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The British Expeditionary Force order of battle 1914, as originally despatched to France in August and September 1914, at the beginning of World War I.The British Army prior to World War I traced its origins to the increasing demands of imperial expansion together with inefficiencies highlighted during the Crimean War, which led to the Cardwell and Childers Reforms of the late 19th century.
British-operated FT tank attached to Canadian troops. The first battle in which tanks made a great impact was the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. British Colonel J.F.C. Fuller, chief of staff of the Tank Corps, was responsible for the tanks' role in the battle. They made an unprecedented breakthrough but the opportunity was not exploited.
The British Army were pioneers in tank combat but by 1939 it could be argued they were behind the times in terms of strategy and tactics, their methods based on the trench warfare of the First World War. The British Army entered the Second World War with an array of poor designs and hobbled by poor doctrine.
British casualties in the fighting between 14 October and 30 November were 58,155 (7,960 dead, 29,562 wounded and 17,873 missing). It is often said that the pre-war professional army died at the First Battle of Ypres. [143] The British Army had arrived in France with some 84,000 infantrymen. By the end of the battle, the BEF had suffered 86,237 ...
The German army recovered about 50 abandoned British Mark IV tanks from the Cambrai battlefield and were able to restore some 30 of them to running order. One was taken to Berlin and was demonstrated to the Kaiser , [ 31 ] while the others went to a captured engineering plant near Charleroi for refurbishment.
Belgian Army order of battle (1914) British Expeditionary Force order of battle (1914) C. ... German Army order of battle, Western Front (1918) I.
In the aftermath of the German spring offensive on the Western Front, the first tank-to-tank battle was between Mk IV tanks and German A7Vs in the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918. [nb 2] About 40 captured Mark IVs were employed by the Germans as Beutepanzerwagen (the German word Beute means "loot" or "booty") with a crew of 12 ...
Design was complicated by a demand that the vehicle could be fitted with sponsons, converting it into a more modern battle tank than the Mark V tank, in case the Mark VIII tank design proved a failure and the type was still designated as a tank, a 'Mark IX' to succeed the Mark VIII but that requirement was soon dropped due to its complexity. [2]