Tank commander’s impressions of the attack at Cambrai, 20 November 1917
Action stations. Everyone inside – driver and officer side by side, front flaps half open – four gunners standing by, closed down – infantry runner sitting on oil container with back to officer – [carrier] pigeons in basket stowed under one sponson [i.e. gun housing on side of tank].
Engine hot, probably been running for some hours; most engines run better once they have boiled, very difficult to guarantee engine would restart if stopped. Not advisable to throttle down too much as sheets of red flame crack out of exhaust pipe or through joints in pipe on roof. If engine kept running too fast exhaust pipes glow red.
Once doors closed tank almost in darkness – similar to overhead yellow London fog – four festoon lamps illuminate interior dimly – used sparingly as visible from outside. Rear door left ajar as long as possible.
Zero hour: comparative silence broken quite suddenly by crash of guns fired simultaneously, whistle and whine of shells overhead, a pause – whole of far side of No Man’s Land lit up in dawn light – smoke everywhere – company commander comes to front and shouts signal to start.
Driver hammers one side of engine casing, holds up one finger, gearsman gets first gear, officer hammers other side, same procedure, tank lurches forward.
Other tanks dimly seen on left and right – going good – occasional shell-hole has to be crossed, each time tank’s nose dips ammunition boxes, odd tools, etc. slide forward and then backwards with metallic crashes. Gearsmen and gunners hang on. Inside of tank getting hotter. Harsh tapping outside tank indicates hostile M.G. [i.e. machine-gun] fire.
Black mass three feet high and as far as the eye can see appears in growing light – German wire. Tank goes up to it – looks terribly formidable – will it catch in tracks and wind round and round tank turning it into a cocoon, or will it spring up behind again and prevent infantry following? Glance through back shows broad lane through wire along which packets of infantry are following. Second belt rather less thick – front flaps opened to facilitate driving.
Sudden tapping on port side of tank – gunner holds hand up, cut in many places with splash and flake [i.e. flying fragments of metal caused by bullets hitting tank]. Burst of M.G. fire had hit tank at spot where sponson turret joins tank and had ripped away felt packing, hitting gunner in hand – tank swung 10 degrees – all ports closed down.
Vision of crew now restricted to: –
Driver – a restricted view to the front through eight small holes drilled close together. A glance at the ground under the front horns of the tank through the front flap which has been left ajar.
Officer – as for driver, in addition a thin periscope has been pushed through the top which does give an all-round view.
Gunners – glass prisms. A glance through them gives a view to the immediate front only of a few yards of strange, green-coloured stygian gloom. An occasional spurt of earth indicates a shell burst.
Gearsmen – nothing.
The bell in the tank clangs, having been pulled by infantry N.C.O. at rear who indicates position of German post. Quickest method of directing fire: swing tank to bring two side guns onto target and indicate to gunners by putting burst from front gun near hostile post.
Infantry advancing very slowly – difficult to see what is holding them up.
Fire becoming intense. Tank on right flank stops and black smoke comes out.
Same gunner hit again with splash. All vizors worn – these are steel masks with slits for eyes and chain [mail] attached covering mouth and throat – whole fixed by tape round back of head.
Sweat causes tapes to slip, completely blinding crew – vizors abandoned.
Bullet enters tank like angry bee. No damage.
Hostile fire intense – splash flying all round – cannot be heard in noise, but suddenly dents appear in ammunition boxes – pieces of exhaust flake off as if torn off by invisible hand. Port unditching rail is hanging down in front of tank, cut through by M.G. fire.
Cannot locate M.G’s – only just possible to see gearsman inside through smoke and fumes.
Snipers in long grass cannot be seen – firing at loopholes – two gunners hit in hand through gun port, one whilst firing and the other trying to change [ammunition] drum. Tank turned in attempt to locate enemy. Only one M.G. seen and put out of action.
Front gun [of tank] out of action – unable to withdraw it – subsequently found M.G. fire had split casing and splayed the end of Lewis gun like discarded cigarette end.
