How mechanized were the armies of ww1 prior,during and at the end of the war?
Did they utilize trucks and cars? did the superpowers of the war understand the concept of mechanization and its benefits of sending supplies and troops quicker than the horses could,and where the trains couldn't reach?
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[1] Sorry for the slower-than-I'd-hoped reply! I was retained on duty and then on a training course. I also wrote a draft for this that became a little too heavily focused on the railway element of the war (which really was key, but it became essentially all of the answer). Anyway, thank you for your patience.
The answer to your question is yes - absolutely they were. An appreciation of what Mechanical Transport (MT) - to borrow the catch-all British term - could offer was known well in advance of the war, and Britain, France and Germany were all investigating means of incorporating MT into their operations. However, it must be borne in mind that these were very much in an experimental phase - the technologies in the late 19th Century were by no means mature. What seems the obvious route to take in terms of incorporating mechanisation into an army today was not necessarily apparent. The capabilities of what existed at the time were limited, the industry to produce them in great numbers did not exist yet, the infrastructure to maintain them in numbers was not yet available. Yes, there was ample supplies of coal, which was the primary fuel source of the world at that time, but maintaining complicated machinery requires experts and specialists, not just the ones driving and fixing the machines, but those who produce the parts, maintain the fuel stores, look after the roads, organise the vehicle parks and so on.
The First World War essentially forced the combatant nations to really organise themselves in a way which no war had previously demanded, and to bring into the armies experts in civilian fields who would never otherwise have had more than a passing interaction with the military. However, this also allowed them to expand their capacity to operate with increasing degrees of mechanisation as a result. It also helped push real understanding of how to employ the MT they had, it encouraged the development of the technology, and it helped lay the foundations to transition towards an economy based around Road Haulage, whereas prior to the war it had been the railways which were the primary mover of goods.
I'll focus mainly on the British side of things - it's the area I know the most about and have sources which comment about it in detail. I will comment on the other nations, but unfortunately I'm not so well placed to really go into the detail.
[2] The military value of Railways was brought into stark relief by the American Civil War of 1861 - 1865 and especially the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 - 1871. The Russo-Japanese War reinforced this. The French and Germans both appreciated the use of railways in allowing them to move strategically after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. It was recognised that railways would be integral to any subsequent conflict and both invested heavily in expanding their networks. Both took different approaches – the French expanded but maintained their networks in private hands, but had a military management structure shadow this, to assume control in wartime. The Germans took a more central level of control, and at the time this meant functionally military control. They even built locomotives with collapsible cabs to fit under the lower-headroom of French tunnels, which can't have been anything but ominous for any visiting Frenchmen prior to the First World War! However, the Franco-Prussian also saw the first operational deployments of steam Traction Engines in wartime conditions. In 1869, the Prussian War Department ordered Eight Fowler Road Locomotives, the first two of which arrived in 1870 and were immediately put to work at the Siege of Paris. They hauled a dozen store wagons some 45km forward and over a seven day period hauled 100,000kg of ammunition supplies forward and 5,000kg of coal forward after the destruction of the Nanteuil rail tunnel threatened a supply crisis for the Prussians. After the war, both France and Germany investigated incorporating such machinery into their military.
The British first saw an attempt to garner interest in steam machinery in 1829, when Sir Goldsworthy Gurney demonstrated Drag, a steam-powered vehicle which pulled a carriage to the Prime Minister and Duke of Wellington. It apparently pulled 27 Guardsmen around Hounslow Barracks at around 17mph by Mr Gurney's own estimates. Nothing came of this in the end, even though the Duke of Wellington was impressed. Renewed interest in mechanisation of the army came after the Crimean War of 1854 - 1856. A Burrell-Boydell "Endless Railway" road locomotive was driven 100 miles from Thetford to Woolwich Arsenal in 1857, hauling 28 Tons 18 Cwt. Its main issues were struggles to find supplies of water, but mechanically performed well. However, it was competing in an era of of massive expansion of the rail network in the United Kingdom. Consequently, it fell by the wayside, and subsequently there were ad-hoc experiments on the part of the Army and the British Indian Government into the technology. The first vehicles accepted into General Service were Aveling & Porter Steam Sappers in 1870, which proved to be greatly successful.
