The Twenty Years’ Truce
3.3. Innovation: From Theory to Practice
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea that systematic research and development could result in a never-ending stream of new inventions had become rmly established, and indeed perhaps never before in history had the belief in “science” been stronger and more widespread. Book after book extolled the great inventors as well as the bene ts they had bestowed on humanity;
some public opinion surveys even pointed to Thomas Edison as the most important person of all. Militarily speaking, the principal innovations took place in the eld of mechanized warfare, air warfare, and naval warfare, where the development of the aircraft carrier and amphibious landing vessels during the interwar years was especially dramatic. These elements were tied together by a vast array of communications and other electronic devices that, in retrospect, may have been the most important of all.23
By the time the First World War ended, the country with the greatest experience in mechanized warfare was Britain, where development of tanks continued with the Mark C (on which Fuller, preparing Plan 1919, had relied) being canceled in favor of the Mark D. This was a truly revolutionary machine. With a range of two hundred miles and capable of speeds up to twenty miles per hour, it wore enough armor to proof it against armor-piercing
bullets, and was topped by a very modern revolving turret that carried twin machine guns. As if all these marvels were not enough, the suspension was sprung, with the result that the crew could survive the ride without being thrown around too much. This, however, was only the beginning. Originating either in o cial orders or in private initiatives, almost year by year new, experimental, models made their appearance—light, medium, and heavy. Some were armed with two-pounder cannon, others merely with machine guns; quite a number had more than one turret. Some were considered successes, but most were not.
In parallel with the tank’s technological development, theories concerning the way tanks should be employed abounded. Some, Fuller included, thought they were analogous to ships at sea, and pressed for an army made up exclusively of the new machines, with heavy tanks providing the impetus for a breakthrough supported by medium “cruiser” tanks to exploit the breach. While these ideas were vindicated by World War II, others, such as small, one-man tankettes for use in guerrilla operations, were destined to be forgotten until the advent of suicide car bombers realized them in a somewhat di erent form. The operations of armored forces were often compared to those of heavy cavalry, a view that eventually proved more correct than any of the others.
Year by year on Salisbury Plain, the machines and their supporting vehicles—trucks for carrying supplies, motorcycles for liaison and communications, and large, open sta cars for accommodating commanders—were put through their paces, often in the presence of senior o cers and their ladies who saw the event as an occasion for a picnic. By 1927, the British had created the world’s rst experimental mechanized force; however, the army never got to the point at which a rm commitment was made to expand its units so that all forces would be mechanized.24
This was in part due to entrenched conservatism—many cavalrymen, afraid lest their status would su er, refused to give up their horses—and in part to sheer nancial penury. At the time, it was assumed that there would be no major war for ten years to
come, and by the order of secretary of the exchequer, Winston Churchill, the “ten years’ rule” was automatically extended from one day to the next.25 Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 ought to have sounded the alarm and made a di erence in the pace of modernization. Instead, by an accident of history, only one year later the post of chief of the imperial sta was taken over by a more than usually conservative o cer, Field Marshal Montgomery- Massingberd who held the position of many top commanders that Britain should never again send an army to the Continent.26 As a result, most o cers continued to play polo or, if stationed in India, stick pigs as if nothing had changed since 1900. As a result, it was only in 1939 that Britain nally got its rst armored division.
French and American attempts at mechanization were hardly more successful. Inspired by Foch, who at long last had concluded that no o ensive was likely to succeed unless the enemy’s repower was neutralized,27 France put its hopes on the so-called methodical battle, employing a combination of all arms and advancing on a wide front so as not to take undue risks. Essentially this was a rehash of the combats of summer and autumn 1918. There was in it a role for armor, but no more than a subordinate one, with tanks providing re support for the infantry. When World War II broke out, most of the French tanks were still the small, lightly armored machines introduced in 1935. There was also a much heavier, better-armored type, the Char B. However, like its smaller compatriot it was undermanned, which meant that it could not re its gun fast enough. In addition, it could carry only enough fuel for fty miles, and since French tanks were not equipped with radios, command and control of armored forces was extremely di cult.
American developments were even more limited. In 1917–18, the Americans had begun building copies of existing French and British tanks, but few could be completed before the war came to an end.
Yankee technical ingenuity also led to all kinds of curious experiments including the above-mentioned steam-powered tank, a gas-electric tank, a steam-wheel tank (basically an armored box
mounted on steel wheels), and even an unarmored “skeleton tank.”28 However, in the person of William Christie the United States had a designer whose ideas were as advanced as those of anyone else, among them the fastest tank built to that time and an amphibious tank. Unfortunately, here, too, conservatism and inertia played a part, and all he was allowed to do was produce a few experimental models. The underlying reality was that the US Army was just too small to set up and test large formations, armored or otherwise, scattered as it was in penny packets all over a huge continent.
