Deborah and the War of the Tanks

by John Taylor

  As for George Macdonald, he would eventually return to the Tank Corps and to the Western Front, though not to a fighting role, and sure enough the following August would bring a final bloody encounter with the Germans. But his association with D Battalion was at an end, and we should leave him to bask in the blustery sea air, and to ponder for a few short weeks the battle he had just survived, and the others yet to come.

  There would be no such respite for his former comrades in D Battalion, who made their way disconsolately back to the camp at La Lovie. No war correspondents came to disturb them, and the next day’s newspapers made vague reference to ‘successful operations’ against positions that were held with ‘great stubbornness’. The report continued: ‘The tanks again took part in the operation. It was not on such a scale as in the affair of August 19, but they seem to have done excellent service.’2 In fact this attack had been on a much larger scale, but had achieved considerably less.

  For the officers, there was the usual round of paperwork to be completed, as described by Second Lieutenant James Macintosh: ‘Every subaltern in the Tank Corps enjoys after action the doubtful privilege of writing a detailed history of his performance, together with any suggestions he may wish to make regarding future shows. This Battle History Sheet is forwarded to Corps H.Q., and in some cases to G.H.Q. itself. Its composition frequently causes more misgivings than the action it is intended to describe.’3 Captain Edward Glanville Smith called these documents ‘self-recommendations for a decoration’,4 and it is unfortunate that so few of them have survived, and none at all from D Battalion during this period.

  There were also letters of condolence to be written to the relatives of those who died, and these must have caused their authors even more misgivings than the Battle History Sheet. One, probably written by Captain Graeme Nixon, was received by the parents of twenty-one year-old Private Alfred Preston. Relatives were often told their loved ones had died instantly and painlessly, so one can only imagine the suffering that was suppressed in his letter:

  I know that anything I may say here will be but slight comfort to you in your great trouble, but I can assure you how we all miss him here. He was most popular with all of us, and his ability had enabled him to become First Driver of his Tank. I have known him personally since June, 1916, and realise how little we can afford to lose such men as him. His death was the result of a direct hit on his Tank with a shell on the 22nd of August last, and although he lived for a few minutes after being hit he suffered little pain. I fully realise what a terrible blow it must be for you, and once again extend the deepest sympathy of all of us out here.5

  A letter also arrived from the Chaplain of 1st Tank Brigade, Captain the Reverend Arthur Huxtable: ‘It is one of the saddest tasks we Chaplains have, sending home the sad news to parents and wives. You must try to find consolation that your son died a hero’s death. I saw him just before he started off into action, and he was wonderfully brave and cheerful. You may well feel proud of him, and happy about him too.’6

  In addition to these duties, the tank commanders normally went through a debriefing, though few can have been as bizarre as that undergone by Second Lieutenant Wilfred Bion at the hands of Clough Williams-Ellis, then a captain and reconnaissance officer of 1st Tank Brigade, following a subsequent attack. Bion had abandoned his tank after it literally sank into the mud a mile-and-a-half from Schuler Farm, and struggled back across No Man’s Land; the problem was, he had no idea where they had been in the featureless swamp and was baffled by Williams-Ellis’s questions.

  ‘Can you show me whereabouts your tank got stuck?’ It sounded simple, but … I seemed incapable of thought. I said it was a bit to the right of Hill 40, that is, east of it – or was it west? It could be …

  He waited patiently, ‘Here, show me on the map.’

  Obviously it could not be west – it would be in the German lines. Nor east, because we would not have got into action. But, come to think of it, I was not sure we had got into action. I kept thinking of my shell-hole which I shared with a corpse from a previous engagement.

  ‘Here’, I said with a wobbly finger.

  ‘Or’, he said with scarcely concealed sarcasm, ‘possibly here … perhaps?’

  I agreed that it was very likely. The corpse was lying andrews-cross-wise. It was thin, dessicated, not blown-up, and the green skin was stretched tight like parchment over the bones of the face.

  ‘Sir?’ He was asking me something.

  ‘I said, did you notice when the alluvial changed to the cretaceous?’

