Deborah and the War of the Tanks

by John Taylor

  The pattern for this was set early on, following his initial military career which took him to the Sudan for the expedition to recapture Khartoum in 1898, then to Crete for the international occupation, then to South Africa for the Boer War where he was wounded, and finally to Egypt.2 While all this was going on he found time to marry Sara Quinan, whose wealthy family had interests in the USA and South Africa,3 where they moved after he retired from the army in 1906. However, his descendants recall that all did not go well there: ‘His business supplying pit props to De Beers failed (he was sold a non-existent forest). He then went to Canada … He suffered from severe financial problems and had borrowed £5,500 from one of his brothers.’ According to his family: ‘The First World War was therefore an opportunity for him to demonstrate, with success this time, his risk-taking capabilities.’4

  Having distinguished himself once again in the army, the coming of peace in 1918 gave him another chance to prove his business acumen. He initially helped to develop a farm in Kenya, before returning to England5 and becoming involved in the film industry, which seemed ideal for someone with his undoubted panache. In 1927 he became joint managing director of a new production company called Carr-Gloria-Dupont, which announced ambitious plans to put out nine big-budget movies. Curiously enough considering the recent past, this was an Anglo-German enterprise built around the talents of the leading Berlin director Ewald Dupont.6

  But alas, Baker-Carr enjoyed less success working with the Germans than he had working against them, and the studio folded without making a single film. The following year he was called before the Bankruptcy Court: ‘He attributed his insolvency to his having lived beyond his means, and to recent unemployment, in consequence of which he had been unable to retrieve his financial position. The liabilities were roughly estimated at £800, the only asset disclosed being a gold watch worth £3.’7

  His sorrows, to echo Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet, came not single spies but in battalions. The following year he was named in a divorce case involving a Kenyan colonial official called Sydney La Fontaine, who alleged his wife had lived with Baker-Carr and committed adultery with him in England and Corfu.8 Unsurprisingly, after that his own wife Sara, who was the mother of his three sons and was then living in Shanghai, also filed for divorce.9

  Thus it was that a volume of memoirs, providing they were sufficiently racy and controversial, was a valuable means of restoring his battered self-respect, and helping his battered finances. As an author Baker-Carr was well blessed, for he had a lively style and was closely involved with two weapons that had come to define the war, namely the machine gun and the tank. From Chauffeur to Brigadier appeared in 1930, and told how he fought his way back into uniform by volunteering as a general’s driver, before setting up the army’s Machine Gun School and then playing a key role in the formation of the Tank Corps.

  A constant theme is the author’s unerring gift for being proved right, normally against determined but ill-informed opposition, and it is clear the book was also a way to settle old scores. It must have been galling for Baker-Carr to have been in charge at one of the few places where tanks had been held up in the initial advance at Cambrai, and he now put forward an explanation that was appealing in its simplicity and could not easily be contradicted: it was all General Harper’s fault.

  The commander of 51st (Highland) Division was not an obvious target for vilification, having created one of the most effective and feared fighting units of the war before being promoted to the command of an army corps. In contrast to the widely held view of staff officers as distant and callous, Lieutenant-General Sir George Montague Harper loved and cared about his men, and they mostly reciprocated; indeed, the view of The Times was that ‘there cannot have been many more popular officers in the Army than Harper’.10 Despite his age and crusty manner, he had a progressive outlook and was described as having ‘a sparkling brain, alive to all the changing conditions, unperturbed by events11 – a description that could equally well apply to Baker-Carr. In Harper’s case this was reflected in his Notes on Infantry Tactics & Training, originally issued to units under his command and later published in book form, which included a chapter on the most effective way for infantry to co-operate with tanks.12 At the same time, Harper was not scared of upsetting people, and this seems to have included the equally strong-willed Baker-Carr, who recalled the ‘wordy warfare’ that went on between them.13

