The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 13

THE SHIPS THAT WALKED

It feels weird walking through the wood this afternoon—and in a way that is because it is so easy. There is nothing to stop me. I just lift the wire loop on a makeshift gate and I am strolling through the haunted grove.

The birds are in good voice, the trees are pushing out their tender leaves. There isn’t a soul in sight. I am here at Ploegsteert wood in southern Belgium, not far from the French border; and as I meander over the mossy forest floor I think of how things might have looked a hundred years ago.

This wood was once famous in Britain. Almost every newspaper reader would have known the name—or rather the name the soldiers gave it. This was Plugstreet, on the Western Front. A century ago the trees were shot to stumps, the branches shredded, the birds silent, the soil contaminated with explosive and other toxins. This was where Lieutenant Colonel Churchill came out on his nocturnal prowlings, terrifying the rest of the patrol by making a noise like a ‘baby elephant’. I can see the remains of the trenches they might have snuck through on their way to the front, now full of black and slimy water. They would have tiptoed to the edge of the mutilated wood, and then on some nights their commanding officer would have gone on—sometimes alone—to no man’s land, and the very edge of the German lines.

That’s no man’s land, there. I can work out from my map where it was—an absurdly narrow strip running north–south through the fields. On one side there are some of those famous Belgian Blanc Bleu cows, with the dikbil, the double buttock that makes for the finest steaks. The far field is ploughed, a heavy brown corduroy that has been sown with whatever Brussels has decided pays the most this year. Between them is a little metalled track that leads—according to my map—to the German lines. I decide to get back in the old Toyota.

It is time to perform a military manoeuvre, a feat that it took Churchill and the British army five terrible years to achieve. I am going to do it in not much more than a minute. I fire up the people carrier. I engage drive. A quick swig of Stella for the nerves—and we’re trundling slowly forward.

First I am bouncing over some ruts; now we’re on the tarmac. I must be doing 15 miles an hour, now 20, 25. I am going over the trenches and the craters; I am passing irresistibly through the barbed wire. The shells, the bullets—nothing can stop the lunging Toyota and its 2.49-litre power plant.

On either side of the lines, weary and broken men are peering from their muddy foxholes and staring at each other with a wild surmise, then breaking into whoops. And then we have done it, almost before you can register the achievement. I have reached the German lines; and as they struggle to react I am through them—slicing effortlessly past the reserve lines and the hospital tents, and the terrified Germans are grabbing their rifles in panic and stampeding from the latrines.

I give a little toot of triumph, and quite unmolested I execute a U-turn. I leave the Kaiser’s army and drive back from east to west, the same 500 pathetic yards, towards Ploegsteert wood. On the way back I stop somewhere in the middle. I park on the verge and go out into the ploughed field. This is the bit where no human being could venture and survive.

Here’s why. There’s one here, and here, and here. Every ploughing season thousands of fragments of ancient and rusty metal make their way to the surface from the past.

This one looks like a bit of fuse, a large knob that is corroded into a cancer of iron and rust and still amazingly heavy. This could be some shell casing, and some more here. I don’t know what they are but they eloquently explain why neither side could win. There is no cover beyond the wood, just these wide fields under open Flemish sky.

No matter how much pluck or spunk or ‘gallantry’ they showed, the young men were cut to pieces every time. They happened to be here at a moment of asymmetry in the evolution of warfare, when mankind had lately invented metal projectiles that could penetrate human flesh, from a distance, with huge velocity and explosive power. No one had yet come up with a defence. For three awful years the position was unchanged.

You can imagine Churchill’s frustration as he saw his men dying—with not an inch of territory to show for it. As soon as he got here he tried to find out what had happened to his plan.

In November 1915 he wrote a long memo to the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, in which he unburdened himself of all sorts of tactical proposals. Some of his ideas sound frankly a bit whacko. He wanted men to be issued with special shields, made of steel or composite, that reached from the helmet to the hips. He proposed that they should form up on the edge of the trench, lock shields, and march forwards, fifteen abreast. He seemed unaware that he was asking twentieth-century soldiers to advance towards machine guns in a defensive posture that was well known to Greek hoplites.

