Battle of Cambrai (1917)

Background

By the autumn of 1917 the British Expeditionary Force had spent months in the Third Battle of Ypres, where the Flanders mud made tanks all but useless. Officers of the Tank Corps looked for firmer ground on which to prove the new weapon. Brigadier-General Hugh Elles proposed a tank operation in the Cambrai area, and his chief staff officer, J. F. C. Fuller, drew up a scheme for a large raid into a canal-bounded pocket south-west of the town, where rolling downland suited tracked vehicles. In August, separately, Henry Tudor, commanding the artillery of the 9th (Scottish) Division, proposed a surprise attack in the IV Corps sector that relied on guns brought up secretly and registered silently, so that no preliminary bombardment would warn the enemy.

General Sir Julian Byng, commanding Third Army, combined the two ideas, and the raid grew into a full offensive with far wider aims: Bourlon Ridge, Cambrai itself and a thrust towards Valenciennes. Britannica judges that the drain of Passchendaele left the British without the resources for aims of that size.

Cambrai was an important supply centre behind the Siegfriedstellung, the Hindenburg Line, and taking the town and Bourlon Ridge would threaten the rear of the German line to the north. The sector was quiet, but the Germans had used the quiet to build an elaborate defence in depth, with deep belts of wire and trenches widened to stop tanks. The attack was set for 20 November on a front of roughly 10,000 yards, some 8 miles west of Cambrai. Despite the secrecy, the Germans were on moderate alert: they expected an attack at Havrincourt and expected tanks.

The armies

Byng attacked with two corps: III Corps (Pulteney) on the right and IV Corps (Woollcombe) on the left, six infantry divisions in all, with one more in reserve and the three divisions of the Cavalry Corps (Kavanagh) waiting to exploit a breach. The Tank Corps brought 476 tanks, about 378 of them Mark IV fighting tanks and the rest supply and service machines. Each fighting tank carried a fascine, a frame of 75 smaller brushwood bundles weighing about 1.5 tons, to drop into the widened Hindenburg trenches; tanks worked in threes, so that each wide trench could be bridged in turn. Elles chose to lead in the centre in his own tank, Hilda.

The artillery mattered as much as the armour. The 1,003 guns were registered silently, with the help of sound ranging, rather than by firing ranging shots, and fired No. 106 fuzes, which burst high explosive without cratering the ground the tanks had to cross. The Royal Flying Corps had trained its pilots in ground attack for two weeks beforehand.

Marwitz's German 2nd Army held the sector thinly, with two or three divisions in the line. One of them, the 54th, included Field Artillery Regiment 108, trained in anti-tank work after the French tank attacks of the spring. German reserves were close, and by 23 November about twenty divisions had gathered around Cambrai. For the counter-stroke they would use the short, intense bombardments and infiltration tactics developed by Hutier and his artillery commander, Georg Bruchmüller, against the Russians.

The battle

The British attack, 20–29 November (CDB90 engagement 320, CAMBRAI I). At dawn on 20 November, 06:20 or about 06:30 by different accounts, the British guns opened all at once on targets they had never fired at, with smoke and then a creeping barrage some 300 yards ahead of the tanks and infantry. On the right, the 12th (Eastern) Division reached Lateau Wood. The 20th (Light) Division pushed through La Vacquerie to the St Quentin Canal at Masnières, where the bridge collapsed under a tank, ending hopes of crossing in strength. In the centre, the 6th Division took Ribécourt and Marcoing, but the cavalry came through late and were repulsed at Noyelles. On the left, the 62nd (2nd West Riding) Division went through Havrincourt and Graincourt to within reach of Bourlon Wood, and the 36th (Ulster) Division reached the Bapaume–Cambrai road.

The check came at Flesquières, in the middle of the front. The 51st (Highland) Division under George Harper was held there,. Almost forty tanks were knocked out by German artillery near the village. Harper's local variation of the tank drill was long blamed; Bryn Hammond argues instead that the cause was the anti-tank gunners of FAR 108 and Harper's reluctance to commit his reserve brigade. The tale of a single German officer who knocked out many tanks, which Haig repeated in his despatch, was recorded by the official history as a legend. The Germans abandoned Flesquières that night.

