by John Taylor
The first mystery to be solved was the identity of the German artillery officer who had apparently brought the combined forces of D and E Battalions to a standstill through his single-handed and suicidal act of defiance. In theory this should have been easy now the Germans were also involved in the search, but in reality they were just as mystified as the British.
The Germans were keen to celebrate a hero who had been so publicly praised by the enemy’s commander-in-chief, but their problem (if it can be so called) was that very few artillerymen, and even fewer officers, had been killed on the first day of the battle, and none of them seemed to fit the bill. The losses in 108th Field Artillery Regiment (FAR), for example, amounted to two officers and seven other ranks killed along the entire divisional front, plus fifty-three wounded and eighty-three missing,4 while 213th FAR lost one officer and two other ranks killed (plus one who later died of wounds),5 and 282nd FAR did not lose any officers at all in this area. There was also a theoretical problem: if a single officer was responsible for knocking out so many tanks with a single gun, this would inevitably diminish the gallant efforts made by all the other batteries and regiments in halting the British advance.
Haig’s dispatch had identified Flesquières as the location, so attention naturally focused on 108th FAR which had been holding the line there. Interestingly, when Leutnant Erwin Zindler came to write the regimental history just after the war, he made no mention of the incident. But Germany badly needed heroes, and Leutnant Zindler was a fervent nationalist who was keen to toe the party – and later more particularly the Nazi Party – line. In 1929, ten years after the history was published, he produced a more personal memoir which belatedly recalled an extraordinary act of heroism and identified the man responsible as Unteroffizier Johannes Joachim Theodor Krüger of 108th FAR, who was a member of No. 8 Battery which had been located near Flesquières.
Zindler wrote: ‘In No. 8 Battery, which stood in a particularly threatening spot – it was surrounded on all sides by the enemy, the battery commander had already given the order to withdraw – a single corporal, Krüger by name, did not follow this order. He remained alone at his gun, hurriedly gave his documents with his paybook to his comrades, and fired. He accounted for many more tanks and so opened an escape route for his retreating companions. Despite the requests of the English he would not let himself be captured, firing until he fell, fatally wounded.’6 Even though Krüger was an NCO, Zindler thought he must be the person referred to by Haig: ‘He admittedly writes “officer”, but 108th FAR has established through the commander of No. 8 Battery, Leutnant Behrmann …, that only Unteroffizier Krüger could tally with the officer in Haig’s report.’7
However, there was one important point the British could not really have been mistaken about. All their accounts said the lone hero was killed beside his gun, whereas in fact Unteroffizier Krüger had survived the battle, although he was badly wounded. Red Cross records show he was taken prisoner on 20 November, and after treatment for a gunshot wound in his side at the British No. 3 General Hospital in Le Tréport near Dieppe, he died there three weeks later on 10 December at the age of thirty.8 He was buried in the nearby Mont Huon Military Cemetery, where he lies to this day.9
By coincidence, another member of the same No. 8 Battery had been captured and interrogated by the British, although the report says he ‘did not display any high standard of intelligence’. The prisoner told how the guns had been dragged from their pits and opened fire on the advancing tanks at 700 yards range. ‘All the tanks were hit and two were seen to be on fire. [British] infantry then came into view, and the battery personnel retired. They were, however, surrounded by another party of infantry and captured. This statement is confirmed by the fact that there are four derelict tanks, two at least of which are burnt out, about 300 or 400 yards in front of [their position].’10 There was no mention of anyone refusing to surrender and staying behind to destroy even more tanks, but according to the later accounts, that is exactly what happened.
