The first mass tank attack gains spectacular results, but they are overturned in an impressive German counter-offensive
‘Just a line. A big battle has begun & we are taking the leading part. In fact it could not have taken place without us …’ wrote Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. C. ‘Boney’ Fuller, on the staff of the Tank Corps, to his mother on 20 November 1917. ‘I believe the attack was one of the most magnificent sights of the war, great numbers of Ts forging ahead in line of battle followed by infantry … Elles our General led the battle in a T, flying our colours. I am glad to say he has returned safely, though the flag has been shot to tatters.’
The Battle of Cambrai was born of the disappointments of Third Ypres (Passchendaele). In July, just before the opening of his great offensive to break through at Ypres and capture the Channel ports, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, a cavalryman, told his army commanders that ‘opportunities for the employment of cavalry in masses are likely to offer’. Meanwhile, on the other side of no-man’s-land, the German chief of staff, General Erich Ludendorff, an infantryman, was convinced that ‘trench warfare offered no scope for cavalry’. Indeed, he wanted to dismount them and give their horses to the artillery and transport: ‘The wastage in horses was extraordinarily high, and the import from neutral countries hardly worth the consideration.’
But while Ludendorff saw the Western Front as siege warfare on an industrial scale, Haig, as a fellow general put it, regarded it as ‘mobile operations at the halt’. Ever since succeeding Sir John French (also a cavalryman) as commander-in-chief in December 1915, he had constantly sought a return to the war of movement of 1914. In his view – and that of the army’s ‘bible’, Field Service Regulations – decisive success in the field was to be achieved only by robust attack. In Haig’s view, this meant an offensive leading to breakthrough followed by rapid exploitation, in which cavalry would be of the first importance.
Both sides had tried to break through in 1915, but without success, leaving their cavalry champing at the bit in frustration. It was the same again in 1916, first for the Germans at Verdun, and then for the British and French on the Somme. Fortunately, away from the front, minds had been at work on the problem of how to penetrate the German lines. In February 1915, Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, impatient with the War Office’s lack of interest in mechanical trench-crossing devices, had himself set up the ‘Admiralty Landships Committee’ to investigate their potential. Seven months later, in September 1915, the first design was tested; by December a completely new and improved version was produced; and in January 1916 this first ‘tank’ was demonstrated to the War Office – which was sufficiently impressed to place an order for 100 of them, equipped with either 6-pounder cannon or Hotchkiss and Vickers machine guns. Thirty tanks went into action in the middle of September during the Somme battles; although most of them broke down prematurely, or were engulfed in the mud, nevertheless Haig recognized their worth and ordered several hundred more.
Opinions as to how the new weapon was to be used were divided. Some officers in the Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps, the unit responsible for fielding the tank, believed from the outset that they should be used en masse and with a degree of independence. Intercommunication was only by hand or flag signals, however, and reliability remained a problem. Fosters, the Lincoln firm responsible for the development work, had been contracted for engineering tolerances of just 50 miles between breakdowns, which – allowing for movement to the start line from the railheads – did not envisage any great part in advancing. The War Office, and moreover Haig’s GHQ, saw tanks essentially as battering rams to crush the initial defences – the multiple trench lines and fortified positions – in order to allow the cavalry to break out.
Haig certainly had high hopes of them at Third Ypres. He had some 140 available for the offensive, all but two of which made it to the start line without mishap. But the mud of Passchendaele would prove even worse than that of the Somme; soon the tanks were stuck fast, and once again the cavalry stood waiting in vain for the breakthrough.
Morale in the new Tank Corps, formed from the Machine Gun Corps on 27 July, fell, as did the confidence of the rest of the army in the tank. The corps needed to be given a fighting chance, on ground specially chosen – better drained and not pock-marked with shell craters. HQ Tank Corps therefore proposed an offensive towards Cambrai. However, planning for Cambrai – originally conceived as a raid, a limited action to show what the tank could do in the right conditions – soon fell prey to the continuing ambition for breakthrough and restoration of the war of movement. Not the least in ambition was another cavalryman, General Sir Julian Byng, recently appointed to command of 3rd Army after Haig had sacked Edmund Allenby, and now given responsibility for the battle as a whole. In 1757, one of his ancestors, Admiral John Byng, had faced a firing squad – pour encourager les autres – for failing to press his attack on a French fleet off Minorca. General Byng was not going to make the same sort of mistake.
He decided to throw all his divisions into the attack, and all his allotted fighting tanks – 380 of them (the Tank Corps now had 476 machines in all, including spares and various specialist tanks) – leaving himself without reserves. Haig placed virtually the entire Cavalry Corps, some 27,500 cavalrymen and their support troops, under Byng’s command, with the intention that they should ‘pass through and operate in open country’.
