“The Rolls-Royce armored car was significant in many ways,” says Philip Brooks, a historian with the Rolls-Royce Owners’ Club. “It wasn’t a tank, but it was a very effective fighting vehicle. It brought mobility to the battlefield that the great cavalry officers of the 19th century like Jeb Stuart would have appreciated. And the simplicity and elegance of Rolls-Royce made it possible.”

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Of course, these paragons were not infallible. David Fletcher, historian at the Tank Museum, notes, “They were bulletproof against rifle fire at reasonable range, but there were still plenty of places where bullets could get in.”

A 1963 account in The Rolls-Royce Owner describes the dispatch of staff cars—a Rolls-Royce open tourer, a Mercedes and a Talbot—to Ostend, Belgium, in August 1914 with the East-church Squadron, under Commander Charles Rumney Samson. Ordered to protect Dunkirk, Samson fitted his staff cars with Maxim guns and promptly engaged a German staff car, wounding two of its occupants.

Two days later, Samson set off with his fleet of cars to Lille, which had only recently been evacuated by the Germans. He was reportedly hit in the jaw by a ginger beer bottle thrown through the windshield of his staff car. The cold welcome didn’t prevent him from posting proclamations around the liberated city: I have this day occupied Lille with an armed English and French force—C.R. Samson, Commander, RN.

Emboldened by his success, Samson had his Rolls and Mercedes sheathed in quarter-inch boiler plate. Soon the armored cars were coordinating operations with British aircraft. They took on German cavalry near Aniche in late September, and in early October screened the evacuation of French troops from Douai by securing a strategic escape bridge and crossroads.

Six more Rolls-Royces soon arrived from England, these thickly armored and equipped with gun turrets. When the necessity of abandoning Antwerp became clear, the Ghosts were given the vital task of fending off German troops along the escape routes to Ostend.

Trench warfare and intractable mud ultimately made the RNAS cars unsuited for combat on the Western Front, but they were to see other fields of action. Number 3 Armored Car Squadron, under Lt. Cmdr. J.C. Wedgwood, went into action against Turkish forces at Gallipoli in 1915. The cars’ Maxim guns put out withering fire, enabling Irish landing forces to gain control of the beach at Sedd el Bahr on April 25. Squadrons No. 3 and 4 continued to attack and harass Turkish troops at Gallipoli through the summer of 1915 until, again, trench warfare made the vehicles impractical.

The armored cars eventually transferred over to the British army for use in the Light Armored Motor Batteries. The vehicles supported Russian and Romanian troops in the winter of 1916, attacking German and Bulgarian positions near the Danube bridge at Cernavoda, Romania. As The Rolls-Royce Owner put it, the “warriors on wheels” had fought admirably in the first 16 months of the war, “successfully attacking the enemy with gusto at every opportunity in an element totally removed from that in which their normal activities lay.”

Armored Rolls-Royces were to prove invaluable to Lt. Col. T.E. Lawrence (the legendary Lawrence of Arabia), who pronounced them “more valuable than rubies” for desert combat. Posted to military intelligence in Cairo, Lawrence became the British liaison to the Arabs in 1916 and coordinated their revolt against the Ottoman Empire. He would eventually command a unit of nine armored Rolls-Royces, which he touted in Revolt in the Desert as “that most involved and intricate weapon.” In a vivid account from that book, Lawrence described using the cars on a one-day mission to blow up bridges, rip up miles of track, capture a Turkish fort and liberate 200 rifles and 80,000 rounds of ammunition.

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