Lieutenant Byford looked at Lieutenant Mitchell. ‘Honour’s pretty even?’ he suggested, now that history’s first tank-versus-tank battle had concluded.
A smile creased Mitchell’s face. ‘I wouldn’t say that, old chap,’ he replied. ‘We’re still here and Jerry has retreated. A victory to the British Tank Corps, I’d say.’
Frankie looked at Taz and whispered, ‘How’d he work that out? Our side lost five tanks and the Jerries lost one.’
‘The Jerry tanks didn’t break through our lines, so they failed,’ Taz replied. ‘I think the generals would call it a “strategic victory” to our side.’
‘Ah.’ Frankie nodded thoughtfully. ‘Now you put it that way . . .’
‘Come along, Pickles, Dutton,’ said Lieutenant Byford, putting away his binoculars. ‘I think we’ve seen enough.’
‘Too right,’ Frankie agreed. ‘There aren’t any British tanks left for us to “observe”.’
‘Where are we going, sir?’ Taz asked.
‘While Jerry is withdrawing, we’ll do the same,’ the lieutenant advised. ‘We’ll rejoin the battalion at its bivouac point.’ Shaking Mitchell by the hand, he said, with a wry smile, ‘Good luck, now that you’re an infantryman like the rest of us.’
‘You and your Australians give Fritz hell, Byford!’ Mitchell responded.
Byford turned to Frankie and Taz. ‘Let’s go, lads.’
With Byford leading and Frankie bringing up the rear, the three of them clambered from the trench and scampered towards the reserve trenches in the rear.
‘Good luck to you, Aussies,’ Mitchell called after them.
Richard was exhausted. For hours Mephisto had been roaming around the battlefield in support of German infantry. The main gun had fired off scores of shells, and the machine guns had used up much of their ammunition. Spent shell and bullet casings covered the floor and Richard’s boots. It was so hot inside Mephisto that many of the crew had ignored Lieutenant Theunissen’s order and stripped to the waist. Richard had followed the others’ lead, removing his tunic and shirt and stuffing them in a corner, then dragging his braces back on so that they lay against his bare skin, which glistened with perspiration. As for the heavy helmet of leather and dangling chain mail, he’d thrown that off after half an hour. Time and again he’d heard the patter of enemy bullets against the hull, but the German armour was too thick, and the British bullets too weak, for the steel walls around Richard to be pierced.
After all the toing and froing of the morning, Lieutenant Theunissen was now unsure where he was on the battlefield, and unsure where the other A7Vs of his group were. So he ordered Papa Heiber to steer Mephisto to the north, closer to Villers-Bretonneux, which was where he had last seen their A7V companion, Elfriede. Before long, Mephisto crawled to the edge of a quarry.
‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ Theunissen yelled.
When Heiber brought Mephisto to a grinding halt, Theunissen warily opened the top flap to his side of the cupola. As the tank’s engines ticked over, the commander put his head up – slowly, fearfully – into the morning air to get a better view of the quarry and what lay in it. Fresh air coursed into the tank via the opening, and several crewmen leaned closer to the commander’s seat to take advantage of the welcome cool air.
‘What can you see, Herr Oberleutnant?’ Wagner called from his machine gun.
‘Elfriede on its side,’ Theunissen replied.
Sure enough, their fellow tank lay in the quarry, completely on one side, with its hatches open and its crew nowhere to be seen. Dead British troops lay around it.
‘There seems to be no battle damage to Elfriede, Herr Oberleutnant,’ Papa Heiber remarked.
‘No,’ Theunissen agreed. ‘It appears to have fallen over. The driver attempted to negotiate too steep an incline in entering the quarry, and it turned over.’
Richard, hearing this, remembered what Lieutenant Biltz had told him about the A7Vs being top-heavy.
‘Make sure you don’t make the same mistake, Feldwebel,’ Theunissen snarled as he lowered himself back into his seat and closed the flap above his head.
‘Fear not, Herr Oberleutnant,’ Heiber cheerily replied. ‘I know this old boy’s limitations. Where to now?’
Theunissen thought for a moment, then said, ‘We need to find the other panzers.’ As far as Theunissen was concerned, there would be safety in numbers. He didn’t like being out here on his own. ‘Head south towards the village of Cachy. Gruppe 3 is operating in that vicinity.’
