The Cambrai Campaign, 1917

By Andrew Rawson

Cambrai Campaign 1917 is an account of the British Expeditionary Forces battles in November and December of 1917. It starts with the plan to carry out a tank raid on the Hindenburg Line at Cambrai. The raid grew into a full scale attack and Third Army would rely on a different style of attack. The preliminary bombardment would be done away with and the troops would assemble in secret.Predicted fire had reached such a level of accuracy that 1,000 guns could hit targets without registration. Meanwhile, over 375 tanks would lead the infantry through the Hindenburg Line, ripping holes in the wire and suppressing the enemy. The study of the German counterattack ten days later, illustrates the different tactics they used and the British experience on the defensive.Each stage of the battle is given equal treatment, with detailed insights into the most talked about side of the campaign, the British side. It explains how far the Tank Corps had come in changing the face of trench warfare. Over forty new maps chart the day by day progress of each corps on each day.Together the narrative and the maps provide an insight into the British Armys experience during this important campaign. The men who made a difference are mentioned; those who led the advances, those who stopped the counterattacks and those who were awarded the Victoria Cross.Discover the Cambrai campaign and learn how the British Armys brave soldiers fought and died fighting to achieve their objectives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526714398

Andrew Rawson

ANDREW RAWSON is a freelance writer who has written several books, covering campaigns from the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II, including the 'British Army Handbook, 1914–1918', 'Vietnam War Handbook' and 'The Third Reich 1919–1939' for The History Press.

Book preview

Introduction

All eyes were focussed on the Ypres Salient during the summer and autumn of 1917. The campaign had started well with the capture of Messines Ridge on 7 June but the attack east of the town on 31 July ended in a mud bath. The few actions in August and early September achieved little but the three big attacks between 20 September and 4 October gave GHQ hope. It seemed they had a successful formula for ‘bite and hold’ which could clear the defensive lines on Passchendaele Ridge before the Germans built more. But the weather again intervened and the campaign came to a bloody and muddy close after the high ground had been secured.

The Tank Corps had welcomed the improved Mark IV tank in the spring of 1917 and they had done well at Messines. However, Brigadier General Hugh Elles’ crews suffered setback after setback in the salient in the face of bad ground and new anti-tank tactics. The low point was 31 July when fifty-two tanks set off but only eleven returned; the rest were burnt out hulks or stuck in the mud. The tanks were withdraw from Flanders soon afterwards but Elles was looking to attack elsewhere. He chose the Hindenburg Line at Cambrai, where the ground was dry and relatively unscarred.

A combination of planning and training meant the tanks and infantry knew what was expected of each other. The use of predicted artillery fire on a massive scale meant the attack could be launched without a preliminary bombardment. That meant less strain on the logistics arm of the BEF and all the benefits of a surprise attack. The question was, could Third Army assemble thousands of men, hundreds of guns and dozens of tanks without the enemy noticing?

This book concentrates on Third Army’s experience in November and December 1917. It does not dwell on the politics or the German view and there are few references to the personal experiences of the men who fought and died. It begins with the plans put forward by the Tank Corps and Third Army for a tank raid at Cambrai. It covers the build-up to the tank attack on 20 November and continues with the stand-off on Bourlon Ridge. It ends with the German counter-attack on 30 November and the decision to withdraw from the salient a few days later. Each stage of the battle between 20 November and 6 December is given the same attention.

The information for the book comes from many sources but the backbone of the narrative comes from the single Military Operations in France and Belgium volume on the campaign. It is one of the twenty-eight Official Histories of the Great War. It was written by Captain Wilfred Miles, the second of his two volumes. His first had covered the 1916 Somme campaign from 2 July to 18 November and it was the subject of a number of controversies when it came out in 1938. The Cambrai volume must have been easier to put together but it did not appear until 1948, after World War II.

Comparing the two volumes illustrates the differences in levels of detail between the Official Histories. Miles’s Somme volume covers two armies’ engagements over a period of 140 days. His Cambrai volume covers one army over just seventeen days (the Cambrai volume does include the buildup while the Somme build-up is in another volume).

A lot of details come from the many divisional histories and regimental histories published between the two World Wars. The quality of these published histories varies enormously. Some are similar to the daily unit War Diaries and others give the bare details. But they all provide more information than the Official History. They often explain the reasons behind the successes and failures and we sometimes see how units blame the actions of others, rather than their own. These histories are good at describing the heroic exploits of members of their regiment or division.

Many of the divisional and regimental histories can be accessed for a reasonable fee at www.militaryarchive.co.uk. You can also access medal rolls, army orders, army lists and get assistance with the location of biographical information, awards and photographs of individuals. Joining the archive has given me annual access to all these resources for the same cost of a day visiting the London archives.

The war diaries are stored in the National Archives at Kew, London. In my experience they sometimes say little about a battalion’s battle experiences because the diarist is fully occupied, both physically and emotionally. Sometimes material you would expect to find has been removed or lost. They can, however, be accessed for a reasonable fee from www.ancestry.com.

