Armored Cars in 1914

On Armor (1.1)

Civilian automobiles serving with British forces in France or Flanders in 1914 (Library of Congress)

Many nations claim the honor of having invented the armored fighting vehicle.  Argentines, Australians, Austrians, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians, and Russians can all point to drawings, patent applications, and, in a few cases, full-scale prototypes, of armed and armored motor vehicles that date from the early years of the last century.  Indeed, the sheer volume of this evidence suggests that preventing the creation of some sort of tank or armored car in the first two decades of the twentieth century would have required the elimination of every backyard tinkerer, writer of fantastic fiction, and dime-store DaVinci on the planet.

The simultaneous invention of so many armored fighting vehicles owed much to the widespread availability of the necessary components. Motor vehicles of various types, ranging from tiny motorbikes to giant tractors, could be found in various corners of the civilian world. The large armament concerns devoted a great deal of talent and treasure to the production armored plate, which grew lighter and stronger with each passing year. These same ‘merchants of death’ also offered for sale many weapons, whether rifle-caliber machine guns or small-bore cannons, that were light enough to be carried in a motor vehicle and, at the same time, powerful enough to be of use. (Many of these had been developed for use aboard naval vessels. Others had been optimized for use in fortresses or service on imperial frontiers.)

In the first decade of the twentieth century, British soldiers serving in South Africa, French soldiers in Morocco, and Russian soldiers in Manchuria bolted armor onto, and fitted weapons upon, a variety of cars and trucks. In 1904, the Österreichische Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, a firm which would soon adopt the handier name of Austro-Daimler, built a prototype of an armored car that its technical director, Paul Daimler, had designed from the ground up. This vehicle made use of two features - all-wheel drive and a full-rotating turret - that gave it a considerable edge over home-brewed armored fighting vehicles. By 1908, three of the great arms makers of Europe - Vickers, Schneider, and Ehrhardt - had all begun to offer purpose-built armored cars of their own.

In the weeks that followed the outbreak of the First World War, the concept of the armed and armored motor vehicle was so well established that, without any sort of central direction, enterprising individuals throughout the world fitted armored plate, machine guns, and light cannon to a wide variety of cargo trucks and touring cars. Many of these were sailors, who knew where to find bits of armored plate and weapons originally acquired for service on naval vessels of the smaller sort.

The outbreak of war found Lieutenant de Vaisseau M.F.E. Destremau of the French Navy in command of the La Zelée, a wooden coast defense vessel protecting the French coaling station at Papeete on Tahiti.  News of the possible approach of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau convinced Destremau that his little ship could do little to keep the two German cruisers from capturing the 7,000 tons of naval-grade coal he had been charged with protecting.  He therefore took six obsolescent 37mm cannon off of his ship and mounted them on six Ford trucks.  (Of a model approved in 1885, these guns fired shells filled with black powder.)  Crewed with sailors, Marines, and a hastily inducted Polynesian volunteer, these provided a reaction force capable of dealing with the sort of landing parties the German cruisers might send ashore, at least until the 160 or so Marines and sailors of his provisional rifle company he had also formed could join the fray.

As Lieutenant Destremau had feared, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau did, in fact, find their way to Tahiti.  Firing at a range of 6,000 meters, they shelled the fort and harbor at Papeete, sinking La Zelée.  The French responded with fire from the 65mm guns Lieutenant Destremau had taken off of his ship and installed on shore.  These, however, proved less of a deterrent to the well-armored German cruisers than the prospect of hitting maritime mines.  And so, without putting the six improvised autos-canons to the test, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau continued their cruise, moving about the Pacific without the aid of Tahitian coal.

While the autos-canons of Tahiti were able to fulfill their mission without fighting, the same cannot be said for most of the armed cars and trucks that were assembled in France, Belgium and Great Britain during the first three months of World War I.  These tended to find their way to the front within days – and sometimes hours – of being put together. (In many cases, these vehicles were operated by the same men who had carried out the cutting, fitting, welding, and riveting required to turn them into weapons of war.)

In the English-speaking world, the most famous of the quasi-guerillas who took part in this war-within-a-war was Charles Rumney Samson, an Englishman who might well be described as the most inadvertent (as well as least known) of the pioneers of modern armored warfare.  In the late summer of 1914, Commander Samson found himself in command of a squadron of the Royal Naval Air Service attached itself to the French garrison of Dunkirk.  With far too few aircraft to do what he thought the situation demanded, Samson took to roaming around the French and Belgian countryside in the privately-owned touring cars that some of his officers had, in the grand British tradition of amateur officership, taken to war.

Samson's first patrol had consisted of nine men, two touring cars, one machine gun.  Within a month, most of the touring cars associated with Samson's squadron had been armed and some, according to the design of Samson's younger brother, had been armored.  These were soon joined by additional touring cars that had been modified for martial purposes prior to leaving the British Isles.

Most of the work of applying armored plate seems to have been carried out in workshops belonging to the Royal Navy.  In at least one case, however, the job of armoring a civilian motor car destined to join Samson's force had been done by a Peer of the Realm in his local garage.  To round out the force, a handful of trucks were converted into rudimentary ‘infantry fighting vehicles’.  So that the Marines carried in these trucks might be able to fire their rifles from the cargo beds in which they rode, the metal workers cut loopholes into the metal sides of those trucks.