He suggested that soldiers be equipped with oxyacetylene torches—of a kind he had seen cutting through sheet metal in the docks—in order to make their way through the barbed wire. It was not clear what he thought would happen if the gas tank was hit by a bullet. But his main interest was in what he described as a new type of vehicle. He said they were ‘moveable machine gun cupolas as well as wire smashers’, and that they were capable of ‘traversing any ordinary obstacle, ditch, breastwork or trench’. There were about seventy of such experimental vehicles already being built, he informed General French.

Sir John should go and see them, he urged. ‘The spectacle of such a machine cutting wire entanglements has only to be witnessed to carry conviction. It resembles the reaping operations of a self-binder’—by which he means a primitive version of what we would now call a combine harvester.

Alas, Sir John never had the chance to inspect this mutant farm machinery. He was sacked by Asquith, who was beginning to panic, not surprisingly, at the lack of progress being made under his leadership. So in January 1916 Churchill tried again.

He took his paper—with its proposal for a new type of armoured combine harvester—to French’s successor, Douglas Haig—a man who is traditionally blamed for much of the paralysis in British strategy. Haig seemed interested. A little later Churchill was asked to go to the British Operational Division at St Omer, to explain his ideas. The general there said he had heard from Haig that there were some new contraptions being devised by the Admiralty, for use in trench warfare.

Did Churchill know anything about it? He certainly did. Indeed, he could have been forgiven for being stupefied and appalled by the continued slowness of the army top brass to pick up his idea. It was over a year earlier, in December 1914—when he was still at the Admiralty—that he had first grasped the nightmare of the stalemate, with trenches and barbed wire stretching intermittently from Switzerland to the Channel.

Churchill had been partly inspired by the science fiction of H. G. Wells, and his description of ironclad ‘landships’. On 5 January 1915 he wrote to Asquith, suggesting that it was time for some kind of technological breakthrough. We needed a machine that could deal with the trenches, he said; and if we didn’t develop one, the Germans certainly would. Asquith responded quite quickly, for him, and asked the War Office to look into it.

The army formed a committee to investigate the matter, and decided that any such machine would just sink under the weight of its own armour. Too impractical; dismissed.

There matters might well have rested, with unthinkable consequences. But Churchill did not let it drop. He was at the Admiralty, remember. He was in charge of ships, not the tactics of the army. This was theoretically none of his business. But on 18 January 1915 he wrote to his colleagues at the Admiralty with what sounded like a bizarre request. He wanted an experiment performed.

Someone—he did not specify who—was to take two steam rollers and yoke them together with long steel rods, ‘so that they are to all intents and purposes one roller covering a breadth of at least 12 to 14 feet’. Then he wanted his officials to go and find a ‘handy’ site, near London, and dig about a hundred yards of trenches, as they did in France. The ultimate objective, he said, was to allow the monster machine to run along the length of the trenches: actually on top of them, with a giant wheel on either lip. The objective would be to ‘crush them all flat and bury the people in them’.

This is Churchill at his dizzying best. There are flaws in his idea. What if the two rollers are running at different speeds, or in different gears? Surely the rods would just snap or shear? He hasn’t worked out that the machine will need a single engine. But you can almost hear the crunching of his giant mental cogs as he grips the problem; and the problem of grip.

The mud, he is thinking now. The hellish seas of mud. The machine will slip and slide unless . . . aha . . .

‘The rollers of these machines will be furnished with wedge-shaped ribs or studs, which can be advanced beyond the ordinary surface of the wheel when required, in order to break the soil on each side of the trench and accentuate the rolling process.’ It’s like peering through a telescope at some distant nebula, and seeing the clouds of interstellar gas as they resolve and harden into a planet.

