Formation of the Tank Corps

On 28 July 1917, by Royal Warrant, the British tank units, until then formally part of the Machine Gun Corps, became a separate arm of service: the Tank Corps. The date of 28 July is given by J. F. C. Fuller, long the tank men’s chief of staff and author of their first history, and by the Tank Museum at Bovington and the National Army Museum. Some studies, for example The Long, Long Trail website, give 27 July. The change was largely a formality, but it confirmed that the tank had found a permanent home in the army.

From the beginning tanks were hidden under misleading names. In the spring of 1916 the first crews were organised as the Heavy Section of the Machine Gun Corps, which by June of that year consisted of six companies. Several dozen Mark I tanks first went into action on the Somme on 15 September 1916. Soon afterwards the General Staff in France proposed organising the tank men on the model of the air arm, the Royal Flying Corps, and according to the Tank Museum it recommended as early as 9 October that they be called the Tank Corps. This was not agreed to at the time. In November 1916 the companies were converted into battalions designated by letters, and the whole was named the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. Command in France was taken by Colonel, from May 1917 Brigadier-General, Hugh Elles, with his headquarters in the village of Bermicourt near Saint-Pol.

In 1917 tanks fought at Arras, at Bullecourt, in Palestine at Gaza and in June at Messines, where the new, better-armoured Mark IV was used for the first time. The results were mixed: the machines got stuck in shell holes and mud or fell victim to artillery, but where they got through, the infantry gained valuable support. After the experience of Arras, Elles’s staff proposed an expansion from nine to eighteen battalions. According to Fuller this was approved on 28 June, but a month later, for lack of men, the expansion was halted. At the same time the Heavy Branch became the Tank Corps. Elles’s chief of staff was Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, later an eminent theorist of armoured warfare.

The new corps went straight into battle. Three days later its three brigades supported the first day of the great offensive in Flanders, but on the sodden, shell-torn ground most of the tanks got stuck. Elles then urged the command to use tanks en masse on dry ground unbroken by shellfire. This happened in November 1917 at the Battle of Cambrai, where Elles himself led several hundred tanks into the attack. In September King George V approved the corps badge. In 1923 the Tank Corps received the prefix “Royal”, and its present-day successor is the Royal Tank Regiment, the oldest armoured unit in the world.