The Boer War of 1899 - 1901 was key for the British for two reasons, in terms of mechanisation. First, the importance of railways was again rammed home, but critically for the British, they found that de-centralisation of the railways, where each sector ran as it needed for its own operations, to be the key to using it to help defeat the Boers. This was undoubtedly a damaging conclusion, which we will come to when looking at the First World War itself, but in marshalling armoured trains on the railways to respond to Boer Commandos, it contributed towards the victory. Traction Engines also demonstrated their value, hauling equipment and stores, and even armoured variants hauled armoured road-trains.
[3] Where did this leave the British, French and Germans as the First World War broke out? Motor-Transport, distinct from steam was itself becoming more prominent and reliable. Whilst all three continued experiments and incorporating heavy steam haulage, they began to also work out what could be done with MT. In 1891, the (British) Army Service Corps (ASC) took over the general running and maintenance of the War Department's fleet, a mix of lorries, cars, carriages and Steam traction engines from the Royal Engineers, a sign that MT was moving from being an experimental part of the army to a fundamental part of it. The French set up an Automobile Department, pushed by General Joseph Joffre. The Germans experimented with mounting light artillery pieces on cars and lorries for mobile balloon-busting efforts and otherwise mirrored the British and French in having an eclectic mix of lorries, cars and steam wagons.
Both the French and Germans faced the issue that they would be mobilising vast armies with millions of men under arms. The French mobilisation plan anticipated 71 Infantry Divisions, whilst the German Army had around 50 Divisions in its Regular Armies before it even stood up its reserves. The British, conversely, were planning around sending a small Expeditionary Force of 6 Divisions, whilst the Oceans would see her main effort. However, because its land army was small, by 1914, MT was built into the British supply chain as an integral part of it.
Essentially the chain went Base Depot > Regulating Station > Railhead > Refill Point > general distribution of supplies. The Base Depot received everything in bulk by sea, and these would be at the docks, places like Boulogne. Supplies and materiel would be sent forward by rail to Regulating Stations, the critical one for the British being Amiens, were it would be broken down and packed onto specific supply trains, and then sent to the edge of the fighting area, where in theory it was close the fighting men, but not in danger of being interdicted by artillery. From Railheads, it would be sent forward and it is here that MT was factored in. Transporting supplies by horse allowed the BEF to operate comfortably within a 7-mile radius. By incorporating MT, it was anticipated that the British would be empowered to operate comfortably within 30 miles, and up to 40, a huge increase in operational flexibility.
Above: Field Service Pocket Book 1914 pp.174
Again, this was possible precisely because the BEF was small. However, to enable this, the ASC had 1,280 motor vehicles in its inventory.
[4] How was MT employed in the war? How did it manage?
As everyone had taken note of the usefulness of railways to facilitate a fast mobilisation and strategic flexibility, the competitive advantage of using railways was nullified. All forces made heavy use of them. The French had agreed with the British to provide all rail transport to the British, something which we will come back to. MT was employed, and in the excitement of the early clashes, several examples of ad-hoc usage of MT rose to prominence. Famously in 1914, the British pressed London Buses into service to help move troops up, and the French moved some 2,000 soldiers by Paris Taxi to allow them to deploy into action at the crucial Battle of the Marne. Much is made of these, but it overshadows the very real and scientific work the French and British put in to incorporating MT. These played an ultimately small part in the battles, especially the taxis - the remaining 150,000 French troops employed at the Marne's means of getting there has somehow failed to capture the imagination of popular history. The French made great use of MT, and became expert in its usage by the end of 1914. The example which shows best the critical importance of incorporating MT fully into the army is best demonstrated by the Battle of Verdun.