  I could hardly believe my ears. ‘I didn’t notice any change’, I said truthfully.

  ‘There seems to be general agreement about that.’7

  Before the war Clough Williams-Ellis was already making his name as an architect, and no doubt he was interested in the subtleties of the underlying geology, but most of the tank commanders like Bion were simply glad to have escaped from it.

  * * *

  For the men of D Battalion, there was also a nagging awareness that almost every position they had attacked was still in the enemy’s hands, and it was only a matter of time before they would have to try to capture them again. Sure enough, a further attack was planned five days later, on 27 August, and this time the challenge of taking Vancouver and Springfield went to No. 11 Company whose commander, Major William Watson, was a more cerebral and less martial figure than his counterpart in No. 12 Company, Major R.O.C. Ward. Indeed, Watson’s greatest claim to fame was that he had published a book describing his adventures as a motorcycle despatch-rider in the early months of the war, and then a series of magazine articles about his experiences in charge of a group of army cyclists. This provoked concern from the military authorities who eventually stifled his literary outpourings, but many must have suspected that he was simply awaiting an opportunity to document the activities of D Battalion, and so it turned out.

  Rather than risk another overnight halt at Bellevue, Major Watson’s tanks spent the night before the battle hidden in the devastated village of St Julien. He admitted this was a bold move but ‘we had realised by then that the nearer we were to the enemy the less likely we were to be shelled.’ As before, the Chaplain, Captain the Reverend Arthur Huxtable, was on hand and ‘before dawn … walked from ruin to ruin, where the crews had taken shelter from shells and the weather, and administered the Sacrament to all who desired to partake of it.’8

  This time only four tanks took part, and any idea that they would lead the attack was ditched as thoroughly as most of their predecessors had been. The new tactics were spelled out by Major Watson: ‘The general principle … will be that tanks will assist the infantry at points where the infantry are held up … Tank objectives thus depend on the success or failure of the infantry attack.’9 Or in the words of the infantry orders: ‘It is to be clearly understood that these tanks are entirely subsidiary to the operations and in no case are the infantry to await their arrival.’10

  This turned out to be a wise move, as the weather on the day was described by Fifth Army as ‘exceedingly unfavourable’,11 and more frankly by XVIII Corps as ‘wretched’. Their report added: ‘Rain fell in torrents the previous night and continued to fall on the day of the operations after zero hour. The ground was in such a state that it was almost impossible for the attacking troops to advance. They were literally stuck in the mud.’12

  The road eastwards from St Julien was still blocked by the derelict hulks of the southern group, so No. 11 Company followed in the tracks of the northern group and advanced up the road towards Poelcappelle. One machine slid off the road early on, but the others engaged their targets before each in succession became bogged down on the flooded battlefield. After hours of desperate fighting the strongpoints at Vancouver and Springfield were finally taken, though the Germans remained in possession of Winnipeg and Schuler Farm to the south.

  Under the conditions the infantry do not seem to have expected much from the tanks, or to have paid them much attention, but decade
s later evidence emerged that one had played a crucial role in the capture of Springfield. This came with the discovery of a diary kept by Edwin Campion Vaughan, a nineteen-year-old lieutenant in 8th Bn Royal Warwickshire Regiment, which was published in 1981 under the title Some Desperate Glory and is now acclaimed as a classic memoir of the war.

  As he waited with his men under a furious barrage on the outskirts of St Julien on the afternoon of 27 August, Lieutenant Vaughan saw D Battalion’s machines heading into action: ‘With a laboured groaning and clanking, four tanks churned past us to the Triangle.’13

  Eventually he led his men forward through appalling scenes of destruction: ‘Up the road we staggered, shells bursting around us. A man stopped dead in front of me, and exasperated I cursed him and butted him with my knee. Very gently he said “I’m blind, Sir,” and turned to show me his eyes and nose torn away by a piece of shell. “Oh God! I’m sorry, sonny,” I said. “Keep going on the hard part,” and left him staggering back in his darkness.’14

