MR CHURCHILL, STILL MINISTER OF MUNITIONS OF WAR, visited the Scene of the attack on the Drocourt-Queant Switch. Hardened though he was to the sight of battlefields, both as performer and spectator, he found something new in this one. ‘It was a very fine strong, deep trench. In front of it was a belt of wire, nearly one hundred yards broad. The wire was practically uncut, and had only little passages through it, all presumably swept by machine-guns. Yet the troops walked over these terrific obstacles, without the wire being cut, with very little loss, killed many Germans, took thousands of prisoners and hundreds of machine-guns. Three or four hundred yards behind these lines was a second line, almost as strong and more deceptive. Over this also they walked with apparently no difficulty and little loss. Behind that again, perhaps a mile further on, were just a few little pits and holes into which the German machine-guns and riflemen threw themselves to stop the rout. Here our heaviest losses occurred. The troops had got beyond the support of the tanks, and the bare, open ground gave no shelter.’
He wrote a letter at once to the Prime Minister: ‘Up to the present there have only been about 18,000 men in the Tank Corps and they have only had 600 or 700 tanks in action. It is universally admitted out here that they have been a definite factor in changing the fortune of the field and in giving us that tactical superiority without which the best laid schemes of strategists come to naught. It is no exaggeration to say that the lives they have saved and the prisoners they have taken have made these 18,000 men the most profit-bearing we have in the Army Every time new success is gained by their aid there is an immediate clamour for large numbers. The moment the impression of that success passes away the necessary men and material are grudged and stinted. I repeat that there ought to be 100,000 men in the Tank Corps.’
It was a little late in the day to say this. The work of a tank crew was the most highly skilled of any, and to train such men to concert pitch requires months of hard work.
The time had come for Sir Henry Rawlinson to take one of the most serious decisions of the war. Happily he was an imperturbable man, for two schools of thought were tugging at him in different directions. First came the ‘Yanks and the Tanks’ school; their case was a good one. The American Armies were gathering strength, not merely in numbers but in battle-worthiness; the Mk VIII, with 19 mm of armour, ability to cross a 14-foot-wide trench and a range of forty-five miles on one filling of its 200-gallon petrol tank was almost in production. Or so it was believed. So was the Mk IX, capable of carrying fifty men in safety for much the same distance; the fast Medium B, C and D were not far behind. Wait until the Spring of 1919 and we shall have such a victory as the world has never seen, ran their counsel. At his other sleeve was the ‘hunch’ school. The Germans now are really and truly on the run; we know Charteris had been saying this for years and was talking nonsense but the cause has altered. We know the German has great and formidable defence lines but has he the men to hold them? And, if he has, will they still fight? Your army has never been in better form and another winter may harm it more than it will weaken the Germans. If we go hard for them now and win, the war will be over. If we fail, then it will be time to rely on ‘Yanks and Tanks’. Sir Henry made the brave decision. The Fourth Army, including its Australian Corps and the American IInd Corps, would advance and take the Hindenburg Line at the end of September.
As matters fell out this was a fortunate decision for the Tank Corps. Excellent though the machines now in the pipeline were, the Germans had in their own pipeline something that would have been deadly. The TUF (Tank und Flieger) machine-gun was of 13 mm calibre and, as experiments on captured tanks had shown, it could pierce steel plates 30 mm thick. It could have riddled the Mk VIII, the Mk IX and the new Mediums as easily as ‘K’ ammunition had slaughtered the training tanks at Bullecourt. Six thousand of these guns were ordered from no less than sixty factories and the first deliveries were promised for December. The Minister of War set so much store by the TUF that daily progress reports were demanded and it was given priority over both submarines and aircraft. The Great Tank Victory of 1919 should not be regarded as a foregone conclusion even though Williams-Ellis, writing in the same year, says of the TUF that ‘the modern tank fears it not at all’. He ought to have known.
Mk Vs of the 301st (U.S.) Battalion taking a German trench. October 1918.
Sir Henry had had one piece of luck that nobody could grudge him. When the booty brought back by Lieut Rollings and his armoured car on 8 August had been thoroughly examined it turned out to be beyond price. Every detail of the Hindenburg position was there, including some fine photographs taken from German balloons. They are still to be seen in General Montgomery’s Story of the Fourth Army. Rollings was awarded a bar to his MC but had to wait some time for a more tangible reward. In 1931 a newspaper got hold of the story and made a meal of it. Lady Houston, benefactress to the Schneider Trophy team and to every Imperial good cause, was so taken by it that she sent Rollings a cheque for £5,000.
After 2 September the tanks were again withdrawn to reorganize themselves, patch up the holes, replace the casualties and make ready for the next and greatest battle.
The doings of the Tank Corps from 8 August onwards have tended to overshadow the early days of another armoured force. General Pershing had no intention of letting his American Expeditionary Force be outclassed by the British and French in any aspect of war so long as he had the power of influencing events. As long ago as September, 1917, he had entrusted the formation of an American Tank Corps to Colonel Rockenbach, who may fairly be called the American Swinton, and had given him a free hand as to what he did. Rockenbach set up his headquarters at Chaumont as part of Pershing’s GHQ and sent selected officers off to learn the business at the French and British tank schools. During their absence he busied himself drawing up an establishment for a body of armoured troops appropriate to the great American armies that were slowly gathering.