I had to judge at what level of detail to pitch the information. There is nothing new to learn if there are too few facts but a book can become overwhelming if there is too much detail. This is not an exhaustive account of the tank battle and the German counter-attack at Cambrai in the winter of 1917 but it is a comprehensive one. I have also bucked the Army trend of describing events from right to left. We read text and look at maps from left to right, so I have written the narrative the same way unless the sequence of events dictated otherwise. The main exception is the German counter-attack because it was made in three stages, the first hitting Third Army’s right and the last was aimed at Third Army’s left.

Nearly fifty tactical maps have been included to help explain the different stages of the campaign. Typically there is one for each corps on each day it was engaged. The saying goes ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, and I believe the same applies to maps. Most military books rely on a limited number of large-scale maps, which do little to help the reader understand the text. Plenty of detailed maps has been a feature of all the books in this series.

My inspiration was Noah Trudeau’s A Testing of Courage, a book about the 1863 battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War. I had found this epic three-day battle confusing until I read Trudeau’s book. He uses large-scale maps every few pages which helped me understand the events both while reading the book and when I visited the battlefield in 2007. I wanted to do the same for the events around Cambrai in November 1917.

The Official History maps are sometimes cited as good examples but I believe the level of detail they show and clarity of information often leaves a lot to be desired. The same goes for those in the Cambrai volume. Some cover large areas while some only show the main terrain features and the minimum of information about units. This book uses trench map extracts, which are well known to anyone with an interest in the First World War, for their topographical background. Their grid system is 1,000 yards for each large square and 100 yards for each minor graduation. The main terrain features have changed little since the battle. The contours, roads, watercourses and woods have not changed their position while villages are only a little larger after one hundred years. It means the maps included in this book can be used to locate places on the battlefield if you visit.

The map symbols have been kept as simple as possible. Front lines before the battle commences are marked in solid lines while a line of dots marks the ground captured or lost. Objectives are marked with a line of dots and dashes while corps boundaries are marked by a line of dashes. Arrows are often used to indicate the direction of the advance. Each division and brigade is marked with its number, usually at zero hour. Battalions leapfrogged each other at regular intervals and it would be impossible to chart their progress without obscuring topographical information. But it is quite easy to estimate a battalion’s movements by comparing the text and the maps.

An exhaustive study of the Cambrai campaign would be twice the length of this book, so what has been omitted? There is little talk of the relationship between the War Cabinet, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s GHQ. But the meetings between the various levels of command and the British and French generals are mentioned. There is also little information on the German units but there is information on their defensive arrangements during Third Army’s attack. There is also sufficient information to give an understanding of their strategy and tactics during the counter-attack which began on 30 November. There are few details of casualties unless they were very high or low, because records are incomplete.

You will not find narratives from the personal diaries, which usually follow a depressing theme of mud and blood. The quotes I have chosen demonstrate the men’s pride in their achievements and their fighting spirit. Sometimes their dark humour perfectly explains a situation.

So what will you find? There is the planning behind the main attack and the attacks that followed. There is information about the bombardments, the infantry tactics and the tank tactics. Particular attention is drawn to the attack on 20 November, which made use of predicted artillery fire en masse and tanks to achieve surprise on a huge scale. There are the reasons behind the successes and failures of each attack. When possible, the men who led the attacks or who stopped the counter-attacks are remembered; as are the deeds carried out by those awarded the Victoria Cross.

The British Army faced many tactical problems as they attacked, some caused by the enemy’s activity and some by the terrain. They tried different methods and we see how they usually learned from their successes and failures. But they faced a capable enemy, a lack of resources and difficult weather conditions. The men of Third Army then had to do something the BEF had not done for three years; they faced large-scale attack. The events on 30 November and the days that followed demonstrated that the British soldier had not forgotten how to defend.

This is the sixth book in a series on the British Expeditionary Force’s campaigns on the Western Front in the Great War. I first visited the Cambrai area with the help of Rose Coombe’s book Before Endeavours Fade in 1990. It was just a flying visit en route to Verdun but I can still remember the town hall bell waking me up every hour. Little had changed when I made my latest detailed visit in the autumn of 2015 but my understanding of the campaign has increased. I have enjoyed writing about the attack and defence at Cambrai and I hope you enjoy reading about them.

I would like to thank Professor John Bourne for his guidance and help over the past twenty-five years. I would particularly like to thank him for the information he provided on the BEF’s generals.

I stayed at No 56 Bed and Breakfast in La Boisselle, on the 1916 front line, during my visit to Cambrai. David and Julie Thomson have looked after me many times at their ‘Oasis on the Somme’ during my battlefield research trips. We have had a number of conversations about Cambrai, especially about the 13th Essex’s last stand at Lock 5 on the Canal du Nord. Private Reginald Sparkes 20895 was one of the West Ham Pals who lost their lives in the heroic action and his name is on the Louverval Memorial to the Missing. He was Julie’s great-uncle. Lest we forget.

