*clips shaby round the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper*
Shoot the antiloop.
*clips shaby round the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper*
Really? I was under the impression that the British army, even with the Experimental Mechanized Force having been wound up, by the start of the war was pretty much the only fully mechanized army in the world, even if it was just as say lorried infantry as opposed to APCs/IFVs as we'd think of nowadays. Ironically for all their fame for Blitzkrieg the Germans still had their infantry mostly march everywhere and use horses for towing their guns/logistics. Reminds me of this scene (possibly NSFW) from Band of Brothers. They did however have the tactics down pat right from the start.The military establishment was in general against mechanization. They wanted to remain noble knights, skilled artists and gentlemen to whom "war" meant horses, heroic missions in the colonies and Rudyard Kipling. To become mechanics in a tank was a nightmare for them. You could just study how almost all militaries resisted introducing the machinegun until WW1 with the same arguments.
Indeed, currently in the middle of reading Peter Beale's Death By Design: British Tank Development in the Second World War and on the funding front he says that of what defence spending there was the funding priorities mostly ran in order of the Royal Navy for defence of the colonies overseas and maintenance of trade, the Royal Air Force for hitting the enemy via Bomber Command and protecting the UK with Fighter Command, and then the Army - and within that the order of priorities were home defence, defending the colonies/Empire and Suez Canal and then what they called a Continental Force for intervening in Europe. Since if the UK was allied with countries like France they would obviously be expected to support them in any fighting, there was however a serious school of thought that it was better to leave ground warfare to them and instead deploy the RAF who would make a Continental Force redundant.Well the UK started mechanization in 1928 and had completed it by 39 for all but the Palestine based regiments.
The issue would be money vs other demands, like chain home , modern artillery, spitfires, carriers, more troops, motorisation generally.