  With his surviving men, Lieutenant Vaughan reached the bunker at Springfield as it was being stormed by another battalion: ‘It was now almost dark and there was no firing from the enemy; ploughing across the final stretch of mud, I saw grenades bursting around the pillbox and a party of British rushed in from the other side. As we all closed in, the Boche garrison ran out with their hands up … We sent the 16 prisoners back across the open but they had only gone a hundred yards when a German machine gun mowed them down.’ Further horrors awaited inside:

  It was a strongly-built pillbox, almost undamaged; the three defence walls were about ten feet thick, each with a machine gun position, while the fourth wall, which faced our new line, had one small doorway – about three feet square. Crawling through this I found the interior in a horrible condition; water in which floated indescribable filth reached our knees; two dead Boche sprawled face downwards and another lay across a wire bed. Everywhere was dirt and rubbish and the stench was nauseating.

  On one of the machine gun niches lay an unconscious German officer, wearing two black and white medal ribbons; his left leg was torn away, the bone shattered and only a few shreds of flesh and muscle held it on. A tourniquet had been applied, but had slipped and the blood was pouring out. I commenced at once to readjust this and had just stopped the bleeding when he came round and gazed in bewilderment at my British uniform. He tried to struggle up, but was unable to do so and, reassuring him, I made him comfortable, arranging a pillow out of a Boche pack. He asked me faintly what had happened, and in troops’ German I told him “Drei caput – others Kamerad,” [i.e. three men were dead and the rest had surrendered] at which he dropped back his head with a pitiful air of resignation.

  Later the wounded officer became ‘quite talkative’:

  He told me how he had kept his garrison fighting on, and would never have allowed them to surrender. He had seen us advancing and was getting his guns onto us when a shell from the tank behind had come through the doorway, killed two men and blown his leg off. His voice trailed off and he relapsed into a stupor.15

  The tank that delivered this blow was D26 Don Quixote, commanded by Second Lieutenant Harold Puttock, which had fought its way round to Springfield despite ditching twice on the way. This was the spot where Lieutenant David Lewis and the crew of Dragon had been captured five days before, but Puttock ‘saw no signs of tank reported to have been surrounded at Springfield’.16 The subsequent reports by D Battalion and 1st Tank Brigade made no mention of the crucial role played by D26, merely noting that the crew abandoned their flooded tank by which time the infantry had advanced ‘well beyond’ Springfield. Even worse, General Gough’s Fifth Army stated: ‘Communication in forward areas very difficult owing to weather conditions. No tanks were able to be used.’17

  It seems unfair that the contribution of Don Quixote received no credit, especially in view of the crew’s personal sacrifice. Three men were wounded, one of whom was somehow carried back across the waterlogged battlefield to the casualty clearing station at Dozinghem, only to die there later the same day. Private Harry Vaughan, aged twenty, took his place in the growing cemetery nearby, where the headstone bears a message from his family:

  Forget him, no we never will

  We miss him most

  But love him still18

  For others who had been wounded in the attack, there was no chance of rescue. Another tank, D27 Double Dee, had advanced even further before its way was blocked and its petrol tank pierced by a shell splinter. The crew abandoned their stricken machine, dragging with them a severely wounded crewman, twenty-year-old Private Sydney Twigg, on a stretcher improvised from a greatcoat. But he slipped from their grasp somewhere in the flooded expanse of No Man’s Land, and was officially listed as missing, believed killed.19

  There were countless others in a similar plight. In his diary, Lieutenant Edwin Vaughan described the final horror as night fell over Springfield: ‘From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony, and despairing shrieks. It was too horribly obvious that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell-holes, and now the water was rising about them and, powerless to move, they were slowly drowning … And we could do nothing to help them; Dunham [his servant] was crying quietly beside me, and all the men were affected by the piteous cries.’20 Later that night they made their way to the rear: ‘The cries of the wounded had much diminished now, and as we staggered down the road, the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes.’21

  In military terms, the actions of 27 August were considered ‘minor affairs’, with the Official History acknowledging that ‘they resulted in considerable further casualties and very little gain of ground’.22 Major Clough Williams-Ellis did not mention the attack at all in the history of the Tank Corps, even in his catalogue of ‘depressing little engagements’.23