‘As you instruct, Herr Oberleutnant,’ said Heiber.
Throwing the gears of both engines into reverse, Heiber eased Mephisto back from the edge of the quarry, then, using the left engine, he dragged the tank around until it was facing south. Engaging both engines again, Heiber sent the monster crawling on its new course. That course was filled with broken trenches, pockmarked with shell craters and littered with barbed wire and bodies in khaki and field grey. It took great concentration to weave through the maze. Where possible, Heiber avoided running over the bodies. But he was not always successful.
‘Slowly, Heiber, slowly!’ Theunissen warned him anxiously, after the tank slid to the right as it trundled by a crater. ‘We don’t want to share Elfriede’s fate by toppling over.’
‘Trust me, Herr Oberleutnant,’ Heiber called. ‘I have no intention of turning us over.’
In the forward compartment, Richard was keeping his feet by bracing himself with one hand against the tank’s side and the other grasping a rope handle dangling from the roof. Seeing Sergeant Eckhardt check his watch, Richard leaned closer and yelled above the engine noise. ‘What time is it, Feldwebel?’
Eckhardt didn’t reply. Instead, he briefly held the face of his watch up for Richard to read the time for himself. Richard could see that it was just after nine in the morning. They had been in the fight for three hours. But to Richard, it had seemed like three days. He knew that Mephisto carried enough fuel to keep going for six hours. On that basis, Richard figured that the ordeal of his first battle as a tankman was only halfway through. In reality, his ordeal was fated to last longer than that. Much longer.
It was the afternoon by the time the three men of the 52nd found their battalion. The unit was resting where Colonel Whitlam had told Lieutenant Byford he’d find them – beside the Bois l’Abbé, the very wood where the trio had that morning linked up with Lieutenant Mitchell and the tanks. While Frankie and Taz had been at the battlefront, the battalions of the 13th Brigade had marched for twelve kilometres, crossing the River Somme via a bridge at Blangy-Tronville then passing through the Hallue Valley. They’d marched full of confidence, with helmets set at jaunty angles, cigarettes hanging from their mouths and laughter erupting from one group and another.
Lieutenant Byford now thanked Frankie and Taz, then set off to report to Colonel Whitlam. Frankie and Taz soon found their platoon among the sea of khaki uniforms lounging in the field where the mustard gas had wreaked havoc that morning.
‘So the wanderers return!’ Corporal Rait exclaimed, standing with his hands on his hips.
‘Bad pennies always turn up again,’ sneered Corporal Will Eager. Rait the Rat’s best friend had rejoined the battalion from hospital that same morning and was now in charge of a section in another platoon of the 52nd Battalion.
But Frankie and Taz received a warm welcome from Private Nash, who stood up and shook each by the hand. ‘I was worried that the Jerries might have got you two,’ he confessed. ‘Did you see any fighting?’
‘Only saw a blooming great tank battle,’ said Frankie, sinking wearily to the ground and laying his rifle down beside him.
‘No! Really?’ Nash exclaimed, his eyes widening with awe. ‘What was it like?’
‘Brutal,’ said Taz. He also took the load off his feet and proceeded to return his bayonet to its scabbard.
‘But we won!’ Frankie added with a grin.
This brought cheers from the men around them, who leaned closer to hear what Frankie
and Taz had to say.
‘We heard that the Germans have broken through British lines and taken Villers-Bretonneux,’ Nash told the pair.
‘Yes,’ Taz replied. ‘We saw a lot of British troops falling back from there. They looked pretty shaken up, I can tell you.’
‘A German plane came over while we were on the march,’ said Nash, sitting down again. ‘The observer took photographs of us. Bleeding cheek, I thought. And there was us just having to smile for the camera.’
‘One Jerry plane dropped a bomb on a tank near us,’ said Frankie.
‘It didn’t get you blokes, though,’ said Nash.
‘Nah.’
‘I wish we could be camouflaged somehow so the buggers couldn’t see us,’ said Nash. ‘A bloke feels almost naked letting Jerry photograph us like that.’