M.G. fire intensive – driver’s flap partially cut through and hanging at an angle of 20 degrees. Front plates of tank hot. Petrol getting short, no other tanks near – impossible to report except by pigeon. Infantry in shell holes unable to advance.1
* * *
These were the vivid recollections of Second Lieutenant Horace Birks as he took his tank into action on 20 November 1917, in what would be one of the defining battles of the First World War, and perhaps of any modern war. During the attack Birks was only dimly aware of the other tanks advancing around him, but among them he could easily have caught a glimpse of D51 Deborah, the principal subject of this story. If so there would have been little to distinguish her, for Deborah was in a sense ordinary – just one of nearly 380 British fighting tanks that attacked the strongly-held German positions before the French town of Cambrai a century ago. In another sense, though, she is unique: for Deborah is thought to be the only one of those tanks still in existence, having been buried on the battlefield through a quirk of fate, and reclaimed through a miracle of archaeology.
This book therefore tells the story of a machine, or rather of two machines, since a previous tank bore the same crew number D51, and is therefore likely (since this was the normal practice) to have had the same name. But it is also predominantly a human story, of the men who fought inside both tanks, of the men who fought alongside them, and the men who fought against them. The intention here is not to give a detailed account of the development of the tank, nor of the great battles of Passchendaele in which the first D51 took part, or Cambrai in which the second played a heroic role. Instead this is unashamedly a work of micro-history, written in the belief that by studying the individual and the particular, one can come to a more complete understanding of the whole.
Of course there are enormous challenges in this approach, in seeking to unravel a single thread from the tapestry of the past. Sometimes we catch only brief glimpses of Deborah through a dim and distorted prism, like those used by the gunners in Birks’ tank. But there are other occasions when the searchlight is turned on her, and we can pick her out clearly amid the smoke and din of battle. And at the end of the story there is always the mute hulk of Deborah herself, preserved for decades in the mud of the battlefield, and now on display as a permanent memorial to the Battle of Cambrai.
In a sense, this is a story that subverts much of what we know, or think we know, about the First World War, with its inexorable tide of tragedy sweeping the British people from Sarajevo to the Cenotaph by way of the Somme, from the glorious patriotism of Rupert Brooke to the war-weariness of Wilfred Owen. We often think of the Germans as fighting a ‘cleverer’ war – an attitude identified by one future tank officer, William Watson, while home after being wounded in 1915: ‘In our suburb it is firmly believed that the Germans can detach a million from one front, throw it against another, wipe up the Serbians, land in Syria, and return before the absence has been noticed. Everything English is good, but silly: everything German is wicked, but wise.’2
Yet despite this, the much-derided ‘donkeys’ of the British General Staff – led by Sir Douglas Haig, who was an enthusiastic advocate of tanks from the start – somehow managed to foster the creation, development and increasingly effective use of a revolutionary weapon that has played a decisive role in every conventional war since, from the Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm. It is true that the Germans, who had settled into a generally defensive war on the Western Front, had a less obvious need to develop tanks than the British and French, but by the time they recognized their potential and produced their own clumsy counterpart, they had fallen so far behind in the race that they were unable to catch up, while the British Mark V tank powered ahead to make a crucial contribution to victory in the battles of 1918.
Even the Germans admitted the enormity of the coup that was delivered at Cambrai. In the words of one officer who was captured in the battle: ‘Here [our High Command] suffered a terrible shock, just like the one experienced by the Romans when Hannibal and his elephants appeared in Italy after going through Spain and Gaul and across the Alps. What the elephants of Carthage were to the legions of Rome, so to a devastating degree were the English tank squadrons to the German troops – a tour de force of English military engineering.’3
On a darker note, this book also describes two exceptional cases in which details of planned tank attacks were given away to the enemy by British prisoners. The intention here is not to condemn, but rather to explore the moral complexities of war and the personal dilemmas faced by ordinary soldiers, and the potentially deadly consequences of their actions.
Above all, therefore, it is important to approach this story with an open mind, to set aside our preconceptions about the Great War, and to experience it as the men themselves did – not with hindsight and a sense of inevitability, but as a series of incidents and events that contributed to their own unfolding experience, and enabled them, and us, finally, to achieve a kind of understanding.
In the words of the author Henry Williamson, recalling his own military service fifty years later: ‘The war was not all evil. We learned something in those days, although things went wrong later on. We just hadn’t the wider vision then that we have now, I suppose.’4