Fighting around the fortress-town of Verdun at the start of the war stabilised and then went quiet in September 1914, leaving a prominent French Salient which sat on the wrong side of the Meuse river. Although the French had tough, modern fortifications which dominated area, they and the salient had for a supply route only a single light-railway at the town of Bar Le Duc and a narrow track, 20 feet wide, that wound alongside. Although the demands of fighting elsewhere over 1915 meant that the French drew down the defences, redeploying the forts' garrisons and most of their guns elsewhere, the Automobile Department recognised the precarious situation which Verdun sat in, should it be attacked. Some incredibly intelligent men, sadly whose names I regret I do not have (but would love to learn more), worked out a plan on how to supply Verdun. When it was clear the Germans were going to attack in late February, efforts were made to undo the parlous state the fortress had been left in. Part of that meant standing up the supply plan.
2 days before the battle, a Regulatory Commission took over the road that ran from Bar Le Duc beside the light railway. They immediately cleared all traffic from it and established a dedicated Police unit for it. By the day before the attack, they had mobilised some 4,000 trucks ready for the defence, and established two further reserves allowing access to approximately 10,000 lorries. At the commencement of battle, the Germans had 3 Army Corps to attack a salient held by 2 under-strength French Divisions. Within 24 hours of the bombardment commencing, the French had moved an Infantry Division forward by MT. By the end of the first week, the French had as many troops in the salient as the Germans, all enabled by MT.
This narrow, second class road, which just had space to allow two lorries to pass each other, saw over the course of the battle some 25,000 tons of supplies and 190,000 men pass along it. 3 regiments of Territorials were employed just to keep the road open, and there were on average 6,000 movements per day, with lorries passing every 14 seconds. Not without reason was it christened by the press La Voie sacrée or Sacred Way - Verdun held because of the utter heroism and tenacity of the troops there, but they could not have done that without an incredible backing of MT to facilitate this.
The British experience of 1914 and 1915 from the point of view of MT can be characterised as shaky, but overcome - there were plenty of issues but most were broadly addressed and worked around. For 1914 and some of 1915, the war was still anticipated as being a short war. MT was still looked after by the ASC and railways by the Inspector General of Communications. Although a chap called Percy Girouard, a Canadian Railway Engineer, did a study of the British use of railways for the war effort in late 1914 and called for centralisation in anticipation of a long war, his advice was not well received by the BEF High Command under Sir John French and the recommendations were shelved. He had made the same recommendations for the Boer War and also not found much luck. He was seen as a Civilian and so surely could not appreciate the needs of the military, although ironically in the end it was the military which were shown to have not appreciated the specialist needs of the railways.
Fortunately for the war effort, whilst Girouard could be ignored, Herbert Kitchener could not, and so while Britain didn't centralise its rail efforts, it did at least expand its army just in case the war ended up being a long one; it expanded from around 150 - 250,000 regulars to a force of ultimately around 7 and a half million men. Getting going early on this paid dividends later in the war, which unfortunately could not be said for the railways.
I said earlier that I wanted to not make this just about the railways, but they really are the backbone for the British supply situation and without them, MT could not have been employed effectively. However, MT itself continued to be expanded, and new staff positions were introduced as a recognition that MT needed to be managed by experts, and that leaving individual units with the responsibility to look after their own fleet was greatly inefficient usage of resources, and wasteful. MT was organised as a Divisional or Corps asset, and units which tried to keep MT just for their own purposes had it confiscated. The settling on a 3-ton load as the standard, rather than a standard model of lorry, allowed many manufacturers to produce their own vehicles at best speed, which could then fit neatly into the supply chain was an innovation which would pay dividends down the line.
