Deborah and the War of the Tanks

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by John Taylor


  In March 1916 he took part in another failed attack and was recommended for a gallantry award, though it was never given. A few days later he was wounded by a German trench mortar bomb, but was back on duty a week later.26 When summer came the battalion moved south to join the huge offensive on the Somme, and it was here that fate delivered a final blow to R.O.C., by now a company commander. In the fighting near Ovillers, 6th Buffs determined to seize a position called Point 20, where a short section of trench known as a sap jutted out from the German front line. Boxes of hand grenades (or ‘Mills bombs’) were stockpiled in readiness, while a British trench mortar stood by to soften up the enemy position. What happened next teetered on the borderline between tragedy and farce: ‘About 2.30 p.m. our [trench mortars] again bombarded Pt. 20 but unfortunately dropped one short into all the bombs. About 1,500 of our Mills exploded, one flying 60 yards and wounding Capt. R.O.C. Ward, Lieut. Sir R. Onslow Bart. and an orderly. As all the bombs were lost, the affair had to be given up.’27

  The regimental historian described this as a ‘somewhat curious accident’,28 but we can be sure this is not the language R.O.C. Ward himself would have used. He summarized the aftermath in a letter to the War Office applying for a payment known as a wound gratuity: ‘I beg to state I was wounded … by multiple bomb wounds in back & thigh … I was operated upon [in Rouen] & had splinters removed from off my spine & from my left thigh. I was then transferred to King Edward VII Hospital … London, where I was again operated on, but the operation was not successful in removing all the splinters.’29

  The accident, though appalling, did at least have one positive aspect: it meant R.O.C. was back in England shortly after the birth of his son in August 1916.30 The spell of enforced inactivity also gave him time to reflect on the frustration of trench warfare, and perhaps the mounting probability of his own demise. If so, the media fanfare that greeted the first tank action in September and the appeal for volunteers to join the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps would have fallen on fertile ground. Here, it appeared, was an opportunity to bring his courage to bear on the Germans more effectively than by simply charging at their machine guns.

  So it was that in January 1917, R.O.C. Ward returned to France to join the HBMGC at its base near St Pol-sur-Ternoise, where the original companies that had conducted the first tank attacks were being expanded to battalion strength. This gave R.O.C., now promoted to major, the opportunity to stamp his considerable authority on his new command, No. 12 Company of D Battalion.31 Major William Watson, who took over No. 11 Company at the same time, was impressed: he described Ward as ‘the great athlete, the very embodiment of energy, the skilled leader of men, the best of good fellows’, and recalled ‘his enormous voice rolling out full-blooded instructions’.32

  Four months later the tanks were back in action supporting the offensive at Arras, and the three companies of D Battalion were scattered along a twelve-mile front. If anyone imagined tanks would provide an easy solution to the challenges of trench warfare, the actions at Arras and Bullecourt were enough to disillusion them. R.O.C. Ward’s company went into battle for the first time on 9 April 1917, supporting his former countrymen in the Canadian Corps, but the ground conditions were so bad that all eight tanks ‘bellied’ – in other words, the tracks sank so far into the mud that the tanks could not move and had to be dug out by their crews.

  Despite this, the infantry reached their objectives and the Canadian commander was effusive in his praise of 12 Company:

  I have never seen a more gallant, efficient, capable or energetic lot in my life, their work was really marvellous and Ward himself was the centre of energy. The action of the members of one of the tanks who carried out repairs standing on the top of the tank while it was under concentrated fire from five guns, and carried out their work as intrepidly as though they had been 10 miles in rear of the line, is only characteristic of the whole work of the whole lot … At any other advance, I hope it may be my good fortune, to have Major Ward and his tanks with the Division for they are certainly the last word in efficiency.33

  After this, his tanks were transported south to take part in an attack on Bullecourt on 3 May. According to Watson, their recent failure ‘was naturally a keen disappointment to Ward, and he and his company … were spoiling for a fight’.34 But the Germans had already beaten off another attack at Bullecourt on 11 April, when No. 11 Company had supported troops from Australia who were as dismissive of the tank crews’ efforts as the Canadians were appreciative.

