Coulsdon Eagle
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Yes, at times the French beat up some of the best German units. The defeat was really down to the mindset of the French GQH.
Sir John Valentine Carden Survives. Part 2.
- Thread starter allanpcameron
- Start date
All of this is a sign of incompetence of one for or another.
The Germans were rolling 10s, not 20s. They did so well because they'd worked out their strategies ahead of time.
Start with giving it a maximum speed better than 15 mph.
No design got it exactly right, but min-maxing proved to be exactly the wrong approach.
Unfortunately, a lot of the British tanks suffered from being placed in the hands of unreformed cavalry officers, who drove them straight into enemy guns.
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Speaking of infantry tank top speed, one of the early members of the Tank Board, Vyvyan Pope, did express his view that while other aspects took precedence he still desired the greatest possible mobility on the infantry tanks, and especially good reliability. If I recall he expected greater speeds than those achieved by infantry tanks up to and including Churchill. The main reason for this desire for highest road speed was because slow and underpowered/insufficently strengthened infantry tank automotives tended to wear themselves out on marches, something tank transporters could not always satisfactorily mitigate. In practice it took until the A33 to start seeing unification of assault or infantry tanks with cruisers, and a resulting improvement in mobility.
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It should be noted that, had the Matilda II been fitted with the Liberty engine used in the Cruiser Mk IV, it would have achieved ~13.6 hp/ton (compared to the 7.5 it managed OTL), and likely a significantly better top speed. Carden isn't being a genius here, he's simply being intelligent enough to know that the ministry is wrong, and stubborn enough to stick to his guns.
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This. Especially in the desert. Hell, infantry units were left to face the Axis forces unsupported because tanks kept swanning off and getting shot up by AT guns or even, in some cases they were found stopping for a brew up instead of supporting the infantry. The latter instances are why I am convinced post war British tanks come with a BV as standard equipment, that way they don't have to stop for tea.
Hm, I thought it was so they didn't have to dismount to have a cuppa.
Yep problem is their was issues from the experimental force before the war was the usually political issues inherent with British army and the two officers who had the biggest to contribution to it was in my opinion Fuller and Hobart, where well politically untenable to promote it because Fuller was a Nazi and made himself highly unpopular with the establishment and Hobart though his men respected him his peers and superiors hated his guts due to him being a cad amongst other issues and without a patron in the army to protect and push him out of the way of flak means after Egypt where he proved what could be done he had pissed off his superiors enough that he was effectively benched.
Also didn’t help that the British and by extension most of the modern militaries at the time who fought in WW1 in the 100 days of 1918 forgot the lessons of it heck there were plans for armoured infantry with APCs amongst the Entente.
That was the reason because the Germans during the fighting in Europe after Overlord found a column of British Armour that had stoped to brew up and they got blown up because of it.
That's the official reason, but stopping for a cuppa when they damned well shouldn't be doing that at that time was something that happened far too often.
Like at the Dardanells
We have made it to the beach
Lets make a cuppa before we try and press in land
Oh Johnny Turk has moved up and has the high ground? Dashed unsporting that
Fair. Was that a universal issue? Or was it more often an issue with the ex-cavalry tankers than the newly-trained ones?
Most troops at Gallipoli had learned their craft on the Western Front. Where hard learned lessons had taught them that once they took a few hundred yards, not stopping to secure their position against the inevitable counterattack led to being caught overextended and in the open and ripped to pieces. They basically had to unlearn everything they had spent a lot of time and blood learning and go back to a prewar line of thought that had been beaten out of them by experience and a lack of training time to do more than train men for the trenches.
Just think what mihgt have hapenned if they hadn't rigged the Summer Exercises and carried on developing a good tank/combined arms doctrine... 
It was more of a universal issue, as there reports of other British units such as the infantry exhibiting the habit as well during both world wars.
I have to disagree on this, mostly because very few of the Anglo-French units that landed on the 25th of April 1915 had served on the Western Front. That goes for both the Home and Colonial units involved. Gallipoli was their very first experience of trench warfare.
I can't help but wonder how much of the resistance to the combined arms approach was down to the fact that it had been the colonials from Canada, Australia and New Zealand who had been at the forefront of developing the tactics during WW1.Just think what mihgt have hapenned if they hadn't rigged the Summer Exercises and carried on developing a good tank/combined arms doctrine...
Now if only Fuller had taken up command of the Experimental Force when offered - then it would be all tanks all the time 😁Just think what mihgt have hapenned if they hadn't rigged the Summer Exercises and carried on developing a good tank/combined arms doctrine...
Problem is he didn't get the staff needed to run it but he was a bit politically unreliable.
True, but the abbreviated training (or retraining, as much of the Cape Helles force from 29th Division was garrison forces returned from India) system that was then in place was still built based on Western front lessons. And 29th Divisions commander, Hunter-Weston, certainly was from the Western front.
That's actually very unfair on Cavalry officers who were generally much more sensible when they were being cavalry officers. The Cavalry regiments of the British Army performed much better in the First World War, especially in 1917-8 in the campaign against the Ottomans then they did between 1939-43. You certainly would never have seen a Great War Cavalry Regiment launch the sort of blind charge that tank regiments did in the Desert.
In reality the cult of the suicidal charge was a result of lessons learned in the interwar period and spread through the Army by Hobart and Fuller among others. The key causes being a serious underestimation of the ability of infantry to resist tanks (which was actually true before things like the Panzerbuchese 39 came along), a lack of emphasis on combined arms operations (because interwar British radios were so unreliable they were essentially impossible) and a lack of training in what tanks were, and were not, capable of. None of which can be blamed on "cavalry officers".