Deborah and the War of the Tanks

by John Taylor

  It was an unexpected discovery that was challenged by some, since the buried tank was found a third of a mile (or more than half a kilometre) from the spot where Deborah was knocked out. However, subsequent evidence has proved the identification correct beyond all doubt. Below the photograph was written ‘Flequiers [sic] Nov 1917’, which was slightly misleading as later evidence showed it was not taken until March 1919. However, it was assumed that the tank had been buried by the Germans after they captured the village in March 1918, probably to use as an underground shelter.

  Following the excavation, no building was available in the village large enough to house Deborah, so for the next two years she remained under a tarpaulin in the farmyard belonging to the Mayor of Flesquières. Later Philippe was able to buy a large, empty barn in the centre of the village, and in 2000 the British army lent its support as 118th Recovery Company of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers moved the tank into her new home, where she has remained ever since. The same year Deborah’s future was assured when she was officially classified as a French historic monument. A group of friends and supporters was formed, called the Association of the Tank of Flesquières, to maintain the tank and to organize commemorative events including an annual ceremony on Cambrai Day. Philippe’s dream of establishing a memorial to the battle also came to fruition with the creation of a monument south-east of the village, overlooking the ground attacked by Deborah and the other tanks of D and E Battalions.

  Although Deborah is regularly sprayed with oil to keep rust at bay, the remains have never been washed or even brushed clean, a fact of great symbolic importance for Philippe. ‘Five men were killed in Deborah and three others were inside, and their DNA is everywhere, so the tank is like a human thing. The earth on the tank is important, what is inside is important, and it must stay exactly like it is.’

  The sepulchral gloom of Deborah’s barn provides an atmospheric setting for such a powerful relic of war, and every year thousands of people come to see her, each visit privately arranged with Philippe and normally introduced by him in person. In 2008, the visitors included a group of friends and former colleagues from the UK with a long-standing interest in the First World War, who determined then and there to help Philippe by uncovering the human story of Deborah. Three of them were current or former journalists and therefore experts in tracking down and interviewing people, while another member of the team contributed his formidable skills as a genealogist. The twentieth-century tools that had been used to excavate and investigate Deborah were now supplemented by the sophisticated research methods of the twenty-first century, including the internet, online databases and digital records. A new chapter in the history of Deborah was about to begin.

  * * *

  The challenge was that although Philippe was already in contact with the descendants of Frank Heap, and some other officers’ families including those of D51’s first commander, George Macdonald, and her company commander, R.O.C. Ward, he had no way of positively identifying the other crewmen or contacting their relatives. The citation for Frank Heap’s Military Cross indicated that four men had died when the tank was destroyed, and though there was no direct evidence, it seemed there might well be a connection with five D Battalion men who were buried side-by-side in Flesquières Hill British Cemetery.

  The team were able to confirm this using the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which showed that four of the men – Joseph Cheverton, George Foot, Frederick Tipping and William Galway – had originally been buried in the same map square where Deborah was knocked out.6 Another photograph of Deborah had since come to light, provided by Jim Christie whose uncle was in Flesquières some time after the battle and noted that the crew were buried across the road from their tank.7 So at least the four dead crewmen had been positively identified, and the task of tracing their relatives began.

  The initial approach by Rob Kirk was to appeal for help through the local newspapers in their respective hometowns. The story was a compelling one, and with the help of journalists in Belfast, Nottingham and Cambridge, the team were soon in contact with the families of Gunners Galway, Tipping and Cheverton.8 With each breakthrough came the excitement of forging another human link with Deborah, of putting a face to a name on a headstone, and piecing together the personal stories that lay behind her fateful mission. Like so many other families at home and abroad, the relatives were aware that a forebear had died in the Great War, and had preserved a few poignant relics: the medals they had won but mostly never worn, the bronze plaques issued to the families of the fallen and known with grim humour as ‘death pennies’, and the faded photographs which were a last treasured link with their loved ones. But unlike most families, they now had a tangible, visible record of their ancestors’ war in the form of Deborah herself, and all have since become enthusiastic supporters of the research project. Frustratingly, however, in every case the letters, diaries or other documents which might have revealed more about the men’s experiences had been lost over the decades, along with their official service records, which were destroyed when a London warehouse was bombed in the Blitz.

  The final challenge was to trace the family of George Foot, and in this case there was no prospect of appealing for relatives through a local newspaper. The surname was not distinctive enough, and the family came from a North London suburb which lacked the clear geographical identity of the other men’s hometowns. Instead, the team developed a tried and tested approach which involved gathering whatever evidence they could from military records and identifying the men’s families in the censuses, before using birth, marriage and death records to prepare a family tree, concentrating on siblings and their descendants. This work was led by Alan Hawkins, an expert genealogist, and the last stage was usually to find the will of a close relative which would point forwards to the next generation. After this the traditional journalistic techniques of ‘phone-bashing’ and ‘door-stepping’ came into play.

