and, after all, in December 1926 Milne gave Fuller charge of the Experimental
Mechanised Force created precisely to test his theories. But in 1927 Maurice
wrote the foreword to a blistering rebuttal of Fuller by V. W. Germains, in which
he rejected the notion that the tank had revolutionized warfare and criticized
‘those who are attempting to create what they call a Science of War, and are
launching their theories, in accordance with modern tactical methods, under a
smoke cloud of verbiage’. 72
Maurice’s foreword was not a rejection of the tank, but a plea for balance in
adopting it, for the pre-eminence of combined-arms warfare, and also for the
recognition that a small professional mechanized force in the event of major war
could be no more than the ‘advanced guard of our national army’. 73 Inter-war
advocates of the tank everywhere, not just in Britain, faced two fundamental
problems. One was how to mechanize the whole of a mass army, given its cost.
Britain’s answer was to mechanize on a broad front but to keep the army small;
when conscription was reintroduced in 1939 and the army expanded, it had no
quick answer to procurement. The other general problem was the challenge
which fast tanks posed to the rest of the army if the infantry was not mechanized,
since the latter could not keep pace with the former. Britain’s answer in 1931–2 was
to divide cruiser tanks which were lightly armoured from heavily armoured
infantry tanks that were slow; it then abandoned the development of medium
tanks altogether. Dividing up the battlefield in this way meant that tactical
solutions replaced operational thought.
Combined-arms warfare, like balance more generally defined, was the casualty
of a debate polarized and politicized by Fuller in the 1920s and by Basil Liddell
Hart in the 1930s. Its outcome was an exaggerated view of the independent
capabilities of armour, sustained by a selective reading of the German invasion
of France in 1940 and fomented that winter by Lieutenant General Richard
O’Connor’s defeat of the Italian 10th Army in Libya in a genuinely lightning
campaign. The ease of this initial victory in North Africa encouraged the ‘Desert
Rats’, as the British 7th Armoured Division was dubbed, to neglect artillery–
armour cooperation, and to eschew the concentration of fire in favour of dis-
persal, with disastrous consequences against the integrated tactics practised by
the Afrika Korps in North Africa. The failures of British armour in the battles of
1941 and 1942 were in part due to poor decisions with regard to tank design, but
they were also a reflection of a wider intellectual and institutional failing. The
general staff had not managed to exploit the victories of the last ‘hundred days’ of
1918 to impose itself on an army which had a strong tradition of independence
among subordinate commands. An inheritance of the regimental system, it left
divisions in the 1930s and into the early years of the Second World War free to
train and prepare for battle according to the ideas of their own commanders, and
not according to a common body of thinking developed and sustained by the
general staff. 74
The British army lacked a doctrine. So much was design. Such an approach
should have accorded with the emphasis on the principles of war, the determina-
tion to avoid dogma, and the need for flexibility and adaptability demanded of an
116 The Evolution of Operational Art