On 27 August 1914, the first Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) squadron disembarked in Ostend in support of the British Expeditionary Force. The squadron was led by Wing Commander Charles Samson. Amongst Samson’s collection of support vehicles were a number of Rolls Royce and Lanchester cars. Samson used the cars to carry our reconnaissance missions for suitable airfields in Belgium and northern France and, if necessary, rescue downed pilots. Samson’s younger brother, Felix, had the idea of fitting a Maxim gun to one of the cars in order to take on an offensive role and by September, boiler plate was being used to armour the cars. So effective were these armoured cars in taking on the German light cavalry patrols, Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered the formation of the Royal Naval Armoured Car Division as a separate wing of the RNAS. Cavalry and gendarmerie units were placed under the command of Samson and he became effectively the first British combined arms commander of the war. Such was the demand for cars to beef up Samson’s mobile attacking force, Churchill offered temporary commissions in the RN to those wealthy and willing enough to fund and supply further cars. Two such notable personages were fellow MP, Josiah Wedgewood, and Lord Grosvenor, a relative of the present Duke of Westminster. The division quickly grew to comprise 60 fighting vehicles. More details of Samson’s exploits and the early days of the Armoured Car Division can be found in my novel The Wings of the Wind and the inspiration for my book, Samson’s autobiography Fights and Flights.
The Germans soon came to regard the armoured cars as a scourge and took action to limit their deployment by digging trenches across roads. This led the RNAS to consider fitting tracks to the armoured cars and some Lincolnshire agricultural engineers were engaged to come up with a new design. However, trench warfare soon set in on the Western Front and the armoured cars were redeployed to other theatres of war, including the Middle East and Russia. Even so, in February 1915, Churchill established the RN’s Landship Committee to investigate the feasibility of building an armoured fighting vehicle suitable for battle on the Western Front. When Churchill was forced to resign following the failure of the Dardanelles campaign, the committee was taken over lock, stock and barrel by the army and the RNAS officers given army commissions. Although the later development of what we now know as the tank was then an army project, today the use of tank parts such as hatch, hull, bow and ports, reflect the nautical origins of these vehicles.
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