by Peter Hart
Rifleman Donald Cree, 1/8th Battalion (Post Office Rifles), London Regiment, 140th Brigade, 47th Division
The 47th Division had finally captured High Wood and gained a foothold in the Starfish Trench. When the men were eventually withdrawn from the front line a few days later they were all but a shadow of what they had once been. The division had suffered some 4,544 casualties over the period.
On our way back, Major General Barter met the battalion and as our company passed him, he said, ‘Well done, 20th, you have done splendid work, I am proud of you’. He might with reason be proud of us, for the battalion of which I am more than proud to be a member, had done that day what many other battalions on previous occasions had failed to do—namely, had driven the Germans out of the wood and kept them out. We have had to pay the price however.46
Lance Sergeant Reginald Davy, 20th Battalion (Blackheath and Woolwich), London Regiment, 141st Brigade, 47th Division
They may have been proud men, but they had little to celebrate. There were scenes of indescribable pathos as the battalions took stock of those who were unscathed, at least in body, after the horrific battle.
From tea time to well after dark, Major Vince and the adjutant, seated at a deal table out in the open, made a detailed roll call of the battalion. The men, clean-shaven, though haggard still, stood round in their mud-soiled, creased slacks. ‘Rifleman “X”?’, the Major’s voice would call. No reply. ‘Anyone know anything about him?’ ‘Yes, Sir’, answered a voice from the crowd, ‘He went over besides me, I last saw him as we got up to the German trench.’ Then silence. No one else knew anything more. ‘Rifleman “Y”?’ No reply and no one knew anything about him. By the light of guttering candles, question and answer went from the flame-lit table to the dark circle and back. Nor did anyone move until the work was completed. The result gave 63 killed, 50 missing and 185 wounded.47
Lieutenant Etienne de Caux, 1/8th Battalion (Post Office Rifles), London Regiment, 140th Brigade, 47th Division
Lieutenant de Caux was the French interpreter attached to the 1/8th Londons and as he watched the roll call he mused that the relationship established between the two traditional enemies had been truly consummated in the fires of war.
A hollow square of jaded muddy figures standing in an orchard open at one side to the after-glint of the sun that set red. Mist begins to float up the valley, but the glint of light on some clouds high up has still the hardness of silver. A strong voice calls one name after another from a roll lit by a fluttering candle shaded by the hand of the one remaining sergeant major. A dark mass of tall trees in the background. There should never, never be anything but brotherly feeling amongst Frenchmen for their English comrades after this war.48
Lieutenant Etienne de Caux, 1/8th Battalion (Post Office Rifles), London Regiment, 140th Brigade, 47th Division
The XV Corps (New Zealand, 41st and 14th Divisions) under the command of Lieutenant General Henry Horne was at the centre of the attack and was to be responsible for the capture of Flers. To assist it in this somewhat daunting task were eighteen tanks of D Company, Heavy Section Machine Gun Corps although only fourteen of these managed to drag themselves even as far as their starting points. The New Zealand Division were on the left of the XV Corps. It was to seize the German lines stretching to the north-west of Flers. As the men advanced they, too, initially suffered from flanking machine-gun fire from High Wood. The tanks were also late coming up into the line and contributed little of value in the initial stages as the New Zealanders closely pursued the creeping barrage and managed to overrun the Switch Line before, after a pause, sweeping on to the outlying trenches of Flers. As they began to encounter stubborn resistance from the Flers Trench, the tanks caught up to lend assistance and a further advance was made to the Flers Support Trench. Here the German resistance stiffened and the attack finally spluttered out of steam.
Adjoining the New Zealanders was the 41st Division. It was to seize Flers itself and then advance on the neighbouring village of Gueude-court. It was allotted ten tanks to assist it, of which no more than seven actually got forward. In many accounts the advance is seen as a walkover—but there is no doubt that to the troops involved it was a tremendous battle. Many of the men of the leading battalions started out in No Man’s Land, sheltering in shell holes. They would advance, clinging as close as possible to the creeping barrage, willing to risk casualties from the occasional shells falling short.
The flames, the shrapnel, the acrid fumes, the clouds of smoke and the uplifting of tons of earth. All these conjured up a vision of awfulness and yet of tragic grandeur. Then a lot of the noise seemed to fade away as we jumped or rather struggled to our feet to get on with the job of going forward. No sooner had we started than the enemy had begun a very useful reply to our guns by dropping a barrage around the Tea Support Trench. The tank wallowed along, not fast enough for the keen troops, so it was left behind us with its gallant section to guard it. We lost some men. The stretcher bearers were doing their best for our first casualties—some were beyond their help. German machine gunners were already successful and our numbers were being gradually thinned. The creeping barrage moved on; and the first objective was captured.49
Lance Corporal Gerald Dennis, 21st Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 124th Brigade, 41st Division.
There was a pause to consolidate and to allow the ‘moppers up’ to complete their grim task. Then they lurched forward again.
