A good article about this man and the brigade in WWI. Some not well known Canadian history.
The forgotten father of mechanized warfare
Remembrance Day seems appropriate to remember the remarkable story of the French officer in the Canadian army in the First World War who invented mobile mechanized warfare.
Raymond Brutinel, who died in France at age 82 in 1964, altered forever the face of war.
An as-yet unpublished book tells how Brutinel, a reserve officer in the French army, made a fortune in Canada in Edmonton, and when the First World War started along with Sir Clifford Sifton and others financed the formation of what was to become the 1st Motor Machine Gun Brigade, (the Emma Gees), commanded by himself.
More than any of his generation, Brutinel saw the machinegun as the weapon of the future and the motorcar as offering mobility on the battlefield.
Unlike soldiers of that day, he didn’t view machineguns as a weapon supporting infantry in defence, but visualized them in batteries of four or eight, firing day and night to inflict casualties behind enemy lines. “Bullet artillery” he called it.
He had studied the 1904 Russo-Japanese war in which Japanese batteries of eight machineguns tore attacking Russian infantry to shreds. The British ignored the lesson.
Brutinel had motorcars equipped with armour-plating, mounted with Colt machineguns (later replaced by Vickers machineguns), able to move wherever necessary to plug gaps in the battle line. To harass the enemy’s rear, or to attack.
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/peter_worthington/2010/11/06/16005596.html
The forgotten father of mechanized warfare
Remembrance Day seems appropriate to remember the remarkable story of the French officer in the Canadian army in the First World War who invented mobile mechanized warfare.
Raymond Brutinel, who died in France at age 82 in 1964, altered forever the face of war.
An as-yet unpublished book tells how Brutinel, a reserve officer in the French army, made a fortune in Canada in Edmonton, and when the First World War started along with Sir Clifford Sifton and others financed the formation of what was to become the 1st Motor Machine Gun Brigade, (the Emma Gees), commanded by himself.
More than any of his generation, Brutinel saw the machinegun as the weapon of the future and the motorcar as offering mobility on the battlefield.
Unlike soldiers of that day, he didn’t view machineguns as a weapon supporting infantry in defence, but visualized them in batteries of four or eight, firing day and night to inflict casualties behind enemy lines. “Bullet artillery” he called it.
He had studied the 1904 Russo-Japanese war in which Japanese batteries of eight machineguns tore attacking Russian infantry to shreds. The British ignored the lesson.
Brutinel had motorcars equipped with armour-plating, mounted with Colt machineguns (later replaced by Vickers machineguns), able to move wherever necessary to plug gaps in the battle line. To harass the enemy’s rear, or to attack.
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/peter_worthington/2010/11/06/16005596.html
