Motor Vehicles: Germany's Impact On The Western Front

At the turn of the twentieth century railways dominated land transport. Motor vehicles had yet to seriously threaten the railways, except for local traffic, while aviation was at an embryonic stage. Consequently the main belligerent nations of Europe built their plans for mobilising and supporting their armies in war primarily around railways. Each nation had developed very sophisticated schedules for concentrating troops and equipment at key depots and then despatching the forces rapidly to designated positions on their frontiers.

Nowhere was the planning more developed than in Germany and France. Germany's 'Schlieffen Plan' provided for concentrating forces by rail rapidly along both the eastern and western boundaries. It was expected that
Every bullet, blanket, bandage, artillery battery or tin of bully beef had to be manufactured and transported where and when it was required. By 1918 each Division of about 12,000 men needed about 1,000 tons of supplies every day - equivalent to two supply trains each of 50 wagons. When an offensive was being planned, even larger quantities of material had to be concentrated in preparation for the operations that might last for months.

Railways were the only way of shifting this volume of material overland and a very sophisticated transportation and supply system was developed, especially after a major reorganisation in 1916. For the British the challenge was complicated by the English Channel. War material had to be railed to a Channel port and, until special ferries were built to carry wagons, loaded onto a ferry, reloaded onto a French train or barges and carried forward to the main supply dumps behind the British
Over 1,000 civilian lorries and over 300 buses were requisitioned at the outbreak of hostilities and were hurriedly moved across the Channel. The owners had been encouraged by a financial subsidy to purchase vehicles that met a War Department specification, a condition of which was that the vehicles could be requisitioned. These were only a temporary stopgap - although some vehicles such as London buses remained in service throughout the war - and thousands more vehicles were ordered from manufacturers in Britain and increasingly the USA. In the meantime, a heavy reliance had to be placed on far less efficient horse-drawn transport. The fodder for the horses alone took up more transportation capacity than food and ammunition for the