interested foreigners. Unfortunately, the brigade, encouragingly renamed the Experi-
mental Armoured Force, was precipitately disbanded in 192 8. Despite being on the
cutting edge of this possible RMA in the 1920s, the British Army did not sustain its lead
in the 1930s. The main reasons were basically mundane: mechanization was expensive;
the Army had no high-priority mission that called for a powerful tank force; and it was
last in line among the three services for budgetary largesse. Furthermore, with European
continental warfare as the Army’s fourth, and lowest, priority, it was difficult to make
a case for an urgent need to develop mechanized fighting units. Also, controversy
persisted between the advocates of two radically different visions of armoured warfare;
indeed, of land warfare as a whole. On the one hand, there was the view that tanks should
be massed in all-tank, or at least very tank-heavy, formations. On the other hand, the
vision of armour as a component, albeit the leading component, of a combined-arms
combat team attracted many followers. The latter view undoubtedly was the sounder of
the two, and eventually generally was to be accepted by all belligerents, though often
more in principle than in practice.
With some difficulty, the French Army fitted mechanization into its existing military
doctrine of la bataille conduite, or the methodical battle. It agreed with the Germans,
and indeed with most of British opinion, that tanks were vulnerable to anti-tank weapons
unless they were protected by infantry. Mechanization was not permitted to effect
revolutionary change in French doctrine. Given that the French were perfectly content
with their defensive doctrine, that they had no intention of attempting bold offensives
and that their industrial base was incapable of producing large numbers of tanks rapidly,
this conservative approach was understandable.
The German Army, under both Weimar and the Nazis, also did not alter its military
doctrine noticeably in order to accommodate mechanization. It had no need to. The ideas
expressed in action in 191 8 , reinforced by the views of Chief of Staff Hans von Seeckt
(1920–6) and the conclusions of the rigorous studies conducted by fifty-seven com-
mittees in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, were well suited to an army with a
large mechanized element. Contrary to legend, the Nazis did not invent a new way of war
called Blitzkrieg. That attention-getting concept was the invention of a journalist, though
the Germans would come to believe that their victories from 1939 until the late autumn
of 1941 were attributable to their unique mastery of the secrets of modern warfare.
German military doctrine evolved in detail from World War I to World War II, but it
did not deviate from a fundamental commitment to a manoeuvrist style. The arrival of
tanks and half-tracked infantry carriers simply enabled the elite mechanized elements
of the German forces to manoeuvre much more rapidly than previously. What the
Germans accomplished against the French and British armies in May and June 1940 did
not differ significantly from their intentions and style in 191 8. The latter battles witnessed
infiltration tactics effected by some genuinely mobile units. The successes of Blitzkrieg
were highly contextual. In common with the French, albeit following experiments with
tank-heavy formations, the Germans decided that their new panzer divisions – the first
three of which were activated in 1935 – had to contain all arms, not only tanks. The
experience of war was to prove the wisdom of that judgement.
For a while, at least, the Red Army, assisted technically and doctrinally by Germany’s
illicit experiments in Russia under Weimar, had the boldest doctrine for the offensive
exploitation of the mechanization RMA. Soviet theorists developed the idea of ‘deep
The mechanization of war 117