A battering ram to drive through German lines

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-11-18/register/a-battering-ram-to-drive-through-german-lines-56lkp80rw

The Battle of Cambrai gave the Tank Corps the chance to lift low morale and prove the worth of new fighting machines designed to crush enemy defences

Allan Mallinson

A tank breaks through the wire of enemy lines during the Battle of Cambrai

“Just a line. A big battle has begun and we are taking the leading part. In fact, it could not have taken place without us,” wrote Lieutenant-Colonel JFC “Boney” Fuller, on the staff of the Tank Corps, to his mother on November 20, 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”. 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.”
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”. Having succeeded Sir John French (also a cavalryman) as commander-in-chief in December 1915, Haig had sought a return to the war of movement of 1914. As Field Service Regulations — the army’s bible — stated, “Decisive success in battle can be gained only by a vigorous offensive”, the chief factor in which was “a firmer determination in all ranks to conquer at any cost”.
In Haig’s view this meant an offensive leading to breakthrough and then rapid exploitation, with cavalry of the utmost importance.

Both sides had tried to break through in 1915, but without success. Their cavalry was left champing at the bit in frustration. It was the same in 1916. First the Germans at Verdun, and then 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.

Brigadier-General Hugh Elles led the Tank Corps into battleTHE TANK MUSEUM/PA

In February 1915, largely because of the War Office’s lack of interest in mechanical trench-crossing devices, Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty (navy minister), had set up the Admiralty Landships Committee to investigate their potential.
The development work was done by William Foster and Co Ltd of Lincoln, a specialist in agricultural machinery. In September 1915 the company tested a first design, little more than an armoured box on American-made caterpillar tracks. These, ironically, had been developed before the war by another Lincolnshire firm, Hornsby, and offered to the War Office for artillery tractors, but had been turned down. Hornsby sold the patent to the Holt Manufacturing Company of California and Illinois.
However, this first design, “Little Willie”, could not cross a gap of 5ft — the average trench width — because the tracks were prone to shed. By December Fosters had produced a new design with bigger tracks wrapped round a hull with forward-sloping “prows” projecting beyond the crew compartment — a rhomboid giving the machine huge reach. On January 20, 1916, sheathed in tarpaulins, the 28-ton “tank”, a deliberately vague term alluding to its boxy shape, was taken to Burton Park outside Lincoln for testing. It crossed a trench 8ft wide, climbed a 5ft parapet and crushed barbed wire entanglements at a steady walking speed of 4mph.
After a further demonstration at Hatfield Park in Hertfordshire, the War Office ordered 100 machines, equipped with six-pounder cannon or Hotchkiss and Vickers machineguns. Thirty tanks would go into action in the middle of September during the Somme battles, most of which broke down prematurely or were engulfed in the mud. Nevertheless, Haig recognised their worth and ordered several hundred more.

The Cambrai flag, which was flown from a tank by Hugh Elles as he drove into battleTHE TANK MUSEUM/PA

Opinions as to how the weapon was to be used were divided. Some officers in the Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps, the unit responsible for fielding the tank, believed that they should be used en masse and with a degree of independence. Inter-communication was by hand or flag signals, however, and reliability was a problem. Fosters had been contracted for engineering tolerances of 50 miles between breakdowns, which, allowing for movement to the start line from the railheads, did not envisage any great advance. 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 — that would enable the cavalry to break out.
Haig certainly had high hopes of them at Third Ypres. He had about 140 available for the offensive, all but two of which made it to the start line without mishap. However, the mud of Passchendaele would prove 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 Tank Corps, formed from the Machine Gun Corps on July 27, 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 pockmarked with shell craters. HQ Tank Corps proposed an offensive towards Cambrai. Originally conceived as a raid — a limited action to show what the tank could do in the right conditions — planning for Cambrai soon became a casualty of the continuing ambition for breakthrough and restoration of the war of movement.

Tanks preparing for the Battle of CambraiTHE TANK MUSEUM/PA

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 responsible 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). Haig placed virtually the entire Cavalry Corps, about 27,500 cavalrymen and their support troops, under Byng’s command to “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. About 270 tons of oats and hay had to be put in place.
“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 to 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 five miles, bridging 26 successive lines of trenches.

Tanks being transported to the battleground of Cambrai — 380 were to be used in the conflictTHE TANK MUSEUM/PA

The battle began well. On November 20, in an obliging morning mist and before an artillery round had been fired, the massed tanks answered to the command “Driver, advance!” In the absence of the usual artillery notification, and the tanks’ quite remarkable success in concealment during the build-up (aided by the Royal Flying Corps’ local air superiority), they took the Germans 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 six-mile front, checked only at Flesquières, by noon Byng’s divisions had penetrated five miles into the defences of the Hindenburg Line, farther to date than anywhere on the Somme or in Flanders. By early afternoon, only a half-finished fourth line stood between the 3rd Army and open country, and here there was a wide-open gap for several hours.
An advance of five miles, even a relatively easy one, was tiring. 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 could not. 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.
The Germans were expecting them. 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 overrun at any minute, they had abandoned Cambrai.

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 next morning, after a night of icy rain, the British faced counterattacks.
Haig sent more divisions to Cambrai, but it was too late. Byng’s renewed attacks on November 22 and 23 quickly petered out, while with impressive speed, and largely undetected, the Germans massed 20 divisions for a counteroffensive. These came out of the morning mist on November 30 after a short, intense bombardment consisting of high explosive, gas and smoke — but with almost no tanks, because the Germans did not rate them.
Using new infiltration techniques, they thrust at both flanks of the salient created by the 3rd Army’s advance, breaking through in the south. Byng’s infantry put up a resolute defence and disaster was averted, but with considerable loss, including Brigadier-General Roland Boys Bradford, VC, MC — at 25 the youngest brigade commander of modern times, who had been in command for three weeks.
Byng was forced to abandon the greater part of his original gains. German casualties at Cambrai were about 50,000; the British Expeditionary Force’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 Britain on the first day to announce a resounding victory, had rung prematurely.
A board of inquiry was held in London to examine how the spectacular initial success had turned into another costly reverse. Haig and Byng survived, but not the chief of intelligence, Brigadier-General John Charteris, “who was incredibly bad as head of GHQ intelligence, who always concealed bad news, or put it in an agreeable light” wrote Captain Desmond Morton, one of Haig’s aides-de-camp, and after the war a member of the Secret Intelligence Service and one of Churchill’s sources during “the wilderness years”.

Soldiers follow a British Mark IV tank at Ribecourt la Tour, near Cambrai, during the Battle of Cambrai, on November 20, 1917REUTERS

Yet the tank had at last proved itself. Production was stepped up and faster types 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 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, 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 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.