“Boney” Fuller, chief staff officer of the British Tank Corps, admitted that “the war was brought to an end, not by fighting, but by famine and revolution.” It was the Germans who insisted that they had been defeated by the tank; the generals considered it honorable to be defeated by a new weapon, just as the infantrymen could flee from the tank with no guilty feelings. This moral reversal that the tank inflicted on the enemy provided a tactical value out of all proportion to its firepower, but as long as it crawled so slowly it would never be capable of more than pushing the enemy back.26 The tank in 1918 was not a war-winning weapon.
In the final months of the war there was much speculation about what might happen if tanks that could travel at 20 or 30 mph were delivered in large numbers to the army. Experts suggested that such a weapon would revolutionize tactics in a manner comparable with the introduction of armored foot soldiers at the battle of Plataea in 479 B. c. or the great victory won by heavy armored cavalry at Pavia in A. D. 774. It would alter the fundamentals of war, since thereafter no army could afford to leave its flanks exposed. Now, perhaps, the world was to embark on its third armored period.
J. F. C. Fuller’s ideas had come to maturity in March 1918, at a time when German infiltration tactics were threatening British Fifth Army rear areas. Divisional, Brigade, and Army HQs were “panic stricken”; chaos spread through the whole command system as it lost contact with the fighting troops.
The Germans failed to exploit this success, just as the Allies failed on several occasions before and afterward, yet Fuller’s ideas began with the German tactics. He realized that a fast tank was just the weapon with which to pursue such an assault. At this time, German Army HQs were, on average, 18 miles behind the line. Corps and divisional HQs were, closer. Using tanks and close air support, the Allies should have no great problem in attacking the HQs of the enemy’s commanding generals. Deprived of its “brain,” the enemy front line would collapse within “a matter of hours,” predicted Fuller.
Fuller’s base workshops had already demonstrated that it was possible to build a tank that could go at 30 mph and keep going for 100 miles. Now he wrote out his ideas in full and sent them back to England with an engineering officer who had worked out a spring suspension for such high-speed tanks. (Until this time tanks had no suspension.) In its final form. Fuller’s imaginative proposal was known as “Plan 1919.” Before the plan could be put into use, the Germans had asked for an armistice and the war was over.
World History
