ON A DAY LONG AGO, somewhere in the Middle East, bearded men had once pushed a wheeled tower towards a walled city. Very probably the wheels fell off, the tower fell over and rude Assyrian laughter rang out. For all that, walled cities were never again entirely safe. Five hundred and seventy years before the Somme battles French bombardiers are supposed to have brought their firecrakes to the field of Crecy. They made so little impression upon observers that nobody bothered to record the fact. It would be interesting to see whether the tank could do better. Mr Churchill, who had seen the searchlights sweep the desert at Omdurman, had always called for a mass onfall by night guided by the same means. What actually happened was a piecemeal ‘chipping in wherever we could’, as Sir Hugh Elles was to call it. Nobody was in command; the Divisions lacked even the tank equivalent of a CRA or CRE.
Baker-Carr, as senior Machine Gun Corps officer about the place, was asked to keep some sort of eye on them. He found the Company and Section commanders ‘harassed almost beyond endurance by their domestic problems of packing equipment, ammunition, food, water, blankets and a hundred other things into a space already overcrowded with machinery and human beings, called upon to answer at a moment’s notice a hundred conundrums that were suddenly hurled at them’. Orders, already incomprehensible, were constantly changed. Up to midnight on the 14th several commanders were still unclear about what they were expected to do or even at what hour to start. In one instance a group of tanks had no petrol at all, nor did they know where to get any. Baker-Carr provided it just in time. The only comfortable words he had to say were that ‘for once the weather was not unfavourable’.
Forty-nine tanks set out for the assembly area. Of these seventeen broke down on the way, mostly with clutch trouble. The proportion sounds high but it was unreasonable to expect anything even as good. The Daimler sleeve-valve engine – still in use today – had never been designed to push nearly thirty tons of metal and humanity along steel tracks. Many of them had not had time to be properly run in and some had been hastily made up from such spare parts as could be found. The petrol supplied was of the lowest quality imaginable. The Heavy Branch deserve great credit for getting any of its ‘Willies’ across the start line at all. The crews of those that managed it had passed a sleepless night following upon an unrestful day. After spending hours trying to digest complicated operation orders, only one copy being provided for each section of three machines, the commanders had at 5 am received a message cancelling all of them. Fresh ones, equally incomprehensible, were given verbally. As soon as it was dusk each tank had been driven to a point a little behind its jumping-off place and the crews had tried to snatch some rest. They got very little, for it takes long practice to sleep through a bombardment. At 5.30 am on 15 September the starting handles were swung, each by four men, the engines spluttered and, after a moment, most of them roared into life belching out great clouds of black smoke. About thirty tanks, iron capsules cutting off their occupants from the world and each with its clumsy pair of wheels trailing behind, lurched towards the German lines, following the tapes laid down by the Reconnaissance Officers. Charteris swears that one was led into battle by a man carrying a red flag as in the earliest days of motoring.
All night long the medium and heavy batteries had been banging away, stirring up yet again the sea of whitish mud that lay ahead. Maps were useless, for everything looked like the surface of the moon. At 6.20, Zero hour, the field guns joined in, putting down the creeping barrage behind whose curtain tanks and infantry were to move forward.
The attack was on a two Corps front. On the right was Lord Cavan’s XIVth, made up of the Guards, 6th and 56th (London) Divisions. To their left was the XVth Corps of General Home, consisting of 14th, 41st and New Zealand Divisions. In accordance with custom, the right-hand formation will be followed first. The 6th was a Regular Division that had come to France just before the Battle of the Aisne. Its task, along with the other two formations, was to attack the line Lesboeufs to Morval. General Marden, the GOC, left his record of the part the tanks took in his battle: ‘As far as the Division was concerned (it) was a failure, for of the three allotted to 6th Division two broke down before starting, and the third, moving off in accordance with orders long before the infantry, had its periscope shot off, its peep-holes blinded, was riddled by armour-piercing bullets and had to come back without achieving anything. A perfect stream of fire was directed at it and the driver badly wounded.’ The 56th, London Territorials, also had three tanks. The instructions given to their commanders were to move off at a time (apparently to be decided by themselves) which would put them on the first objective five minutes before the infantry arrived. That done, they were to move on, halt and turn themselves into strong-points. ‘Departure from this programme to assist any infantry held up by the enemy was left to the discretion of the Tank Commander.’ For the third and fourth objectives the tanks would go on ahead without the creeping barrage, the infantry following behind them. Signals were arranged. Red flag meant ‘Out of action’; Green for ‘On objective’.
