Deborah and the War of the Tanks

by John Taylor

  Neither side had an opportunity to bury Lieutenant Lawrie and Sergeant Weeks, and they are now commemorated on the memorial to the missing at Tyne Cot Cemetery, along with nearly 35,000 other men whose bodies were lost for ever in the mud of the Salient.

  CHAPTER 12

  Failure is an Orphan

  Though painful to admit, the men of D Battalion had achieved virtually nothing that day for all their struggle and sacrifice. It is true that Bülow Farm was taken on the left, but it seems likely that this happened before the arrival of Devil and Dracula. On the rest of D Battalion’s front, the British had edged their positions forward but failed to capture any of the enemy strongholds. In the words of Fifth Army’s brief summary: ‘48th Division on the right encountered bad ground which prevented tanks reaching their objectives, and were held up by machine-gun fire approximately 150 to 200 yards short of their objective.’1

  Tank Corps headquarters had to admit that operations across the entire front were ‘not very successful’, but they had warned repeatedly that tanks could not achieve the impossible. Nor did they feel they were the only ones to blame: ‘The want of success was chiefly due to the inability of tanks to gain their objectives on account of bad going and the incapacity of the infantry to co-operate with them when they did.’2

  Even the successes at Bülow Farm, and before that the Cockcroft, were called into question by the staff of 11th Division. As they looked back over recent operations, they came up with an important insight: ‘It is true, that the enemy gave up the Cockcroft and Bulow practically without a fight, but any points which he considers valuable … he fights for stubbornly.’3 In other words, the much-vaunted battle of the Cockcroft had been a success not because of the brilliant tank tactics, but rather because the Germans did not see these positions as strategically important.

  Not only that, but there were claims that the tanks might actually have made the situation worse on 22 August. As soon as the action was over D Battalion came under fire again, this time from Major-General Sir Robert Fanshawe, commander of 48th Division whose troops had tried to take Vancouver, Springfield and Winnipeg. He sent an aggrieved memo to his superiors at XVIII Corps:

  In my opinion, the Germans knew that we were going to attack to-day. They bombarded our artillery heavily yesterday and also with gas during last night. This morning, just before zero hour, our assembly positions were heavily shelled. There are various reasons which may account for this. Firstly, some tanks moving at about 7.30 a.m. yesterday near Bellevue Farm, which the enemy may have seen; or the capture of a signalling officer yesterday evening. The enemy did not display any of the signs of surprise this morning as he did on the morning of the 19th; there were no rockets or lights sent up along this division’s part of the front.4

  There is no recorded response from the commander of XVIII Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir Ivor Maxse, who must have been as frustrated as anyone else by the failure and had scant regard for Major-General Fanshawe, who he damned with faint praise as ‘a good average divisional commander and trainer’.5 In fact, the biggest surprise is that anyone could have expected the Germans to be surprised by the second attack. The sudden arrival of tanks on 19 August came out of the blue, but after that the enemy knew a further push was only a matter of time. This was obvious even to a junior officer like Second Lieutenant Douglas Browne: ‘The Germans this time were wide awake, and the stratagems which had proved so successful in effecting a surprise on the 19th could hardly be expected to deceive again so soon after.’6 One recalls the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Giffard Martel: ‘An enemy is rarely caught napping twice running by the same trick.’7

  Just as the success of 19 August had many parents, so the failure of 22 August found itself an orphan. Colonel Baker-Carr made no mention of it in his memoirs, perhaps recognizing that the tactics which proved so effective at the Cockcroft had not worked second time round, and may even have made things worse for the infantry, who were left to attack unsupported when the tanks failed to deliver.