  Baker-Carr alleged that at Cambrai, his adversary ‘laid down a system of cooperation with tanks which was, essentially, based on disbelief. If all went well with the tanks, “my little fellers,” as he affectionately called his division, could take advantage of the situation; if things, however, fared badly, then his men would not be implicated in any disaster and would suffer no heavy losses.’ Thus far, the prosecution case against Harper sounds like a defence, since there was no point in sacrificing his men’s lives unnecessarily. However, Baker-Carr criticized this approach by invoking the spectre of the lone artillery officer: ‘The result of this method of “co-operation” was that the tanks outdistanced the laggard infantry and were massacred by the action of a single man whom one well-directed bullet would have settled.’14

  The case against Harper was unanswerable, at least by the general himself, for the most tragic of reasons. In 1922 his car – which was found to have bald tyres – skidded and overturned on a muddy road while he was driving to his new home in Dorset. General Harper, who was then heading the army’s Southern Command, died instantly from a fractured skull, and was buried with full military honours in Salisbury Cathedral.15 His wife survived the accident, but they had no children and there was no-one to defend his posthumous reputation.

  Although Baker-Carr’s attack on Harper was the most compelling, it was not the first or the only one. Public criticism had come as early as 1920, when Brevet-Colonel John Fuller mentioned in a book how 51st Division was held up at Flesquières after having ‘devised an attack formation of its own’, adding ‘it appears that the tanks out-distanced the infantry or that the tactics adopted did not permit of the infantry keeping close enough up to the tanks’.16 After Harper’s death he launched a more outspoken attack on the general’s ‘blundering tactics’, claiming the tanks were 400 yards ahead of the infantry when they approached the ridge.17 Major Frederick Hotblack also considered the 51st Division’s attack formation to be among the factors that had contributed to failure,18 and the criticisms were echoed by the prominent military theorist Captain Basil Liddell Hart.19

  The one thing all these officers had in common was that none of them had actually witnessed the attack on Flesquières, though they obviously knew many who had. Only one of Harper’s critics had seen what happened, and his views must carry some weight since this was none other than the commander of the Tank Corps, who famously joined the attack in an H Battalion tank to the right of E Battalion. In 1944, Lieutenant-General Sir Hugh Elles wrote to the official historian that Harper’s system of advancing in ‘waves’ (i.e. lines of men extending at right-angles to the tank’s direction of advance, designed to minimize losses from enemy fire) rather than ‘worms’ (i.e. lines of men following the tank along its direction of advance) had proved ‘very faulty’ and was responsible ‘in some degree’ for the disaster: ‘The “waves” took a long time to get through the gaps in the wire and as a result the tanks going up the hill were 150-200 yards ahead of their supporting infantry. I know this because I saw it. If the infantry had been in “worms” on the tail of their tanks I am quite sure we should not have had all our losses on the reverse slope and Flesquières must have fallen very much more rapidly than it did.’20 Reflecting this, the Official History concluded that the failure to take Flesquières was ‘mainly’ due to Harper’s refusal to accept the battle drill that had been laid down.21

  If Harper had been in a position to defend himself then knowing what we do of him, he may well have responded with a single word, and not a polite one at that. If he had gone further, he might have pointed out t
hat no-one in the Tank Corps had raised any objections at the time, either in training or directly after the battle, and that the tactics worked perfectly well in the first phase of the attack, and throughout the operations conducted by 62nd Division to the left. He might have produced a series of exhibits for the defence, starting with Baker-Carr’s own battle report which concluded: ‘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.’22

