelled guns, and motorized infantry in trucks and half-tracks. Through its elaborate exercises on Salisbury Plain, the Experimental Mechanized Force showed that it was possible to effectively maneuver large bodies of tanks utilizing two-way radios (or “radio telephones,” as they were known). Its maneuvers may have been sniffed at by traditionalists—after witnessing one exercise, Rudyard Kipling complained, “It smells like a garage and looks like a circus”—but they were closely followed abroad, especially in Germany and the Soviet Union. Also studied were the official British publications on armored warfare: a booklet on Mechanized and Armored Formations (1929) and Lectures on Field Service Regulations, Part III (1932).
The Lectures were written by Fuller, but by the early 1930s his influence was rapidly waning. He had missed his big chance when he had turned down the command of the Experimental Mechanized Force over a petty matter of bureaucratic politics. He was promoted to major general in 1930 and then summarily retired. Boney Fuller continued to be a prolific writer after leaving the army but an increasingly marginal one. He joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and took to denouncing democracy (“nothing more than a pluto-mobocracy”) and the Jews (“the Cancer of Europe”). His intemperate blasts at the “know nothings” and “mineralized intellects” who ran the army alienated most of his potential supporters within the ranks. One of his favorite targets, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, complained, with some justice, that all of Fuller’s books “are written with the intention of annoying someone.”
Fuller’s cause was effectively taken up by a younger, less acerbic, and more genteel champion who looked (to a novelist’s eye) “far more like the cartoonist’s idea of a learned professor than a military man at all.” Basil Liddell Hart had been a British army captain in the Great War and later became an influential historian and defense correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and The Times. His most famous contribution to strategy was his advocacy of the “indirect approach,” which he claimed had been utilized by all “great captains” to strike where their enemies least expected. He believed that tanks and airplanes could make this strategy even more effective in the 1930s than it had been in Scipio Africanus’s day or William Tecumseh Sherman’s. Although Liddell Hart was a skilled and shameless self-promoter who became a close adviser to War Minister Leslie Hore-Belisha (1937–40), he did not manage to make any more of a dent in the British army of the 1930s than Fuller did.
The army disbanded the Experimental Mechanized Force after a couple of years. It created the 1st Tank Brigade in 1931, but did not form an armored division until 1939. By then, Britain had long lost its lead in mechanized warfare. The island nation continued to build tanks in the 1930s, but they were mostly light models designed for scouting, and instead of massing them together, as Fuller, Liddell Hart, and other strategists advocated, the army chose to parcel them out to infantry divisions where they would be incapable of achieving a decisive breakthrough. Moreover, the British did not continue developing a coherent doctrine of tank warfare—i.e., a set of widely shared and understood principles about how these weapons should be employed. They did not continue exercising large tank formations in the field to gain operational experience with newer and faster models. And they did not practice coordinating air and armor operations.
When war came, the tiny British Expeditionary Force sent to France was entirely motorized (relying in part on requisitioned civilian vehicles), but it had to make do with just a single tank brigade and some armored cavalry regiments. “In September 1939,” wrote Bernard Law Montgomery, who as a general commanded a division in France, “the British Army was totally unfit to fight a first-class war on the continent of Europe.”
Fuller, Liddell Hart, and other critics were quick to ascribe this failure to the stupidity of the “military mind,” but this is only partly correct. There were indeed some purblind Colonel Blimps who continued to insist that tanks would never replace the good old horse. As late as 1926, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig would write: “Aeroplanes and tanks…are only accessories to the man and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past.”
Such sentiments existed in all armies. Britain primarily resisted the creed of armor in the 1930s, however, not because of the woolly-headed influence of the Haig mind-set but simply because of the overall neglect of its armed forces. The bulk of the paltry defense budget in the interwar years went to the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, which were, not unreasonably, judged vital to keep Britain safe from invasion. The army, such as it was, was mainly devoted to colonial policing in places like Ireland, India, and Palestine, where there was no need for large tank formations; a few armored cars were quite sufficient to put down “native revolts.” Many Britons thought they would never again fight another land war in Europe. Ironically, Liddell Hart and Fuller were among those who argued against a continental commitment. This proved more in tune with the popular mood in the decade of appeasement than their calls for strong armored and air forces.