  The final word goes to Major Watson, who went to inspect the remains of his tanks when the front line had moved further forward:

  Two of the tanks had been hit. A third was sinking into the mud. In the last was a heap of evil-smelling corpses. Either men who had been gassed had crawled into the tank to die, or more likely, men who had taken shelter had been gassed where they sat. The shell-holes near by contained half-decomposed bodies that had slipped into the stagnant water. The air was full of putrescence and the strong odour of foul mud. There was no one in sight except the dead. A shell came screaming over and plumped dully into the mud without exploding. Here and there was a little rusty wire, climbing in and out of the shell-holes like noisome weeds. A few yards away a block of mud-coloured concrete grew naturally out of the mud. An old entrenching tool, a decayed German pack, a battered tin of bully, and a broken rifle lay at our feet. We crept away hastily. The dead never stirred.24

  CHAPTER 14

  The Bogs of Passchendaele

  Following this setback, there was a further hiatus in the British offensive in the Salient, and it would be more than three weeks before D Battalion saw more action. The delay was partly a result of the dreadful weather and ground conditions, but there was another, more fundamental reason: Sir Douglas Haig was making major changes to address the lack of progress in the first month of fighting.

  Having consistently identified the crux of the battle as the Gheluvelt plateau, he was disappointed by the failure of Fifth Army to drive the Germans off this low ridge, which offered a natural vantage point over the battlefield. As a result he now transferred the responsibility for this sector, and the units fighting there, from General Gough to General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army which had been attacking to the right. Gough later said this was done at his suggestion, but the claim does not seem particularly convincing. In fact, although the tank crews did not know it, by mid-August the commander of Fifth Army had lost faith in the offensive as completely as most of his men. In his memoirs he wrote:

  The state of the ground was by this
time frightful. The labour of bringing up supplies and ammunition, of moving or firing the guns, which had often sunk up to their axles, was a fearful strain on the officers and men, even during the daily task of maintaining the battle front. When it came to the advance of infantry for an attack, across the water-logged shell-holes, movement was so slow and so fatiguing that only the shortest advances could be contemplated. In consequence I informed the Commander-in-Chief that tactical success was not possible, or would be too costly, under such conditions, and advised that the attack should now be abandoned.

  I had many talks with Haig during these days and repeated this opinion frequently, but he told me that the attack must be continued. His reasons were valid. He was looking at the broad picture of the whole theatre of war. He saw the possibilities of a German victory, a defeat of the whole Allied cause. There was only one Army in the field in a position to prevent this disaster, and that was the British Army in France. On it fell this heavy burden.1

  To the men of D Battalion, who bore their share of the burden, it was probably not a major concern that the centre of gravity had shifted away from Fifth Army, whose headquarters were near their own at La Lovie; the square facade of the château remained as inscrutable as ever, and the staff officers strutted up and down its steps just as imperiously. All the crews could do was prepare for the next time they were called on to cross the dreaded Canal, and in the tankodrome at Oosthoek Wood, they began the task of repairing and refitting the few tanks that had returned in readiness for the next attack.

  The losses also had to be made good, and this meant a welcome break for the crews who were now sent to pick up replacement vehicles, as described by Captain Edward Glanville Smith: ‘No. 12 Company, who had lost heavily in tanks in their first attack, were sent down to Erin to re-equip with new machines from England, which were brought up to the salient and parked in Oosthoek Wood.’2 This meant an 80-mile round trip to the peaceful French countryside near St Pol-sur-Ternoise, where the Tank Corps had taken over a group of villages which now formed their rear support area. At the heart of this complex lay the Central Stores and Workshops at Erin, an ‘engineer’s paradise’ covering seven acres of railway sidings and six acres of buildings, where the shortage of manpower was made up by thousands of imported workers from the Chinese Labour Corps. Here new tanks arrived by rail from factories in England, and here the damaged machines that had seen action were brought back to be repaired, and if possible returned to the front, or else cannibalised for spares.