The main objective of 56th Division was Bouleaux Wood; this had to be cleared before defensive flanks could be formed. One brigade was to hold the line through Leuze Wood and to capture the notorious Loop Trench to the south-east which ran into the sunken road to Combles. One tank, called the Right Tank, was to advance on the right of the wood, drive the enemy beyond the sunken road and halt. The Centre and Left Tanks were to work along the left of Bouleaux Wood and ‘proceed to a railway cutting, which promised to be a point of some difficulty’. The right Tank ‘gave valuable assistance, but was set on fire by a field gun’. The Centre Tank broke down on its way to the assembly position. The Left Tank is not mentioned again, but was included in the general conclusion that ‘the Tanks were by no means a success’. Nobody blamed the gallant crews. Evidence of the impossible task set them comes from one of the Brigade Majors in 56th Division, Philip Neame, already VC and in due time to become Lieut-General Sir Philip. ‘One of the tanks was not bullet-proof; it came crawling back past our HQ with a very frightened officer inside whose first sight of fighting this had been. The steel walls were riddled with bullet holes. I imagine that by mistake inferior boiler-plate instead of armour-plate must have been put in.’
The Guards Division were given nine tanks, later increased to ten. In accordance with immemorial practice, long and careful Orders were drawn up. Guards Division Orders No 75 devoted all of Appendix IV to the subject. Gaps 100 yards wide were to be left in the barrage to accommodate them, but the attacking troops were warned that in no circumstances were they to wait as, on such heavily cratered ground, the tanks were not thought likely to manage even fifteen yards a minute. At 6.20 am the creeping barrage opened up. It was an historic moment, for more reasons than one. For the first time ever three Coldstream battalions marched off in line, ‘as steadily as if they were walking down the Mall’. They took hideous punishment. Behind them, late but pursuing, the first armoured fighting vehicles lurched and rumbled, smoke belching from each exhaust. The crews had been up since 3 am when their commander had had to report to Major-General Feilding that only seven of his machines, parked on the southern outskirts of Trones Wood, could be persuaded to start. He cannot have enjoyed the interview. The report on the day of battle was not encouraging. ‘It was an infantry battle throughout, for the tanks in this their first cooperation in the field with the troops of the Guards Division proved of little or no assistance to the infantry. They were late in crossing the parapet and so were unable to move forward in advance of the leading battalions. The tank to which had been entrusted the important task of dislodging the Germans from their position at the south-eastern corner of Delville Wood does not appear to have come into action. The remaining tanks wandered about in various directions and are reported to have done a certain amount of useful fighting on their own account either in the area of the Guards Division or in that of 6th Division, but they certainly failed on this occasion to carry out their main task and were of no help to the infantry in the subduing of machine-gun fire … the moment they started they lost all sense of direction and wandered about aimlessly.’ There is not a kind word about the crews in the Guards Divisional History. But the Guards are seldom lavish with praise.
Now to General Home’s area, with the left-hand XVth Corps. Apart from four tanks given to the 47th (London) Division of IIIrd Corps to help in the attack on High Wood, all of which came to grief early on broken tree stumps and in shell holes, this was the only remaining tank area. The 14th (Light) was one of the senior New Army Divisions, 41st its newest and last. So low had manpower stocks fallen that its immediate predecessor, 40th, had been made up of infantry of low medical category in the hope that an unusually good artillery might even things up. It had not worked. The category men had had to be discharged and new recruits found. No Kitchener divisions were raised after the 41st. All those with later numbers, save for 63rd (Naval), were either first – or second-line Territorials. The 41st, mostly made up of south country regiments, had only been raised the previous September and had arrived in France in May, 1916. Like so many formations from which nobody expected much, it turned out to be an uncommonly good one.
