by John Taylor
Similarly, visitors to the park at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire between the wars were greeted by a tank with the serial number 2740, mounted on a plinth beside the entrance. Various snapshots show it was a popular attraction: an elderly gentleman poses beside it in a boater, and a moustachioed man holds the hand of a little girl who has clambered onto the back and smiles proudly in her best hat and coat. The serial number shows this was the first D51, the tank which George Macdonald and his crew steered out of Oosthoek Wood in August 1917, only for it to be damaged at Bellevue, forcing them to transfer to another tank for their doomed mission against Schuler Farm.21
After their encounters with the enemy the tanks were repaired in the workshops at Erin, and the first D51 spent the rest of the war as a workhorse, hauling supplies for the Mark V fighting tanks before returning to Britain. What happened to the others is unknown, but they must have remained on the Western Front as their front horns bear the vertical white and red stripes added in 1918 to distinguish British tanks from the increasing number of captured ones being used by the Germans.
But the tanks that had been such a novelty in the flush of victory soon became a white elephant for their new owners, who resented the cost of upkeep and increasingly saw them as reminders of something most people would prefer to forget. The coming of another world war provided an excuse to remove the remaining presentation tanks, which were melted down to forge a new generation of fighting vehicles. D42 Daphne survived and became a museum piece, but D46 Dragon, the first D51 and hundreds more were swept away, leaving only the one at Ashford in Kent which had been turned into an electricity sub-station and remains there to this day.
Though the tanks were disappearing from the former battlefields, one that survived in Belgium became the centrepiece of the little community of Poelkapelle. This was D29 Damon II, which had reached the outskirts of the village in the final tank attack in the Ypres Salient on 9 October 1917, before being knocked out by artillery. Its commander, Lieutenant Jack Coghlan, escaped, but three of his crew were killed and the tank itself was swallowed up in the ground. After the war it was dug out and put on display at the village crossroads, becoming a popular attraction for the tourists and pilgrims who were visiting the area in increasing numbers. It was also a source of revenue for local youngsters, who would pose for photographs in return for small change and became known as the ‘penny children’.22 But a few years later the Salient had visitors of a different kind, and the German invaders had no use for souvenirs, particularly ones that reminded them of their previous defeat, and needed scrap metal as badly as the British. In 1941 Damon II was taken away, and although the villagers had many more pressing concerns, it still left a hole in their lives.
The inexorable advance of the German armoured divisions across Europe showed they had truly learned the lessons of Cambrai. Some time after the fall of France, a convoy of military vehicles pulled into the village of Havrincourt and an officer stepped out to revisit a place that was etched in his memory. It was Erwin Zindler, whose writings had celebrated the heroic resistance of 108th Field Artillery Regiment and identified Unteroffizier Krüger as the lone hero of Haig’s dispatch. Now he was working on a new book called Und Abermals Soldat … (‘A Soldier Once Again …’), describing his experiences as an artillery captain in the present conflict.
Zindler’s visit took him through Flesquières and past the spot (‘somewhere near that small silver poplar’) where Unteroffizier Krüger had faced sixteen tanks and sacrificed himself for his country. Looking back, he felt a sense of pride: ‘Fields of cabbages, turnips and chicory stood green and luscious. Acres of corn waved in the wind. It was a farmer’s field like a thousand others, but celebrated in history for the first tank battle with a novel doctrine of warfare, and at the same time reflecting glory on the small handful of defenders …’. Flesquières had remained impregnable for a simple reason: ‘Because they were guardians of their homeland, aware of the women and children behind them, because without knowing the phrase “Germany must live, even if we must die”, its sense had long ago become the soldier’s law. They were warriors, not war-makers.’23
Zindler was again doing his best to boost morale, but when the book came out in 1943 the tide of war was already turning. The following September, American armoured vehicles swept into the village and drove the Germans out, this time for good. Flesquières was once again a peaceful, unexceptional place.