  Harper might have pointed out that his own instructions stressed the vital importance of the infantry keeping in contact with their tanks at all times.23 He could have countered Elles’ claim that his men should have been ‘on the tail of their tanks’ by referring to Baker-Carr’s own instructions at the time, which said tanks should precede the infantry ‘by at least 100 yards’,24 or Fuller’s, which gave 100 yards as the optimum distance between them.25 Going further, he might have produced a report prepared for Third Army, headed Lessons from Recent Operations – Tank Corps, which said: ‘The general tendency of the infantry is to get too close to the tank. It was found that a suitable distance for the infantry to be maintained behind tanks was about 200 yards.’26 He could also have pointed to Birks’ description of his own tank after the battle, virtually shot to pieces by concentrated machine-gun fire, as evidence that no infantryman who was on its tail could possibly have survived.27

  Harper might have highlighted the fact that only one of his units, the 6th Bn Gordon Highlanders, had reported losing the tracks made by their tanks through the enemy’s wire, and this was also the only one that had reported killing German gunners with small-arms fire, so the argument was not as simple as his detractors made out.28 The tank apologists argued that it would have been easy for the infantry to shoot the enemy artillerymen if they had been closer to the tanks, but one tank commander on the western side of the village told how the infantry had warned him about a field gun that was ‘quite close’, but neither he nor they could put it out of action before his tank was hit.29

  Finally, Harper might have pointed out that once so many tanks had been destroyed, the infantry assault was almost bound to fail. This was because the first phase of the attack showed that the role of tanks was not simply to crush a way through the wire, vital though that was. Afterwards the infantry still relied on them for mobile fire support to neutralize enemy strongpoints, and in particular machine guns. In other words, with the tanks out of action there was very little chance of 51st Division taking Flesquières, however close behind they were. Of course, Baker-Carr and others believed there was only one German gunner, and if he had been shot then no more tanks would have been destroyed, but it is hard to resist Harper’s supposed one-word response to that argument.

  General Harper was not in a position to make any of these points himself, even had he been minded to, but a more balanced view has since been put forward by a number of historians. The first was Robert Woollcombe, grandson of the IV Corps commander at Cambrai, who substantially absolved Harper from blame (though not from all criticism) in his book about the battle in 1967.30 Bryn Hammond took a similar view in a study published in 1995,31 and two years later, John Hussey’s detailed analysis in British Army Review concluded that much of Baker-Carr’s critique was ‘a red herring’.32 Despite this it still continues to surface in discussions of the battle, and like the story of the lone gunner, General Harper’s supposed antipathy to tanks is an idea that simply will not lie down.

  * * *

  We have explored two popular explanations for what went wrong at Flesquières, resulting in the destruction of many tanks – including Deborah – and a crucial delay in capturing the village. Both are appealing in their simplicity, but neither is particularly convincing.

  The story of the lone artillery officer seems to have started as a ‘trench myth’ based on the flimsiest of evidence. It was then seized on by the British General Staff as an excuse for failure, and sustained by German nationalists as a beacon for hero-worship, before being ultimately discredited. The story of 51st Division’s flawed tactics cannot be dismissed entirely, due to the eyewitness evidence of Hugh Elles, but it is hard to escape the feeling that General Harper was being made a scapegoat by some senior tank commanders. Baker-Carr may have had his own motives for this, but one should bear in mind that a debate about rearmament was raging at the time, and defending the reputation of tanks was vital for Britain’s future military capability, even if Harper’s reputation suffered in the process.

  The long-running debate over these two issues has deflected attention from a number of factors which probably played a far greater role in holding up the British advance at Flesquières. In the words of Frederick Hotblack, who was wise and brave in equal measure, there is probably no single explanation for the setback: ‘The Fates seem to have fought against the tanks at Flesquières. Everything was against them.’33

  The Germans were already at an advantage, because the village on its low ridge formed a naturally defensible feature which was guarded on both sides by well-sited batteries of field guns, though these were thinly stretched and short of ammunition. It is now clear that the defence was significantly strengthened because some prisoners, partly motivated by hostility to British rule in Ireland, had warned the Germans that the area was about to come under attack. The British became aware of this security breach immediately afterwards from captured men and documents, but despite this, most accounts of the battle have played down the impact of the prisoners’ revelations. Strangely, the betrayal seems to have barely registered with the Tank Corps – in contrast to the earlier disclosures of Sergeant Phillips, which aroused widespread condemnation despite having far less military significance.