Again at 6.20 the barrage opened. The 14th, on the right, faced a maze of trenches before it could reach its objective, the now non-existent village of Guedecourt. In the centre the 41st looked out at what remained of Flers; the task of the New Zealanders was to secure the spur north-west of the same village. Eighteen tanks had been given to the Corps to try and make the job of the infantry a little less impossible than it seemed. An hour before the main attack was due to start General Horne had decided to give the tanks a chance to see what they could achieve by surprise. Three of them had been sent off on their own to set about the tenacious German unit that was clinging so grimly on to the south-east corner of Delville Wood. Only one arrived, but Lieutenant Mortimore’s ‘male’. No 1 of D Company, got there, straddled Hop Alley and opened up with both 6-pdrs and machine-guns. The stupefied Germans poured out with hands in the air. On the way back Mortimore’s tank took two direct hits from a field gun and was put out of action, two of the crew being killed, but they had shown what a tank could do, given a little luck.
Away to the left Gough’s Reserve Army had been allocated seven machines which he had passed to 2nd Canadian Division. They had come out of the darkness at 4.30, their engines roaring, and drove into a counter-barrage. It did no particular harm, but as the Canadians moved on Courcelette four hours later they had to manage without them. One had broken down, two were bogged in the German support area while the others pitched and rolled slowly behind the infantry incapable of so much as a foot pace. They did, however, put the wind up many Germans and induced them to surrender for fear of what they might be able to do. (‘Not war but bloody butchery,’ one of them complained.) A solitary tank, its mate dead, attached itself to 15 (Scottish) Division and clanked down the Martinpuich road clearing trenches as it went.
It was on the front of the 41st that the tanks made themselves felt. Four of them, D6, 9, 16 and 17, rumbled through the nth Royal West Kent and 15th Hampshires at about 8 o’clock. Number 16, Lieutenant Hastie’s tank, barged its way into Flers, slewed on its tracks to face down the main road and opened fire with all it had. The others joined in, smashing down wire entanglements, lurching over ruined buildings and shooting up everything. The two infantry battalions, who had been up all night carrying stores, cheered their hearts out and followed along behind as if Flers had been Lord Salisbury’s golf course. A bright young man in the RFC, watching it all from above, wrote and dropped his famous message which reached Swinton as he was about to disembark at Boulogne. It was a message of which the Heavy Branch was to become heartily sick, but it sounded splendid at the time: ‘A tank is walking up the High Street at Flers with the British Army cheering behind.’ It was a small incident in a battle of gigantic size, but it was not insignificant.
It was eleven days after the battle, on 26 September, that the first DSO came to the Heavy Branch. 21st Division, one of those New Army formations so wantonly thrown into the mincer at Loos, was attacking towards Guedecourt and one of its Brigades – Leicestershire men – had once again come up against uncut wire in front of the strongly defended Gird Trench. Lieutenant Storey and D14 were whistled up to see what they could do. D14 was a female, designed for the job of clearing trenches with her machine-guns. She waddled off at 6.30 am, followed by a party of bombers. The German defenders opened up with machine guns, and potato-masher grenades burst around and in front. It did nothing for them. D14 swept the wire aside, swung right and clanked down the 1500-yard length of the trench, firing bursts as she went, assisted by an aircraft of the RFC which did much the same thing. The Germans fought well, but their case was hopeless. Up and down went D14 until white handkerchiefs appeared. 362 men surrendered to the Leicesters as Storey headed for Guedecourt, meditating further havoc. Before he could wreak much more D14 ran short of petrol and had to come home; all but two of the occupants were wounded but at that price they had done something that would otherwise have demanded a full brigade of infantry and hundreds of dead and wounded. DSOs to Colonels and above are usually no more than glorified service stripes; very rarely do they come the way of subalterns.