An idea was being born. Perhaps without even knowing it, he was describing caterpillar tracks. All it needed, he concluded, ‘was a big enough pair of steam rollers and an unscaleable bullet-proof house for the crew’. He signed off with a superbly peremptory order that the whole thing should be achieved within two weeks: ‘WSC’.

You can imagine the reaction of the naval engineers. He wants us to bolt or solder some steam rollers together? And he wants us to muck up some park with a load of experimental trenches? But they did it.

So began what came to be known as the Landships Committee, and you can see why it was convenient for Churchill to adopt the H. G. Wells terminology. There was no particular reason why this project should be led from the Admiralty, unless they pretended they were discussing a form of ship. On 22 February 1915 this small group met for the first time, under the direction of one of several heroes of the story, Mr Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, the Director of Naval Construction. He reported to Churchill.

The first discussion was mainly about the very point that the First Lord of the Admiralty had raised: how to make sure that the great beast did not just skid in the mud. They discussed the potential of cleated wheels, and also of ‘pedrails’, a peculiar device by which lots of little feet were fixed to the rim of the wheel, each gripping the ground in turn as the wheel turned. Two days later, Tennyson d’Eyncourt wrote to Churchill with news. They had made cracking progress.

They were proposing to make a 25-tonne model that would be ‘a tractor of real military value carrying 50 men with machine guns and capable of negotiating enemy trenches’. They were getting closer. Churchill wrote back tersely, and on the same day: ‘As proposed and with all despatch. WSC.’

By 3 March they had two designs—one with a big wheel at the back, and one with a caterpillar track. It was time to spend money. With no authorisation from the War Office, and certainly without consulting his cabinet colleagues, Churchill placed an order for the prototypes. He hadn’t a clue which would be more effective: so he ordered both—a dozen caterpillars and half a dozen big wheels. In the hope of encouraging a spirit of competition, the Admiralty engaged two contractors. They were called Foster and Foden, and they were given a 10 per cent profit margin. The overall cost was £70,000—£5 million today, which strikes me as being pretty cheap by the standards of modern defence procurement, and when you think of the military history that was being made.

While the men continued to be massacred in Flanders, Tennyson d’Eyncourt and his team beavered away at the problem. Which was better? The cleats or the pedrail? And how could they overcome this basic problem: making the occupants of the vehicle safe, but without encumbering it with so much armour that it would sink in the mud? From his vantage point at the Admiralty, Churchill continued to chivvy and encourage; and then, in May 1915—disaster.

His own career went off course. He ended up in the ditch with all his wheels in the air, and no hope of getting him out. He lost office over Gallipoli, hounded out, effectively, by Tories who wouldn’t work with him in government. He tried, rather tragically, to keep a role in the Landships project. He asked Balfour, who succeeded him at the Admiralty, whether he could continue to chair a small joint committee between the Admiralty and the War Office. Nothing came of it.

He took his mentor, Lloyd George, who had become Minister for Munitions, to see the muddy open-air laboratory at Wormwood Scrubs, where belching, roaring iron scarabs were being hurled at ramparts and ditches, with mixed results. Alas, the project was no longer his baby: he had no role, formal or informal. Without his creative drive, the Frankentractor languished. On the Western Front, men continued to go over the top, with hideous consequences. As far as the military top brass were concerned the plans for a new machine were all but buried.

By the autumn of the year Churchill was himself at the Western Front, performing his unique act of penitential soldiering, and the following year he took over as lieutenant-colonel in command of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He saw the horror and the pity at first hand. He wrote his long memo; and it was only after he had been to see Sir Douglas Haig—and found Haig so worryingly vague—that the project seemed to come to life.

On 14 February 1916 Tennyson d’Eyncourt wrote him a joyful letter. He was sorry it had all taken so long. The whole enterprise had become bogged down, metaphorically as well as physically. ‘After losing the great advantage of your influence I had considerable difficulty in steering the scheme past the rocks of opposition and the more insidious shoals of apathy.’

