12 December 1939. Wanquetin, near Arras, France.
The General Headquarters of the BEF had had a couple of days to relax now that the visit of His Majesty King George VI had passed off successfully. The King had been very gracious and all the units he had visited had been most pleased and boosted by his presence and interest. The problem now was that there was something of a backlog of work that had been shelved to allow Lord Gort and his senior officers to attend the King. So it was that Brigadier Justice Tilly found himself having pre-dinner drinks with the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Gort, the Chief of the General Staff, Lt General Henry Pownall, and Deputy Chief of Staff Major-General Philip Neame. Tilly was replacing Frederick Hotblack who’d been given command of 2nd Armoured Division. Gort was using the opportunity to thank Hotblack for his contributions to the build up of the armoured forces of the BEF as Brigadier Armoured Fighting Vehicles (BAFV).
This role had been created in September as part of the General Headquarters (Armoured Fighting Vehicles) which had replaced the pre-War AFV Branch. The purpose of GHQ(AFV) was to represent the Director of Mechanisation (Major-General Alexander Davidson) in the field. The organisation performed a technical liaison role between the Ministry of Supply, the War Office and the BEF in France. Originally Hotblack’s team had been based in at the Staff College at Camberley, but had arrived at Le Mans in France on 14 September.
Hotblack had been thinking deeply about how best to manage the Armoured Fighting Vehicles in the BEF and had submitted a paper on the subject to Gort’s General Staff in November. The situation was still fluid as the numbers of AFVs in France were still somewhat limited. There was the 4th Battalion RTR had its A11s, increasingly becoming known by their Vickers’ codename of Matilda. The King had spent a morning with the tanks and had been impressed by them, wondering if the pompom guns might have a secondary role of shooting down aircraft! 4RTR was the basis for the 1st Army Tank Brigade, with two more Battalions of the Royal Tank Regiment expected to join them before the end of spring 1940.
The other AFVs in France were the Light Tanks that made up the Divisional cavalry regiments (1st Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, 1st East Riding Yeomanry, 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, 15th/19th The King's Royal Hussars, 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards; 12th Royal Lancers; 13th/18th Royal Hussars; 1st Lothians and Border Yeomanry). All of these cavalry regiments were being used currently in their traditional role of providing the reconnaissance element for each infantry Division. This meant that each Regiments were operating more or less independently of each other and their parent Royal Armoured Corps.
In his paper Hotblack had argued for the formation of an “Armoured Group” with a commander and full headquarters to direct all aspects of the BEF’s AFVs, as the current role of the AFV Branch was advisory only. Having a sound organisation set up now, before the numbers and various types of tanks starting arriving, which would give proper ‘command and control if last minute improvisations are to be avoided.’ ‘In the absence of a higher organisation the BEF will be at a dual disadvantage. It will be attempting to use a weapon, made clumsy by lack of adequate means to control it, against a similar weapon in the hands of an enemy who has spared neither money nor pains to provide an efficient and flexible system of command.’ Here he was referencing the German panzergruppen, army sized commands for the amoured forces which would generally encompass two or four corps, each corps consisting of two to four divisions.
Hotblack’s proposal was that the Headquarters of the British Armoured Group would have a commanding Major-General, with a full staff, and a technical establishment of an Assistant Director of Mechanisation with his staff. This would be ‘simple, flexible, and therefore reduces the risk of hasty improvisation to a minimum.’ As 1st Armoured Division was expected to join the BEF sometime in May 1940, it would come under the command of the Armoured Group along with the 1st Army Tank Brigade and all the divisional cavalry regiments, which would be grouped into two Light Armoured Reconnaissance Brigades.
‘Provision was made in peace for four Armoured Divisions, one of which is in Egypt. Of the remaining three, one should join the BEF in the spring of 1940, and another in autumn of 1940, and the third some six to nine months later. These divisions are most convincingly grouped together in an Armoured Corps as was the original intention when it was decided to divide the old ‘Mobile Division’ into smaller Armoured Divisions. Their role requires them to operate against hostile Armoured Divisions and may well take them far from the Infantry Tank formations.’
Hotblack argued that once his new command, 2nd Armoured Division arrived in the autumn of 1940, it should join 1st Armoured Division in the 1st Armoured Corps. As the 1st Army Tank Brigade were joined by the proposed two follow-on tank brigades of infantry tanks this would become the 1st Army Tank Division, consisting of three brigades. The Light Tanks of the two Reconnaissance Brigades would eventually be joined by a third brigade, preferably equipped with cruisers rather than light tanks, which would then be another Division of AFVs.
What Hotblack had seen when visiting with the French army was that their Divisions Légères Mécaniques (DLM), the nearest equivalent of the British Armoured Division, were grouped together in a Corps de Cavalerie. It was interesting that their heavy tanks in the Divisions Cuirassées de Reserve (DCr), like the British infantry tanks in the Army Tank Brigade, remained independent. He noted that ‘At HQs of Armies and higher formations there is an Infantry Tank Commander and a small staff whether tanks have been allotted to the formation or not. In addition, there are a number of HQs of ‘Tank Groups’ which can be allotted to any formation in the Army to command whatever tank units are made available to work with that formation. These ‘Tank Groups’ commanders and staffs are provided on the scale of one Group to two battalions though it will often occur that one Group may have three or more battalions while other Groups only have one.’ As such Hotblack argued that if the BEF didn’t have a higher organisation for tanks, then ‘it will complicate the work of cooperation with its allies in as much as the ally will find no organisation comparable with its own which to establish and maintain liaison.’
