Men, Ideas, and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903–1939 by J. P. Harris

Abstract

364 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Men, Ideas, and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903-1939. ByJ. P. Harris. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Pp. viii+ 342; illustrations, notes, bibliogra­ phy, index. £40.00 (hardcover); £14.99 (paper). Two British “military intellectuals” have pride ofplace as pioneer­ ing theorists of armored warfare, Major-GeneralJ. F. C. Fuller and Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart. These were reputations they created for themselves, not merely as propagandists for tanks but also as his­ torians of British armor. Through their own accounts, they influen­ tially presented the British military as stupidly resistant to the tank, right into World War II. This book is a comprehensive demolition both of the historical account they pioneered and of many of their own claims regarding the tank. First, J. P. Harris shows the extraordinary speed with which the tank was developed and put into production in Britain (well ahead of France, which developed tanks independently). The tank was strongly supported at the highest levels of the British high command and extensively used by 1918. During the war, the British army cre­ ated a Tank Corps to parallel the Royal Flying Corps, even though the tanks were exceedingly prone to breakdown, exhausted their crews very quickly, and, in open warfare in 1918, could not even keep up with the infantry. During and after the war, the British army had a very effective “tank lobby” that made Britain the leading tank power of the 1920s. Moreover, this lobby ensured that by the late 1930s and the early part ofWorld War II, Britain had tank formations that in Harris’s view overrated the tank’s power and underplayed the importance of supporting formations. This is not all: Harris shows that Fuller’s influence on tank tactics in World War I has been exaggerated and that his famous “Plan 1919” does not deserve its reputation. Furthermore, Fuller’s ideas were not rejected in the 1920s, and he was offered the command of the key experimental tank unit. Liddell Hart was by the late 1930s no longer a believer in the merits of tanks and argued against the commitment of British forces to the continent and hence against the buildup ofa large tank force. Harris also examines the frankly progressive thinking of many tank officers and shows that most interwar heads of the British army were sympathetic. In short, the book is a powerful defense of the much traduced British army against unrealistic, extremist critics. Harris’s account of the development of the tank is quite fascinat­ ing. He gives the clearest account yet and shows that the idea of the tank originated at the highest levels of the British state, within the prime minister’s secretariat, the navy ministry (headed by Winston Churchill), and in the Royal Naval Air Service. Harris demonstrates that Ernest Swinton, later professor of military history at Oxford, wrongly but influentially claimed to be the originator of the tank. It was actually a committee established by the navy ministry that de­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 365 manded an armored machine to cross trenches. The design of the first tanks was carried out for the committee by two engineers: Wil­ liam Tritton, the managing director of a Lincolnshire engineering firm, and Walter Wilson, a Cambridge-trained officer of the RNAS. Hovering around was a clear influence from H. G. Wells’s 1903 “The Land Ironclads.” Interestingly, too, right into the interwar years, tank enthusiasts made strong but misleading analogies between tanks and warships. Remarkably, then, the origins of the tank are to be found at the heart of the British elite, and not in industry or in the mind of an inventor. Indeed, this important book should be seen as a major contribution to the rewriting of the history of the relations of the British elite and technology in the twentieth century. Far from being antitechnological, as a whole school of technocratic and declinist historiography (which includes Fuller and Liddell Hart) has insisted, the British elite showed a notable enthusiasm for technology and indeed for the technological extremists such as Fuller and Liddell Hart themselves. Despite its narrow focus, the book is an...