On again, as the rain of iron from our guns moved slowly forward. Heavy shells continued to sing overhead, more earth was being churned up and smoke slowly drifted in the wind. Although our main aim was to press on, we did look to the right and left now and again to see our troops moving on. An occasional glance revealed one man stumbling head foremost, another blown in the air, another collapsed in a heap, nearby one with blood streaming from his face. Our lines were getting thinner and thinner.50
Lance Corporal Gerald Dennis, 21st Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 124th Brigade, 41st Division
Alongside the 124th Brigade to their left, the men of the 122nd Brigade were directly facing Flers and were assisted greatly in this attack by the presence of the tanks. Amongst them was D-17 commanded by Second Lieutenant Stuart Hastie, and which he had named Dinnaken. His second gearsman in the tank was Gunner Reiffer.
We were a male tank and carried two 6-pounder guns with several hundred rounds of ammunition and some Hotchkiss light machine guns with .303 ammunition. Our tank was filled up with stores of all kinds: drums of engine oil, gear oil, iron rations, gas masks, equipment, overalls, revolvers, anti-’bump your head against the roof of the tank’ leather helmets, carrier pigeons in a basket, semaphore signals. We even went into action with ten 2-gallon tins of petrol (flaming red in colour) on the outside of the tank on either side of the exhaust pipes.51
Gunner A, H. R. Reiffer, Tank D-17, D Company, Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps
As the infantry and tanks went over the top, Lieutenant Cecil Lewis was up on contact patrol at the vital moment. From high up in the skies he truly had a grandstand view and could even see the red petrol cans carried on the tanks.
There was this solid grey wool carpet of shell bursts, but it was just as if somebody had taken his finger in the snow and pulled it through the snow and left a sort of ribbon. There were four or five of these ribbons running back toward High Wood. Through these lanes at zero hour we saw the tanks beginning to lumber. They’d been cleared for the tanks to come in file. They came up three or four in file, one behind the other. Of course they were utterly unexpected, the first lot went sailing over the trenches and we thought, ‘Well this is fine!’ Because the whole thing was the year was getting a bit late, ‘If we don’t get through now, we never shall!’ This was the great opportunity and hope was high. We thought, ‘If they can get through the third line defences, we can put the cavalry through and the whole war will become mobile again!’ And so we watched pretty carefully to see how things went. Amongst th
e grey wool of shell burst these lumbering chaps. One or two of them with red petrol tanks on their back; one even with a little mascot, a little fox terrier running behind the tank. Then one would stop and we had no idea why. Obviously it had been hit, or somebody had thrown a grenade at it, or it had a breakdown. At the end of two hours they had moved about a mile and we thought everything was going well and we came back because our petrol was finished.52
Lieutenant Cecil Lewis, 3 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps
Unfortunately, a somewhat farcical incident soon removed two of the tanks trundling towards Flers. Tank D-9, commanded by Second Lieutenant Victor Huffam, was following Tank D-14, commanded by Second Lieutenant Gordon Court, when they came to grief in embarrassing fashion.
Before he had gone 200–300 yards he attempted to cross a disused support trench. As he crossed it—the tank weighed 28 tons—the parapet crumbled beneath him. His tail end, the backside of the tank, disappeared into the trench. He scrambled out of his tank—quite a job—and he came back to me. Now we had been equipped with very large iron hooks on the stern of our tanks and we had wire hawsers coiled on the roof. Court was a particular friend of mine, so I manoeuvred up behind him and attempted to come alongside of him, to cross in front of him and to try and tow him out. But in manoeuvring alongside of him, my sponson got tangled with his and the two tanks were locked together.53
Second Lieutenant Victor Huffam, Tank D-9, D Company, Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps
There was nothing more they could do but climb on to the roof and watch the rest of the battle. What the infantry thought of this wretched display of bad luck and ineptitude can easily be imagined. Passing close to them D-17 continued up the main road, heading directly into Flers.
There was a terrific amount of noise in the tank made up by the engine, the tracks, and the tumbling about of the drums of oil and various paraphernalia that we had to carry. Our own barrage was going on outside and the German barrage, but really we couldn’t hear a lot of this because of our own noise.54
Gunner A. H. R. Reiffer, Tank D-17, D Company, Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps
His officer, Lieutenant Hastie decided to push on alone in support of the infantry. Ahead of him was the battered village of Flers.
It was up to me to carry on alone. Having crossed the front German line I could see the old road down into Flers which was in a shocking condition having been shelled by both sides. At the other end of this road, about a mile away, which was about the limit of my vision from the tank, I could see the village of Flers, more or less clouded with smoke from the barrage which had come down on top of it and the houses, some of them painted white, some seemed to be all kinds of colours. Across the front of the village, we could see the wire of a trench named Flers Trench and this formed a barricade in front of the village on the British side. We made our way down the remnants of this road with great difficulty. Just as we started off our steering gear was hit and we resorted to steering by putting on the brake on each track alternatively and trying to keep the tank following the line of the Flers-Delville Wood road. When we got down to Flers Trench and passing into the village, there was a great deal of activity from the eaves, under the roofs of the cottages and also from a trench which appeared to be further through the village but which we couldn’t just locate at that point.55
Second Lieutenant Stuart Hastie, Tank D-17, D Company, Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps
The tank was targeted by German machine gunners and the sides were liberally splattered with bullets. The multiple impacts caused slivers of hot steel to whip round the confined interior of the tank.