But he was thrilled with the result, he told Churchill. The latest war-hog was positively athletic. It would easily clear a 4 foot 6 perpendicular parapet and then cross a 9-foot gap. It had 6-pounder guns in ‘sponsons’—bulges on the side—like a battleship; and it could fire broadsides as well as forwards. It went through wire entanglements, he boasted, ‘like a rhinoceros through a field of corn . . . It looks like a great antediluvian monster, especially when it comes out of boggy ground. I hope it will scare the Bosches.’

He ended with an awkward but heartfelt tribute to the humiliated Churchill. ‘Allow me to offer you my congratulations on the success of your original project, and wish you all good luck in your work at the front.’

Production of the Landship began. In the interests of secrecy the factory workers were told to call them ‘water tanks’, with the vague suggestion that they were gigantic bowsers, destined for the thirsty battlefields of Mesopotamia. Tanks they became, for short, and tanks they still are, even in Russian.

In the history of British breakthroughs, the tank is unusual. It is not just that some of the key ideas were British—that is quite common. The development was British and the practical application was British, in the sense that by 1917 Britain was producing hundreds of them—more than any other belligerent nation.

By now Churchill himself was once again responsible for their production—because in July of that year Lloyd George had him back in the cabinet, as Minister for Munitions. The press freaked out. The Sunday Times said any such appointment would be ‘a grave danger to the administration and to the empire as a whole’. The Morning Post warned, ‘That dangerous and uncertain quantity, Mr Winston Churchill—a floating kidney in the body politic—is back again at Whitehall.’

They could not have been more wrong. Churchill was indispensable to success. Frantically he worked to equip the forces with the devices—planes, gas shells and tanks—that he believed were essential to break the deadlock; and still the slaughter intensified. That autumn the Haig strategy of head-on assault plumbed new depths of madness. In spite of the anxieties of both Churchill and Lloyd George, the general launched the Ypres offensive—in which almost 850,000 men were to die, including 350,000 British soldiers. It was carnage on a scale never yet seen by men—an industrialised version of Cannae.

And then, at last, the tanks were ready—and in numbers. There were 400 of them in action at Cambrai on 20 November 1917, where they made significant gains. Now Churchill went into overdrive. He set up a Tank Board, with a target to deliver 4,459 by April 1919. When tank factory workers got uppity, he threatened to send them to the front. That sorted them out. Then came the great psychological moment: it was at that Battle of Amiens, on 8 August 1918, when the armoured leviathans really rattled the Germans.

Six hundred British tanks burst through German lines, grinding over the trenches, gripping the mud with their tracks and with the enemy’s bullets flattening themselves on their hard metal hides—just as Churchill had imagined. It is true that the Germans learned quite fast not to be so scared—just as the Romans overcame their terror of Hannibal’s elephants. In the following weeks they were to become efficient at taking out the tanks. But the damage to German morale had already taken place. General Erich Ludendorff called day one of the Battle of Amiens a ‘black day’ for the German army; and it can be seen as the beginning of the end.

It was the tank which was decisive on that day. Think of all those disconsolate captured soldiers Churchill saw on the 9th. They had been routed with the help of machines that he co-invented. Everywhere he went, he reported, he saw the tracks of the beasts.

Let us be clear about the exact nature of his role. It is true that he had, personally, a great natural flair for invention and improvisation—and he loved thinking about things in a practical and mechanical way: from the ‘bellybando’, a brown paper tube he devised to stop his cigars disintegrating, to the question of how to stop the bobbing of the prefabricated ports of Mulberry Harbours on D-Day. As a small child he loved building forts, and he and his brother Jack made a trebuchet with which they successfully fired apples at a cow.

He loved painting and bricklaying, and creating ponds and earthworks. He was not only one of the first of his generation to fly a plane; he was one of the first to drive a car (so scarily that his fellow Hughligans refused to be his passengers); and, indeed, to imagine the possibility of the atomic bomb; and to wonder what would happen if you fitted a torpedo to a plane. His enthusiasm for technological innovation—and its potential to advance the human race—was of a piece with his Whiggish personality. He had a marvellous ability to visualise, to articulate, and to fire the imagination and confidence of others.

