Matilda II

[Bruce_in_Oz]

The odd thing is that "combined operations" were introduced by the British Army in WW1. The father of the "art" was Australian General Monash, who was aghast at the "meat-grinder tactics in use, especially with his relatively tiny contingent of Australians. The battle of Hamel was a good demonstration of the technique. Artillery, air, armour and infantry were organised to operate in UNISON, not in free-wheeling penny-packets.

British theorists Maj. Gen. Fuller and Capt. B. Liddel-Hart further refined the process that so impressed the beaten Germans, that if formed the core of their concept of "Blizkrieg" in later conflict.

Sadly, the very people who had developed "Blitzkrieg" were sidelined and thus the "Matilda" whose only real asset was reasonably thick, (for its time) armour; the dinky main gun and "walking-speed" mobility, not so much. Australia used a small fleet of Matildas quite successfully in the Pacific campaign. Japanese tanks were generally less bullet-proof than most allied light armour of the era. However, the Japanese, like their friends in Germany, quickly worked out that, whilst their "anti-tank" guns were ineffective against the Matilda, their bigger anti-aircraft guns, 75, 90 and 120mm would mess up the day of a Matilda crew, and even moreso , the poor, dumb bastards sent into an assault along defended airfields in the much faster, but much flimsier M-3 Stuart light tanks.

It was all a bit shaky at first, but by early 1918, "Combined Arms" was the done thing. The other innovation at the time was the "silent offensive" as introduced by the Australian contingent. This involved NO saturation bombardment prior to an assault, hence not much warning to the intended victims. It also involved a steady stream of "packets" of heavily-armed infantry quietly moving into any and every nook and cranny and as close to the objective as possible, including right inside if they could manage. Bypassing "islands" of Germans was the norm. This method was later demonstrated on an enormous scale, (just not as quietly), in the U.S. Marines "Island Hopping' campaign in the Pacific in WW2.