  The second attack on Bullecourt, involving both Nos. 11 and 12 Companies, turned out to be no more successful than the first. The infantry were unable to penetrate the enemy lines, and the tanks suffered heavily from armour-piercing (A.P.) ammunition which was now widely available to the Germans. Slowly but surely the attack broke down, as ‘furious messages came back from Ward’.35 One of his officers summarized the outcome: ‘The result of the attack was a tremendous disappointment to all, as we had fondly imagined exploiting “into the blue” … The casualties among the men were very heavy, and of the tank commanders seven out of eight were wounded … The following day was spent counting the number of holes in each tank, caused by A.P. bullets, one tank having between 20 and 30.’36

  The failed attack left Ward ‘wrathful but undismayed’,37 though there was nothing more he could do for the time being. The second battle of Bullecourt marked the end of this phase of action by D Battalion, and his men now withdrew for further training and refitting to prepare for whatever fate might hold in store, which turned out to be the even more disastrous Battle of Passchendaele.

  CHAPTER 18

  Redundant Oddments

  As Frank Heap settled into his new role, there was one person he was unlikely to have much contact with, namely the commanding officer of D Battalion. This may seem strange, but the lieutenant-colonel in charge of a tank battalion was normally a distant figure, and William Frederick Robert Kyngdon seems to have been more distant than most.

  In fact, Kyngdon remains so anonymous that one struggles to find any mention of him at all in the copious literature of the Tank Corps. Major William Watson, who was the battalion’s most accomplished chronicler, wrote appreciatively about Kyngdon’s predecessor, John Hardress-Lloyd – described as ‘a man of big ideas’ by none other than Lieutenant-Colonel John Fuller, himself a prominent military theorist.1 When Kyngdon took over in May 1917, Watson commented simply that ‘to our sorrow, Colonel Hardress Lloyd [sic] had left us to form a brigade, and a stranger from our particular rivals, “C” Battalion, had taken his place’.2

  Lieutenant Jack Coghlan, one of D Battalion’s junior officers, may have been thinking of Kyngdon when he wrote: ‘The senior officers were not battlewise and had come mainly from those redundant oddments that a great army inevitably creates. Perhaps my criticism is harsh, but it did appear that they sought personal prestige rather than efficiency and never felt able to point out to the High Command that a suggested operation was unwise or impossible.’3

  In defence of Kyngdon, it must be said that his role was not clearly defined, especially with a strong-minded brigade commander like Colonel Baker-Carr who was likely to dominate on questions of strategy. The fact was that the thirty-six fighting tanks, ninety officers and 825 or so ‘other ranks’ of D Battalion had never gone into battle as a single unit, and the primary responsibility for leadership therefore fell on the company commanders such as Watson and Ward. Even Tank Corps headquarters had not seen a battalion in its entirety before July 1917, when E Battalion arrived in France and the War Diary noted: ‘This is the first occasion in the history of tanks that a complete battalion with tanks has paraded. It was a very imposing spectacle.’4

  Nevertheless, it seems curious that someone so apparently lacking in charisma should have been appointed to such a key role, especially at this critical time. So who was the man who now led D Battalion, and was therefore responsible for the fate of Frank Heap and his crew? William Kyngdon had been born thirty-six
years earlier in Sydney, Australia, the son and grandson of doctors who had emigrated to practice there. He first came to England at the age of twelve to attend public school, after which he went to a ‘crammer’ and gained a commission in the Royal Garrison Artillery.5

  Initially Kyngdon joined the Militia, a volunteer force responsible for home defence, and therefore found himself defending the shores of South Wales against potential invaders, who in 1901 were few and far between. It was a slow start to his career, but he soon transferred to the regular army and a more exciting opportunity presented itself: service in West Africa with the Sierra Leone Artillery,6 described as ‘the only regular negro Royal Artillery unit’, whose officers were sent from Britain on three-year postings.7 When Kyngdon sailed from Liverpool to take up his new post in 1906, he could not have guessed that the next ten years of his life would be spent almost entirely in sub-Saharan Africa.