The preparations were prodigious. Some of the regiments had to march long distances to the assembly areas – the Queen’s Bays, for example, 106 miles in five night marches. Oats and hay for the horses – 270 tons – had to be pre-positioned. ‘Cavalry track battalions’ were formed, largely of Indian NCOs and sowars (troopers) recently arrived in France as reinforcements, to make gaps in the barbed wire and fill in or bridge the trenches and shell holes to help get the cavalry forward in the wake of the advancing tanks and infantry. With pick and shovel, assisted by tanks fitted with grapnels to tear up the wire, they were expected to clear paths 60 yards wide to a depth of 5 miles, bridging twenty-six successive lines of trenches.
The battle began well. On 20 November, in an obliging morning mist and before a single artillery round had been fired, the massed tanks answered to the command ‘Driver, advance!’ Favoured by the absence of the usual artillery notification, and their own quite remarkable success in concealment during the build-up (aided by the RFC’s local air superiority), the tanks took the Germans wholly by surprise. When the following infantry reached the forward trenches they found flasks of hot coffee at the firing step – breakfast hastily abandoned. On a 6-mile front, checked only at Flesquières, by midday Byng’s divisions were able to penetrate 5 miles into the defences of the Hindenburg Line – further to date than anywhere on the Somme or in Flanders. By early afternoon, only a half-finished fourth line stood between 3rd Army and open country, and here there was a wide-open gap for several hours.
An advance of 5 miles, even a relatively easy one, was tiring, however. By now the tanks were crewed by men exhausted by noise, fumes and concussive vibrations, or were out of action owing to breakdown or enemy fire. The infantry could make no further progress without them, and if the infantry could make no progress, the cavalry certainly couldn’t. Besides, for whatever reason – poor communications, lack of ‘dash’ in regiments that had been inactive for three years (recriminations would follow) – the cavalry were slow getting forward.
And they certainly were expected by the Germans. Leutnant Miles Reinke of 2 Garde-Dragoner Regiment wrote home: ‘We waited for several regiments of cavalry to sweep up and drive us towards Berlin. But this didn’t happen, much to our surprise.’ Indeed, expecting to be over-run at any minute, they had even abandoned Cambrai itself.
With no reserve of tanks and infantry to renew the attacks, Byng told his spent troops to dig in, and the cavalry, when they did come up in the afternoon, to hold along the St-Quentin Canal. German reserves began pouring into the breaches, and the following morning, after a night of icy rain, the British faced the predictable counter-attacks.
Haig sent more divisions to Cambrai, but it was too late. Byng’s renewed attacks on 22 and 23 November quickly petered out, while with impressive speed, and largely undetected, the Germans massed twenty divisions for a counter-offensive. These came out of the morning mist on 30 November after a short, intense bombardment consisting of high explosive, gas and smoke – but with almost no tanks, for the Germans did not rate them. Using new infiltration techniques they thrust at both flanks of the salient created by 3rd Army’s advance, breaking through in the south. Byng’s infantry put up a resolute defence, and disaster was averted, but only with considerable loss, including Brigadier-General Roland Boys Bradford VC, MC – at twenty-five the youngest brigade commander of modern times, who had been in command for just three weeks.
Byng was now forced to abandon the greater part of his original gains. German casualties at Cambrai were around 50,000; the BEF’s were 45,000 (of which 10,000 were dead), yet with nothing to show for it, just the sense of a ‘near miss’, a demonstration of what the tank could do in the attack if well handled. The church bells, which had rung in England on the first day to announce a resounding victory, had sounded prematurely.
A board of inquiry was held in London to examine how the spectacular initial success had turned into another costly reverse. Byng survived, as did Haig, though the perceived intelligence failures led to the dismissal of his chief of intelligence, Brigadier-General John Charteris.
However, the tank had at last proved itself. Production was now stepped up, and faster types were developed. From Cambrai on, it was seen as an essential element in the all-arms battle, which was itself the key to any sustained success on the Western Front.
As ‘Boney’ Fuller wrote to his mother, Brigadier-General Hugh Elles had led the Tank Corps into the battle ‘flying our colours’, which were ‘shot to tatters’. The flag was in fact almost as famously improvised as the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ at the defence of Fort McHenry. Nothing had been done about distinguishing colours for the Corps, and so just before the battle Elles went into a French shop to find material for a flag. Although stocks were small, he managed to buy some lengths of brown, red and green silk, which were then sewn together and flown from his tank, Hilda. Fuller suggested that the colours typified the struggle of the Corps – ‘From mud, through blood to the green fields beyond.’
Ever after, the flag has been flown with the green uppermost.