‘Us camouflaged?’ Frankie asked, incredulous. ‘What, covered in netting, or dressed up like trees or something?’
‘They should invent a paint to make us invisible,’ Nash suggested. ‘Like in The Invisible Man.’
Frankie frowned. ‘In the what?’
‘The Invisible Man – the novel by H. G. Wells,’ said Taz. ‘Haven’t you read it, Frankie? It’s terrific!’
Frankie pulled a face. ‘I don’t have time to read books.’
‘If they covered us in invisible paint,’ Nash went on, ‘the Germans would never see us and we could just march up to their trenches and take their guns off them. The war would be over in a day.’
‘Wouldn’t work, Nash,’ Rait the Rat interjected from behind.
Nash looked around. ‘Why not, Corp?’
‘The sodding Fritzes always get what we’ve got, chum. Sometimes they even invent things before we do – mustard gas, for example. They’d get invisible paint, too, and paint all their men with it.’
Frankie laughed. ‘So we’d be invisible and they’d be invisible, and we’d all be charging around the battlefield like blind men.’
‘And bumping into each other and falling over,’ said Taz.
Men around them laughed at the thought.
‘Load of silly sods, the lot of you,’ Rait growled, putting an end to the revelry.
Lumbering towards Monument Wood, Mephisto was in search of its brother and sister tanks. As it rolled along, the machine-gunners replaced the barrels on their Maxims with fresh ones; the heat of battle having worn out the old barrels.
The area that Mephisto now entered was known as Monument Farm, while the exact locale it found itself in was called the Orchard. Scattered bricks lay where a farmhouse and outbuildings once stood. The trees of the orchard had been ripped from the earth by numerous artillery barrages from both sides, leaving just the occasional tree stump.
British troops had fled from their trenches all along the 1.6-kilometre front of the morning’s powerful German assault, but not every trench had been abandoned. Where officers or strong-willed NCOs survived, British resistance remained. The rapid German advance had passed them by, leaving them isolated, like small islands in a shark-infested sea. Here, nearer to Cachy, that resistance was at its strongest. As Mephisto crept through the remnants of the Orchard, Richard and the other weary crew members heard the pitter-patter of bullets on the armoured front and right side of their tank.
‘Where is that fire coming from?!’ Lieutenant Theunissen demanded, peering through his viewing slit.
‘One hundred metres to the right, Herr Oberleutnant,’ replied Papa Heiber, who had the best view.
‘Engage! Engage!’ Theunissen bellowed, punching one of the buttons in front of him to light up the lamp on the extreme right of gunner Eckhardt’s indication panel.
Eckhardt, looking through his front right port, saw the flashing muzzle of a British Lewis Gun to his right and the helmeted heads of British soldiers. Quickly, he spun the wheel that turned the tank’s big gun in their direction. Adjusting for range, he fired. The gun boomed. His shot fell beyond the target.
‘No! No! No!’ Theunissen yelled. ‘Lower your sights! Lower your sights!’
As Eckhardt adjusted his aim, Richard loaded another shell into the breech. At that moment, Mephisto was rocked by an explosion close by. Shrapnel clattered against its armour. A British artillery shell had landed just metres to the right of the tank.
‘The English artillery has our range! They have our range!’ Theunissen was almost screaming. ‘Get us out of here, Heiber!’ He pointed to a conglomeration of shell craters ahead and to their left. ‘There! There! Get us in there! Hurry! Hurry!’
Heiber did as commanded, accelerating towards the massive holes in the ground. As Eckhardt and the machine-gunners continued to fire on the British trenches, another shell landed where Mephisto had been moments before, and enemy bullets continued to rattle against the tank’s armoured sides.
‘It looks deep in there, Herr Oberleutnant,’ Heiber called as they drew closer to the craters.
‘Good, good,’ Theunissen came back. ‘We need cover from the artillery.’
‘But we might not get out,’ Heiber protested.
‘Nonsense. Keep going!’ To emphasise his point, Theunissen pounded the driver on the knee. ‘Keep going!’
Never one to disobey an order, Heiber eased off the accelerator and pointed Mephisto’s nose down the side of a crater, taking care not to let the tank lean too far to either side, in case it turned turtle. Down into the hole in the ground the tank eased, until it came to rest at the bottom of several linked craters, with just its cupola visible from the British trenches. Bullets now tickled the armour plating on the side of the cupola, close to Theunissen’s head.
