334 Chapter Nine
of what could be accomplished along these lines. Early in the war it
occurred to several persons that a tracked, armored vehicle might be
able to cross enemy trenches with impunity. If equipped with suitable
guns, such a vehicle could destroy enemy machine guns and open the
path for a general breakthrough. Both British and French authorities
acted on this idea. On the British side continuity with naval experi
ence of command technology was assured by the fact that the Bureau
of Naval Design took responsibility for the early development of
“land cruisers,” as tanks initially were called.
When British tanks first went into battle during the closing weeks of
the Somme offensive (August 1916) mechanical failures and imperfect
coordination with infantry and artillery made the new weapons in
effective. Soon afterwards, the French suffered similar disap
pointments. Yet a handful of technically minded officers clung to a
vision of what yet might be; and by 1917 improved designs (and
training) won real if limited successes. When the Allies’ final counter
offensives began in June 1918, a new generation of tanks assisted the
infantry in battle all along the line. Indeed, the British High Com
mand went so far as tentatively to approve a plan for 1919 which
would have inaugurated the tactics of Blitzkrieg twenty years before
the Germans first actually used tank columns in Poland to penetrate
deep in the enemy rear and disrupt command and supply systems.^51
The remarkable feature of the “Plan 1919” was that its feasibility
depended on a weapon that did not exist when the plan was drawn up.
New tanks, with improved speed, maneuverability, and range were
required for the dash toward the enemy rear which the plan con
templated. Thus, instead of remaining content with the capabilities of
existing weapons, as military planners had done before, “Plan 1919”
undertook to shape the future by deliberately altering existing
technology to make it fit the needs of the plan. The test of action
never came of course, and large-scale operations based on improved
capabilities of armored vehicles waited until 1939– But by 1918 it
was clear that command technology had begun to transform land war
fare as pervasively as it had transformed naval warfare in the prewar
decades.
Before 1914 the world’s leading armies had unanimously resisted
rapid, disorganizing technical change. As long as all movement beyond
- Basil Lidell Hart, The Tanks: History of the Royal Tank Regiment and its Predeces
sors, 2 vols. (London, 1959) is a semiofficial British account. Cf. also J. F. C. Fuller,
Tanks in the Great War. 1914–1918 (London, 1920); and for Plan 1919, R. M. F.
Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, 1914–1918, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1936), p. 547.