  Lieutenant-General Maxse also made no mention of the operation in his letters home to Tiny, and the debacle was played down in a report from his headquarters: ‘The assaulting troops had received definite instructions to await the arrival of the tanks before they started, and as the tanks did not arrive no attack started. Later an advance was made but only little ground was captured. Our casualties for the operation were very slight.’8

  Maxse was nothing like the popular image of a blinkered Great War general (a biography of him is appropriately entitled Far From a Donkey),9 but the deaths of more than 130 men in the infantry units under his command do not strike one as ‘very slight’. However, this was regrettably true by the standards of the time, and also in comparison to neighbouring units such as 61st Division which lost more than 320 men. When all the British and Imperial armed services are taken into account across all fronts, a total of 1,650 people died on that single day, even though no major offensive took place.10

  The biggest frustration was that there was still no effective way of tackling the concrete bunkers that blocked the advance. An officer from the brigade which attacked with F Battalion invoked the language of the apocalypse: ‘Every kind of mechanical means of destruction must be brought to bear against strong points. It is not likely that Stokes [i.e. trench mortars] can be got up with our barrage. This points to a use of tanks – gas – boiling oil – liquid fire – burning phosphorous – smoke etc. The condition of the ground will not always allow of tanks being used. They failed in the late attack on this account.’11

  * * *

  While the British regarded 19 August as a success and 22 August as a failure, the Germans were more consistent: they regarded them both as minor triumphs.

  They had beaten off two concentrated attacks without giving any ground from their main defensive position. It is true that their losses were judged to be heavy, with 125th Infantry Regiment alone losing thirty-two officers and men killed, eighty-six wounded and eleven missing,12 while casualties were probably even higher in 23rd Reserve Infantry Regiment manning the line to their right (from the British perspective). These losses were primarily the result of artillery fire, as described by one infantry officer: ‘The English artillery are exceptionally agile and flexible … They systematically destroy one concrete bunker after another. In comparison with the defensive battle at Arras, it is striking that the enemy uses almost exclusively large calibres.’ The report confirms the efficacy of these heavy munitions against the supposedly impregnable blockhouses, of which ‘many … were destroyed by the first shot’.13

  On the other hand, the Germans saw the enemy infantry as lacking in determination, and the use of tanks as an attempt to compensate for this. The same report continues:

  ‘The English infantry attacked better at Arras. They are no longer so spirited, nor do they come in such compact groups. First of all, it seems that tanks and raiding parties equipped with machine guns have to reach and hold a secure line before the English infantry form up to attack … The failure of the tank attacks is primarily due to the difficult terrain and machine-gun fire. The machines remain stuck in the mud in the deep shell-holes. The anti-tank batteries fired around 100 shells, which landed close to the tanks. One tank was completely destroyed.’14

  Their pride at holding the British at bay was sealed two days later, when a message arrived for the 125th from Kaiser Wilhelm II himself: ‘For the recent glorious achievements of the regiment, which repulsed two heavy English attacks without giving the least ground, I offer my warmest congratulations, and wish to convey to the regiment, which has always proved itself so magnificently, my deepest appreciation and sincere gratitude.’15

  * * *

  The attack of 22 August was hardly a decisive encounter, but we have considered it so closely not just because it was the first battle involving Deborah’s crew, but also because, in the words of Major William Watson, it was ‘typical of many a tank action in the Salient’.16

  The various Briti
sh units produced various reports on the operation, but there was no real soul-searching about its failure, and no sign that any major lessons had been learned; in fact, the main response was more or less to forget about it. The entire day’s fighting by XVIII Corps and D Battalion merited a bare five lines (plus footnote) in the official account of the battle.17 Major Clough Williams-Ellis, in his history of the Tank Corps, devoted two whole pages to the action of 19 August, but merely mentioned 22 August among a number of what he called ‘depressing little engagements’.18 Lieutenant-Colonel John Fuller later compiled a list of every action fought by the Tank Corps during the Great War, but one searches in vain for any mention of D Battalion on 22 August. It seems that he, too, had simply forgotten about it.19

  But the soil of Flanders could not forget so easily, at least for the time being. A month after the attack, Private Frank Cunnington walked across the former battlefield, near what had been the boundary between D and F Battalions.