CHAPTER 37
Varied Fortunes
We have seen what happened to Deborah and the other tanks of D and E Battalions in the years after the war, and now it is time to examine the varied fortunes of those who fought inside them.
On 17 December 1920, a group of men gathered at one of London’s most opulent venues, the Restaurant Frascati in Oxford Street, to work their way through a menu including oysters, fillets of sole, lamb cutlets, roast pheasant, and ‘souffle glace Frascati’. This was the second reunion dinner for the officers of No. 12 Company, presided over by Major Edward Glanville Smith, who proposed the loyal toast, after which came the silent toast in which each man paid tribute to his comrades, both living and dead. At the end Major Smith passed round his menu to be signed, and the nickname ‘Uriah’ shows that Frank Heap was there, along with James Macintosh and around twenty of their brother officers.1
Major Smith also kept a list of names and addresses on the notepaper of Clarke & Heap, Frank’s family firm, showing he had a hand in its preparation.2 Perhaps there were other reunions after that, but if so Smith did not keep the menus, and after a while the list of names and addresses was no longer updated. The process of drifting apart had begun, familiar to anyone who grew up in the era before social media. As they swayed out of the warm restaurant into the chill of the West End, past the street musicians playing carols in their shabby greatcoats, there was a sense that the suffering and dangers of war had passed, but so had the spirit of comradeship that had made it tolerable, and even at times strangely enjoyable.
Of course, this was not true for everyone, and some men were left so physically or mentally scarred that they never recovered. This was the case with Lieutenant Stanley Cohen of E Battalion, who had returned to the front after being wounded in the attack on 20 November, only to suffer horrific burns to his face and hands, as well as the loss of an eye and a leg, when his tank was blown up in August 1918. After a year of treatment, the pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies performed surgery on him at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, grafting on skin to replace his badly damaged eyelids and nose.3 Fortunately disfigurement and disability did not stop him having a successful career, and in 1921 he began a long association with The Times, initially helping to run their motor insurance scheme before transferring to the pension fund, of which he became secretary until retiring in 1959. The newspaper reported: ‘He was in more ways than one well-equipped to face the problems involved in the administration of welfare schemes for, having been fearfully injured in the war of 1914-18, he was not unacquainted with illness and suffering.’4
But at a deeper level, he was terribly affected. His godson Paul Russell recalls that ‘Stanley’s fiancée deserted him because she was too horrified by his appearance to live with him’, and although he married in 1945, it lasted less than a year. Though kindly, he could be severe, and he was haunted by the conviction that God had inflicted his injuries on him as a punishment for his actions in the war – in particular an episode in which he had to drive his tank over a German gun position. It was a war in which many people had done dreadful things, but he carried this burden of guilt alone until his death in 1972.5
Despite Stanley Cohen’s suffering, at least he survived. Many other lives were shortened by military service, like that of Sergeant Owen Rowe from D Battalion, who died in 1923 at the age of twenty-five. After the war he ran a taxi firm in Bovington with another tank pioneer, Gunner Roy Reiffer, who wrote: ‘His last action in France was at Cambrai where, on the first day of the offensive, he lost his leg while taking shelter outside
his tank after it had caught fire. He … was discharged in 1919 … He contracted consumption, and after an illness of six months he died. No doubt the loss of his leg at Cambrai, in 1917, weakened his constitution to such an extent that he would be prone to catch disease quicker than an able-bodied man.’6 Sergeant Rowe was buried in Devon, near the land his parents farmed, his coffin draped in the Union flag.7
However, some men were able to build on their wartime experiences as a basis for future careers. This obviously applied to those who stayed in the army, like Horace Birks, who had started the war as a rifleman and ended up as a second lieutenant, eventually retiring in 1946 as a major-general. During the Second World War he commanded an armoured brigade in the Western Desert, and it was said that ‘his handling of the tanks and his design of the minefields in the rear had a major part in checking Rommel’s successive efforts to capture Tobruk …’8 Having survived two wars, he had a further brush with death in late 1945 when he parachuted from a crippled aircraft over the Austrian Alps, and was found by rescuers twenty-four hours later lying on a mountainside with a broken leg. This ended his military career, but he went on to become secretary of a London medical school, as well as an important source of reminiscences about the early years of the Tank Corps, until his death in 1985 at the age of eighty-seven.9
In a less tangible way, wartime experiences also influenced the later career of Wilfred Bion from E Battalion, who had won the Distinguished Service Order after keeping the enemy at bay with a Lewis gun from the roof of his tank. Bion was a unique combination of action man and intellectual, and after the war he studied first history and then medicine before moving into psychoanalysis, the field in which he established an enduring reputation. Bion developed a theory of group behaviour inspired by what he had witnessed in the army, and put his experiences to good use in the Second World War by developing a more effective approach to the selection of officers.10
Bion could not bring himself to write home to his parents during the First World War, apart from a single letter after Cambrai, which must have been agonizing for them but is of tremendous benefit to us, since he wrote a detailed account for them immediately after the war which was subsequently published as War Memoirs.11 He supplemented this decades later with an autobiography which remained unfinished at his death in 1979,12 and taken together these provide an honest and unguarded perspective on his time in the Tank Corps.
