Every war and every nation had its own heroes. They were in the infantry, among the pilots and sailors, they were also among the British tankers who fought on their primitive fire-breathing "monsters" during the First World War.
“And I looked, and, behold, a pale horse, and on him a rider, whose name was“death”; and hell followed him; and power was given to him over the fourth part of the earth - to put to death by the sword, and by hunger, and by pestilence, and by the beasts of the earth."
(Revelation of John the Evangelist 6: 8)
Tanks of the world. Today we will continue to get acquainted with the actions of British tanks on the battlefields of the First World War and, as in the previous material, we will first get acquainted with the history "in general", and at the end of the material with an example of how only one single tank fought, which also made although and small, but "its own story."
And it so happened that after a successful offensive on the Somme, Commander Haig began to throw tanks into battle, regardless of the circumstances, and in the end it ended badly. All their shortcomings came out! And now he again needed a victory to compensate for the nightmarish defeats in the fall of 1917. And in the middle of October, the desperate Haig finally heeded the voice of reason and agreed to present the "right to vote" to the tankers in the upcoming operation, and everyone else would only adapt to them. It was decided to strike at the Germans unexpectedly, abandoning preliminary artillery shelling, long before the offensive itself, announcing the place of its start, and attacking exclusively with tanks.
For the offensive, a section of the front with a length of 8 kilometers with dense, not swampy ground in the Cambrai region was chosen. About 400 tanks were to march ahead of six infantry divisions at dawn on 20 November. They were followed by a cavalry corps, tasked with taking possession of Cambrai and blocking enemy communications in the Arras area. In the sky, if the weather allowed it, the Royal Air Corps was supposed to operate - to bomb and shell artillery positions, warehouses and road junctions, and, most importantly, to conduct continuous reconnaissance and provide information in real time about the nature of the enemy's advance and reaction. There were 1,003 artillery pieces, which now had to play by the new rules. If earlier artillery fired at squares, destroying barbed wire, now it was ordered to fire on enemy batteries in the depths of its defenses on a tip from airplanes. It was not shells that were to tear the wire, but tanks. To facilitate their work, it was supposed to create a dense smoke screen with smoke shells directly in front of the main defense centers of the German troops and blind the enemy artillerymen and artillery observers so that they could not see the masses of tanks and infantry attacking them.
Moreover, the "Hindenburg line" was specially chosen as the attack area, fortified so strongly that the Germans called this place "a sanatorium in Flanders", since troops were withdrawn here to rest from other sectors of the front. The Germans dug a wide anti-tank ditch, so they believed that the tanks would not pass here.
The British needed to think about this, and they found a way out. Were prepared bundles of brushwood weighing one and a half tons, mounted on rails mounted on the roofs of Mk IV tanks. The tanks, approaching the ditch, had to alternately throw these fascines into the ditch, then force it and move on to the artillery positions, crushing and destroying the German machine guns. Then the cavalry was to enter the breakthrough and take Cambrai with a decisive throw!
What further strengthened the success of such an attack was the strictest preservation of military secrets. And, of course, it was necessary to somehow distract the enemy's attention. Therefore, tanks, cannons and infantry reached their initial positions at night, and during the day all movements were covered by hundreds of fighters raised into the air. Rumors were deliberately launched that the troops were being assembled to be sent to the Italian front, where the Germans won a resounding victory. And although the Germans still received some information about the impending offensive, they did not take any measures to repel it. Moreover, the reason was still the same - the inertia of thinking. They believed that the offensive would begin with a hurricane of shelling, with which the enemy would destroy their barbed wire barriers. This will take time, during which the forward units can be pulled back, and reserves can be brought from the rear to the fired area. And so it was before. The fact that this time everything will be completely different, the German generals simply did not assume.
Surprisingly, this complex and, one might say, revolutionary plan for that time … worked. The offensive began when the tankers started their engines early in the morning and, leaving the shelters, moved in their tanks to the German positions, at the same time British artillery opened fire, but it struck with smoke, not high-explosive shells. Hundreds of Allied airplanes appeared over the battlefield and began to "process" the German artillery positions. As soon as the roar of cannonade was heard, the Germans ran to hide in the dugouts, in order to then go to repel the attacks of the British infantry.