  At and beyond Schuler Galleries it was like picking a way through hell itself, no chamber of horrors could be like it. From out of what had once been the earth protruded arms, legs, dead faces, riven bodies which swelled till they burst, and over all clouds of flies. One arm pointed upwards, on its sleeve the red square, symbol of the [Staffordshires]. The shells had killed them, buried them, and churned them up again out of the depths of this horrible, bloody porridge, over which hung the awful stench of the dead and shell fumes, the earth is soaked with it and the hot sunlight over all. We hurried on and were soon on cleaner ground. On ahead we now saw [our observation post] at Kansas House … About 10 yards in front lay one of our dead on his back, arms flung wide just as he had fallen, eyes open and lips parted in a smile. You had to look twice to realise he was dead, his whole expression was that of surprised pleasure, as if meeting a long lost friend.20

  On his return journey, Private Cunnington and a colleague came across another reminder of the battle – an abandoned tank with a shell hole in the front. They decided to investigate:

  Tom said, ‘She’s been hit by a dud and the crew’s cleared off for the present. Now’s the chance to see what the inside of a tank’s like.’ A narrow door, placed low down, was open, so Tom got head and shoulders inside, looked up for a moment, gasped and hurriedly withdrew. ‘Lord, what an awful sight. I wouldn’t go in there for a pension!’ I looked in and up, and I don’t think I shall ever forget it. There on the machinery hung the remains of the lookout man [sic]. The shell had hit him direct, he was smashed to pulp except for the left arm and hand which hung stripped bare of any sign of sleeve. And shocked as I was, I noticed a gold ring on one of the fingers. Perhaps the rest of the crew lay inside, I don’t know, we didn’t go in to find out. Poor devil, but he couldn’t have felt anything, and Tom said how glad he was not to be in the Tank Corps.

  Even worse was to come when they passed by again the next day: ‘A few chaps are round the tank, [an officer’s] servant among them. He wanted the gold ring on the dead man’s hand and because he couldn’t remove it, he hacked off the finger and secured it by brute force, the callous swine. I loathed the sight of him ever afterwards.’21

  Just six weeks later, with the British offensive in the Salient nearing its close, Lieutenant-General Maxse gained a very different impression as he toured the same area with his brother-in-law. Their walk from St Julien to Wurst Farm took them along the road where D51 and the southern group had met their fate, and over the crossroads at Winnipeg. He told Tiny they had been ‘amongst scenes which were of intense interest to me during August and Sept. last! Now they are in our possession they become less interesting day by day, and are losing their battle characteristics so rapidly that I quite understand why no historian ever can reproduce any accurate description of anything but the broad lines of any battle.’22

  It was as though the landscape itself was moving on. An even bigger surprise was in store for Arthur Judd, who had narrowly escaped death in the attack near Pond Farm: ‘Our battalion never went back to Ypres, but I revisited it – a new clean city – just ten years later. I was amazed at the change, not so much with the re-built city itself, but the transformation of the countryside – a beautiful rich fertile land, fields of flax and wheat waving in the sun, freshly-planted trees, dear little churches set in a wonderland of model villages; children playing gaily in the streets, and above all, peace.’23

  Nothing much has happened since to change that description, apart from the present-day hazard from cars speeding along the straight rural roads. Most of the concrete pillboxes have been removed, though it is fortunate that at Pond Farm, the farmer’s son Stijn Butaye has a rare affinity with the past and part of a waterlogged bunker has survived there, its concrete bulk so battered that it resembles a granite crag or the remains of a coral reef. One of the farm outbuildings is packed with the relics of war that are still turned up by the plough – twisted rifles and bayonets, a shattered fragment of armour plate from a tank, and the fuse-caps of shells, their corroded brass dials still set by the gunner’s careful hand to determine the moment of impact. Outside, locked in a wire cage, a few of those that failed to detonate are lurking, scabrous and lethal, packed with explosives or poison gas and awaiting their final appointment with the Belgian bomb disposal squad.24