  In this way Vince McGarry, a retired journalist blessed with boundless enthusiasm and irresistible charm, called at the London home of George Foot’s nephew Charles Foot, and struck gold. As well as his medals – including the Distinguished Conduct Medal awarded for his courage in an early tank attack on the Somme – Charles had preserved a tiny, hand-coloured photograph showing the angelic face of his uncle, and two even more precious documents, namely the letters sent to George’s parents by his commanding officers to break the news of his death. One was written by Frank Heap, and so the four men’s connection to Deborah was proved beyond all doubt.

  The letter also revealed a mystery, because Frank wrote ‘four more of my crew have also gone’, showing that another of his crewmen had been killed during the battle. For a time it was thought Walter Robinson might have been a member of the crew, since he now lies buried alongside the others, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records show his original gravesite was closer to Deborah than to any other tank. However, when Vince McGarry tracked down his relatives in the USA, it turned out they had kept a number of vital documents, including the letter of condolence written by Walter’s tank commander, who turned out to be James Vose. This showed that Walter had been in Demon II rather than Deborah, and at the time of writing, the identity of the fifth dead crewman remains a mystery.9

  The Robinson family had also kept a letter written by Walter’s father Fred to break the news to another of his sons. Fred had been widowed a few years previously, and now his son’s death left him ‘utterly heartbroken’. Forwarding the message sent by Second Lieutenant Vose, he wrote to his son: ‘I must ask you to return the letter to me when you have finished with it, as I intend to keep it, I expect it will be found in some drawer after I have joined Mother & Wal.’ The letter has been lovingly preserved by his family, along with a number of photographs of Walter, the last one with its jaunty message: ‘Cheer up Dad!!!! For all’s well that ends well.’10

  Meanwhile there was another equally baffling question: who were the two crewmen w
ho had survived the attack and escaped from Deborah along with Frank Heap? One was almost certainly the driver, and therefore probably an NCO, but there was no obvious way to identify them. Perhaps it was clutching at straws, but one approach was to compare the casualty lists for 22 August and 20 November – the two dates when D51 went into action alongside other tanks from No. 12 Company.11 Apart from Walter Robinson, only one man appeared on both casualty lists, namely Lance-Corporal David ‘Bert’ Marsden, whose service record gave his occupation at the end of the war as ‘tank driver’. Bert survived the war and resumed his career as a butcher before dying in 1969.12

  Bert Marsden’s family were easy to track down and eager to help, though sadly they had no evidence linking him to a specific tank, nor was this information given in his surviving service record. Like many other veterans of the Great War, he had rarely spoken of his experiences, apart from a few brief but vivid recollections from his grandson, David Melliar-Smith: ‘He told me that the only reason he survived was because at the moment the shells hit [his tank], he had moved back to get more ammunition for his machine gun. He also told me that for years after the war, they were still taking metal out of him. At some time in the 1950s I recall him telling me about the piece of shrapnel that was lodged underneath his diaphragm. He was X-rayed at Guy’s Hospital where they found the piece of shrapnel, but decided that it would be too dangerous to remove.’13

  All we can say for certain is that Bert Marsden was in the same company as Deborah, and was wounded on 20 November. In fact, this may reduce the chances that he was in Deborah’s crew, since the survivors escaped on foot and there is no mention of any of them being wounded. However, there is one final enigma: when Bert’s granddaughter was born in 1951 she was christened Deborah. Was this a coincidence, or a tribute to the tank in which he had so nearly died? We will probably never know, but his descendants have been welcomed as members of the extended ‘Deborah family’.

  Meanwhile, the project continued at full tilt. As the focus for many battlefield visits to Cambrai, Philippe often met the relatives of former combatants and these provided a rich vein for further investigation, along with his ever expanding collection of books and photographs. My own focus was on historical research, hunting down and analysing the records and documents preserved in libraries and archives across Britain, France and Germany. In this way a number of previously unknown descriptions of the battle were brought to light, while the authors of some anonymous accounts were identified for the first time – notably Edward Glanville Smith, whose series of articles appeared in the Tank Corps Journal in the 1920s.

  Another vivid account by George Koe was discovered in his long-defunct company journal, and most precious of all were the specific references to Deborah found in the writings of James Macintosh, Douglas Wimberley and Robert Tennant Bruce, as well as in various German accounts. Despite every effort, however, the most crucial document of all – the Battle History Sheet prepared by Frank Heap following the battle – has not come to light, and we have to accept that it probably never will.

  During the research it also emerged that vital information about two tank actions had been given away to the Germans by captured British soldiers, the second time with direct and disastrous consequences for Deborah’s crew. These cases, though isolated and distressing, were investigated by the team and the full circumstances now stand revealed for the first time.

  By 2009 the team had contacted the descendants of everyone closely connected with Deborah, including the families of all her known crewmen, and the scene was set for a historic gathering.

  * * *

  In Flesquières, on the 92nd anniversary of the day Deborah was destroyed, the descendants of her crew met up for the first time for a weekend of commemoration and celebration.