  His experience in Sierra Leone stood him in good stead when the government of Zanzibar – a British protectorate off Africa’s east coast – decided to conduct the first geographical survey of the neighbouring island of Pemba. In 1911 Kyngdon was seconded to work with Captain John Craster, who was disappointed to find his companion knew virtually nothing about surveying. ‘But he had one more important qualification: he had spent four years on the West Coast of Africa without a day’s illness. So far he had proved himself immune to all the diseases of Africa.’8

  Sadly even this qualification proved illusory, and Craster recorded that ‘the day after our arrival in Zanzibar Kyngdon had a sharp attack of fever. I confess his illness caused me a good deal of anxiety … because it must inevitably reduce his strength and render him less able to endure the hard work, poor food, and exposure that would be our lot for the next eight months.’9 Nevertheless, he soon recovered and the expedition members posed for a photograph before leaving Zanzibar: Kyngdon and Craster, scrubbed and moustachioed, clutching their solar topees, surrounded by native bearers and servants, the epitome of imperial pride and self-confidence.10

  At that time map-making was a gruelling business, in which hilltops had to be cleared of foliage to erect survey points, and lines hacked through the undergrowth from one coral-fringed shore to the other. It was a constant struggle against exhaustion and disease, to which both men succumbed, on an island described by Craster as the haunt of witch-doctors, freed slaves and former cannibals. In the event the survey took ten months and the two men did not finally take leave of Pemba, and each other, until 1912.

  Kyngdon had only just returned to England when he was sent back to Africa for another, even greater adventure.11 Again this was a geographical expedition, but with added political sensitivities, for Germany was flexing its imperial muscles and had gained a foothold in West Africa by acquiring the Cameroons, a colony to the east of British-held Nigeria. In August 1912 an expedition was sent to fix the boundary between Nigeria and the Cameroons by building marker-posts along its length. Since the frontier traversed 360 miles (or 580 kilometres) of remote jungle and mountains, it promised to be a challenging trip, and there was an added complexity: the expedition consisted of two parties, one British and one German, each with its own bodyguard of native troops. The British team was headed by Captain Walter Nugent, assisted by Lieutenant Kyngdon, while the Germans were led by Oberleutnant Hermann Detzner.

  The expedition was unusual enough to attract media interest, and Nugent apparently sold the cinematographic rights to a newsreel company for whom they filmed scenes of special interest. In one we see a British officer in shorts and topee – almost certainly Kyngdon – striding along a riverbank at the head of a column of porters, preceded by a party of native soldiers bearing a Union flag. In the next scene, the officer leads them into shot before planting the flag in the ground, and then directing the erection of a tent with imperious flapping gestures.12

  Kyngdon may not have had natural screen presence, but Detzner clearly respected him, and the rest of the British party. Despite the growing tension between their countries, the teams established a good rapport, Nugent recording simply that they had ‘worked together for more than six months without a single point of difference.’13 Detzner generally shared this view, though he described an incident deep in the African bush when he was invited to lunch in the British camp despite warnings from Förstl, his faithful sergeant-major, who was convinced that war was about to be declared and the invitation was a trap.

  Detzner insisted on going, arguing the British were ‘men of honour’, and found the party in full swing thanks to the cocktail-mixing skills of the expedition doctor and the sparkling wine brought by some visiting officers. ‘The gramophone … bawled out a constant succession of cake-walks, Scottish melodies and waltzes. The relaxed legs of the patrol officers became restless and two of them danced together, becoming more boisterous as the level of alcohol rose and made their blood run faster. Here Kyngdon took part in a wrestling-match with a younger colleague, there two more settled a dispute in a friendly fashion with their fists. It was the inevitable conclusion of any such drinking bout in British Nigeria.’ That evening, Detzner was horrified to find that Förstl had secretly posted native troops all round the British camp, in case they turned out to be less honourable than Detzner had thought.14