  The contrast between memory and forgetting was brought home to the author Henry Williamson when he returned to the battlefield in 1964, and went in search of the Canadian ‘brooding soldier’ memorial at the Vancouver crossroads, which he had visited soon after it was built:

  Where were the crossroads? Where am I? Could the war ever have been here – those four years. For this country today looks like a great English estate during the Edwardian heyday. We stop. Drive on. I am nervous.

  ‘I swear it was at the muddy cross-roads. Is that it, among those trees?’

  ‘Good God! What a difference …’

  For this place was once called Vancouver, a featureless waste of dead men, mules, tanks and shell-holes linked together with five feet of water in each. Triangle farm stood, solid with concrete and steel, like a tooth decayed to its root, with other German pillboxes in line.

  The sun of high summer is shining, leaves move to the breeze, all is quiet, a dream of summer. We cross a fine new motor road.

  This, rising above lawns and flowers, is the Canadian Memorial, surely the memorial for all the soldiers of all wars? For the bowed head and shoulders with reversed arms emerging from the top of the tall stone column has the gravity and strength of grief coming from the full knowledge of old wrongs done to men by men …

  The genius of Man rises out of the stone, and once again our tears fall upon the battlefield.25

  Like the frozen grief of the brooding soldier, the wrongs that were done on that day could never be erased from the memories of those who were involved. Andrew Lawrie’s parents would never forget the telegram telling of his death, and Jason Addy would never forget the twisted arm protruding from their son’s tank, and George Macdonald would never forget the day when he had hoped, and failed, to finally come face-to-face with the enemy.

  In the mental hospital where he remained until his death, a former private in 2/5th Bn Gloucestershire Regiment was also unable to forget. Ivor Gurney, now regarded as one of the finest poets of the First World War, had been attached to his brigade’s machine-gun unit and was held back as a relief during the attack in which so many of his comrades died. Ten days later he was gassed and repatriated, triggering a physical and mental collapse from which he never fully recovered.26 Decades afterwards, he was still struggling to process the disjointed images that haunted his fractured mind:

  … Having seen a Passchendaele lit with a flare of fire

  And Ypres a dawn light ruddy and golden of desire,

  The stuck tanks – and shook at our guns going in

  As my body would not stay still at such Hell of din;

  Worse than any of theirs – and seen Gloucesters going over;

  Many for the last time –
by accident gone further.

  Dwelt in two pillboxes, had open station –

  And lost of geography any the least notion,

  Seeing Verey lights going up from all quarters,

  And all German, and yet to go onwards where the

  Tangle of time and space might be somehow dissolved,

  Mixed with Londoners, Northerners and strange Gloucesters

  Whom I knew not – and seen shattered Ypres by canal waters.

  His poem drifts to a close with a line that provides an epitaph for everyone who fought there:

  Ypres, they that knew you are of a Company through you.27

  CHAPTER 13

  The Dead Never Stirred

  For George Macdonald, as he returned to England for the second time on a stretcher, there must have been a frustrating sense that his life was not going to plan. He had commanded two tanks in twenty-four hours, neither of which had got anywhere near the enemy, and after two years of trying to reach the front line, neither had he. George had now been wounded twice, both times in August, and he could only wonder what another summer would bring, assuming both he and the war lasted that long. In the meantime he made a good physical recovery: within a month, a doctor’s report said he was ‘now convalescent, but somewhat debilitated. Wound healed.’ After treatment at an officers’ hospital in Knightsbridge, London, he was sent to recuperate at a luxury seafront hotel now serving as a convalescent centre.1 This was in Lytham St Anne’s on the north-west coast of England, a couple of miles from Blackpool which, by a strange coincidence, was the home of D51’s next commander.