Canadian Armored Cars 1914-1916
On Armor (1.3)
Encouraged by Commander Sampson’s exploits, the Royal Navy formed, in the spring of 1915, eighteen armored car squadrons. By the time that these units were ready for action, however, trench warfare had set in on the Western Front. As a result, many suffered disbandment shortly after formation.
The squadrons that survived the Admiralty’s axe saw service in many different parts of the world. Some chased German guerrillas in East Africa. Two took part in the suppression of a tribal revolt in Italian-held Libya. Three, like the Belgian armored car battalion, operated in support of the Russian Army. Because of this diaspora, three years would pass in which the only armored cars serving with British Empire forces in France and Flanders were the ones provided by the Dominion of Canada.
Like their naval counterparts, the armored car units of the Canadian Expeditionary Force owed their existence to enthusiastic amateurs, successful men who used their own wealth, connections, and energy to do what bureaucracies could not, or would not, do. In Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal energetic businessmen recruited men, bought Colt machine guns, and engaged American automobile makers to design and build a variety of armored cars and trucks.
Atop this flurry of self-directed activity stood Samuel Hughes, a brash politician with a rather romantic view of what the Canadian way of war ought to be. Though this Minister of Militia declined to reduce his views to a manifesto, he often sang the praises of citizen-soldiers who, thanks to lessons learned on the prairie, had learned how to shoot and ride well before they put on their uniforms. Armored cars, which might provide formations of these mounted riflemen with mobile artillery, fit in nicely with this vision.
In September of 1914, this confluence of ideas and capabilities gave birth to the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade. This unit, which employed the organizational nomenclature of the Royal Artillery, consisted of two ‘batteries’, each of which was divided into two two-truck ‘sections’. (While the men of each crew enjoyed the option of firing their weapons from their vehicle they were also trained to employ them in the manner of infantry machine guns, that is, from tripods placed on the ground.)
Arriving on the Western Front soon after the onset of trench warfare, the Automobile Machine Gun Brigade saw much service in the dismounted mode. Indeed, while serving in the manner of an ordinary machine gun unit, it helped to develop the machine gun barrages that would play a central role in British machine gun tactics in the second half of the First World War. Nonetheless, neither the leadership of the Brigade nor the authorities charged with the organization of the Canadian Expeditionary Force forgot the raison d'être of the organization. Thus, in the summer of 1916, when they added a three additional batteries to the (recently renamed) Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade, they provided each with four armored machine gun carriers of the type in use with the two older batteries of the unit.
Sources:
British armored cars would return to the Western Front in April of 1918, when the 17th Battalion of the Tank Corps took delivery of sixteen Austin armored cars that had originally been built for the Russian Army. J.F.C. Fuller Tanks in the Great War, 1914-1918 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920) page 289.
For more on the ideas of Samuel Hughes, see Bill Rawling Surviving Trench Warfare, Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914-1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).
For discussions of the development of the machine gun barrage, see Graham Seaton Hutchinson Machine Guns: Their History and Tactical Employment (London:Â MacMillan, 1938); Paddy Griffith Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of the Attack 1916-1918 (New Haven:Â Yale University Press, 1994); and John F. Wallace Dragons of Steel: Canadian Armour in Two World Wars (Burnstown, Ontario: General Store Publishing House, 1995).
For more on the organization and equipment of Canadian armored car units in the First World War, see Per Finsted The Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade, Part 1, Part 2, and Supplement.
Hi Bruce, I work for the Vickers MG Collection & Research Association in the UK. This is a great article and we have some interesting bits and pieces on the Autocar in the collection that we'd be happy to share with you? You can contact me at matty@vickersmg.org Regards Matt.
The lore of the Emma Gees has seen revival in the past ten years as the Infantry Corps reinvested in its organic combat support capabilities. Here is Part 1 of a two part article that routinely makes the rounds to young officers and NCOs.
http://www.regimentalrogue.com/emmagees/emmagees1.htm