Deborah and the War of the Tanks

by John Taylor

  This book therefore tells the story of a machine, or rather of two machines, since a previous tank bore the same crew number D51, and is therefore likely (since this was the normal practice) to have had the same name. But it is also predominantly a human story, of the men who fought inside both tanks, of the men who fought alongside them, and the men who fought against them. The intention here is not to give a detailed account of the development of the tank, nor of the great battles of Passchendaele in which the first D51 took part, or Cambrai in which the second played a heroic role. Instead this is unashamedly a work of micro-history, written in the belief that by studying the individual and the particular, one can come to a more complete understanding of the whole.

  Of course there are enormous challenges in this approach, in seeking to unravel a single thread from the tapestry of the past. Sometimes we catch only brief glimpses of Deborah through a dim and distorted prism, like those used by the gunners in Birks’ tank. But there are other occasions when the searchlight is turned on her, and we can pick her out clearly amid the smoke and din of battle. And at the end of the story there is always the mute hulk of Deborah herself, preserved for decades in the mud of the battlefield, and now on display as a permanent memorial to the Battle of Cambrai.

  In a sense, this is a story that subverts much of what we know, or think we know, about the First World War, with its inexorable tide of tragedy sweeping the British people from Sarajevo to the Cenotaph by way of the Somme, from the glorious patriotism of Rupert Brooke to the war-weariness of Wilfred Owen. We often think of the Germans as fighting a ‘cleverer’ war – an attitude identified by one future tank officer, William Watson, while home after being wounded in 1915: ‘In our suburb it is firmly believed that the Germans can detach a million from one front, throw it against another, wipe up the Serbians, land in Syria, and return before the absence has been noticed. Everything English is good, but silly: everything German is wicked, but wise.’2

  Yet despite this, the much-derided ‘donkeys’ of the British General Staff – led by Sir Douglas Haig, who was an enthusiastic advocate of tanks from the start – somehow managed to foster the creation, development and increasingly effective use of a revolutionary weapon that has played a decisive role in every conventional war since, from the Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm. It is true that the Germans, who had settled into a generally defensive war on the Western Front, had a less obvious need to develop tanks than the British and French, but by the time they recognized their potential and produced their own clumsy counterpart, they had fallen so far behind in the race that they were unable to catch up, while the British Mark V tank powered ahead to make a crucial contribution to victory in the battles of 1918.

  Even the Germans admitted the enormity of the coup that was delivered at Cambrai. In the words of one officer who was captured in the battle: ‘Here [our High Command] suffered a terrible shock, just like the one experienced by the Romans when Hannibal and his elephants appeared in Italy after going through Spain and Gaul and across the Alps. What the elephants of Carthage were to the legions of Rome, so to a devastating degree were the English tank squadrons to the German troops – a tour de force of English military engineering.’3

  On a darker note, this book also describes two exceptional cases in which details of planned tank attacks were given away to the enemy by British prisoners. The intention here is not to condemn, but rather to explore the moral complexities of war and the personal dilemmas faced by ordinary soldiers, and the potentially deadly consequences of their actions.

  Above all, therefore, it is important to approach this story with an open mind, to set aside our preconceptions about the Great War, and to experience it as the men themselves did – not with hindsight and a sense of inevitability, but as a series of incidents and events that contributed to their own unfolding experience, and enabled them, and us, finally, to achieve a kind of understanding.

  In the words of the author Henry Williamson, recalling his own military service fifty years later: ‘The war was not all evil. We learned something in those days, although things went wrong later on. We just hadn’t the wider vision then that we have now, I suppose.’4

  Author’s Notes

  In many cases, passages quoted from books and other documents have been edited to substitute lower case for upper case letters (e.g. the word ‘tank’ was commonly written ‘Tank’), and to simplify or clarify punctuation. Tank names have been italicised.

  The village of Flesquières was frequently misspelled at the time (the accent proving a particular bugbear), and in general I have replicated the spelling used in the original documents. See also the note below on the spelling of Belgian place-names.

  As far as possible, an individual’s rank is shown at the time of the events in question, or at the time he wrote a book or article (which may result in different ranks being shown for the same person).

  In general, the quotes from German books have been quite freely translated to give a sense of the original meaning. The writers were frequently imprecise about the nationality of their enemies (they often used ‘English’ to mean ‘British’, and described Scottish troops as ‘English’ or even ‘Canadian’). In these cases, the original terms have been followed in the translation.

  In some cases, longer extracts and copies of original documents are shown on the website supporting this book: www.deborah-tank.co.uk

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for permission to use material, and anyone with a potential concern about this is requested to contact the publisher.

  Abbreviations

  Bn

  Battalion

  CWGC

  Commonwealth War Graves Commission

  HQ

  Headquarters

  ICRC

  International Committee of the Red Cross

  IWM

  Imperial War Museum

  NA

  National Archives

  PART I

  INTO THE SALIENT

  Map 2 shows places associated with D Battalion during the Third Battle of Ypres (July–October 1917). French place-names are shown, as these were generally used by the British Army at the time.