Rockenbach thought big. The US Tank Corps should consist of five heavy battalions, equipped with the most modern British tanks, and twenty more using the Renault FT 17. The importance of this lay in the fact that as soon as the establishment was approved by Pershing, as it was very quickly, orders could go to Mr Stettinius, the War Department representative in Paris, for the full might of American industry to be put at the service of Stern’s Inter-Allied Commission. Work on the Liberty (alias Mk VIII) tank began soon afterwards. Mr Henry Ford, not to be left out of anything mechanical, produced a design of his own. The Commission, fully occupied, was not interested. Mr Ford went ahead just the same and set up a production line for a midget tank weighing only 3½ tons. It had all the virtues and all the defects of the ‘Tin Lizzie’ and while many were made only a few arrived in France before the Armistice. It never saw action.
The 301st Battalion spent its formative months with the British Army, using Mk Vs and being to all intents and purposes part of Elles’ Corps. This state of affairs pleased both sides, for they got on famously together. Two light battalions were formed at Bourg, the Tank Training Centre of the French Army. By the time the Hundred Days battles had started the two battalions of Renaults, 124 machines strong, had been formed into a Brigade. Its commander was that George S. Patton, Jr who had so impressed his bloodthirstiness on Sir Douglas.
Patton’s Brigade was shipped to the St Mihiel salient in time to begin its work on 12 September. The American Army then going into its first attacking battle had a touching resemblance to the British of 1916. It was enthusiastic, determined and bursting with courage; it also had everything to learn. Patton, having done the course at Wool before going on to the French school at Champlieu, was well instructed, though he thought little of either the St Chamond or the Mk V. His was not the only name familiar to a later generation. 42nd US Division was commanded by a young General named Douglas MacArthur: much of the planning for the St Mihiel offensive was the work of one of Pershing’s Staff officers, Lieut-Colonel George C. Marshall. Something like half a million American troops plus 150,000 Frenchmen took part in the battle. It would have been against nature to expect a few score of light tanks to have much effect on it. Deliveries at the last moment had brought Patton’s strength up to 174. Zero was 6 am; six hours later a hundred were bogged down. Most of the others ran out of petrol. It was not Patton’s day. Next day, however, one of his sections had a little victory. Lieutenant McClure, caught in the open by a German battery, kept straight on in a proper ‘Damn the torpedoes’ style and rammed it.
Men of the 30th (Tennessee) Division, U.S. Army and 8th Bn Tank Corps attacking the Hindenburg Line near Bellicourt.
The next American battle, the Meuse-Argonne, was not suited to the tank of 1918. As mud had wrecked all hopes at Ypres so did trees in the Argonne forest. Patton took a painful wound in the side from a shell splinter and was out of the war. The rest of it, for the AEF, was old-style foot and guns slogging matches. By 1920 the US Tank Corps had ceased to exist and Patton was back with the cavalry.
Further north, on the fronts of the British First, Third and Fourth Armies, it seemed that 1759 had come again; every breakfast time produced its enquiries about what victories the previous day had brought. For the Tank Corps it had hardened into a drill. As Williams-Ellis put it, ‘preparations for a battle had been so completely reduced to a routine that to attempt to chronicle the preparations for any of our set attacks would be to make a mere cento, whose pieces might be culled from particulars already recorded for Cambrai and Hamel and for Amiens.’ Details of gallons of petrol, tons of grease and acres of maps do not make compelling reading. The critical matter was training with other arms. Wherever these were accustomed to working with tanks success invariably followed at a price that could be accepted. The two RAF Squadrons detailed for tank protection, Nos 8 and 73, were essential members of the team. Their task was to spot enemy anti-tank guns and to eliminate them by bombing or machine-gun fire. Without their help tank casualties might well have been so heavy that they could no longer be an effective force. Something like thirty per cent of the German field artillery was now reckoned to be put to work at tank-killing and when the machines were left to fight private battles in the open the odds were heavily against them.
The heat and fumes in the Mk Vs also forced the crews to shifts and expedients. So far as possible they were kept outside the machines until battle was imminent. The habit grew up of having them driven to a point just short of the start line by skeleton crews, the remainder being brought up by lorry. There were small advantages in the slowness of these machines; on one occasion a tank was attacked by German infantry throwing phosphorus bombs; when they had been chased off and the inside became uninhabitable the crew calmly got out leaving the tank in motion and walked between the horns until the fumes had cleared; then they resumed business.