We were fired on by German machine guns. First of all they were firing on the starboard side and the impact of their bullets was making the inside of the armour plate white hot. And the white hot flakes were coming off and if you happened to be near enough you could have been blinded by them. Fortunately, none of us on the starboard side caught it. But there was a gunner, Gunner Sugden, on the port side who was wounded that way. We went on and Percy Boult was rather upset about this machine gunner and he said, ‘I can spot him, I think, he is up in the rafters!’ He was a pretty good shot and he scored a bull’s eye on the target and brought him down.56
Gunner A. H. R. Reiffer.Tank D-17, D Company, Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps
Above them a contact patrol of the RFC sighted D-17 moving through Flers and the observer’s sober message, ‘Tank seen in main street Flers going on with large number of troops following it’ was transmuted and thereafter immortalised by the press as, ‘A tank is walking up the High Street of Flers with the British Army cheering behind’. Whatever the impression may have been from the air, D-17 was soon deep in trouble. Second Lieutenant Hastie could achieve little by crashing around the ruins of Flers without solid infantry support. Although elements of the 122nd Brigade had managed to enter the village, they had naturally gone to ground in the heavy shelling and were invisible from D-17.
Having steered the engine by using the brakes up to this point, the engine was beginning to knock very badly and it looked as if we wouldn’t be fit to carry on very much further. We made our way up the main street, during which time my gunners had several shots at various people who were underneath the eaves or even in the windows of some of the cottages. We went on down through the High Street as far as the first right-angle bend. We turned there and the main road goes for a matter of 200–300 yards and then turns another right angle to the left and proceeds out through towards Gueudecourt. But we did not go past that point. At this point we had to make our minds up what to do. The engine was really in such a shocking condition that it was liable to let us down at any moment. So I had a look round, so far as it was possible to do that in the middle of a village being shelled at that time by both sides. I could see no signs of the British Army coming up behind me. So I slewed the tank round with great difficulty on the brakes and came back to Flers Trench and turned the tank again to face the Germans.57
Second Lieutenant Stuart Hastie, Tank D-17, D Company, Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps
Having rejoined the main body of the infantry, Second Lieutenant Hastie tried to find out what was going on and what he should do. It was fairly obvious that D-17 was all but finished.
I got out of the tank and contacted an infantry officer who asked me if I could take the guns out of the tank if the tank was unable to go any further forward and help them meet the counter-attack which they were certain was going to come. I had to explain to him that it was impossible because the guns are fixtures in the tanks and the machine guns are fitted in ball mountings which when you took the machine gun out it could not be mounted on anything else—it had no mounting of its own. By this time the infantry did not show any particular anxiety to go on, they were more concerned with consolidating in Flers Trench. We made up our minds that nothing could be done with the tank except get it back. We eventually turned the tank off the road to the left, pushed it up against a small hillock which gave us a certain amount of cover—and at that moment the engine packed up and did not start again.58
Second Lieutenant Stuart Hastie, Tank D-17, D Company, Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps
Shortly afterwards one of their tracks was hit and the tank was finally immobilised and abandoned. Later that day two other tanks (Second Lieutenant Arthur Arnold in D-16 and Second Lieutenant L. C. Bond in D-18) helped break down the German defences around Flers by making a determined approach towards the west face of the village.
A tank appeared on the left front of my company position which I immediately attacked with machine-gun and rifle fire and also, as it came closer, with hand grenades. These unfortunately caused no real damage because the tank only turned slightly to the left but otherwise just carried on. He crossed the trenches in the area of the company on my left, caused us heavy losses with his flanking machine gun fire on trenches which had to a large extent been flattened, without my men being able to do anything against it.59
Leutnan
t Braunhofer, 5th Bavarian Infantry Division, German Army
The tanks then took up a position from which they were able to provide useful machine-gun support fire for the advance of the New Zealanders towards the northern section of Flers. They were also ideally placed to deal with German counter-attacks.
We were rewarded with the sight of long lines of Germans advancing in open formation, and opened fire with our port-side Vickers guns at 900 yards range. It was impossible to tell just what effect our fire took, but it certainly checked the advance. Dracula cruised about for a while in front of the village and then came under what seemed to be direct fire from a field gun. A difficult matter to judge, but someone was making useful practice against us. One shell in particular seemed to miss us by inches. I had, in the meantime, collected a bullet through my knee, while outside. It was now late afternoon, and as our infantry had been reinforced, I judged it was time to get back.60
Second Lieutenant Arthur Arnold, Tank D-16, D Company, Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps
