Deborah and the War of the Tanks

by John Taylor

  True to form, Colonel Baker-Carr, commander of 1st Tank Brigade, was even more upbeat: ‘The cases of assistance rendered to the infantry are too numerous to mention. The tanks invariably operated in front of the infantry, virtually leading them the whole way, enabling them to seize and consolidate positions with comparatively little loss and destroying numerous enemy machine guns.’20 He noted some minor differences in the tactics used by 51st and 62nd Divisions, but had nothing but praise for them: ‘The formations adopted by the infantry of the 2 Divisions with which this Brigade was operating differed slightly, but in principle were the same. Both were highly successful.’21 This is significant, because a decade later he completely changed his tune. But that, also, we will consider in due course.

  The infantry with whom they worked were also appreciative, including those in the second wave who had seen so many tanks destroyed before their eyes. The 7th Bn Gordon Highlanders had been pinned down in the trenches before Flesquières, but commented that ‘the 6 tanks specially allotted to the battalion did everything possible to assist the advance and did not lose their formation until disabled by gun-fire’.22

  The commander of 6th Bn Black Watch singled out one man for praise: ‘I wish to place on record my indebtedness to and appreciation of the services rendered by Major Watson of D Tank Battalion. During the period of training he co-operated with me in a most hearty manner to the one end, and the smooth and successful way in which his company’s tanks assembled on my front was directly due to the great efforts he expended on Y/Z night [i.e. the night of 19-20 November].’23

  The 8th Bn Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were just as positive about E Battalion: ‘The action of the tanks was beyond all praise, and all my officers report that it is impossible to pick out any special tanks which distinguished themselves – as all did so well.’24 The commander of E Battalion received recognition from the infantry brigade working with them: ‘I would here mention that Lieut. Colonel Burnett, D.S.O. and his battalion staff and company commanders spared no effort in their endeavours to ensure the success of the operations.’25

  Despite this, following the battle Second Lieutenant Wilfred Bion asserted, without giving any reasons, that Lieutenant-Colonel Burnett ‘had been very strongly condemned by the [General Officer Commanding] 51st Div. for his behaviour at Cambrai and was almost certain to be recalled, although he fought hard against it’.26 He may have been right, as Burnett was replaced as commander of E Battalion in January 1918, when he went away to hospital and never returned.27 Lieutenant-Colonel Kyngdon retained his position as commander of D Battalion, but there must have been speculation about how long he would last in view of the fallout from the battle.

  * * *

  There was plenty of time for the commanders of D and E Battalions to work on their reports, since it was obvious they would play no further part in the fighting. Their final contribution had been helping to take Bourlon Wood, where British troops maintained a tenuous foothold for the next few days, though they were unable to make further progress to the far side of the wood or into the village beyond, and remained under relentless pressure from German bombardment and counter-attacks.

  As the fighting raged, the appalling conditions there could not have been more different from those back in Havrincourt Wood, where the tank crews were now building proper shelters and, in the words of Major Watson, making themselves ‘thoroughly comfortable’. He added: ‘We felt a trifle guilty in our luxury as we watched the grim infantry going forward to the dark terrors of Bourlon, and my men in their kindness would give them part of their rations … But war is war, and, putting Bourlon out of our minds, we made an expedition to Bapaume, had tea at the officers’ club, a haircut and a shampoo, bought potatoes and eggs and dined sumptuously.’28

  Finally, after another failed attempt to take Bourlon village, the commander of Third Army, General Sir Julian Byng, ordered a halt to the offensive on 27 November. The wooded crest of the hill had been captured, but the enemy still controlled the shoulders of the ridge, and it was clear there were insufficient resources to dislodge them. The British now settled down to consolidate their gains, but it was a dispiriting end to a campaign that had started so brilliantly. In the words of the official historian, ‘None could view with satisfaction the events of the past seven days: so many attacks had failed, so many casualties had been suffered and so much hardship endured by the troops, in attempting to force a definite issue and to break a resistance of which the strength appeared to have been consistently under-estimated.’29

  The Tank Corps was no longer required, and the crews of D Battalion were told to prepare for withdrawal to the camp at Méaulte, south of Albert, where they had stopped over briefly on their way to Cambrai and now expected to spend the winter. The tanks would be moved there by rail within a week, and early on 30 November Lieutenant-Colonel Kyngdon and his battalion headquarters left Havrincourt Wood taking their motor transport with them. Major Watson was sitting down to breakfast a few hours later when he noticed ‘strange things’ were happening:

  We walked out of the wood into the open to investigate. We could hear distinctly bursts of machine-gun fire, although the line should have been six miles away at least. German field gun shells – we could not be mistaken – were falling on the crest of a hill not three-quarters of a mile from the camp. On our left, that is to the north, there was heavy gun fire. On our right, in the direction of Gouzeaucourt, shells were falling, and there were continuous bursts of machine-gun fire.

  We had not fully realised what was happening, when a number of wounded infantrymen came straggling past. I questioned them. They told me that the enemy was attacking everywhere, that he had broken through near Gouzeaucourt, capturing many guns, and was, to the best of their belief, still advancing.30

  The Germans had indeed rallied their forces, secretly brought up reserves and launched a massive counter-attack which caught the British as unawares as the original advance had caught them out ten days before.

  In the words of D Battalion’s history: ‘This attack was a complete surprise and great disorganization ensued. The enemy were within a mile of Havrincourt Wood before any intimation of the attack was received. All fit tanks were at once deployed on the ridge S.E. of the Wood in readiness to hold up any further advance … Co-operation was arranged with the Guards Division to retake Gouzeaucourt on the morning of the 1st December. Only two tanks were of any service owing to great lack of supplies.’31

  The German assault took the form of a pincer movement designed to drive the British out of the ground they had taken. It was eventually halted through determined resistance on both axes of the advance, though not before the Germans had made substantial gains to the south, equivalent to the area captured by the British and resulting in a similar number of prisoners, so both sides could declare the honours were more or less even when the German advance ground to a halt. The British position in Bourlon Wood now formed an exposed and untenable salient, and on the night of 4/5 December they pulled back to a new ‘line of resistance’, mainly following the old Hindenburg support system along Flesquières ridge. The village now formed a much smaller salient, but the Germans had already shown this to be a naturally defensible position, and the British settled down there for the winter.

  D Battalion finally pulled out of Havrincourt Wood on 5 December and moved back to Ytres, to the spot where Major R.O.C. Ward had met them as they unloaded their tanks in such high hopes less than three weeks before. Now the major lay buried in the cemetery at Metz-en-Couture, two dozen of his men were dead, and many of their tanks, including Deborah, lay wrecked and scattered across the battlefield, so it was a sadly depleted force that waited at the ramps ready for the train journey back to Plateau and Méaulte.

  However, their duty was still not entirely done, as explained by Captain Edward Glanville Smith: ‘Owing to the doubtful and somewhat unsafe conditions in the Cambrai Salient, it was decided that complete withdrawal of the Tank Corps was temporarily impossible, a
nd, for a fortnight, sections of the various battalions were sent to the forward area in alternation, taking over the tanks there and acting as a defensive patrol behind the line.’32 It was an unwelcome assignment, and when Second Lieutenant Bion took over a tank from D Battalion he recalled they ‘looked in pretty poor spirits and didn’t cheer us much.’33 Fortunately there was no sign of hostile activity, and the men of D and E Battalions were able to celebrate Christmas in their bleak camp near Albert, and to await whatever the New Year might bring.

  Inevitably, there were comings and goings within the battalion. Second Lieutenant Horace Furminger, or ‘Contours’, the reconnaissance officer of No. 12 Company, departed to his new posting in the Indian Army, while new company commanders arrived to replace Majors Ward and Marris who had been killed and captured respectively.34

  Major William Watson had slightly longer to wait, but he returned to the UK at the beginning of 1918 for reasons that are unclear, though a document in his service record says he was ‘sent back to England … as a “tired officer”’.35 Tired or not, his new job was to set up the 4th Tank Carrier Company, whose task was to haul supplies for the fighting tanks – a vital and hazardous role, though hardly a glamorous one. He did not relish the move: ‘One gloomy day I was ordered home with other company commanders to help form new battalions at the celebrated Bovington Camp. The orders came suddenly, although they had not been unexpected. On the 31st January I handed over the command of the company to B. [i.e. Major Hugh Baird], and the parting was the less bitter because I knew that the company would be safe and happy under him.’36

  His departure was history’s loss, for it meant that D Battalion – or 4th Tank Battalion, as it was now renamed – was deprived of its most erudite and informed chronicler.

  * * *

  The battle may have ended in chaos and recriminations for the British, but no-one could dispute that tanks were now a force to be reckoned with. Second Lieutenant Horace Birks described morale after Cambrai as ‘tremendous throughout the Corps. We thought we had established ourselves, which was something, and of course we held everybody else in wholesome contempt.’37

  On the other hand, contempt was too strong a word, but the cavalry had hardly covered themselves in glory. In this sense Cambrai could be seen as the death of the cavalry, though fortunately in metaphorical terms only, since there was no need to prove the point with a massacre of splendid horses and splendid men.

  A report on 1st Cavalry Division, which had been in the Flesquières sector, was sent to Sir Douglas Haig to establish why they had failed to ‘justify their traditions’.38 The document was anonymous, but a note identifies the author as Major-General Sir Henry Macandrew, commander of 5th Cavalry Division – described as ‘one of the best and most dashing of our cavalry leaders in the war’.39 He concluded: ‘It was the one chance the Cavalry has had in this war from start, to date, of carrying out its legitimate offensive role, and it failed from lack of offensive spirit, amongst the leaders … it failed from the lack of the spirit of enterprise and resolution – it failed as a result of three years in back areas, in trenches, in “intensive training” usually of the wrong … description, it failed because the offensive has entirely given way to the defensive spirit and because failure is not visited with the drastic penalty it deserves.’40

  However, the idea that massed horsemen might ever have pursued the enemy through the streets of Cambrai and the drives of Bourlon Wood with the arme blanche was almost certainly a fanciful one. Although the German forward positions had been shattered, they still had subsidiary lines of defence, and if the cavalry had gone forward even a small number of machine guns would have sufficed to stop them in their tracks. In his authoritative history of the British cavalry, the Marquess of Anglesey concluded: ‘There can be little point in stressing the number of “mistakes” made on 20 November by the cavalry commanders … since they all, in effect, contributed to the saving of the arm from virtual annihilation.’41

  For all that, the cavalry now had to live with the consequences, which were clear to the Australian journalist and historian Charles Bean when he encountered a group of horsemen a fortnight after the battle:

  The comment of the day and hour here is that the cavalry missed one of the chances of the war after waiting for it for four years. We met a brigade of cavalry trotting down the road through the long long [sic] desolate moorland which was last year the Somme battlefield. The Somme is all grey and brown with a very little yellow green tobacco stain in the grass, this time of year; one twelvemonth has been enough to transform it from a brown mud wilderness into a great moorland. And the cavalry trotting down the road seemed as stern and sad as the scenery. Their faces were rather set and I thought they looked self-conscious and were feeling that they had missed the Allies’ chance for them.

  They blame themselves poor chaps. ‘You know, we have come to think of limited objectives, of the next hill and the next mound of earth instead of the horizon and the wide plain.’ … And so on Nov. 20th when the infantry and tanks passed Flesquières on either side, as the cavalry was standing in masses just a mile or two away from it, waiting to go through … – just because there were still a German Major in Flesquières with three or four machine guns and four field guns, still unreduced, the cavalry was held back by order from some Cavalry General …

  The British cavalry – the famous regiments with glorious names like the Greys whom we met trotting with their horses half covered in yellow mud down the straight Roman road across that brown moorland – they were held hesitating for two or three all important hours – and the chance was gone.42

  PART VI

  ACROSS THE THRESHOLD

  ‘At Cambrai we stood upon the threshold which separates the past from the future’

  Tank Corps Journal, November 19221

  CHAPTER 34

  Sticking to their Guns

  Cambrai had changed everything, yet in a sense it had changed nothing. On 20 November it felt as if the British Army had awoken from a three-year nightmare in which it was struggling through an endless labyrinth of mud and machine guns. A few days later, it felt as if this brief awakening had itself been a dream.

  Looking back over the battle, the Germans saw it as having two distinct phases: first the ‘Tankschlacht’ or tank battle, in which they had been driven back through a combination of guile, careful planning and mechanical ingenuity, and then the ‘Angriffschlacht’ or offensive battle, in which the gallant underdogs, their backs to the wall, had rallied to triumph against overwhelming odds. It is interesting that these two phases run exactly counter to our stereotyped view of the two armies and nations.

  In a sense, therefore, both sides could draw some reassurance from the outcome of the battle; the British felt the use of tanks in combination with other arms meant that no defensive position could now be considered impregnable, especially once the more manoeuvrable Mark V model became available in early 1918. The Germans were acutely aware of this, and the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht, commander of the army group which fought at Cambrai, summed up the situation: ‘The enemy will be able to repeat such hit-and-run attacks wherever the terrain permits the use of tanks. So here we can no longer talk about “quiet fronts”.’2 On the other hand, the Germans felt their greater adaptability and more sophisticated infantry tactics gave them an advantage in the counter-attack and in any subsequent war of movement, especially with reinforcements flowing back after their victory on the Eastern Front.

  Both these conclusions would be tested in the final year of the war, and one of them would be tested to destruction. It goes without saying that Deborah would take no active part in the further fighting, but she was a mute witness to two more battles, and suffered extensive damage in one of them.

  The first of these came in March 1918, when the Germans swept forward in the great offensive known as the ‘Kaiserschlacht’, or Kaiser’s battle, in which their stormtrooper tactics succeeded in driving the British far back towards the Somme. The Ge
rmans were once again left in possession of Flesquières, and for the first time they were able to inspect the tanks they had destroyed in the attack on 20 November. Many photographs were taken by soldiers who came to inspect the broken hulks strewn along the ridge, and one shows a German soldier standing proudly beside a wrecked tank in the village street, his terrier perched on its broken track. Another snapshot shows the same tank from the rear, and the number D51 can be made out on its hull. Together, they provide our first glimpse of Deborah since the moment of her destruction.3

  These photographs show that Deborah had not yet suffered the massive damage to her front which is evident today, and this was probably inflicted six months later when the tide of war had turned again and the British were pushing forward on what would be their final advance to victory. In September 1918 a second great battle was fought at Flesquières, with improved Mark V tanks once again used to drive the Germans from their stronghold, which then remained in British hands until the end of the war. It seems likely that Deborah was hit again in the course of this battle, perhaps after being mistaken for a fighting tank, or perhaps during the British barrage, as her roof was penetrated at some point by a large-calibre shell. Whatever the cause, her mangled frame was now an even sorrier sight than before.

  * * *

  Although the war came to an end a few months after this, the battle over what happened at Cambrai, and particularly at Flesquières, continued to rage long afterwards, and is to some extent still being fought. Both sides struggled to make sense of what had taken place on 20 November, when the world war had been suddenly and temporarily thrown off its axis. Hanging over these post-war deliberations was the growing sense that Europe’s conflicts had not been fully resolved and were likely to erupt again, and the lessons to be learned therefore took on a special significance for the future.