There are several other men to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for recording their wartime experiences. Second Lieutenant James Macintosh returned to South Africa after the war to begin a successful legal career, and in 1921 he published Men and Tanks, which gives the most detailed account of life in No. 12 Company, to which Deborah belonged.13 The book is informative and entertaining, though a straitlaced reviewer in the Tank Corps Journal found some of it far-fetched: ‘To those of you who joined the Corps since the Armistice we would say:– Read this book. You will like it. But you must not swallow quite all of it.’14 One hopes the same could not be said of his later published works, which were sober legal textbooks with titles like Negligence in Delict.15
‘Jim’ Macintosh was a powerful figure, which made it all the more shocking when he collapsed and died from heart disease in 1943 at the age of just forty-five, leaving behind a widow and young son. The South African Law Journal paid tribute to him: ‘Of unassuming and, on first acquaintance, somewhat reserved disposition, Jim Macintosh, with all his profound learning, was of a modest and gentle nature. When one got to know him he proved an amiable and companionable friend … Moderate in all his tastes and habits, he was in every sense of the simple words “a good fellow”.’ The writer referred to his ‘enthusiastic and cheerful presence’,16 and this comes across in Men and Tanks, although he pulls no punches in describing the horrors of war.
The other member of No. 12 Company to record his experiences in print was Major Edward Glanville Smith. His series of articles called ‘The Wanderings of “D” in France’ was published anonymously in the Tank Corps Journal in 1921,17 and its author has only now been identified through careful detective work. So secretive was he that even his own relatives were unaware he had written it. Many of those involved in the war never spoke about their experiences, and Smith does not seem a likely communicator in the way that Macintosh does. In photographs he often appears sombre, and later suffered from depression as a result of his wartime experiences, but he also seems to have had a sense of the absurd, and one photograph in his album shows a group of officers – including Frank Heap – sitting in a field wearing their pyjamas. The rationale for this is lost, but it may relate to a family story about the time Smith went to war and found his mother had packed his pyjamas, which seemed somewhat incongruous in an army hut.18 ‘Glan’ was also clearly an effective officer, and became commander of C (formerly No. 12) Company, as well as presiding over its post-war reunions. He started a family and worked as an export manager in the iron and steel industry, gaining a new lease of life with a further spell of military service in the Second World War, when he became a sergeant in the Home Guard. He died in 1970 at the age of seventy-seven.19
The third, and most celebrated, of D Battalion’s authors was Major William Watson, who was demobilized in early 1919. He had already published an account of his early wartime experiences, called Adventures of a Despatch Rider,20 but a further series of articles in the leading literary magazine Blackwood’s ended abruptly in 191721 when the authorities clamped down on works by serving personnel.22 It therefore came as no surprise when a further series began to appear in Blackwood’s in May 1919, and this was republished in book form as A Company of Tanks – now regarded as a classic of Great War literature.23
During the war Watson had married the strikingly attractive Barbara Wake-Walker, a solicitor’s daughter whose upbringing had been disrupted by her family’s financial difficulties. William’s daughter-in-law described him as having ‘a very high intelligence, courage, and flair and natural charisma. It’s no surprise that Barbara fell in love with him. She had not had much love in her young life, and now she was swept up in it.’24 With three young children to support, Watson embarked on a career as a civil servant at the Ministry of Labour, focusing on issues of industry and education and becoming private secretary to a succession of ministers.25 The contrast with his previous life could not have been more marked: ‘Now I travel daily to St. James’s Park station by the 9.31, and when a “file” returns to me after many days, I sometimes wonder how I ever managed, without writing a single “minute,” to command a Company of Tanks.’26 The war had been his literary inspiration, and although he continued to write, his efforts were now limited to a history book and anthology for children.
