Landships II

James H · Legend

Band of Brigands - Anyone Read It?

Rhomboid · Field Marshal

I found the book to be well worth reading. The overall subject (the creation and employment of British tanks in WW1) will be familiar to most forum members, but this book stands out due to a wealth of anecdotes about the tank crewmen and the leaders of the Tank Corps. I didn't note any glaring inaccuracies in the text. The "Band of Brigands" refers to a comment about the Corps by a senior officer. Some of the stories, such as the suicide of Col. Brough, and a possible tank espionage plot, were quite new to me. The book has been favourably�reviewed in a thread on the Great War Forum which included the author's�participation.�

James H · Legend

Thanks, Rhomboid. I've read the stuff on GWF and the book has gone down well. It must just be a review from someone who's not very well-up. I'll give it a try.

James H · Legend

Just fancy that.

This is from Amazon's blurb for Band of Brigands, pub. October 2007:

Very few of them had been professional soldiers; they were motoring enthusiasts and mechanics, plumbers, motorcyclists, circus performers and polar explorers.

This is from P.71 of Tank, by Patrick Wright. It is a rather strange book that tries too hard to attach cultural and artistic significance to aspects of Tank development, but does at least tell most of the story along the way. The point is that it was published in 2000:

Very few of the recruits were trained soldiers. There was a music hall proprietor; The Medical Officer had previously spent two years with Shackleton at the South Pole; the assistant technical adviser had managed motor buses in New York; a signals officer ... an acrobat whose pre-war achievements included rigging up the electrical apparatus that had enabled some "thought-readers" known as The Smithsons to deceive their London audiences.

And�Mr. Wright says in his footnotes that this information comes from much earlier books by C.D. Baker-Carr and E. Charteris.

Haven't yet read Band of Brigands, but I don't see the point of this. Wright says later that no more than 2 or 3 per cent of the 20,000 men who served in the Tank Corps were professional soldiers. I should think the same applied to the rest of the armies by 1918. And if they were recruits they obviously had jobs before the War. It seems to me that most of the men described had some talent that they were able to bring to the Corps, whether it was technical, admin, or indomitability. I hardly think that a man who shared Shackleton's ordeal is a figure of fun.

Lt-Col Wilfrith Elstob V.C. was a schoolteacher, but that didn't stop him fighting to the death. This all sounds like a very cheap shot to me.

There'd be no more jokes in music halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

-- Edited by James H at 19:58, 2008-03-31

delta · Corporal

I think that the comments about the lack of military experience , and the wide range of the previous employments of those who served in the tanks, was originally meant to be praise; an indicaition of importance of a common goal, i.e. to use tanks to allow the infantry to get on and destroy the enemy. Certainly, in his foreword to the Williams-Ellis' "Tank Corps", Hugh Elles says much the same thing.

Stephen

James H · Legend

Fair enough. I was a little concerned that this bloke was trying to depict them as some sort of Dirty Dozen/Dad's Army. J.F.C. Fuller, whose�view of things�is not one I would automatically trust, does�opine that some of the recruits were a bit dodgy. By the nature of the secrecy of the project, no one really knew what they were volunteering for, and he does claim that some joined just to get out of whatever they were already doing and that there were some chancers and malingerers amongst them.

I suppose the�solution is that I read the book. Obvious, really.

James H · Legend

Humble pie time. Have invested in Band of Brigands, and, about half-way through it,�I withdraw my previous reservations. I've always been spoiled by A New Excalibur but this comes close; if anything, more detailed in certain matters, although not quite as wittily written as ANE.

Maybe the title is supposed to be sexy, but if you ask me it detracts from the fact that this is a very thorough account, albeit (as Rhomboid says) a familiar one, of the development of the Tank. It certainly fills in some gaps left by AJ Smithers and John Glanfield. In particular, it�appears to throw new light on�the disenchantment with Stern and describes the conditions inside and outside the Tank more graphically.

It looks as if it was a victim of lazy reviewing; and�I still think the title is a bit unnecessary.

On the downside, French Tank development is, as usual, worth little more than a footnote. Oddly, Mr. Campbell gets the name of the French railway wagons wrong: 24 Hommes, 8 Chevaux. However, unlike his illustrious predecessor in the post of Defence Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, John Keegan, he hasn't so far been more than a year out with some of his facts.

In the acknowledgements he mentions Glanfield, Pidgeon, Childs, and many others, but not Smithers. Curious.
Anyway, so far so good.

James H · Legend

Finished it. IMHO, excellent in parts but with some worrying flaws.