Theunissen hunched fearfully. ‘The Tommies can still see us! I think the crater is deeper to our left. Go left, Heiber.’
But when Heiber tried to use the left track to turn them Mephisto wouldn’t budge.
‘Why are we not moving, Heiber?’ Theunissen demanded.
‘We are stuck, Herr Oberst. I did warn you –’
‘What! Stuck? That can’t be possible. Try again.’
Heiber applied full power to the left track. At maximum capacity, the engine on the left strained with a roar, then died.
‘What now?’ Theunissen said, the blood draining from his face.
‘The engine has stopped. We are stuck fast, Oberleutnant,’ Heiber replied with a helpless shrug.
‘But we’re a sitting target.’
‘Yes, we are,’ Heiber said matter-of-factly. As far as he was concerned, Theunissen had got them into this predicament and it was up to him to get them out again. ‘What are your orders?’
‘Try the other engine.’
‘But that will only take us around and around in circles.’
‘Try it!’
Heiber engaged the right track solo and tried to move Mephisto around to the right. But the tank remained where it was. Looking around at the commander, Heiber shrugged.
‘Turn off the other engine,’ Theunissen growled. ‘I can’t think with the noise.’
Heiber did so, and for the first time in many hours, the crew found themselves in a world of silence. Members of the crew exchanged worried glances.
‘That’s better,’ said Theunissen, removing his peaked cap and wiping his brow with his cuff. ‘Someone had better look outside,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Who is the nearest to the forward hatch?’
‘Rix, the youngster,’ said Heiber. Leaning low, he called into the forward compartment. ‘Rix, find out why we’re stuck. Use the forward hatch.’
‘Me?’ said Richard, looking up at the driver in horror. ‘Go outside?’
‘Do as he says, boy!’ said an impatient Sergeant Eckhardt, beside him at the gun. ‘Quickly! None of us want to be stuck here for long. Here, for your protection . . .’ Reaching to his belt, Eckhardt removed a 9 mm Mauser automatic pistol from its holster and handed it to Richard.
The sixteen-year-old took the pistol, then, plucking up his courage, peeked out a small round spy-hole in the middle of the forward hatch.
/> ‘Hurry, boy!’ yelled Lieutenant Theunissen.
Seeing no sign of British troops in the crater, Richard unfastened the hatch door. Pistol in hand, he climbed out into the light of day and dropped to the ground. As fresh air washed over his bare torso, the sounds of battle from further west met his ears. Anxiously, with the pistol at the ready, Richard looked around. The crater, which was really a series of linked holes created by several shells falling in the same spot, was more than two metres deep in places and at least three metres deep at its centre. There was no sign of anyone, living or dead, in the vicinity.
‘All clear out here,’ Richard called with relief. ‘No Tommies.’
‘See what the problem with the tracks is, boy,’ Theunissen called through a cupola flap. ‘Why are we unable to move?’
Richard dropped to his knees to inspect the front of the tank. Mephisto’s angled steel nose was lodged against the earthen wall at the front of the crater, with its big gun pointing uselessly into the ground. Beneath the nose was the remnant of a deep, wide ditch, over which the tank’s tracks were hanging. The ditch was probably all that was left of an irrigation channel that had fed the orchard here in peacetime, thought Richard. It looked ominously wide, and he remembered how, during training outside Charleroi, BadenI had become stuck in a stream bed. Experience would show that an A7V’s tracks could not cross a gap wider than 1.5 metres. This ditch beneath Mephisto’s nose was at least two metres across.
Richard wasted no time out in the open. Climbing back into the forward compartment and closing the hatch behind him, he reported to Theunissen. ‘Mephisto is stuck fast against the bank, Herr Oberleutnant. At the front, the tracks have nothing to grip on to. They are hanging over the remains of a ditch.’
Upon receiving this news, Theunissen called to Hartmann. ‘Mechanic, try to get the left engine started again.’
Both Hartmann and Hess laboured unsuccessfully for five minutes with the engine crank, before giving up, exhausted.
Tank Boys Page 9