  Despite this the expedition came to a peaceful conclusion, and Kyngdon’s next posting was to yet another topographical survey, this time to the Gold Coast which forms part of present-day Ghana.15 He was there when Britain declared war on Germany, and immediately found himself at the heart of the action. East of the Gold Coast lay the minuscule German colony of Togoland, and Britain and France prepared to invade using the much stronger military forces in their neighbouring colonies. This was not simply a matter of settling imperial scores, as the Germans had built a powerful wireless station at Kamini which could transmit messages from their warships to Berlin. A small British invasion force accordingly landed on the coast of Togoland, and on 12 August 1914, a member of the Gold Coast Regiment became the first soldier in the British Army to fire a shot in anger during the Great War.16 The equally tiny German force fell back, fighting as it went, and on 22 August Lieutenant George Thompson became the first British army officer to die as a result of enemy action.17

  Other British and French troops entered Togoland at various points, and Kyngdon was sent in with forty armed police who joined up with a larger column of which he was made the intelligence officer. Shortly after this the Germans surrendered, having first demolished their prized wireless station. The campaign had been a success, though the newspapers acknowledged it was no more than a ‘minor operation’,18 particularly with the British Expeditionary Force now in retreat across the Continent following its initial clash with the Germans at the Battle of Mons.

  Though it was always a sideshow, the war in Africa grew in intensity, with protracted campaigns across the remaining German colonies. Fresh from their victory in Togoland, the British and French invaded the Cameroons to the east, but this proved a tougher nut to crack and it was fifteen months before the Germans were finally forced to surrender. The opposing armies, only a few thousand strong, were scattered across an area oneand-a-half times the size of Germany. It was a campaign of long marches through hostile terrain, ill-defined battle-lines and brief, often inconclusive skirmishes, in one of which Kyngdon was wounded in the arm while commanding a native gun battery in January 1915.19

  After recovering he became a staff captain in the Cameroons Expeditionary Force,20 and helped to plan the military operations that were gradually driving the Germans out of their former colony. Victory came in early 1916, though even the official historian had to admit that ‘to a world whose thoughts were almost entirely filled, and its attention held, by the vast and more important events in the main theatres of war, the Allied operations in the Cameroons appeared at the time of minor interest’.21 It has to be said that nothing much has happened since to change that view.

  * * *

  So where did this leave Kyngdon? Th
e imperial struggle was still in full flow, and following victory in the Cameroons, the Gold Coast Regiment – to which he was attached22 – sailed round the Cape to join in the battle for German East Africa (equivalent to modern-day Tanzania), where fighting would continue for the rest of the war. Kyngdon might reasonably have been expected to join them, but instead he headed north instead of south, and shook the dust of Africa from his uniform for ever.

  By May 1916 he was back in England, a country he hardly knew, with a new unit called the Heavy Section of the Machine Gun Corps, about which hardly anyone knew anything,23 for these were the men who were preparing to go into battle in a secret weapon, referred to simply as a ‘tank’ to disguise its true purpose. The Heavy Section, then based at Bisley in Surrey, consisted of six companies and Kyngdon was promoted to major and put in charge of one of them.24

  Even for someone who been in many unfamiliar situations, the transition must have come as a shock. Kyngdon’s service record lists his main qualifications as ‘special knowledge of West Africa and its natives; knowledge of topographical survey’.25 He had little experience of machinery or machine guns, and the men he now commanded, many from the industrial cities of Britain, must have seemed as outlandish to him as his barefoot native troops would have been to them. It is not clear who recommended him for the move, but Kyngdon had been in the army long enough not to question its ways, especially when they involved promotion and a step forward in his career.

  While the new force was being trained on a secluded country estate near Thetford, Kyngdon was sent to France in August 1916 with one of its senior officers, Lieutenant-Colonel John Brough, ‘to precede the Heavy Section and help to prepare for a continuation of its training’.26 After this he took even greater responsibility as staff officer to Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Bradley, who had been given command of the Heavy Section in the field.27

 

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