A few miles away, across the Albert-Bapaume road, eight other tanks were achieving something just as valuable. Thiepval, where the great archway commemorating the Missing stands, had been a name of dread since the day when 36th (Ulster) Division had been decimated in its first battle. The fortress, still untaken but absolutely necessary if the long battle was to achieve any sort of results, was in the sector of Sir Hubert Gough’s Reserve Army and, after the disaster of Gommecourt, Gough’s stock stood low. This time, as a rather desperate expedient, he decided to do without any preliminary bombardment and to give the tanks some chance of showing how they could manage on their own. The result was entirely successful. The role of the tanks was admittedly ancillary to that of the infantry but eight of them set off up the shell-blasted slope, through the mounds of what had been buildings and across the shattered orchards. Most of them got to their destination and, as Williams-Ellis quoted from an officer then present, ‘our men were over the German parapets and into the dug-outs before the machine-guns could be got up to repel them’. Once again the point had been made. Tanks could save casualties amongst our own men as nothing else could; besides this the business of killing Germans was far less important.
The performance of the tanks, however, had been patchy. Four were given to 18 Division, the main assaulting formation, commanded by Major-General Ivor Maxse who would become a tank enthusiast in time. One, Creme de Menthe, certainly earned its rations. The 12th Middlesex, ‘cleared line after line of trenches until they reached the château, where one company was checked by deadly machine-gun fire. Just at this critical moment the leading tank came up, having crossed over from Thiepval Wood; its arrival was most opportune as it dealt with the enemy machine-guns and the leading companies of the Middlesex passed determinedly round both flanks of the château. Two Tanks had been assigned to the Brigade and were intended to lead the infantry into Thiepval and then on to the Schwaben Redoubt. Unfortunately, having done excellent service, this tank subsided into the mud and remained there, whilst its fellows arrived a little later and suffered the same fate. That was the end of Creme de Menthe and Cordon Bleu as active combatants on this great day,’ says the Divisional History. The other tanks are nowhere mentioned.
Williams-Ellis made out a score card. Forty-nine tanks were employed. Thirty-two reached their starting points. Nine pushed ahead of the infantry and caused considerable loss to the enemy. Nine others did not catch up the infantry but did good work in ‘clearing up’. Five became ditched. Nine broke down from mechanical trouble. The casualties amongst tank personnel were insignificant, though one officer of great promise was lost.
Though the operations had not been an unqualified success, there was justification for the pioneers, when faced with the question of what use tanks were, to give Michael Faraday’s reply: ‘What use is a baby?’
With October the rain came back. Six miles of mud lay behind the front line, between the men in the trenches and supplies of every sort. There would be no more battles for a while. The main business was to keep the army in being.
The War Committee, under the Prime Minister, held a meeting on 18 September with the object of deciding what should be publicly announced about the Caterpillar Machine-gun Destroyers. Mr Montagu, ex-Financial Secretary to the Treasury and now Minister of Munitions, disliked the original draft submitted by the CID because ‘it did not give sufficient credit to the Ministry or to Major Stern. Nor did it do justice to Mr d’Eyncourt and Mr Tritton, who were responsible for the design’. Stern, he asserted ‘was responsible for the production,’ but nobody thought to mention Wilson. He would not have minded, for he was a self-effacing man. Mr Lloyd George ‘thought that the training of the “Tank” Corps (it did not yet exist under that name) had not been entirely satisfactory and for that Colonel Swinton might be held to some extent responsible.’ The others were having none of that. ‘Very great credit was due to Colonel Swinton,’ said Mr Asquith. Mr Montagu ‘thought that the reason why the training was not satisfactory was that the “Tanks” were used before the training of the Corps had been properly completed.’ The upshot of it was that no official statement was made but Mr Lloyd George would say something rather vague in the Commons. Which he in due course did.