France, too, had its prophets of armor but they were even more lonely and embattled than their British counterparts. General Jean-Baptiste Estienne, inspector of tanks from 1921 to 1927, was an early and vociferous proponent of deploying heavy tanks independently of infantry formations. Thanks in part to his influence, France became a leader in tank design in the 1920s and 1930s. The Char B1 was the best heavy tank in the world; German shells would simply bounce off its armor. The Somua S35 medium tank was also world-class. It combined speed, protection, and hitting power better than any rival. But France was slow to mass-produce these tanks, and even slower to figure out how to make the best use of them.
A fiery young captain named Charles de Gaulle was impressed by “the idea of the autonomous operation by armoured detachments—an idea,” he later wrote, “whose advocates were General Fuller and Captain Liddell Hart.” In 1934, while on the faculty of the St. Cyr military academy, he published a book called Toward a Professional Army in which he proposed the creation of a volunteer, highly trained “army of shock troops” that would “move entirely on caterpillar wheels.” These mechanized units, supported by their “indispensable comrades in arms,” the air force, could “rapidly move round far in the rear of the enemy, strike at his sensitive points, throw his whole system into confusion.”
The leftist Popular Front government was aghast at the notion of creating a professional military that it feared would become a den of reactionary conspiracy. The military high command was no more impressed by de Gaulle’s ideas. Instead of concentrating its armor in the kind of elite outfits that he favored, the army dispersed it among infantry and cavalry divisions composed of indifferently trained draftees. As late as July 1939, General Maurice Gamelin, the French army commander, told the parliament, “One must not exaggerate the importance of mechanized divisions. They can play an auxiliary role in enlarging a breach, but not the major role the Germans seem to expect of them.”
In keeping with this philosophy, France in the 1930s concentrated on light armored forces designed to support infantry and artillery, not to fight tanks on their own. On paper, France created the world’s first armored division in 1933: the division légère mécanique (DLM), or light mechanized division. But it was not fully operational until 1938. The first heavy armored division (division cuirasée, or DCR) was not ready until 1939. When the German invasion came in May 1940, France had three DCRs and three DLMs, though without enough modern tanks to fully equip them. A fourth DCR was hastily set up on May 15, in the middle of the campaign, and given to de Gaulle, by then a general, to command. It was too little, too late.
The French had forfeited an opportunity to maintain a lead in armored warfare because their post–World War I mind-set was so defensive. Traumatized by the slaughter in the trenches, they wanted to avoid casualties at all costs. The most famous symbol of this mentality was the Maginot Line, a system of fortifications completed in 1937 along France’s eastern border between Switzerland and Belgium. The Maginot Line (named after Minister of War André Maginot) has been much mocked and little understood. In and of itself, it was not a bad idea: The Germans never did penetrate most of its formidable bunkers. But France did not extend it all the way north to cover the Belgian border where the German army had invaded in 1914. Here they had to rely upon mobile forces to fill in the gap. And that is where the trouble occurred. The French mode of operations was primarily passive, designed to minimize casualties, not to achieve decisive results. Their doctrine of “methodical battle” emphasized defense over offense, firepower over maneuver, rigid planning over freewheeling improvisation, centralization over local unit autonomy, and maintaining a continuous front instead of opportunistically trying to punch holes in the enemy lines.
It was, in every respect, the opposite of what the Germans were training for. The French essentially anticipated a replay of 1914–18, expecting that the Germans would charge their defenses and get slaughtered en masse. As a result, they made no serious effort to attack Germany from the west while most of its armed forces were engaged in Poland in September 1939. France’s defensive orientation, de Gaulle would complain, “handed the initiative over to the enemy, lock, stock, and barrel.”