Gort and his staff had read the paper and weren’t keen on recommending to the War Office the formation of a British Armoured Group. With the opportunity to speak directly to Hotblack, and his successor Tilly together, Pownall told them that the General Staff had agreed to the AFV Branch being stiffened up with more staff and given control of all AFVs in the GHQ reserve. Hotblack recognised the compromise, he could make the argument to the War Office from his new role as commander of 2nd Armoured Division in due course. What he did want from Gort was that the GHQ AFV reserves needed a specific commander, just as the French did. The reason he explained was that Tilly, or whoever was made commander, needed to remain at GHQ at Wanquetin, not at Le Mans where he was currently based. The bulk of the reserve AFVs would normally be far away from GHQ, either training or conducting firing practice. An overall commander needed to be at the centre of decision making so that he would be in a position to make sure the AFVs were where they needed to be when they were needed. Gort agreed and welcomed Tilly to his staff.
It had taken a great deal of work and negotiations with the French, but the British had finally been given two training areas for tanks. The first was in the vicinity of Pacy-sur-Eure in Normandy (110 miles southwest of GHQ at Wenquetin (Arras)). The firing range was at Meuvaines on the Normandy coast just north of Bayeux, another 110 miles west of Pacy-sur-Eure. It became clear that the distance to Meuvaines meant that it was more practical to have a number of tanks from the normal reserves based there to save the first line vehicles from having to be moved in and out. It would be easier just to move the crews to the firing range and let them use the vehicles there for practice. The arrival of the Vulcan A12 and Cruiser tanks with the 2-pdr would complicate matters as these tanks were so rare that there weren’t enough to have a ‘normal reserve’.
Tilly said that he really wanted another training area in central France, preferably with uncultivated land so that the Cruisers when they arrived could really be put through their paces. If it was sufficiently remote then experiments with the new types of tanks, the Vickers Valiant and the proposed A20, could be done away from prying eyes. General Pownall smiled, there were a lot of things the BEF wanted from the French, he didn’t quite say ‘don’t hold your breath’ but Tilly was enlightened about how hard it had been to get the two current training areas.
While Tilly had only been in France for a few days he and Hotblack had visited these training areas, and when Gort asked him what he saw as his priorities, Tilly argued that the Royal Armoured Corps Base Depot, with its workshops, stores and AFV recovery sections should be based at Pacy-sur-Eure. The plan was that the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) intended to build its main Base Ordnance Depot (BOD) at Rennes in Brittany, 200 miles away from Pacy-sur-Eure. A second Base Ordnance Depot would be created at Le Harve, 75 miles northwest of Pacy-sur-Eure, but on the other side of the river Seine, which might cause problems with the railway bottleneck at Rouen. As the RAOC was responsible for the supply and repair for weapons, armoured vehicles and other military equipment and ammunition, having the AFV element of the RAOC centered on the primary RAC base made more sense, as otherwise tanks would have to be shifted back and forth from their forward positions to the RAC Base Depot by rail, then onwards to either Rennes or Le Harve for significant repairs, and those judged Beyond Local Repair, would then be shipped back to Britain.
Furthermore, Tilly also expressed the hope that if Pacy-sur-Eure was to be the main RAC depot, then due to its distance from the area that the BEF might be operating in, then the RAOC recovery sections should be under command of whoever was commanding the AFV reserves. Tilly was working with the thought that tanks would operate in a similar way to what had happed in the Great War. Then tanks were expected to take to the field intermittently for specific battles rather than be continually in the field for the entirety of the campaign. He said, “Over any considerable period of time the employment of Armoured Formations in active operations will be the exception rather than the rule. When employed, the duration of the period will be relatively short, and the losses relatively heavy, resulting in periods of very heavy and comparatively light commitments in maintenance and repair.” He went on, “The armoured formation will either be far behind the line training and re-fitting, or in reserve closer to it but still undisturbed and free from casualties, or else in action. It will never be ‘in the line’ in the sense that an infantry division is. Nor is it to be supposed that our armoured formations will be employed only on the British sector of the front. The creation of the necessary mass of tanks may send them far afield in the French sector.” The RAOC recovery sections would be needed to collected broken down or destroyed tanks, and then get them to a railhead where they could be shipped back to the BOD to be repaired and re-fitted.
Gort and Pownall said they were happy to pass on his thoughts the War Office for deliberation with the Principle Ordnance Mechanical Engineer (POME), after all if RAOC units were to come under the specific command of a Royal Armoured Corps chain of command it would be up to Major-General Albert Valon (POME) to make that decision. Gort declared that was enough business for the moment, and that the dinner to congratulate Hotblack on his promotion and wish him well would be getting cold.
NB, all this is as mostly OTL, the direct quotes are as they appear in A13 Mk I & Mk II Cruiser Tanks A Technical History by P M Knight, Black Prince Publications, 2019, from which much of this update is drawn. I have pushed a few things around timewise, though most it happened in December 1939 just not all in the one meeting.
