In all five vehicles the gun was pintle-mounted towards the front of the vehicle, and had a 360 degree traverse and a maximum elevation of almost 90 degrees, allowing them to be used as anti-aircraft artillery. These five guns which participated in various field exercises as part of the Experimental Mechanised Force and it successor, the Experimental Armoured Force which was dispersed in February 1929. Mechanised armour advocate and theoretician B. H. Liddell Hart subsequently argued the EMF's operations were always too small in scope, were exclusively confined to that of an adjunct to larger, traditionally organised force of the kind whose limitations had been so cruelly exposed in the Great War. In effect he asserted the exercises had been designed to avoid any hint that mechanised forces could operate independently or be strategically decisive. Whether or not that accusation was well-founded one shortcoming highlighted by the exercises was that infantry lorries (and by extension, towed artillery) could not keep up with the tanks cross-country. The solution, that of providing the infantry with tracked or half-tracked armoured personnel carriers (the route taken by France and Germany) was deemed far too expensive and effectively dismissed. It was against this largely negative background that the Experimental Armoured Force was disbanded, leaving the British Army that pioneered the use of armoured formations to form ad hoc armoured forces, employing tank brigades and motorized infantry brigades that acted independently and thus did not practice integrated arms warfare, a habit so ingrained that it survived well into World War II. With the withdrawal from service of five Birch guns in June–July 1931 ended not only the British Army's promising experiments with tracked self-propelled artillery ended but any attempt to integrate infantry, guns and tracks until the hurriedly improvised vehicles were rushed into British service during the Second World War, notably the Bishop and the Deacon, then learning afresh how to best employ them. Not only had lessons learned in the 1920s been squandered, so had the opportunity to perfect the operational use of highly mobile armoured forces working in collaboration with similarly mobile and well-protected infantry. When these lessons had to be re-learned (or those who refused to learn them replaced) the British army could once again make proper use of such weapons systems while pitted against a well-equipped, forward-looking, fast-moving and aggressive adversary for whose military leaders the British experiments and advocates of mechanised warfare had been inspirational. If 'exotic' weapons like the Birch gun were dismissed as something between a fad and a threat to the established order of the peacetime army seems foolish in hindsight perhaps it is understandable in the context of an army - and in a nation - that had just fought "the war to end all wars" for four long years, in the processes losing a million killed, two million injured, and ended the war exhausted and on the verge of bankruptcy.