The regiment’s casualty list confirms Krüger’s date of death as 10 December,11 so Zindler must have known he could not be the man identified in Haig’s dispatch, but this became the widely accepted version, and remains so to this day. The old comrades’ association of 108th FAR were so concerned that in 1931 they wrote to their former commander, Generalleutnant Freiherr von Watter, pointing out that Unteroffizier Krüger had not died in the battle, and supporting an alternative candidate, Leutnant Karl Müller of No. 9 Battery, who really was an officer and really had been killed on 20 November. Their letter ended with a quotation from the Bible: ‘Honour to whom honour is due.’12 The problem was that No. 9 Battery was situated south-east of Marcoing and was nowhere near Flesquières,13 but he still continued to enjoy considerable support.14
In the previous century it was a German archaeologist who had uncovered the truth underlying the legend of Troy, but this more recent mystery proved a much tougher nut to crack – though like Achilles, the lone hero of Flesquières remained an inspiring figure whether real or not. In 1937 the military magazine Der Frontsoldat Erzählt (literally ‘The Front-line Soldier Recounts’) featured an article by a member of No. 8 Battery, repeating Zindler’s version of the Krüger story.15 Confusingly, the very next edition ran a poem of dubious merit extolling Müller:
While hell erupts, there quietly lies in wait
The Field Artillery Regiment 108.
Lieutenant Müller, battery number nine,
Directs his fire towards the battle line.
Now airmen spy him, swooping overhead
O’er man and gun erupts a storm of lead.
Just one gun left! Now tank on tank must die:
Twelve – thirteen – fourteen burned and broken lie.
A fifteenth slowly lumbers close at hand
Lieutenant Müller now must make his final stand.
‘For Germany,’ he cries, and tests once more his aim
The fifteenth also is destroyed ’mid smoke and flame.
Just one shot left, and when it blasts away
The sixteenth too must meet its judgement day.
‘The end’, he cries, ‘and now my work is done!’
A pistol shot – he falls, eternal freedom won.
And when in English hands the village lies
They praise the fallen hero to the skies.
Lieutenant Müller, battery nine, will stand
As victor, hailed for evermore throughout the land.16
In contrast to the sombre memorial to the Royal Artillery at Hyde Park Corner in London, the Germans erected a monument to their own field artillery which was both startling and sensational. It showed a lone gunner behind his shattered cannon, preparing to hurl a stick grenade in a final act of defiance. The original model showed a tousle-haired warrior in an army greatcoat, but in the final version he wore a smart coat similar to those worn by Nazi party officials, and his features now bore a remarkable resemblance to those of the Führer himself. The statue was dedicated in 1936 on the riverbank in Cologne, the occasion coinciding with a reunion of artillery veterans. Germany was rearming, and their earlier sacrifice now served to inspire a new generation for the coming struggle.
At the same time, the former defenders of Flesquières were stung by criticisms that they had been caught unawares by the British, and Erwin Zindler of 108th FAR tried to correct this with an article in a leading journal of military theory called Wissen und Wehr (literally ‘Knowledge and the Army’). This told how the regiment had practised anti-tank gunnery using horse-drawn targets under the far-sighted guidance of its divisional commander, Generalleutnant Freiherr von Watter, and was therefore ideally placed to repel an attack.17 While this may well have been true, it ignored the fact that most of D Battalion’s tank losses to the west of the village were probably caused by 282nd FAR, while the men of 213th FAR, who had never seen a tank before in their lives, still claimed to have knocked out at least twenty-three at Flesquières. In the words of the historian
of 213th FAR: ‘At first sight [the tanks] were naturally something out of the ordinary for the gunners, but firing over open sights is like a long-lost pleasure for them, especially when the first tank is knocked out with a few shots at around 950 metres.’18 Despite this, Zindler’s claims were reported in the British counterpart, The Army Quarterly,19 and have now become part of the accepted orthodoxy surrounding the battle.
When von Watter died in 1939, the bishop who gave his funeral oration paid tribute to ‘that unforgettable Unteroffizier Krüger, standing by his field gun and hurling shot after shot into the enemy’s tanks’. It was exactly one week before the invasion of Poland, and a new generation would soon be called on to follow the example of Theodor Krüger, not to mention ‘Onkel Oskar’ who ‘had implanted this spirit in the hearts of his soldiers’.20
* * *
While the Germans were busy building up the story of the lone hero, the British were just as busy knocking it down. No-one seems to have realized that Unteroffizier Krüger, far from being killed at his post, had died in captivity three weeks later and was buried in a cemetery on the Channel coast. Instead, British efforts were directed towards showing that the setback at Flesquières was caused not by one man and one gun, but by concentrated fire from multiple batteries.