And the infantry was just not there. The shells fell not on the rows of barbed wire, but on the artillery batteries in the rear. The artillery officers who survived under the fire were waiting for orders, but they were not, since the morning fog (by the way, it interfered with the British pilots, but to a lesser extent) and clouds of thick white smoke near the front line blinded the observers. But the fog did not prevent the tanks from crawling forward. They stopped only to throw the fascines into the ditch, and moved on, finding themselves in the enemy's rear. The infantry ran behind the tanks, seizing trench after trench. Grenades flew into the dugouts, those who tried to resist were finished off with bayonets. As a result, all three lines of defense were broken before the Germans came to their senses and began to actively resist.
First of all, individual German machine guns came to life in the rear, cutting off the infantry from the tanks. And it was hard for her to follow them even at their speed of 5 km / h. It took a lot of time to destroy the machine gun nests. And the tanks went and went forward until they reached … the Saint-Kantan canal. On the left flank, the tanks managed to take the Flequière ridge and even began to move towards the Burlon forest, from where Cambrai was already a stone's throw. But then they were met by the fire of the unsuppressed German artillery …
And here unforeseen difficulties began. Thus, several tanks reached the canal two or three hours earlier than the infantry. And they could have crossed it, because the Germans did not actually oppose here, but they managed to blow up the bridge over the canal, and it collapsed as soon as the first tank drove onto it. But even after that, the tanks could cross this obstacle, if at least someone had guessed to supply them not only with fascines, but also with assault bridges. But no one thought of that. According to the plan, the cavalry was supposed to build on the success in the direction of Cambrai. However, when she arrived, the German opposition on the opposite bank of the canal became too persistent. Therefore, only a squadron of Canadian cavalry and a few infantry companies crossed the canal. And that's it! The rest of the troops were simply … tired and did not have the strength to go further.
And in the area of the Flequière ridge and the village of Quentin, the tanks got ahead too much and were alone, without the support of the infantry. And the infantry did not go, because behind the tanks the resistance of the German soldiers was still not completely broken. But the tanks, too, did not go forward, for fear of falling under fire from German batteries. And they, in turn, found themselves in a very difficult situation, since many soldiers were brought here from the Russian front only the night before. In addition, the gunners were shocked to find that they had been brought in a new type of shells, and the old keys for installing the fuses did not fit them. In fact, they could only be fired like blanks. So all that was required of the British infantry was to shoot the gun servants and … follow the tanks to Cambrai. However, the British did not understand this. And the German guns, although there were few of them, fired at every tank that appeared.
As a result, on the evening of the 20th, the Germans themselves withdrew from Flequière in an organized manner, having achieved the most important thing - disrupting the enemy's offensive in this sector. The next day, the British could no longer make significant progress. Large losses in tank units caused concern at headquarters. The infantry was very tired, and there were no reserves. The cavalry on the "lunar landscape" was simply useless, especially under machine-gun fire. The fighting then continued for another six days. It was not possible to defeat the Germans, although the main thing came to be understood: the future belongs to armored combat vehicles, and horses on the battlefield have nothing to do.
There was, in fact, another revolution in military affairs, although the Germans made their contribution to it, actively using the tactics of assault groups. But they did not have tanks, and in the future they could not get enough of them.
Another interesting circumstance was also revealed - the high anti-tank potential of a 77-mm German gun mounted on a truck chassis for firing at airplanes. Only one such gun in the village of Manyers, having entered into a duel with an English tank at a distance of 500 m, was able to destroy it with 25 shots, and three days later, when the British tried to make their last breakthrough to the Burlon Forest, it still continued to fire on them. … Near the village of Fontaine, a battery of such autocannons disabled five tanks and was able to stop the advance of the British. German anti-aircraft gunners on these autocannons fired so zealously at the tanks that the German command even had to issue special instructions in which they were reminded that their main task was to fight enemy aircraft, and tanks were … well, in the most extreme case!