This left the Soviets and the Germans, and during the 1920s the two pariah states worked together, reviving the close relationship they had enjoyed during most of the nineteenth century. They built experimental vehicles and tested them in Kazan, until Hitler’s rise to power brought such cooperation to an end, much to the regret of some German o cers. Left to their own devices, the Soviets made their share of mistakes, coming up with their own designs and also buying foreign models that they tried to copy. They certainly were not alone in producing monstrosities; one heavy tank design featured no fewer than ve turrets. However, in their next step they committed an error opposite to the British, French, and Americans.
Whereas the Western countries came up with a very large number of experimental designs, most of which either went nowhere or were produced in only very small numbers, the Soviets settled on a single, basic design as early as 1933 and began mass-producing it.29 By 1939, they had nearly twenty- ve thousand vehicles—far more than the rest of the world combined.
The Red Army tanks were organized in no fewer than four armored corps, fty tank brigades, four armored car brigades, twenty-six tank regiments in cavalry divisions, eleven tank regiments in armored schools, and an unspeci ed number of tank companies in infantry divisions. Yet they were used only in support of the infantry. There were no armored divisions; nor were tanks expected to operate independently. Worse still, by the time the design, called the T-26, went into action against the invading
Wehrmacht, it was obsolete and easily dealt with. Modern ghting vehicles, such as the heavy KV-i and the magni cent T-34, made up only a very small percentage of the total, and even those were not properly employed.
The case of the Germans was unique. First, they had been defeated, which made them better prepared to experiment and innovate. Second, by the beginning of 1918 they had developed a new organization, a new doctrine, new techniques, and some new weapons—which, as the events of March through July proved, were capable of breaking through the strongest forti ed fronts that then existed. Company-sized, decentralized battle groups, supported by short but intensive artillery bombardments, armed with an assortment of weapons up to and including light cannon, pushing forward into nooks and crannies while bypassing centers of resistance and leaving them behind, accomplished the trick.30 Except that the available technical means still prevented the groups from bringing up supplies and maintaining easy communications with one another and with the rear, there was no question that the toughest problem of all—gaining superiority over the defense—was
nally being mastered.
As was the case elsewhere, not every German commander was enthusiastic about armored warfare. Another factor was the Treaty of Versailles, which prohibited Germany from building tanks; in the end, it required Hitler’s personal intervention to get things moving.31 No later than 1935, the Reichswehr had its rst three armored divisions. By the time the war started there were eight self- contained divisions, each made up of tank units, artillery, motorized infantry, anti-tank troops, a headquarters, signal troops, and an organic supply component equipped with trucks. These early units, however, proved to be tank-heavy, and after the victory over France the number of tanks in each division was cut to two hundred or so, which has remained standard for tank divisions to the present day.
When unleashed on rst Poland, then France, the results were devastating. But what made these formations so powerful was
neither their number (never during the war were more than 20 percent of all German ground troops motorized), nor the quality of the tanks themselves, which in 1940 were hardly better than their French opposites.32 It was instead the way they were organized and grafted onto the pre-1914 strategic doctrine, which emphasized mobility, simultaneous attacks coming from several directions, out anking, and the Kesselschlacht (the tactic of surrounding the enemy in a cauldron or pocket).33
Impressive as these developments were, they would never have grown as successful as they did had it not been for the simultaneous rise of airpower. By the close of World War I, though both sides were already launching “strategic” bombardments, air forces remained very much ancillary to their respective armies and navies.
Later, most countries followed Britain’s lead in creating independent air forces, so that the aggressive promotion of airpower was driven partly by the new air forces’ attempts to preserve their independence, expand it, and gain additional nancial resources in order to do so.
There were sharp di erences in the expression of that aggressiveness, however. In the United States and Britain, island powers both, advocates of airpower insisted that it should be used for launching attacks on civilian, demographic, and industrial targets in a Douhet-like fashion.34 In Germany and the USSR, the insistence was rather that it be used either to attack military targets at the front (this came to be known as close air support, or CAS) or else to interdict lines of communications. The two opposing points of view struggled and intermingled, but they were never really reconciled. In the US Air Force this remains true to the present day.
This debate as to the best use of airpower had important repercussions in the eld of technology. True to their doctrine, the United States and Britain invested fortunes in the development of heavy, four-engined bombers, thus establishing an important technological lead that they never subsequently relinquished—and which later, incidentally, translated into the production of
commercial passenger aircraft. On the other hand, nding ways to make the most e ective use of these forces proved much more di cult than Douhet and his followers had anticipated, and several more years had to pass before the problem was really solved.