Leading the investigation was Major Frederick Hotblack, who was sceptical, although he had not been at Flesquières on 20 November: ‘I did pass by, early the next day, while the knocked-out tanks and most of the dead were still unmoved. From the positions of the tanks and the lie of the ground it appeared to me to be quite impossible for one gun, or even one battery, to have done the damage … Wheelmarks, visible on the morning of November 21st, tended to confirm the statement that several batteries were concerned.’21
However, Major Hotblack had talked to several people who had seen a gun with a single German officer lying nearby, and he suggested that this might have been the body of Major Fritz Hofmeister, commander of 84th Infantry Regiment, who was badly injured in the fighting and whose body was lost as he was being carried away.22 This seems unlikely as he was taken as far as the village of Noyelles, but it was true that the body found could have been that of an infantry officer even though it was found near a field gun.
With the discussion on rearmament in full flow, it was crucial to counter the suggestion that tanks were excessively vulnerable to artillery fire, and his findings were summed up in the headline of a letter to the Royal Tank Corps Journal: ‘A Cambrai Myth?’23 Another tank officer ridiculed ‘the hoary old legend’ of the artillery officer ‘whose name I always thought was Munchausen, but which, in default of any German evidence of his existence, appears in reality to have been the Teutonic equivalent of Harris’.24
But despite their efforts to kill off the lone hero, he kept rising from the grave. In 1935 the War Office organized an instructional visit to pass on the lessons of Cambrai to a new generation of tank commanders. As well as Major Hotblack, lectures were given by Captain Horace Birks, formerly of D Battalion, and Major Alexander Gatehouse who had been in E Battalion.25 Following the visit, Gatehouse fuelled the story of the ‘gallant German gunner’ by claiming he and Birks had discovered ‘what we imagined was the exact position of the German battery, one of whose guns did such deadly destruction on 20th November’.26 This was at the south-eastern corner of the village, and although it might have knocked out some of E Battalion’s tanks, it could not possibly have seen those from D Battalion on the other side of the village.
After this the Royal Tank Corps Journal carried an even firmer putdown, and this time there was no ambiguous question-mark in the title, which was ‘The Legend of Flesquieres’. This repeated the conclusion that ‘the legend of the single gunner cannot be sustained’, and whatever Theodore Krüger might have done, ‘it was the combined effect of great masses of artillery that told’.27
There it should have rested, except that in 1941 the story was resurrected by Major Archibald Becke, a seventy-year-old ex-officer who published an extensive study in The Journal of the Royal Artillery. Perhaps surprisingly in view of the prevailing circumstances, he inclined towards the German version of events, possibly because it cast the gunners as heroes, and told how Unteroffizier Krüger had destroyed six tanks single-handed.28 Becke also believed the gun had been sited to the east of Flesquières, though he chose a different location to Gatehouse – who was now otherwise occupied commanding 4th Armoured Brigade in the Western Desert, and ‘establish[ing] his reputation as a skilful and resourceful commander of armour’.29
It so happened that the volume on Cambrai was the last of the Official Histories to be published, and did not appear until 1948. The question of the lone gunner was a thorny one for the army’s historian, and he tried to resolve it by contacting as many of the former commanders as possible. The results will be familiar to anyone who has tried to pin down a myth: plenty of people were sure it was true, and remembered exactly when they had heard about it, but no-one had any real evidence.