First of all, the reviews rather exaggerate the motley nature of the early Tank crews. Campbell doesn't actually make that big a thing of it. Pity the reviewers are so keen to seize on that aspect, but then why give it that title in the first place?

Mr. C at least equals Smithers, Glanfield, & co. in telling the story. He is less of a Stern fan than Smithers, who depicts Stern as a brilliant motivator and organiser who was undone by rivalries, bureaucracy, and the indecision of others, whereas Campbell claims that S was too full of himself and that doubts about him set in very early. He is also far less critical of the War Office and senior officers than is Smithers.

The inclusion of so many anecdotes paints a fuller picture of what life in the Tanks was like, which, since the subtitle is The First Men In Tanks, is fair enough. When it comes to relating the complicated intertwining of the military, technical, and political strands of the tale and the often turbulent relations between the men involved, he goes into impressive detail, with very precise dates and references to memoranda and correspondence to support the story. Up to this point, all is very well.

The descriptions of The Somme, Ypres, and Cambrai, on and off the battlefield, are most impressive. From Amiens onward, however, the whole thing seems very rushed. It takes 372 pages to get from the familiar description of trenches/barbed wire/machine guns to Amiens, and just another 30 to get from there to the inter-war period, taking in the 100 Days, the American involvement, the fate of the surviving Tanks, the post-war squabbling, the later careers of the significant figures, and the opportunities that Britain missed and Germany took between 1919 and 1939.

Since Amiens is often held to be the most important battle of the War and the first "modern" combat, the detail is disappointing compared to that of Cambrai, etc. It is dealt with in less than 3 pages, including several anecdotes that are not dramatically different from earlier ones, and the tactical innovations greatly understated. Maybe Mr. C thought that by then he had done what he promises in the title and that there was little point in adding more of the same. Even so, it does feel as if he spent too long getting to August 1918 and realised he had to get it finished. The last one-and-a-half chapters and the afterword seem positively thrown together.

The Americans and their use of British Tanks and Renaults are treated, and this part seems to borrow heavily from Dale Wilson's Treat 'Em Rough. There is, though, no mention of Franco-American tank ops, nor of the ignominious failure of the USA to produce the Liberty and M.1917. It is, like so many others, a predominantly Anglocentric account, so how much of the French and American involvement to include poses a problem, but it will come as no surprise that the A7V gets the full treatment while French actions are referred to largely in passing.

The difficulty is clearly how to find a balance between the experiences of the Tank crews and the wider story of Tank development. Smithers and Glanfield blend the�former into the latter. Dale Wilson's book falls into two distinct halves, the first fascinating and the second a dry and eventually rather repetitive series of descriptions. I would say that Mr. Campbell does it very well in the early part of the book, but that it loses its way towards the end. The suicide of Lt-Col John Brough is certainly an intriguing way of opening the book, but by the end so much has happened that it seems irrelevant.

Now the definitely bad news. I'm afraid Mr. C is only slightly less prone to factual errors than John Keegan.

When referring to the FT17 he uses the dreaded expression faible tonnage - a misnomer also included in Treat 'Em Rough, which is suspicious. A bit more reading would have sorted that one out.

He says that on April 16th, 1917 138 Schneiders and St. Chamonds were lost in combat. The St. Chamond didn't make its debut until the following month, and his figures seem to be a jumble of dates, engagements, and losses. A sign of his confusion here is the claim that "the Schneider, on its Baby Holt tacks, proved fatally nose-heavy". He's got this dreadfully mixed up.

He claims that 400 FT17s made their "battlefield debut" at Soissons in July 1918. The Renault had seen action on (depending how you define an action) at least ten occasions from May 31st, and at Soissons the number deployed was 255 plus 123 Schneiders and 100 St. Chamonds.

His estimate of the British Heavies deployed at Amiens is 326 (plus 96 Whippets), one of many figures put forward.

He states that 20 A7Vs led an assault east of Reims on July 15th, 1918 and again, to the west, on the 16th. All 20 A7Vs never went into action en masse; this was actually a mixed force�- A7Vs in one assault and� Beutepanzers in the other, and it was the latter that were destroyed by French artillery.
There are one or two other doubtful or vague references. The trouble is that encountering such obvious inattention to research undermines confidence in the historical accuracy of the rest. I have to say, though, that the descriptive passages are, in general, evocative, convincing, and often harrowing.

In the space of 20 years we have now had three main accounts of early (mostly British) Tank development, all of which tread more or less the same path. Please feel free to comment on any of the above.

One final note: a couple of references call to mind an earlier thread that I have taken the liberty of reopening here: http://www.activeboard.com/forum.spark?forumID=63528&p=3&topicID=13346351

-- Edited by James H at 12:01, 2008-04-30