And now a concrete example of the combat activity of one of the British tanks of that time. The F41, named Fry Bentos, was the male Mk IV, number 2329. In August 1917, its nine-man crew survived the longest tank battle of the First World War. Here is a list of his crew members:
Captain Donald Hickling Richardson
Second Lieutenant George Hill
Sergeant Robert Francis Missen
Shooter William Morrie
Shooter Ernest W. Hayton
Shooter Frederick S. Arthurs
Shooter Percy Edgar Budd
Shooter James H. Binley
Lance Corporal Ernest Hans Brady
The story began at 4:40 am on August 22, 1917, when the Fry Bentos tank was supposed to support an attack by the 61st Division near Saint Julien. This was an episode of the Third Battle of Ypres, when the British fought in the old fashioned way, throwing people and tanks forward indiscriminately. As the tank advanced, it came under machine gun fire from the Somme farm, but the crew soon overwhelmed it with their left-hand 6-pounder cannon.
At about 5:45 am, the Fry Bentos was fired upon by a German machine gun from the Gallipoli farm. Missen recalled:
“We got into a very deep swampy place, started to make a turn, and just at that moment Mr. Hill fell from his seat. Captain Richardson sat down in his place to change him, but lost control and before the driver could do anything, our tank got stuck so that we could no longer budge. Hill was wounded in the neck, Budd and Morrie were also wounded."
The tanks carried detachable beams on the roof for self-recovery in case they got stuck. And Missen tried to get out of the tank to attach such a beam to the tracks, but
“I heard bullets hit the tank and saw that some Bosch was shooting at me 30 yards away. I climbed into the tank again."
Then Missen came out through the door on the right, and Brady did the same on the left. He was not lucky. As Richardson said, he
"Died while installing a beam under terrible machine gun fire."
The Fry Bentos could no longer move, but could still fire, and the gunners from their 6-pounder cannons
"Successfully opened fire on machine guns at the Gallipoli farm."
At about 7 o'clock, the British infantry began to retreat, leaving the tank's crew surrounded. The Germans tried to get closer, but they were restrained by fire from 6-pounder guns and a Lewis machine gun, as well as the crew's personal rifles and revolvers. Missen recalled that
"The boshes were in an old trench just below the front of the tank, and we couldn't point Lewis at them because of the angle of the tank, but we easily shot them with a rifle, sticking it out of the revolver hatch."
British soldiers also started shooting at the tank, so Missen volunteered
"To return and warn the infantry not to shoot at us, because sooner or later we will have to get out of the tank … I climbed out of the sponson's right door and crawled back to the infantry."
By the time Missen left, all of the surviving crew members except Binley were injured. The British sniper, who also fired at the tank and apparently decided that it was captured by the Germans, stopped firing when he was shown a white rag from one of the hatches. However, the crew did not manage to get out of the tank on either the 22nd, the 23rd or the 24th, and the Germans fired on the tank all this time and even tried to break open its hatches. But to no avail, since the crew fired back at every opportunity.
Finally, at 21:00 on the 24th, Richardson decided that they should still try to leave the tank, as it ran out of water, and make their way to the British positions. Despite their injuries, the team managed to take the 6-pound locks, all their weapons and maps with them. Reaching the nearest British infantry unit from the 9th Blackwatch Battalion, Richardson asked the Marines to try to prevent the Germans from capturing the tank and left them all of Lewis's tank machine guns.
Ernest Brady's body was never found subsequently, but his name is recorded in the Tyne Cat memorial. Percy Budd didn't survive the war either. He died on August 25, 1918 at the age of 22.
The result of more than 60 hours of continuous combat operations for the tank's crew was as follows: one person was killed and seven were wounded (Binley escaped with a shell shock). It was not possible to calculate how many they killed and wounded soldiers of the German army, but it is obvious that quite a lot. But thanks to their bravery, they became the most titled tankers of the war.
Richardson and Hill were awarded the Military Cross (see article on bayonets in combat), Missen and Morrie were awarded the Medal for Distinguished Bravery, and Hayton, Arthurs, Budd and Binley were awarded the War Medal.