  The grandsons and great-grandsons of Frank Heap were there, along with those of George Macdonald who had flown in from New Zealand and Bulgaria. The families of Joseph Cheverton, George Foot, Fred Tipping and David Marsden were present, as was the great-nephew of Theodore Wenger, the man responsible for burying Deborah, who had come over from South Africa. The man who identified her, David Fletcher of the Tank Museum, was there, as were Johan and Luc Vanbeselaere from Poelkapelle – now involved in a remarkable project to build their own full-size working replica of a tank to replace the lost Damon II.

  In the packed Salle des Fêtes (or village hall), a review of the team’s research was presented by Philippe Gorczynski, Rob Kirk and myself. The cemetery was the setting for a moving night-time ceremony in which the poetry of Wilfred Owen was read by Russell Enoch, the son of Captain Alfred Enoch and a professional actor. Across the gravestones, John Heap read the letter of condolence that his great-grandfather, Frank Heap, had written to the family of George Foot, while the dead man’s nephew Charles Foot looked on. The evening ended with the ‘Flame of Memory’, a cascade of fireworks and flares which turned the sky red and evoked the sight and sound of battle, and a bagpipe lament in memory of the Highlanders who had fought and died there.

  Doris Summers, the elderly niece of Joseph Cheverton, was unable to attend in person but was fascinated to hear about the ceremony, and proud that her family was represented. When told about the achingly beautiful song of the skylarks that can sometimes be heard in the battlefields and cemeteries of the Western Front, she replied: ‘I expect it’s the souls of the men, singing.’

  Since that unforgettable weekend, the research has continued apace and new information continues to emerge. Important insights were provided by Iona Murray, an archaeologist who contacted Philippe with a rich archive of material from her great-grandfather, who visited Flesquières after the war in search of his brother’s grave. One photograph showed the exact spot where Deborah was knocked out, and confirmed that the hulk had remained in the village street until at least March 1919, rather than being buried during the war as previously supposed.

  Another breakthrough came with the discovery of two photographs of Deborah, taken by German soldiers after they occupied the village in March 1918. In these pictures the tank appears relatively intact, proving that the extensive damage to her front and right side was inflicted later in the war, probably during the fighting in September 1918.14

  Finally, during routine maintenance and inspection work on the tank it was noticed that a painted number was faintly visible inside her cab, just above the driver’s and commander’s seats.15 This was 2620, listed in battalion records as the manufacturer’s number of D51 Deborah. It was the final proof, if any were needed, that this was indeed ‘Mr Heap’s bus’.

  Now, as we near the centenary of the battle in which D51 Deborah was destroyed, there are hopes that she will be given a new and permanent home. Plans are well advanced to create a special, purpose-built museum in which she will be properly displayed for the first time, on a site adjacent to the cemetery in which her crewmen lie buried and almost within sight of the spot where she was knocked out by German artillery.

  For Deborah, it will mark the end of a journey that has lasted 100 years and has seen her become a static, but moving, memorial to all those who fought and died in the Battle of Cambrai. For Philippe Gorczynski, it will mean the fulfilment of a dream.

  * * *

  Setting out from the sleepy village of Trescault, it takes an hour or so of pleasant country walking to reach Flesquières, perched on its low wooded ridge just over twoand-a-half miles (or four kilometres) away.

  Near the starting point is a little civilian cemetery with a handful of Commonwealth war graves, mostly dating from early 1917 when this was a ‘silent front’ and each side generally allowed the other to go about their business in peace. Near this spot, the crews of Deborah and the rest of No. 12 Company assembled on that misty November morning and waited for the bombardment to come crashing down, signalling that it was time for them to go forward into the unknown.

  From here a muddy track leads gently downhill between fields of crops, and one soon passes over the British front line, crosses No
Man’s Land with its thick belt of German wire, and reaches the yawning chasm of the Hindenburg Line – though in the imagination only, for the scars have long since healed, the forest of wire has been uprooted, and the landscape lies once again bland and blameless.

  Only when the path becomes narrow and sunken between high banks is there a sense of some darker purpose, for this is the start of the Stollenweg, and one soon passes shattered slabs of concrete and a steel girder showing this was once the heart of the German defences in this sector. Further on, the deepest part of the gully – where Hauptmann Soltau and his men mounted their last desperate stand – has been filled in and planted with trees, and the path descends gently to the flat floor of a broad, open valley.

  This is the so-called Grand Ravine, and from here the track rises gently towards the east side of Flesquières, passing the squat bulk of a concrete bunker and the curving hedgerow which marks the line of the disused railway where the attackers sheltered. As height is gained the flagpoles of the memorial come into view on the ridge ahead, and then the strongly-built brick wall which was such a formidable obstacle for the Highlanders. Hidden away in nooks and corners of the landscape are bunkers and machine-gun posts, each with its carefully calculated field of fire, some so perfectly preserved that they look as if the defenders had abandoned them a few hours ago, rather than nearly a century.