On 18 September came the Battle of Epehy, a little to the south of the old Cambrai battlefield. This was an area from which the Germans had to be cleared before the main assault on the Hindenburg Line, a couple of miles in the rear on average, could be mounted. It was a strong position, not to be taken at a run, for there were old trench systems, much wire and, in a countryside that had been farmed for thousands of years, a number of sunken roads. Four Divisions of Third Army had driven the enemy from the old British trenches south of Havrincourt on the 12th but the line running from Peizières to the Quadrilateral, by Selency and only a mile and a half from St Quentin itself, would not be pushed in without a lot of hard fighting. Sir Henry Rawlinson quite deliberately entrusted the business to some very tired Divisions. He had fresh ones, but they were earmarked for the great attack on the Hindenburg Line itself.
If the infantry Divisions were worn out, so were the Tank Brigades. Only about a score of machines, all sadly in need of overhaul, could be put into the fight, all of them from Courage’s Fifth Brigade. Once again it was to be an affair not of armoured fleets but of small, very vulnerable packets. Eight were to go with Butler’s IIIrd Corps on the left, four more with their old friends the Australians in the centre and the last eight were to work with IXth Corps, now commanded by Walter Braithwaite. The morning broke in rain and mist; many of the crews directed themselves into action for the first time by the naval compasses with which each fighting tank was now equipped.
In the north, Epehy itself fell without much resistance but Ronssoy proved a hard nut to crack. Anti-tank guns and machine-guns firing armour-piercing rounds seemed to be dug in everywhere. The Division charged with taking the place, the very good 18th, was under orders to press through to Lempire and The Knoll. It does not seem to have been greatly aided by its tanks. Of the seven allotted to the 53rd Brigade five were knocked out. ‘So heavy had been the machine-gun fire,’ said the Divisional History, ‘that they had found it impossible to fight their guns.’ Several veterans who had been present at almost every western front battle are on record as saying that they had never encountered such fire as this. 74th Division, the dismounted Yeomanry brought back from Palestine after the March Retreat, simply observed that ‘The tanks were unable to give any assistance as they failed to reach the starting point or were knocked out before reaching the first objective.’ On the Australian front things went better, as might have been expected after Hamel and the rest.
Far and away the hardest fighting was in IX Corps area, between Maissemy and Holnon. Two Regular Divisions, the 1st and 6th, moved forward. The German line had been recently strengthened by the arrival of the crack Alpine Corps. Major-General Marden, commanding the 6th had, as you may remember, had dealings with the first tanks on the Somme and did not think much of them. His 16th Brigade was on the left, with its left on Fresnoy-le-Petit and its right on the formidable defence system called the Quadrilateral. ‘Six tanks were allotted to the Division,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘but met with various mishaps or were knocked out and were not of much use.’ Another entry, three days later, says that ‘the four tanks detailed to attack the Quadrilateral again had bad luck, one being turned absolutely turtle by a minefield.’ This tank must have had the melancholy distinction of being the first ever to be wrecked by such means. Both sides had been laying mines since soon after Cambrai but they were not effective, usually being made out of old shell cases.
The adventures of two tanks around the Quadrilateral must not go unchronicled. First on the scene was that of 2nd Lieut Smallwood, which was caught in one of the sunken roads and brought to a halt. So heavy was the fire directed at it that any attempt to get at the unditching beam would have been suicidal. While this one was stuck a second tank loomed out of the murk with all its guns blazing. The driver was dead, the second driver grievously wounded and the commander, 2nd Lieut Hedges, was at the controls. Also aboard was the Section Commander, Captain Hamlet, doing duty as gunner. As Hedges’ tank was getting to work on the defenders and seemed to be gaining the upper hand it suddenly exploded into flames. The crew, having little choice, scrambled out into the hands of the surrounding Germans. Hedges, in no mood to be taken, shot his way clear with his revolver and made for Smallwood’s tank, bullets cracking all round him. When fifty yards short of it he dropped; Smallwood came out and dragged the badly wounded Hedges inside. Before long the tank was being rocked and holed to an extent that it made it impossible to stay aboard. Smallwood and the survivors unshipped the Hotchkisses, jumped down and began to open up on the Germans. They held the position for long enough to enable the infantry to cover the furlong separating them and handed over the post. Hedges was sent to the rear to find a Dressing Station. He was never seen again.
Epehy cannot be claimed as the tanks’ finest hour. With a handful of machines that should have been in the workshops and a few score men who should have been enjoying well deserved leave that is hardly remarkable. But they had something to show for it. Major-General Marden, up till now one of the unenlightened, admitted on 24 September that four tanks had been of great assistance to his 16th Brigade in securing the north face of the Quadrilateral. Coming from Marden this meant much. Four tanks had saved a lot of infantry lives, and that was what they were for.
All the outer works of the Hindenburg Line had now been cleared. The tanks were withdrawn for a brief respite and for Colonel Searle to have his men work on them. As many of the crews as possible were sent on leave to the Tank Corps’ almost private station balnéaire, Merlimont Plage. The Chinese labourers, along with others, were put to work on a new accessory. Fascines had done well enough at Cambrai; ‘cribs’, great oaken octagonal frames bound together with iron, would do even better when it came to crossing the Hindenburg Line. And every tank, even Baker-Carr’s old Mk IVs, must be ready in time for The Day.