However, the British supply situation broke down in 1916 over the strain of supplying the Somme. The French had asked the British to take over Belgium lines and feeder lines in 1915 and by 1916, they asked the British to take completely over the part of the network which they were operating in. Trains and wagons were breaking down through over-use, the lines cried out for maintenance.
MT was used to bridge this gap, but this caused issues - increased vehicle usage on roads and tracks designed for infrequent farm traffic quickly became unusable. The only way to repair them was to use Road Stone in bulk - but the only way to bring that up was by... rail! David Lloyd George asked Sir Eric Geddes, former Chief Manager of the North Eastern Railway, and who been responsible for mending Britain's production crisis of 1915 to inspect the railways in France. He recommended essentially the same things as Percy Girouard, but found a much more receptive audience in Sir Douglas Haig, who made him Director General of Military Railways and Inspector-General of Transportation, with the rank of Major General. He reorganised the railways and got them and the docks into a position of incredible efficiency. He established light railways to supply the front, although these would be an evolutionary red-herring. He carried out Time and Motion Studies to improve dockyard and railway efficiency, and developed Roll-On, Roll-Off ferries, an innovation which greatly sped up the ability to get supplies across the channel.
While the British could barely sustain the Somme in 1916, in 1917, they were able to sustain multiple large-scale operations: Arras, Messines, Cambrai, 3rd Ypres (not in any chronological order). To highlight just how far things had come, in July 1917 during the 3rd Battle of Ypres, the GOC of the 36th Ulster Division requested enough lemons to supply every man in his division with one. History doesn't record why he wanted them, but the supply chain was able to take this in its stride and fulfil this unusual request without issue. It has to be borne in mind that Lemons do not grow well in Britain and neither did they have put on a special Lemon train or anything - it was incorporated into the system without stress.
What has always made the First World War so compellingly fascinating to me is that it is the first time that the war was the world of not just military experts, but it is a war where for the first time, real expertise was put into looking at the mundane, but necessary - there would be officers responsible for tyre-presses and dunnage, looking after water supplies and bakeries, not just ammo dumps but vehicle parks and marshalling yards, everything that an army needed beyond the bravery and tactical expertise: all the mundane, unglamorous work that enables an army to fight was organised along scientific lines for this war and given over to specialists and experts, not just a fighting soldier as something to do in the background.
[6] 1918 and the development of combined-arms warfare
All this provided a very unglamorous but incredibly resilient backbone for the actual fighting arms. The Germans smashed through the already battered British 5th Corps in March 1918 as part of their Spring offensives. The situation became very precarious and they overrun some 1,200 square miles of ground. The light railways which had supplied the Western Allied lines, needless to say, got overrun immediately. But the British and French were able to respond and stabilise and keep fighting, thanks to the heavy use of MT to redeploy troops and keep a level of supply going. Although railheads were overrun, MT had the flexibility to mitigate against this. That isn't to say that it wasn't incredibly difficult, but without the level of integration of MT, it is possible the British and French might have collapsed, or been brought to the negotiating table.
As it was, the Germans threatened the British Regulating Station at Amiens, but apparently didn't appreciate just how critical it was to Britain's ability to operate the BEF, as they changed targets and attacked elsewhere. This was the second opportunity the Germans had had to break the backbone of Britain's supply chain, as they had previously actually overrun Amiens in 1914, although it was recaptured in the Autumn.
The British and the French moved to the counter offensive in Summer 1918, and shattered the German Army. They kept up continual offensives, attack in a non-linear fashion at different points in sequence across the whole of the German line. They would launch limited offensives to take parts of the German line, but then close down the offensive and attack elsewhere. MT allowed the flexibility to do this and the Germans were unable to respond effectively, and were effectively in constant retreat until the sought the Armistice. The British were operating in excess of 60 miles of their railheads to do this, and by the time of the Armistice, they were exhausted, out of supply and equipment. They could only manage that because of MT.