The vehicles modified in Great Britain sported armor made of hardened steel.  Those that had started the campaign with Samson's squadron, however, had been modified in Dunkirk builders of commercial ships, who had been obliged to make do with boiler plate. What was worse, the metal plates affixed to one car, which had been attached by mechanics working in a local garage, displayed a distressing tendency to fall off while the vehicle was in motion.

Notwithstanding these teething problems, Samson's private army proved successful.  At a time when neither the Germans lacked a clear sense of what was going on the region between Dunkirk and Antwerp, aggressive patrolling by Samson's armored cars did much to prevent the German cavalry divisions from clarifying the situation.  With Belgian postal employees using the still intact telephone network to report on German movements, Samson was able to drive deeply into German held territory.  The effect this had on the peace of mind of German commanders who were already nervous about their position as guardians of the long, overextended right flank of the German army in the West, can only be imagined.

Closer to the base at Dunkirk, Samson's armored vehicles assisted French, British, Belgian detachments in contact with the Germans.  In these comparatively small affairs, rarely involving more than a thousand combatants on either side, the action of a few armored cars often tipped the scales in favor of the Allies.  This sometimes took the form of "stiffening" the muscle-powered units.  (As the Allied troops involved in these combats - to include most of the Marines under Samson's command - tended to be reservists who had been deemed too old, or too poorly trained, to fight on other fronts, stiffening was not a mission to be scoffed at.)  At other times, the armored cars made full use of their mobility and machine guns to exploit open flanks, cover retreats, or race the Germans to a piece of important terrain.

Commander Sampson’s unit of improvised armored cars, trucks, and small-caliber naval guns had many counterparts in the French forces.  Operating mostly as groups of two, three, or four – but sometimes in units that contained as many as thirteen vehicles – the French autos-canons and autos-mitrailleuses (as vehicles carrying machineguns were called) were most active in support of French cavalry formations.  Though already provided with a small number of 75mm field pieces and machineguns carried in horse-drawn carriages, the French cavalry, like its German counterpart, suffered greatly from a dearth of firepower.  (In 1914, an infantry division could put as many rifles, machine guns, and field pieces as four cavalry divisions.) It is thus not surprising that, in addition to welcoming such armored cars that came their way, French cavalry commanders managed to build a few of their own.

Considerable as it was, the enthusiasm for armored cars within French cavalry formations paled in comparison to that of the Military Governor of Paris, General Joseph Simon Gallieni.  Brought back from retirement to serve in what had originally been seen as a rear-area command, Gallieni found, in the first week of September, 1914, that the fortunes of war had brought the front to his neighborhood.  His most famous reaction to this unexpected event was the requisitioning of Paris taxi cabs to move troops and supplies to the battlefields of the Battle of the Marne.  Less well known is his program to build more than a hundred autos-mitrailleuses and autos-canons, initially to equip the raiding parties he was in the habit of sending into the disputed territory northeast of Paris and then for the French Army as a whole.  Making the most of his location in the seat of government, Gallieni convinced the French naval authorities to provide 37mm naval cannon and the Ministry of War to provide machineguns for his vehicles.

Some of the first armored cars produced under Gallieni’s program ended up in the Belgian Bataillon des Autos-Canons Mitrailleuses.  This unit, with ten armored combat vehicles, nine trucks and cars providing various logistical services, a hundred bicycles, and twelve motorcycles, began its short tour of active service in the West by cooperating with Belgian armored trains. Later, it worked in concert with Groupes d’Autos-Canons, each of twelve gun-carrying vehicles and four unarmed ‘tenders’.  (As might be expected from the use of naval terminology for the logistical vehicles, the personnel of these companies came from the French Navy.)

Before Gallieni’s newly minted autos-canons and autos-mitrailleuses could see much action, the conditions that had permitted the employment of road-bound motor vehicles ceased to exist.  By the middle of October, 1914, the great open areas in northern France and western Belgium had filled with troops.  The great stalemate that was the Western Front for most of the next four years had begun.  Commander Sampson’s organization returned to England, where it formed the core of an impressive, but short lived, Royal Navy Armoured Car Division.   The Belgian and French autos-canons and autos-mitrailleuses withdrew behind the lines, there to prepare to exploit the the war of grand maneuvers that many of the military leaders of the time expected to resume the following spring.

Note: In 2004, the worst book I ever submitted for publication rolled of the press. Called On Armor, it combined solid research and a handful of fresh ideas with hasty composition and abysmal editing. The series that begins with this post will consist of sections of this ill-favored work that I have rewritten, fact-checked, and, most of all, scrubbed for painfully obvious errors.

Sources:

Walther Albrecht Gunther Burstyn und die Entwickelung der Panzerwaffe [Gunther Burstyn and the Development of the Tank Arm] (Osnabrück:  Biblioverlag, 1973) pages 46 and 47

Alain Gougaud L’Aube de la Gloire, Les Autos-Mitrailleuses et les Chars Français Pendant la Grande Guerre [Dawn of Glory: French Armored Cars and Tanks during the Great War] (Issy les Moulineaux: Société OCEBUR, circa 1987) pages 36-53

B. H. Liddell Hart The Tanks (London: Cassell, 1959) Volume I, page 13

Charles Rumney Samson Fights and Flights (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1930) pages 6-33

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