Who Invented the Armoured Car?

In September 1914, Britain deployed its first armoured cars to Northern France and Belgium, but they weren’t army vehicles. They were driven by members of the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) under the command of Commander Charles Samson! Initially, they were unarmoured touring cars owned by the pilots as Samson thought they would be useful both to pick up aircrew who had been forced to land in hostile territory and to reconnoitre new spots for RNAS emergency landing fields. Then Samson's younger brother Felix armed a car with a Maxim gun and successfully ambushed a German car. It inspired Samson to have a shipbuilder add boilerplate to the cars and the ‘armoured car’ was born. Due to the weight of the armoured plate, the RNAS tended to prefer the powerful engines of Rolls Royces and then Lanchesters. The cars quickly proved their worth, regularly shooting up German cavalry patrols, and performed so well that 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 to support the Royal Naval Division fighting as infantry in France and Flanders. My WW1 naval aviation novel, The Wings of the Wind, gives further details.

By November 1914, there were plans to expand the RNACD to 23 squadrons. Churchill personally offered his rich friends commissions in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and RNACD on condition that they supplied the squadrons with cars at their own expense. The 2nd Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, and the MPs Oliver Locker-Lampson and Josiah Wedgwood were such examples.

However, the Germans were not slow to spot the success of the armoured cars either. 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 the agricultural vehicles in Lincolnshire operate. This later paved the way for the invention of the tank by the RN’s Landships Committee. Nevertheless, as the static war of the trenches set in on the Western Front, the RNACD became less effective and its squadrons were redeployed to other theatres, including Russia, Africa, Gallipoli and Palestine. In the end twenty active squadrons were formed, but some were taken over by the Army’s Machine Gun Corps and even the RAF. As late as WW2, Number One Armoured Car Company RAF, was using former RNAS armoured cars in Iraq.