  Major Watson, for example, commented that the men captured before Cambrai ‘fortunately knew little,’ adding that the enemy ‘gathered from them that we were ourselves preparing a substantial raid, and he brought into the line additional companies of machine-gunners and a few extra field guns’.34 The results were also minimised in the official history of the Tank Corps: ‘At the last moment a higher enemy authority seems to have again examined the prisoners, and, too late, an urgent warning was sent down to all units in the line to maintain a sharp look-out and to issue armour-piercing bullets immediately.’35

  Both these accounts were published soon after the war, and drew on the snippets of information contained in the daily intelligence summaries issued by Tank Corps headquarters. These were generally accurate, though a few were wide of the mark: one quoted a letter from a German soldier which told how ‘6 prisoners had been taken and said that Havrincourt was to be taken in the course of the next day or so, because it was wanted as a birthday present for a British Princess’.36

  However, the true scale of the enemy’s response to news of the forthcoming attack was revealed when German accounts began to appear in the 1920s and 1930s. This was spelled out by Major Frederick Hotblack in a briefing to fellow officers of the Royal Tank Corps in 1935, with one eye on the threat of further conflict:

  It is only since the publication of the German History that we have known how much Flesquieres was reinforced as the result of the information given by prisoners … The problems of preventing the leakage of information through troops in contact with the enemy persisted throughout the war and it is one which is likely to occur again. Officers should ensure that all soldiers realise that the danger, to their comrades, of giving away information is a very real one and that by the Hague Convention a prisoner is not required to give any information except his name and number … This giving away of information was not one-sided; a very great deal was obtained from talkative German prisoners.37

  In contrast to the British version of events, the Germans tended to emphasize their vigorous and rapid response to the prisoners’ warning, desperate as they were to avoid the charge of being caught unawares. Even allowing for this, there is no doubt that substantial reinforcements from 84th Infantry Regiment,
27th Reserve Infantry Regiment (RIR) and 213th Field Artillery Regiment (FAR) were moved into Flesquières to meet the anticipated threat, and that these made a crucial contribution to the defence of the village – indeed, the commander of 27th RIR, Major Erich Krebs, took charge when his counterpart in 84th Infantry Regiment was fatally wounded. The Germans frequently stressed the narrowness of the margin by which they had held Flesquières on 20 November, and it seems these last-minute reinforcements almost certainly swung the balance – while 213th FAR claimed to be responsible for the destruction of a number of tanks, possibly including Deborah herself.

  As we have seen, once the initial attack had been beaten off, the only realistic chance of taking Flesquières occurred in the afternoon when a reserve of wire-pulling tanks became available. It is just possible these might have proved decisive if a further attack had been mounted in conjunction with the infantry. Clearly this would have been an enormous challenge, but if all had gone to plan it would have been in the hands of Major R.O.C. Ward, who had a better chance of pulling it off than anyone else. As it was, the burden of responsibility fell onto the commander of D Battalion; it was unfortunate that Lieutenant-Colonel Kyngdon had little experience of directing joint combat operations in the field, and this was neither the time nor the place to learn.

  Even if R.O.C. Ward had survived, success was far from guaranteed, but it seems a much greater opportunity was missed after 6th and 62nd Divisions had gained their objectives to the right and left of Flesquières. There was now nothing to stop them sweeping round behind the village in a pincer movement, leaving its garrison clinging desperately to the high ground as the tide rose around them. This was obvious to both British and Germans at the time, and the failure to act seems to reflect a lack of experience and initiative on the part of the attacking commanders in the unfamiliar world of open warfare. Whoever was to blame, they allowed the best chance of keeping the attack on track to slip through their fingers, just as the last defenders were able to slip away to safety that night.