Separate to the importance of MT in logistics is the genesis of concepts that would fit into the modern concepts of mechanised warfare: The British had introduced the Tank in 1916, with the French not far behind and both had developed a coherent doctrine in how to employ them and how the infantry were cooperate with them.
With radios now being reliable and small enough to fit into aircraft, the Infantry and Tanks were able to communicate directly with the Artillery, which had started the war only able to fight like the artillery of the American Civil War or Napoleonic War: firing over open sights, in direct line of sight of the enemy. By 1918, they were able to fire accurately and effectively without pre-registering (i.e. doing ranging shots) from the map, and could fire directly on targets which were requested.
Tanks were converted into Troop Carriers and Supply Vehicles to free up men, and bring them forward into the fighting zone in relative safety. One tank could carry more supplies further (when it didn't break down) than a 60-man supply party. The British experimented with Self-propelled guns to try and keep up with and support the advancing troops. None of these necessarily meant that the British were suddenly discovering Blitzkrieg warfare, but the foundations could clearly be seen.
[7] Hopefully this mammoth essay should highlight how critical mechanisation was to the war effort, but also just how interconnected the railways, despite being the "previous generation" of technology were to this. After the war, the sudden glut of the ubiquitous 3-ton lorries available for private usage revolutionised transport of goods and began to challenge the supremacy of the railways. As lorries became more reliable and economic, and roads were maintained to a standard that allowed them to run everywhere, not just the major routes, the railways' hegemony on transport of goods. Prior to the war, Churchill and the British Admiralty had gambled on using oil-fired Battleships in face of an uncertain supply of oil from disparate parts of the Empire (for example Mesopotamia, at a time when coal was abundant on the UK mainland). By the end of the war, it was clear that oil power was the future.
The First World War saw a lot of the theorists and thinkers, and notable armoured formation commanders who would influence the very nature of the Second World War fight and begin to develop their ideas: John Fuller, George Lindsay, Basil Liddle-Hart, Heinz Guderian, Erwin Rommel, Brian Horrocks, Bernard Montgomery, Richard O'Connor, George Patton, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Georgii Zhukov and so on.
Nascent work towards further mechanisation went on - the British had an Experimental Mechanised Force set up in 1927 and although economic strain meant it was disbanded in 1929, it marked a recognition of the potential of experimenting further with combined arms and armoured / mechanised warfare. Nevertheless, the Tank Corps survived, becoming the Royal Armoured Corps, and the Cavalry Regiments became a part of that, leaving behind their Mounted Infantry role to operate tanks and armoured cars. Ultimately, the restrictions of economic downturn, military conservatism, Treaty restrictions or purges meant that many of these ideas would only come to full fruition once the Second World War had fully erupted, although undoubtedly they could have been made good beforehand if circumstances had been better.
However, WW1 is primarily remembered as a bloody, grinding slog, enabled by horses and with primitive technology. That isn't completely untrue, but but all of the groundwork for modernisation was laid during the war. Technology and the understanding of how to use it leapt forward. Douglas Haig is often popularly portrayed as a horse-obsessed stick-in-the-mud, but to my mind he can be better criticised for over-enthusiastically reaching for potential opportunities to employ technology to win the war when it simply wasn't ready or yet understood - the widespread adoption of Light Railways being one, and the Tank being another. Light Railways were an inefficient dead end, and tanks needed more work and understanding to allow them to be an integral part of the war effort. His army ended the war with some 120,702 Motor Vehicles servicing some 2,360,400 men - compared to the 1,280 vehicles for 164,000 men which the ASC had started with. Whilst horses remained integral, the future was very clear, and to re-iterate the answer I started this response with: Yes, absolutely, the combatant nations completely understood the value mechanisation could bring and worked every opportunity they could to maximise that.
I could never have written half of this without the incredibly detailed, compelling and enjoyable work that the now sadly late Rob Thompson did on logistics in the First World War. Many of his Western Front Association Lectures touch on this, but these two are the ones relied on here, and are absolutely worth your time:
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