Post by Diarist on May 15, 2016 16:22:42 GMT 1
Early life
Giffard Le Quesne Martel, born 10 October 1889 in Millbrook, Southampton, is a British Army officer who served in the Great War. He is the son of Brigadier General Charles Philip Martel, C.B., Chief Superintendent of Ordnance Factories. He married Maud Mackenzie on 29 July 1922. He entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in 1908 and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 23 July 1909. Martel was instrumental in the establishment of The Royal Navy and Army Boxing Association in 1911 and was Army and Inter Services boxing champion both before and after the war.
The Great War
In 1916, as a sapper officer with direct experience of the first British use of tanks on the Somme, Martel was put in charge of recreating a 1.5-mile (2.4 km) wide replica of the British and German trench systems, complete with no man's land, at Elveden, Norfolk, as part of a tank training ground.
There he developed a keen interest in tank theory believing them to be the future of warfare and in November 1916 he wrote a paper, A Tank Army, suggesting an army composed entirely of armoured vehicles. As J. F. C. Fuller's GSO3 the wide-ranging ideas set out in this paper profoundly influenced Fuller's thinking which at the time simply regarded the tank as no more than a useful adjunct to infantry on the battlefield. Martel was also interested in the construction of wire net roads as deployed in the British Army's 1917–1918 campaign in the Sinai and Palestine and their use in supporting tracked vehicles.
In late 1916, Martel was on Hugh Elles' staff at Bermicourt in France assisting Fuller on the operational planning that culminated in the British tank tactics employed at the Battle of Cambrai.
In addition to his MC (1915) and DSO (1916), in the course of the war Martel was mentioned in dispatches five times.
Post-war
In 1919, Martel was able to combine his two interests of tanks and military bridging when he became head of the Experimental Bridging Establishment at Christchurch, Hampshire, which researched the possibilities of using tanks for battlefield engineering purposes such as bridge-laying and mine-clearing. Here he continued trials on modified Mark V tanks. The bridging component involved an assault bridge, designed by Major Charles Inglis RE, the Canal Lock Bridge, which had sufficient length to span a canal lock. Major Martel mated the bridge with the tank and used hydraulic power generated by the tank's engine to manoeuvre the bridge into place. For mine clearance the tanks were equipped with 2-ton rollers.
Martel also developed his new bridging concept at the EBE, the Martel bridge, a modular box girder bridge suitable for military applications. The Martel bridge was not developed but its modular construction became the basis of the Bailey bridge.
Martel also continued to pursue his interest in tanks independently. In 1925 he built, in his own garage, a one-man tankette powered by a car engine and capable of a speed of 15 mph. After a demonstration to the War Office, Morris Commercial Motors was contracted to build four test models, the first of which was delivered in 1926. And as a result of the publicity, Carden Loyd Tractors built a similar one-man machine, the Carden Loyd One Man Tankette.
In 1927, eight more Martel tankettes were ordered to assess their potential role in forward reconnaissance. They were tested along with two-man Carden Loyd tankettes in manoeuvres with the Experimental Mechanized Force on Salisbury Plain in 1927 and 1928 when Martel was commanding officer of a company of Royal Engineers stationed there.
The idea for a single-man fighting vehicle was soon dropped as it became apparent that one operator could not control the vehicle at the same time as firing a weapon and the British Army requirement for a light tank, the Light Tank Mark I, was a development of the Carden Loyd tankette. Morris Motors tried developing a two-man version of the Martel design and Crossley Motors a further version - the Morris-Martel - in 1927 with Kégresse rubber tracks but after two prototypes were tested the project was abandoned.
In 1928, the Tank and Tracked Transport Advisory Committee that Martel was a member of became the Mechanical Warfare Board which was to liaise with industry and to advise on technical matters relating to "mechanised transport".
In 1929, Martel was seconded to the King George V's Own Bengal Sappers and Miners and then served as an instructor at the British Indian Army's Staff College in Quetta from 1930 until 1934. In April 1935 he was assigned an advisor on mechanization in TRADOC.
Source: Wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffard_Le_Quesne_Martel