Fire-Power

The British Army Weapons & Theories of War 1904–1945

Shelford Bidwell, Dominick Graham

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781844152162
• eBook ISBN: 9781473814233
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The great siege of Gibraltar was the longest recorded in the annals of the British army. Between 1779 and 1783 a small British force defended the Rock against the Spanish and the French who were determined take this strategically vital point guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean. The tenacity and endurance shown by the attackers and defenders alike, and the sheer ingenuity of the siege operations mounted by both sides, make the episode an epic of military history, and the story gives us a fascinating insight into the realities of siege warfare. In this, the first full study of the siege for over 40 years, James Falkner draws on a wide range of contemporary sources to tell the exciting tale of a huge and complex operation.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Prologue

Book I The Fire-Tactics of the Old Army: 1904–1914

1 The Artillery as an Accessory

2 The Tactics of Separate Tables

3 The Still and Mental Parts

Book II One Great and Continuous Engagement: 1914–1918

4 Prologue and Retrospect

5 Many a Doubtful Battle

6 Ubique

7 Queen of the Battlefield?

8 A Technical Knock Out

Book III The Years Between the Wars: 1919–1939

9 The Swingletree Factor

10 Policies, Theories and Weapons

11 A Fairly New Model Army

Book IV The Second Round: 1939–1945

12 Blitzkrieg

13 The Sand Model

14 A Cybernetic Solution – I: The Artillery on the Ground

15 A Cybernetic Solution – II: The Artillery of the Air

Interlude. Fire-plan statistics: 1940–45

16 Ends and Means

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Photographs

1 General Sir Noel Birch (Royal Artillery Institution)

2 Major-General Sir Herbert Uniacke (Royal Artillery Institution)

3 Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Holland (Royal Artillery Institution)

4 Major-General C. E. D. Budworth (Royal Artillery Institution)

5 18-pounder stuck in the mud, 1917 (Imperial War Museum)

6 18-pounder in action, March 1918 (Imperial War Museum)