Brigadier-General Sir Standish Craufurd had commanded 18th Infantry Brigade, which attacked to the right of 51st Division. He wrote: ‘I doubt if it is fair to a very gallant German officer to treat the story as a “legend”. I was told the story by the 51st Division that same afternoon when occupying Premy Chapel Ridge and was shown the gun next day when Flesquières Village was captured. It was certainly very firmly believed in by the troops who actually took part.’30
Major Richard Purey-Cust, who had been with the artillery of 6th Division, was sure he could locate the battery that had knocked out seven tanks: ‘I did go and have a look at it later in the day and I could probably find the place if I could borrow a Trench Map of that area.’ But he was never sent quite the right map, and could never work out the exact spot.31
Major-General Sir John Davidson, who had been on the General Staff and was now chairman of the Bank of Australia, also clung to the story: ‘I rode over the battle field [sic] with Haig, I think it was on the 3rd or 4th day, and it seemed to me at the time, and to him, and to all of us, that one German gun had in fact knocked out several tanks on the Flesquieres Ridge, and it surprised me to see it stated that that was not the case.’32
However, Lieutenant-General Sir Hugh Elles – the former commander of the Tank Corps, now responsible for organizing resistance to a possible German invasion of south-west England – was not having any of it. ‘My then [staff officer] Hotblack, our military attaché in Berlin for four years, made exhaustive enquiries about this supposed incident and was never able to substantiate any of it. I met the German official historian in February 1939 and he was unable to throw any light at all.’33
This seems to have been decisive, and when the Official History came out it consigned the heroic gunner to a footnote, dismissing him as a ‘legend’ and adding: ‘It seems certain … that the losses suffered could never have been inflicted by one gun or even by one battery.’ Zindler is credited with providing ‘the only reliable evidence from either side’, and his story about Krūger is mentioned,34 but as we have seen, Zindler was not really very reliable at all.
The hero of Flesquières had finally met his match, and once again he had gone down fighting. There was no-one now to champion his cause in a Germany devastated by another war and racked with guilt over the military prowess that had once been its pride. The statue of the lone gunner, badly damaged in an Allied air raid, was removed from the riverbank at Cologne by British engineers, along with other reminders of the Nazi past, and now only the surrounding steps remain. His final memorial was the Unteroffizier-Krüger-Kaserne, a barracks in the German town of Kusel, but this has now closed and at the time of writing, it was being used to house refugees from the world’s current conflicts.
In the end, all we can be reasonably sure about is that the body of a dead German officer was found near a field gun on the first day of the Battle of Cambrai, and the field gun was found near some destroyed tanks, but who he was, or where he was, or what he had been doing, no-one
can say. He was unlikely to have been an artillery officer, since extensive searches have failed to find a suitable candidate. Even if he was, there is no evidence that he manned the gun alone, since the rest of his crew might simply have run away, as Haig was originally told. Even if they did knock out some tanks, there is no reason to think this was decisive, since there were many other gun batteries in action that day. The only thing we can say for certain is that the body was not that of Unteroffizier Theodor Krüger, since he was not an officer, and more importantly, not dead.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the story – and the name of Theodor Krüger – still continue to surface from time to time in accounts of the battle, and perhaps that is no bad thing. There is something in it that appeals to us deep down, to our sense that even when we are overwhelmed by a tide of catastrophe, we can still make a difference as ordinary individuals, as long as we are prepared to defy impossible odds, to stand alone, and above all to stick to our guns.
CHAPTER 35
‘The Fates Fought Against Us’
The legend of the lone gunner was not the only controversy that dominated the discussion of events at Flesquières in the decades that followed. There was another issue, more complex and contentious, that will probably never be fully resolved, though this time the battle was fought entirely between the British with the Germans standing on the sidelines.
To understand what happened, we must renew our acquaintance with Brigadier Christopher D’Arcy Bloomfield Saltern Baker-Carr, the energetic and colourful commander of 1st Tank Brigade, which included both D and E Battalions. This will be no hardship since he was, in the words of Major-General John Fuller, ‘a most cheery companion’, whose boundless enthusiasm and optimism had been important assets during those dark days.1 However, although he could be said to have had a good war, peace often had a habit of treating him less kindly.