  To the left is the town of Poperinghe, with La Lovie Château to the north and the camp which was home to D Battalion throughout the campaign. The tankodrome and workshops were in Oosthoek Wood, and the areas allocated to four tank battalions are shown (E Battalion also subsequently moved into the wood).

  The crew of D51 left here for their first action on 19 August, moving along a supply route called Rum Road to spend the night at Murat Farm before reaching the Yser Canal north of Ypres. A number of crossing-points were used by tanks, including Bridge 4 (‘Brielen Bridge’) beside Essex Farm and ‘Marengo Causeway’ to the north. This brought them into the Ypres Salient, indicated by a thick dotted line showing the German positions in July 1917 (i.e. before the start of the offensive). By August the Germans had been driven back beyond St Julien, and after crossing the canal, the tanks moved along a supply route called Buffs Road to reach the former farm of Bellevue near the original German front-line. Here they prepared for their attack.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Vision of the World’s End

  Through the windows of Johan’s car, the road north of Poperinge1 unfolds, flat and featureless, through a drab Belgian landscape of muddy fields and dank woods. It is only when he switches on his laptop computer, linked to a GPS satellite tracking system and loaded with the meticulous trench maps of the First World War, that the area suddenly springs into long-forgotten life. As we gaze out of the car through the drizzle, each empty field is filled with the ghostly outlines of huts, sheds and hangars – an extraordinary profusion of camps, hospitals, gun emplacements and supply dumps, now swept away like the remains of an ancient civilisation.

  But history pressed hard when it wrote on these pages, and although the words have long been erased, their imprint still remains. Down a muddy track, swallowed up by woods, lies
the site of the enormous Dozinghem dressing station, named in faux-Flemish style like its fellows, Bandaghem and Mendinghem (this was to have been called Endinghem, but officialdom felt that was going beyond a joke).2 Here at least there is a tangible reminder of the past, for although the wards and operating theatres are long gone with their reek of anaesthetic and disinfectant, some of the patients and staff remain – more than 3,000 men whose white headstones fill the cemetery beneath the Cross of Sacrifice.

  Standing there in the silence, it seems incredible that this whole region once teemed with activity. Very little actual fighting took place here, but for four years this was the rear area and support zone which provided for the needs of the British and allied armies during some of the greatest battles in their history. Here were the camps where the troops rested before going up the line and recovered on their return; the workshops and dumps where their food and ammunition were stored; the hospitals where their wounds were treated; and for some, the cemeteries where their bodies were buried.

  Although it lay well behind the front line, the area was not entirely safe, for aerodromes and gun batteries were located here and the area offered many targets for German artillery and bomber aircraft; but the destruction was sporadic rather than systematic, and was no more than an irritation for anyone who had been to the front itself.

  One Tank Corps officer who arrived here in the summer of 1917 likened the area to ‘a disturbed ant-heap … The countryside was “stiff” with light railways, enormous dumps, fresh sidings, innumerable gun-pits, new roads, enlarged camps.’3 Now a curving hedge across a field of maize is all that remains to mark the line of a railway that once transported the tanks into the battle zone, and their destination, Oosthoek Wood, where hundreds of tanks were hidden in preparation for the offensive, is a nature reserve called Galgebossen and stands, dripping and deserted, in the autumn rain. A couple of miles away, the woodland at De Lovie, where the tank crews were encamped throughout the summer and autumn of 1917, provides the setting for a smart residential centre for children with special needs, but at the time of our visit, the imposing château at its heart stood grey and empty, awaiting restoration and brooding on its glorious past.

  Leaving Dozinghem Military Cemetery, my guide, Johan Vanbeselaere – who was born in the area and is an expert on its tank battles – turns his car eastwards, and before long our way is blocked by a dark expanse of water. This is the Ieper-Ijzer (or Ypres-Yser) Canal, now an idle waterway lined with industrial estates and frequented by joggers and ducks; but for the British troops it was a kind of River Styx, a symbolic barrier that separated a reasonable chance of life from an unreasonable risk of death. A rum ration was issued before the men went into action, and one tank commander recalled: ‘The mess had already dubbed rum as “canal-crosser”, because it was supposed to give you sufficient courage to cross the Ypres Canal! The name stuck to it ever afterwards.’4 Despite this, he added sixty years later: ‘Even now the menacing streets of Ypres and this nightmare Canal can return to me and leave a stain of foreboding on the brightest day.’5

  There is nothing but the hum of traffic to be heard here now, but for years this place was rarely free from the distant rumble of gunfire, and crossing the canal represented the rite of passage into the Ypres Salient, a killing field where the British and French trenches bulged outwards into the German lines, and where the armies were engaged in a protracted struggle over a few square miles of sodden farmland.