7 Three-man portable ‘wireless’ station (Imperial War Museum)

8 British Mark V tanks and Canadian infantry (Imperial War Museum)

9 Self-propelled field/AA 18-pounder ‘Birch’ gun (Royal Artillery Institution)

10 Early experiments in mechanised, tracked draught (Royal Artillery Institution)

11 General Sir John Woodall (Kindly lent by the subject)

12 Major-General J. H. Parham (Mrs J. H. Parham)

13 General Sir Brian Horrocks (Kindly lent by the subject)

14 Air Chief Marshal Sir Harry Broadhurst (Kindly lent by the subject)

15 Model 68R portable radio (Imperial War Museum)

16 Vickers .303-inch medium machine-gun (Imperial War Museum)

17 The 25-pounder Mark I with turntable platform

18 The 5.5-inch gun (Imperial War Museum)

19 Hurricane ‘tank-busters’ of the Desert Air Force (Imperial War Museum)

20 HMS Warspite bombarding the Normandy coastal defences (Imperial War Museum)

Diagrams

1 Direct and indirect fire

2 Why the machine-gun is deadly

3 The battle of Neuve Chapelle, March 1915

4 Loos, 1915. The stages of the battle

5 The situation on the Western Front, June 1916

6 Schematic example of barrage

7 Shrapnel

8 The Somme, 1916

9 The Flanders Campaign

10 Example of grid reference

11 Eighth Army defence layout, May 1942

12 Panzer tactics in the desert

13 ASSU communication diagram

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge our gratitude to all those who gave us advice, lent us papers and photographs, answered many questions and read various chapters in typescript, and whose assistance has been invaluable: Correlli Barnett, Brian Bond, Air Chief Marshal Sir Harry Broadhurst, Major-General W. D. E. Brown, Martin Blumenson, Air Vice-Marshal S. Bufton, Lieutenant-Colonel C. E. Carrington, Field Marshal the Lord Carver, Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Eastwood, Major-General N. L. Foster, Major-General J. D. Frost, Brigadier P. C. Graves-Morris,\Group-Captain E. B.\Haslam, Brigadier P. H. C. Hayward, Colonel S. M. W. Hickey, Ian V. Hogg, Colonel P. Hordern, Richard Holmes, John Keegan, Ronald Lewin, Major Kenneth Macksey, Lieutenant-Colonel J. Marriott, Major-General J. M. McNeill, J. R. S. Peploe, Mrs Parham, Peter Simkin, Keith Simpson, Major-General E. K. G. Sixsmith, Roderick Suddaby, T. H. E. Travers, John Terraine, Lieutenant-Colonel P. S. Turner, P. H. Vigor, Brent Wilson and Lieutenant-General Sir John Woodall.

We are also indebted to the librarians of the Bodleian Library; the library of Churchill College, Cambridge; the Imperial War Museum; the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, in King’s College London; the Ministry of Defence (Army); the Staff College, Camberley; the Royal Armoured Corps Museum, Bovington; the Royal Engineers Institute; the Royal Signals Institution and the Royal United Services Institution for Defence Studies.

Miss B. D. Wood, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Artillery Institution, has given us unflagging and omniscient support throughout our researches. Carole Hines, Phyllis Miller and Mrs Jean Walter copied our often chaotic and much amended typescripts with unerring accuracy.

Lastly but first in other respects, our wives who cherished us while we wrote and chapters crossed and recrossed the Atlantic for mutual comment, and who listened patiently and critically to us while we read them aloud. Valerie Graham drew the maps.

In making these acknowledgements we must add that all the opinions expressed and any errors of fact are ours alone.

Shelford Bidwell
Dominick Graham

List of Abbreviations

AACC	Army Air Control Centre
AASC	Army Air Support Control
ACT	Air Contact Team
ADC	Aide de Camp to a general officer
AG	Adjutant General
AGRA	Army Group, Royal Artillery
ALO	Air Liaison Officer
ASSU	Air Support Signals Unit
BAFF	British Air Forces in France
BEF	British Expeditionary Force
BGS	Brigadier General Staff (to a corps commander)
BGS (I)	Brigadier General Staff responsible for Intelligence
BGS (Ops)	Brigadier General Staff responsible for operations at GHQ
Cab	Cabinet Office paper at the PRO
CID	Committee of Imperial Defence
CIGS	Chief of the Imperial General Staff
C-in-C	Commander-in-Chief
CRA	Commander Royal Artillery
DMT	Director of Military Training
DSD	Director of Staff Duties
FAC	Forward Air Controller
FAT	Field Artillery Training (manual)
FCP	Forward Control Post
FOO	Forward Observation Officer (artillery)
GHQ	General Headquarters
GOC	General Officer Commanding
GOCRA	General Officer (Royal Artillery) at Corps
	CCRA (term used in the Second World War)
	CRA brigadier commanding artillery of a division
	MGRA major-general advising the C-in-C at GHQ or the GOC at Army headquarters
GSO	General Staff Officer (category 1 etc)
HE	High explosive
I	Intelligence (branch)
IWM	Imperial War Museum
LHC	Liddeil Hart Centre for Historical Research, the Library, King’s College, London
MGGS	Major-General General Staff (to an Army Commander)
MGO	Master-General of the Ordnance
m.v.	Muzzle velocity
OH	The Official History of the Great War: military operations in France and Belgium
Ops	Operations
PRO	Public Record Office
p.s.c.	Passed staff college
QF	Quick-firing
QMG	Quartermaster-General
RA	Royal Artillery
RAF	Royal Air Force
RAJ	Journal of the Royal Artillery
RE	Royal Engineers
RFA	Royal Field Artillery
RFC	Royal Flying Corps
RGA	Royal Garrison Artillery
RHA	Royal Horse Artillery
RUSI	Journal of the Royal United Services Institute
SD	Staff Duties (branch of general staff)
SLE	Short Lee Enfield
TA	Territorial Army
TF	Territorial Force
WO	War Office

Prologue

During the first two hundred years of its existence the British Army was chiefly engaged in small wars in remote territories. Its rôle was to acquire an overseas empire and then police it, varied from time to time by expeditions to Europe, where its contingents formed part of Allied armies. Britain was never deeply involved on land, the forces concerned were small and their casualties low, for her position as a sea-power permitted her to play as great or as small a part in a land war as she chose. This privilege ended in 1914, when she sent an expeditionary force to France on the same principle and in the same hope, only to be drawn inexorably into making a major effort in the bloodiest and most destructive war in her history.

General Sir John French led abroad a force consisting of seven divisions, whose heavy artillery consisted of twenty-four 5-inch guns. In 1918 General Sir Douglas Haig could dispose of over sixty divisions supported by six and a half thousand field pieces from three to eighteen inches in calibre. In addition he had a new form of artillery in the shape of armoured motorised gun-platforms, the ‘tanks’, and also an air force able to intervene with machine-gun fire and bombs in the land battle. Both these innovations were to dominate future wars.

With these resources Haig was able to play a leading rôle in ending the war. In ninety-five electrifying days from 8 August to 11 November 1918, the British Army in France fought nine great battles, equal to or exceeding any of its operations of the Second World War, capturing as many guns and prisoners as the French, Americans and Belgians put together. It was not these victories, however, that became imprinted on the national consciousness, but the terrible cost of the battles of attrition that preceded them.

The British sacrifice had indeed been great and grievous, but they were by no means the principal sufferers. Their losses were exceeded by those of the Germans and Austrians, who fought on two fronts, the Russians and the French. There is no need to search far for the cause of this slaughter. The generals of that war were men whose military outlook had been formed in the nineteenth century and they were faced with the weapon technology of the twentieth. Modern agriculture provided a surplus of food to put in the mouths of unproductive soldiers, modern medicine preserved the unhygienic masses of soldiery from decimation by epidemic disease, and modern transportation enabled millions of men to be concentrated in the theatre of war. Then modern science and engineering enabled factories to turn out modern weapons to kill them in equally large numbers.

There had been portents. It had been discerned that the killing power of modern weapons would lead to a revival on a large scale of the use of obstacles and entrenchments, and that attacks in the old fashion by means of gunpowder and the arme blanche, would be difficult if not impossible. (Not that this was the sole cause of casualties on the horrific scale that were to be inflicted in both World Wars. There was ample room for manoeuvre in the vast spaces of Russia, but even there, where divisions by the hundred grappled with each other, using tanks by the thousand and guns by the tens of thousands, there were losses beside which even those of the earlier war paled.) The American Civil War was the first to presage the bloody nature of future mass warfare. In South Africa Boer marksmen showed the damage rifle-fire could inflict on infantry and that it could even silence the artillery. It was clear that machine-guns could multiply this effect many times. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 emphasised the following points: the importance of machine-guns and heavy artillery; that artillery had to adopt the new technique of indirect fire from covered positions instead of assembling long lines of guns wheel to wheel in the open; the utility of hand grenades and mortars and the importance of signal communications. It was one thing, however, to read the omens correctly, but quite another to change the ideas of men so traditionally conservative as soldiers.

The British, in fact, made good use of their painful lessons in South Africa. It had not been their equipment that had been mainly at fault. The infantry, on whom British generals had always relied, could not shoot straight, its fire discipline was rotten, and its old fashioned reliance on drill precluded the use of field-craft and battle-craft. This was all put right, and the accuracy and intensity of the rifle-fire of the ‘Old Contemptibles’ of 1914 became a legend, but what was easy to instil into long-service volunteers after much careful training was not possible for the mass armies raised after the outbreak of war. In 1916 a battalion commander, speaking of his New Army soldiers during the battle of the Somme, asserted that they were less effective than the arch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents