The Royal Naval Armoured Car Division

One of the first naval officers to be trained to fly in 1910 was Lieutenant Reginald Gregory. On 1 July 1914, the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) was formed and, immediately on the outbreak of WW1, it deployed to France and Belgium under the command of Commander Charles Samson. However, Samson initially had too few aircraft at his disposal for his pilots, so he re-tasked those with their own private cars to mount reconnaissance patrols of the Belgian and French countryside, scouting for new airfields to replace those overrun by the quickly advancing Germans and to rescue downed airmen. Once armed with a machine gun, these cars were able to mount aggressive patrols into German-held territory and to frustrate the German cavalry’s own reconnaissance patrols. He appointed Gregory, then a Lieutenant Commander, to deputise for him in command of what was named the RNAS Armoured Car Squadron. The cars were quickly fitted with steel boiler plates. Rolls Royces, and later Lanchesters, were chosen because their powerful engines were suitable to take the additional weight of the armour. The RNAS officers were expected to provide their own cars. I outline all this in my WW1 novel, The Wings of the Wind, about the early days of the RNAS.

The cars created so much havoc amongst the Germans that on 3 September 1914, Churchill, as the First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered the formation of the Royal Naval Armoured Car Division (RNACD) as a separate wing of the RNAS. However, the Germans were not slow to spot the success of the armoured cars. They began to dig trenches across roads as obstacles for the armoured cars. The Navy responded by looking to replace the wheels of their cars with tracks so that they could cross the ditches, in the same way they could see agricultural vehicles in Lincolnshire operate. However, as the static war of the trenches set in on the Western Front, the RNACD became less effective and, accordingly, its squadrons were redeployed to other theatres, including Russia, Africa, Gallipoli and Palestine. Churchill built up the squadrons by commissioning his friends into the RNACD and even offering them command of a squadron if they could finance and supply their own cars. Accordingly, several well-known personages found themselves in the RNACD. These included the Duke of Westminster and Cherry-Garrard, who went to Antarctica on Scott’s last expedition, and Lieutenant Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, an MP in Huntingdonshire.

Locker-Lampson initially served in France and Belgium, but in 1915, he was promoted to Commander and despatched to Russia in command of three squadrons of armoured cars to support the Russians on the Eastern Front. Gregory was promoted to Acting Commander and as his deputy. The squadrons arrived in northern Russia on 1 January 1916. There the squadrons operated with the Russian Army in such places as Galicia, Romania and the Caucasus. They saw particularly brisk action under Gregory’s command in support of the Romanians defending a bridge against the Germans on the Danube. However, after the second Russian Revolution in late 1917, the RNACD was withdrawn and then abolished. Some of its personnel were transferred with their vehicles to the Machine Gun Corps and sent to Persia and Iran in 1918, but neither Locker-Lampson nor Gregory accompanied them. Locker-Lampson joined the Ministry of Information as its Russian representative before returning to his parliamentary career after the war. Gregory was appointed in command of the sloops HMS Mimosa and Veronica until the end of the war. He then served in Hong Kong, but died there in 1921 of a heart attack.

An interesting postscript to the history of the RNACD concerns how it influenced the development of the tank. In February 1915, Churchill established the 'Landships Committee' to develop armoured fighting vehicles capable of fighting on the Western Front. Key members of this committee were an RNAS officer, Flight Commander Thomas Hetherington and a Colonel of the Royal Naval Division, Wilfred Dumble. The committee’s work was kept secret from Kitchener and the War Office for fear its work would be blocked. William Foster and Company of Lincoln, manufacturers of agricultural machinery, were given the contract to develop a prototype tracked vehicle. However, following Churchill’s resignation, in July 1915, the War Office learned of the project and took it over, along with the naval personnel working on it.

Finally, to protect the secrecy of the machines being developed, they were referred to as ‘water carriers’, with the cover story that they were designed for carrying water to front line troops. Somebody then recognised that some wag would be bound to contract the term to WC with the potential for all sorts of ribaldry, so it was decided to use the term ‘tanks’ as the code word for the new fighting vehicles. The name has stuck ever since.