After three years of trench deadlock, armies were unaccustomed to mobile warfare. Some objectives hadn’t been captured, the assault troops were exhausted and the cavalry hadn’t been exploited. “Church bells were rung a great victory had been achieved.”īut it hadn’t. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, they had suffered 57,000 casualties to capture just three square miles.”Reaction in Britain was euphoric,” Turner and Dennis write. The British had suffered just 4,000 casualties the first day. “German reaction swung from incredulity to helpless despondency that morning Rupprecht had considered ordering a general retirement.” “At first glance it had been a stunning success: three to four miles’ penetration on a six-mile front at unprecedented speed,” write historians Alexander Turner and Peter Dennis in their book Cambrai 1917: The Birth of Armored Warfare. Yet the German defenses had been breached. There were the inevitable holdups, such as the 51st Scottish Highland Division’s attack at Flesquieres, where German artillery ambushed their supporting tanks. From the smoke and morning mist, the British tanks emerged to trample the barbed wire and pulverize the machine gun nests. But what if- just what if-every First World War general’s dream came true, and there was a genuine, complete breakthrough? Then might not the cavalry, those dashing upper-class darlings made obsolete by those working-class machine gunners, burst through the breach and reach “the green fields beyond?”įor a moment, the prize seemed within reach. Given past offensives against the Germans, that sort of shallow bite-and-hold attack was the best that could be achieved without taking heavy losses for little gain. Quentin Canal in the south and repel the inevitable German counterattacks. Was this operation a full-scale breakthrough or just a raid? The tanks and infantry, backed by artillery, would aim for limited objectives: seize Bourlon ridge at the north end of the sector, cross the St. That last part seems a bit of an anachronism and reflected a certain ambiguity in the British plans. To a veteran of Normandy 1944 or Desert Storm 1991, the tactics and technology of Cambrai might have seemed primitive, but not unfamiliar.įor their attack, the British assembled seven infantry divisions, three tank brigades, a thousand guns-and five cavalry divisions. Massed armor, short, surprise artillery barrages and air support. The Kaiser’s resolute riflemen, backed by artillery, could handle a few clumsy metal monsters. But at the Somme, a mere thirty-two Mark I tanks, unreliable and prone to breakdown, were neither enough to force a breakthrough or alarm the German high command. The dismal British offensive at the Somme in July 1916 had seen the advent of the newfangled “landships.” They were designed to break the deadlock of trench warfare by knocking down the barbed wire and knocking out the machine gun nests before the infantry they supported could be massacred.
It wasn’t the first time that tanks had seen combat. But in front of them clanked hundreds of fire-spitting metal rhomboids deflecting machine gun bullets like Wonder Woman’s bracelets. Onward, on usual, trudged the British infantrymen grunting under their heavy packs as they crossed No Man’s Land toward the German lines.
But this autumn morning would be different. That had been the grim, futile script of the first half of the First World War, played out at Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele and the other notorious bloodbaths of the Western Front. While the enemy struggled to regroup, the Germans would mass reserves for a quick, savage counterattack to retake any lost ground. If the British troops opposite them attacked, they would be impaled on barbed wire or machine-gunned into oblivion. Their plan was do what had worked for them so far.
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