In the case of France and Italy, failure to build such large aircraft was more a result of nancial penury than anything else. After all, the money needed for building a heavy bomber could buy several light, twin-engined bombers and single-engined ghters. And if the outcome was a large order of battle that would impress dilettantes such as Mussolini and Hitler, then all the better.
Planning for a war in the Paci c, Japan focused on carrier- launched aircraft, with the result that heavy bombers were never in the cards. Finally, the Soviet Union produced a few gigantic aircraft for demonstration purposes. However, its commanders never abandoned the idea that the real purpose of airpower was to act as
ying artillery35
As so often happened during this period, the most interesting case was presented by the Germans. Commanded by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s corpulent deputy and ex-World War I ghter ace who claimed that “everything that ies belongs to me,” the Luftwa e was as jealous of its independence as any other air force. Since there had been no air force during the Weimar Republic, though, most of its commanders were ex-army men, who consequently understood the importance of joint operations better than their British and American colleagues. Whenever such operations were planned, it was German practice to put an air force general in charge. Like the Soviets, the German Luftwa e was not organized by type of aircraft
—bomber command, ghter command, and so on—but divided into air divisions, air corps, and air eets, each including machines of all types with organic ground support. Accordingly, they could be moved from one theater of war to another without any need for reorganization. All that was needed was to build the physical infrastructure, and even for that, the Luftwa e was able to rely partly on its own resources.
As in several other countries, one reason behind the German failure to build heavy bombers was the desire to create a large, impressive-looking order of battle in the face of scal reality.
Another, though could be connected to a doctrine that began to be developed in the mid-1930s. Unlike the Red Air Force, the Luftwa e never allowed itself to degenerate into mere ying artillery—or, as one of its commanding generals put it, to become “the hand maiden of the Army.”36 Insofar as the Luftwa e planned to start any campaign with a devastating attack on enemy air bases, it owed more to Douhet than is usually realized. However, in the form of the famous Stuka dive-bombers, it acquired a superb instrument for providing close support—sometimes almost literally at the feet of the ground troops. This required excellent air to ground cooperation, and air o cers had to possess a good understanding of the ground battle. Here, again, the fact that many Luftwa e o cers had started their careers in the army helped. Only during the later half of the war did the Western Allies nally begin to equal the Germans in these respects.
Another eld in which the Germans acquired a commanding lead was airborne operations. Beginning around 1930, the armed forces of many countries toyed with the idea of delivering troops either by parachute or by glider and developing the necessary units, equipment, and doctrines to do so. Because they were taking the o ensive, however, the Germans were the rst o the mark.
Fearless men dropping from the sky, including a former world heavyweight boxing champion, Max Schmeling, played a spectacular part in the invasion of Norway as well as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Crete. On the other hand, such operations proved enormously expensive. This was true in terms of both materiel and personnel. Besides being vulnerable during the approach ight, even under the best conditions many gliders and aircraft had to be crash-landed and could not be reused. And since the troops could not carry any heavy weapons, they were sometimes slaughtered by their better-equipped opponents, which is what happened to US paratroopers at Arnhem in 1944. As a result the
entire technique, spectacular as it was, proved something of a cul- de-sac. After 1945, it was only rarely employed and then only on a relatively small scale against very light opposition, as for, example, when the US 101st Airborne operated in Iraq in 2003.
For millennia, the ability of eets to identify and track their enemies had depended essentially on lookouts. From perches high on the swaying masts of ships it was the straining human eye that had to do the job, day and night. Once ying craft had been introduced, it did not take long to appreciate that their use at sea could greatly extend the range of observation. The earliest experiments in this direction were made just before World War I. By 1918 British aircraft were logging thirty thousand miles a month over seas surrounding the Home Islands on submarine patrols.
Owing to their need for takeo and landing surfaces, aircraft were more di cult, and so took longer to deploy at sea than balloons.
Aircraft equipped with oats (hydroplanes) could be lowered into the water by means of a crane, take o , and, having performed their mission and landed, be recovered. It was, however, soon discovered that doing so was a dangerous operation practicable only in calm seas. To really draw the bene t from sea-based airpower, it would be necessary to construct a specialized ship equipped with its own air eld so that wheeled, high-performance aircraft could be launched and recovered. The rst such ship, the British Argus, entered service in 1918.
As usual, the attitudes of the powers toward what would become known as the aircraft carrier varied. France, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy never built or completed carriers. In the case of the rst three, this was because they were, or considered themselves, primarily land powers. In that of the last-named, it was because Italy itself was a giant carrier jutting into the Mediterranean
—or so, at least, Mussolini (who was always right) said. This left the island nations of Britain, Japan, and the United States, all three of which depended on the sea to project their power, and the rst two could not survive for long if their naval communications were cut.
During the 1920s, all three had already established a separate naval