The Times commented that ‘with his zeal, marked ability, and personal charm, Mr. Watson would undoubtedly have risen high in the Civil Service,’ but alas, he died in 1932 at the age of just forty-one.27 His daughter-in-law recalled: ‘William died suddenly of pneumonia, no doubt as a result of trench fever in France, leaving Barbara with very little money. She was completely desolated by his loss and ill for a year after, during which period the children … were sent away to school or to friends, until such time as she had … bought a cottage where she was able to gather her family together again.’28 It was a tragic end to a promising life, and to their dreams of happiness together after the hardship of war.
* * *
In 1962, the death of a veteran in a Surrey hospital resulted in another extraordinary record of D Battalion’s war coming to light. Claude Rowberry had joined the Tank Corps after transferring from a cavalry regiment, being promoted to sergeant and winning the Military Medal for bravery in 1918. He was a complex, enigmatic character, and it turned out he also had a secret life: while serving in the Ypres Salient he had been struck by the ‘terrible beauty’ of the blasted landscape, and on his next leave he bought artist’s materials so he could capture the scene in paint. Although Rowberry had no artistic background or training, he turned out to have a rema
rkable aptitude, and his paintings depicted the tanks and battlefields with a vivid, spontaneous energy.29
But whatever inner compulsion this activity fulfilled, there was no corresponding desire to display his work, which he kept hidden with obsessive secrecy. A journalist later recorded that ‘back in civilian life, he carried on with his art in a locked studio. If his son was ever admitted …, a newspaper or a piece of cloth was thrown over the current picture. When the picture was finished it went into [a] steel trunk without anyone having seen it.’
Rowberry worked as a senior salesman for a textile firm, returning to military service in 1939 when he rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and painted his way through another war. Again the results were kept hidden in a way that even his son Donald found baffling: ‘There was something almost feverish about the way he painted; something seemed to be driving him. And everything went into that steel trunk as soon as it was finished.’
When Claude died his widow could not bear to open the trunk, so it was only after her death in 1965 that his vision was finally shared with the world. An exhibition was held, and a sale eventually brought his work to a wider audience. The paintings he did while in D Battalion were bought by the Royal Tank Regiment, and now adorn the walls of their mess at Bovington where his work can at last enjoy the appreciation it deserves.
At this stage we should also pay tribute to another remarkable man who had no such urge to hide his light under a bushel. This was Brigadier-General Christopher Baker-Carr, whose memoirs may not have provided a solution to his own financial problems, but have given us a lively account of his time as commander of 1st Tank Brigade, as well as bringing him hands-down victory in his feud with Major-General Harper.30
As we have noted, Baker-Carr tended to prosper in uniform but not in a civilian suit, and this pattern was repeated when he joined the army for a third time in 1940 at the age of sixty-two. Initially based in Egypt, he was attached to the Spears Mission which attempted to resolve the future of Syria and the Lebanon to the satisfaction of de Gaulle and the local French community, but ended up antagonizing most of the parties instead. Anyone familiar with Baker-Carr’s turbulent financial affairs would be astonished to learn that he was made the mission’s Economic Adviser.31