He was certainly no scientist, but his endlessly fertile and playful intelligence legitimised the boffins in their desire to experiment, and to please him. Some of the resulting wartime ideas were brilliant but barmy, like the plan to create gigantic floating aircraft carriers by mixing ice with sawdust. This substance was known as ‘pykrete’, after its inventor, Geoffrey Pyke of the Royal Navy, and there is a story of how Mountbatten demonstrated its astonishing rigidity to Churchill and Roosevelt.

Mountbatten brought a great block of frozen pykrete to the Quebec conference in 1943, and shot it with his service pistol. The guards outside the room rushed in, thinking there had been an assassination, while the bullet whanged off the pykrete and almost killed the British Air Marshal Charles Portal.

That is the way of scientific experiment. Pykrete might have been a triumph, but wasn’t. The tank might have been a flop, but worked to devastating effect. And it might have been a flop had it not been for Churchill’s imaginative drive: his ability to hold an idea in the forefront of his mind and then work away at it—like the process of getting his mental vision to appear in oils on a canvas—until he had made the idea a reality.

His interest in machines was of course partly aggressive: he wanted planes, tanks, gas and bombs because he wanted to win, and as fast as possible. But again the underlying motive was compassion, to reduce the mayhem and misery that he saw. ‘Machines save life,’ he said at the beginning of 1917, before the tank had yet proved its worth. ‘Machine-power is a great substitute for manpower. Brains will save blood. Manoeuvre is a great diluting agent to slaughter.’

That was why he went for the great flanking operation at Gallipoli; that was why he pioneered area bombing even in the First War, and that was why he personally oversaw the production of huge quantities of mustard gas. That was why he wanted the tank—to reduce the mortality rate of men who were asked to walk or run into a hail of metal projectiles.

Dotted in the fields and lanes around Ploegsteert are the cemeteries with their rows and rows of white stone crosses—witness to the criminal waste and stupidity of those tactics. For his role in pioneering the tank, Churchill surely deserves credit not just for saving lives but for shortening—and, arguably, helping to win—the First World War.

And not just with the tank, of course. When Germany eventually capitulated, it was very largely thanks to the slow boa-constrictor-like strangulation of the Royal Navy blockade, protracted over five years, and which by 1918 had brought the Germans to the brink of starvation. It was thanks to Churchill, as pre-war First Lord of the Admiralty, that the oil-fuelled fleet was ready in 1914 to do the job. We owe him, then, for ships on land and sea.

—

I WANDER BACK to the wood he used to frequent, and I stand there with my almost empty beer can and a cigar, communing in a kind of daze with the shades of those who died. My meditation is shattered. A Belgian farmer has seen the car parked by the wood, and he is advancing towards me with the air of one who wants me off his land.

I almost point out that a lot of British soldiers died terrible deaths to defend the title of Belgian farmers to these very woods; but I think better of it. Has he heard of Winston Churchill? I ask him. He looks thoughtful. Did Churchill fight in the war? he asks. I confirm this.

‘One must always respect those who fought in the war,’ says the farmer. Well, I will drink to that. I drain the Stella and leave the ghostly wood. No one else in the First World War had anything like Churchill’s record, of risking his life at the front, and simultaneously originating and promoting wholly new directions in the grand strategy of the conflict. How did he do it?

There is a reason why Churchill drove forward so much new technology, why they didn’t just remain in some naval designer’s sketchbook. I have by now read a large number of his memos and notes, and I have been amazed not just by his bureaucratic stamina but by his phenomenal attention to detail.

Of all the politicians of his generation, Churchill was not just the best speaker, the best writer, the best joke-maker, the bravest, the boldest and the most original. It was crucial to the Churchill Factor that he was also the biggest policy wonk you ever saw.

That was an essential feature of his handling of the war effort in 1940. Of course he could do the big picture, and the great sweep of history; none better. But there was one aspect of Churchill’s character that consistently surprised his biographer Roy Jenkins, and that was his work rate.