Andrew Rawson 2017

Chapter 1

Most Suitable for a Surprise Operation

The Genesis of a Surprise Attack

The Retreat to the Hindenburg Line

The town of Cambrai had been thirty miles behind the German lines since the autumn battles of 1914 and trains had carried troops and ammunition through the busy railway centre ever since. That all changed when the German High Command decided to withdraw its armies, to shorten its line, in the autumn of 1916. The new front would pass only eight miles to the west of the town.

Construction companies, labour units and Russian prisoners worked together on new fortifications all through the winter. Short stretches of trenches were joined together until they formed one long length, eighty-five miles from Neuville Vitasse to the River Aisne, east of Soissons. The new line was called the Siegfried-Stellung but the British would refer to it as the Hindenburg Line, after Paul von Hindenburg, the Chief of the German General Staff.

The line had several trench systems and they sometimes covered a three-mile deep area. An outpost line would disrupt attacks while the fighting would take place in the battle zone; a support line would contain any breakthroughs. Belts of barbed wire were erected in irregular patterns and gaps were left to funnel the enemy troops towards the machine-gun posts. The infantry hid in concrete shelters while the headquarters, communication and medical facilities were safe in deep dugouts.

The German Second Army began withdrawing from the Somme region at the end of February 1917. The British cautiously followed, encountering three defensive lines as they crossed the devastated region. Any thoughts that the Germans would continue their slow withdrawal were abandoned when a captured document revealed the ‘Alberich’ plan (named after a malicious dwarf in Richard Wagner’s Nibelungen musical dramas). They planned to move as fast as possible, beginning on 17 March.

The delayed withdrawal had given the German engineers time to carry out a ‘scorched earth’ policy, destroying everything before they left:

There were many fires burning when we occupied the village and as they were still burning, we tried to put them out. The junction of every road had been mined and blown up and everything of value had been destroyed. All the fruit trees had either been pulled down or an incision made around the bark so the sap would not rise. All the wells had been blown in and one had been poisoned with arsenic.

Buildings and dugouts were either blown up or booby-trapped with a multitude of crude and ingenious devices, making the British and Australian soldiers wary of touching anything. It would take the tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers weeks to make the rear areas safe.

The Western Front in November 1917.

The rolling countryside south-west of Cambrai was similar to the Somme, with small villages and large woods a feature of the landscape. The River Schelde meandered west of the town, passing through a narrow valley around Banteux; the St Quentin Canal ran parallel to it. The Canal du Nord was under construction when the war broke out and it consisted of a huge, dry channel.

The Hindenburg Line ran in a north-west to south-east direction. The outpost line had short lengths of trench and fortified buildings to keep patrols away from the front trench. The main line was approximately 1,500 yards from the British line and it had two trenches. They were often dug much wider at ground level to prevent the tanks crossing. Typically there were four belts of waist-high barbed wire, each over ten yards deep. Wire was also erected either side of the communication trenches, to stop the attacking troops moving laterally. The support line was a similar system, 1,500 yards to the rear, but it was incomplete and some trenches were no more than shallow ditches protected by a little wire.

There was another line of defence in preparation up to 2½ miles behind the support trenches. The Cantaing Line section covered Bourlon Wood while the section east of the St Quentin Canal was called the Beaurevoir–Masnières line. They were again only half completed.

Planning a Tank Raid

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), had first discussed an attack in the Cambrai area with his French counterpart, General Robert Nivelle, on 24 April 1917. The British battle around Arras was in its third week while the French attack on the Aisne had been underway for a week. Neither had achieved the desired breakthrough, so the generals had to consider future operations.

Nivelle wanted the French to attack the Hindenburg Line around St Quentin while the British attacked at Cambrai. Haig discussed the idea with General Sir Henry Rawlinson of Fourth Army and General Sir Hubert Gough of Fifth Army. Rawlinson was asked to prepare a plan of attack.

The French offensive failed to live up to its expectations and Nivelle had been sacked on 15 May. Three days later Haig met his successor, General Phillipe Pétain. He said he might attack the Hindenburg Line instead of in Flanders, following the capture of Messines Ridge, and wondered if the French could attack at St Quentin. Lieutenant General Sir William Pulteney, III Corps’ commander, eventually suggested advancing between the Canal du Nord and St Quentin canals but the plan came to nothing and the BEF attacked in Flanders on 31 July.

The Cambrai area prior to Third Army’s attack.

Brigadier General Elles and his chief staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Fuller, were pushing to get their Tank Corps involved in future offensives. But Haig still thought the tanks were an ‘adjunct to the infantry attack’ and the Flanders mud did not help the Tank Corps’ case. The tanks had either bogged down in the mud or were knocked out on the few roads, so Elles suggested using the tanks on better ground. Lieutenant Colonel Fuller suggested a large tank raid with the RFC making low-flying attacks, as the