  It was here that the opposing front lines became fixed after the thrust and parry of the first months of the war evolved into a ‘race to the sea’, in which the great columns of marching men and horse-drawn transport sought to outflank each other, before digging in to create the trench systems that famously stretched from Switzerland to the sea, and would become their home for the next four years. The British recognized Ypres as a vital hub for communications throughout Belgium and northern France, and were determined to hold it at all costs. It was here, in late 1914, that one of the first great set-piece battles of the war was fought, the cloth-capped boys of the old brigade and their French and Belgian allies against the pickelhaubed flower of German youth, musketry against machine guns, until the First Battle of Ypres drew to an inconclusive end and the trench-lines stagnated with the coming of winter. To the British, the battle represented the death of the BEF, because so many men were killed from the small standing army that originally made up the British Expeditionary Force. To the Germans, the deaths of so many of their young recruits meant the battle became known as ‘Kindermord’, the massacre of the innocents.

  The Allied armies found themselves holding a low-lying position surrounded on three sides by hills that were so low as to be almost indiscernible, but which nevertheless gave the enemy a natural vantage-point which they exploited to the full. In April 1915 the Germans launched a fresh offensive in the Salient which became known as the Second Battle of Ypres, and this time the full ghastliness of industrial warfare was unleashed, including the first use of poison gas. But even this failed to break the stalemate, and although the allies were pushed back, the Salient held and the trench-lines atrophied again as the fighting spiralled away to fresh vortices at Verdun and the Somme.

  And so it remained until 1917, with the two opposing sides clinging to their positions while Ypres itself, the once prosperous medieval township at the heart of the Salient, was shelled so relentlessly that it became, in the words of one journalist, ‘like a ghost city in a vision of the world’s end’.6 Plans for a major Allied offensive here began to coalesce early in that year, spurred on by the prospect of sweeping the Germans out of the Channel ports which provided a base for their increasingly effective U-boat attacks on shipping. The British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, also believed that the German army had been dangerously weakened, and that a successful push in Flanders could trigger its collapse; while there was an urgent need to relieve pressure on the French armies, whose morale had been shattered by the disastrous Nivelle offensive in April.

  Hopes of a breakthrough were encouraged by a successful attack at Messines in June 1917, in which British, Australian and New Zealand troops swept the Germans from a ridge south of Ypres that had given them a crucial position overlooking the Salient. This had been achieved with the aid of nineteen enormous mines buried under the German positions, whose simultaneous detonation dealt a shattering blow to the defenders, and by a creeping artillery barrage that sheltered the attackers as they advanced across No Man’s Land.

  Tanks, which had first gone into action only nine months before, were now being used in increasing numbers, and a total of seventy-two were allocated to the attack at Messines where they made a useful, though hardly decisive, contribution to victory. As planning went ahead for the much larger offensive in the Salient, there were some who argued that the time had come to apply an entirely new doctrine of warfare, using tanks in place of the protracted artillery barrage that had become the accepted precursor of an attack.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Giffard Martel, then a staff officer at Tank Corps headquarters, was one of those who believed this approach might have worked:

  Before the eight days’ preliminary bombardment for the battle had started the ground was comparatively dry, and although this low-lying land was not the most suitable for tanks, yet it is reasonably certain that a surprise attack could have been launched with only a very short preliminary bombardment of a few minutes, and that the tanks would have led the infantry successfully on to the Passchendaele ridge on the first day of the attack. This proposal was made by the Tank Corps …; but against this was set the great success of Messines as an artillery battle. Those responsible for the third battle of Ypres argued that while they had the recent example of a great success at Messines by making full use of our superior artillery, why should they risk a novel method of attack involving considerable risk. The answer to this (though it is being wise after the event) is that an enemy is rarely caught napping twice running by the same trick, and that surprise
is essential in war.7

  With so much at stake, it would have taken a bold act of faith by the British General Staff to dispense with a prolonged bombardment and gamble on tanks to carry the day. All the evidence suggested that if things went well, tanks could provide valuable support for the infantry, but they were an unreliable weapon which might just as easily contribute nothing.

  The tone had been set by the first-ever tank action on 15 September 1916, when a handful of machines crawled towards the German lines near the villages of Flers and Courcelette on the Somme. Despite the initial terror these monsters induced among the Germans, and the euphoria of a British media desperate for something to celebrate, the tanks had failed to achieve much of real military consequence. Although they were sometimes useful in subduing defenders and helping the infantry to gain their objectives, tanks also proved all too vulnerable to mechanical failure, to direct hits by artillery and sometimes even small-arms fire, and above all to sodden and uneven ground which tended to leave them either ditched in impassable obstacles, or ‘bellied’ and unable to move in the mud.

  Although the tank commanders believed they could play a decisive role in the Third Battle of Ypres if they were allowed to lead the attack across unbroken terrain, it was also clear they would face an insuperable challenge if the low-lying ground had first been churned up by artillery fire. Brigadier-General Hugh Elles, the Tank Corps commander, warned that the chances of success for the tanks fell with every shell fired, and since more than four-and-a-quarter million of them were used in the preparatory and opening phases of the battle,8 those chances now looked very slim indeed.