Smithers - Cambrai. The First Great Tank Battle 1917

CAMBRAI

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CAMBRAI

The First Great Tank Battle
1917

by
A. J. Smithers

LEO COOPER
LONDON

First published in Great Britain in 1992 by
LEO COOPER

190 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8JL
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd.,
47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorks S70 2AS

Copyright A. J. Smithers, 1992

ISBN 085052 268 4

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

Typeset by Yorkshire Web, Barnsley, South Yorkshire
in Plantin Roman 10 point

Printed in Great Britain by
The Redwood Press
Melksham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS

For anyone minded to write about the Battle of Cambrai there is only one possible point of departure. The Library of the Tank Musem at Bovington Camp has the privilege of owning great quantities of manuscript material, all of it authoritive and, for the most part, written by those who fought there and before memories began to fade. My gratitude to David Fletcher, Librarian and author, transcends all the rest. Not only did he produce far more documents than a single volume can digest but, of his kindness, he found time to read the typescript and discover errors. That, I emphasize, saddles him with no responsibility for the now contents. The Imperial War Musem, the Public Record Office and the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at Kings College, London custodians of the papers of Sir James Edmonds and Sir Launcelot Kiggell have all been laid under contribution and have been generous with help above the call of duty. The Museums of the Intelligence Corps at Ashford, of the Royal Artillery at the Rotunda, Woolwich, and the Royal Engineers at Chatham all furnished necessary ingredients. In particular, the Corps Library RE, personified by Mrs Magnuson, went to much trouble in disinterring for me all that remains to be known about that early surface-to-surface missile the Livens Projector. The Estate of the late Major-General Sir Edward Spears permitted me to quote from Prelude to Victory and Two Men Who Saved France; this I much appreciate, for the General was in a class of his own as both actor and chronicler. Lastly, my thanks to faithful friends. To Major Derek Poulsen for reading more than one draft typescript and criticizing all of them; and to Philippa Arnott for once again transmuting heaps of what appeared nothing beyond erasures and corrections into typescript that is a pleasure to read. I would include M. Le Patron of the Hotel de la Paix in Albert were it not for his cook, whom I cannot congratulate.

Throughout the 1930s the Army organized many Battlefield Tours, in which senior men who had participated could pass on their experiences to the next generation. Brigadier P.C.S. Hobart (in later years Major-General Sir Percy) led one of Tanks Corps officers to Cambrai in 1935. A number of those attending, at Hobarts request, wrote down accounts of what they best remembered; as all of them were still serving they were necessarily anonymous. These, together with much else, were put together under the title A Narrative Of Cambrai and ended up in the Library of the Tank Museum at Bovington, by whose kind permission I have drawn upon it. In some instances identification of the memorialists has been possible, but others remain unclaimed. In the following pages various unattributed recollections appear. All these come from Hobarts unfinished book.

In a letter to Sir Basil Liddell Hart written in 1953 Hobart calls it this pile of dusty pleas from the dead years. And very little response did they evoke. Any other possible reader of this book may agree that Brigadier Hobart deserved better fortune, here as in other ways.

Children of to-day, when reading the great stories of the past, will not thrill to them the less when they remember that deeds as wonderful were performed in their own lifetime by their fathers and their fathers friends.

John Buchan

Days to Remember 1922