By dark the British had advanced up to 5 miles (8 km) on a front about 6 miles wide, at a cost of about 4,000 casualties. They had taken 4,200 prisoners by one count, about 7,500 by another. But 179 tanks were out of action: 65 to enemy fire, 71 broken down and 43 ditched or lost to other causes. Bourlon Ridge was still in German hands.

On 21 November Flesquières and Cantaing were taken early, but the advance slowed. III Corps stopped and the effort shifted to IV Corps and Bourlon Ridge. German counter-attacks retook Moeuvres that day and Fontaine on 22 November. On 23 November the 40th Division (Ponsonby), with almost 100 tanks and 430 guns, attacked Bourlon Wood. It reached the crest but could go no further, losing more than 4,000 men in three days. A last effort by the 62nd Division and 30 tanks on 27 November was thrown back. On 28 November the offensive was halted, and the British dug in around a salient roughly 7 by 6 miles while the Germans fired more than 16,000 shells into Bourlon Wood in a single day.

The German counter-attack, 30 November–7 December (CDB90 engagement 321, CAMBRAI II). The Germans planned to pinch out the salient. Gruppe Arras (Moser) was to strike at Bourlon, while Gruppe Caudry attacked from Bantouzelle and Rumilly towards Marcoing, with Gruppe Busigny advancing from Banteux. At 07:00 on 30 November, after a short, intense bombardment, infantry advancing in groups rather than waves bypassed strongpoints and fell on III Corps. In the south they moved unexpectedly fast, spreading across some 8 miles and coming within a few miles of the village of Metz. The commanders of the 12th and 29th Divisions were almost captured, and Brigadier-General Berkeley Vincent had to fight his way out of his headquarters. At Bourlon the Germans lost heavily; one group of eight British machine guns fired more than 70,000 rounds. Counter-attacks by the Guards Division, the arrival of British tanks and nightfall held the line.

The German momentum faded the next day, but on 3 December they took La Vacquerie and forced the British off the east bank of the canal. Haig ordered a partial withdrawal from the northern salient. By 7 December the British were back near their start line, keeping only a stretch of the Hindenburg Line around Havrincourt, Ribécourt and Flesquières, while the Germans held a slightly smaller sector to the south, around Gonnelieu.

Aftermath

Britain greeted the first day's success by ringing church bells, the first such celebration since 1914 according to one account. British losses were about 44,000 for the whole battle, about 6,000 of them captured on 30 November; German losses were somewhere between 45,000 and 55,000 depending on the source. The ground taken was almost all given back, and the shock of 30 November led to several investigations, including a Court of Enquiry.

The lessons cut both ways. Cambrai showed that even the strongest field defences could be broken by surprise, using predicted artillery fire, tanks, infantry and aircraft together, methods that matured in the Hundred Days of 1918. Crown Prince Rupprecht warned that wherever the ground suited tanks, surprise attacks like this could be expected, so there could be no more quiet fronts, forcing scarce resources into anti-tank defence. Their own counter-attack, with its short bombardment and infiltrating storm troops, encouraged them to believe that an offensive could end the war before American strength told.

Cambrai is often called the first tank battle. It was not: British tanks first fought at Flers–Courcelette in September 1916, and both the British and French had used them in numbers earlier in 1917. It was the first large-scale, effective use of massed tanks, but the official historian and modern scholars such as Hammond give the artillery and infantry methods as much credit as the armour. The Royal Tank Regiment still marks Cambrai Day, and the Newfoundland Regiment is remembered at Masnières.

Wargaming it

Cambrai offers two very different games on the same rolling downland. The battalion or company scale suits it best, with one stand per company or platoon, one model per tank or section of tanks, and turns of 15–30 minutes.

The opening day is a set-piece break-in. The British player has surprise, a predicted barrage and hundreds of tanks, but tanks that break down, ditch and need their fascines to cross the widest trenches. The key terrain is the Flesquières ridge, the St Quentin Canal bridges at Masnières and Marcoing, and Bourlon Wood on the skyline. Rules should cover mechanical failure, German field guns firing over open sights and the friction of infantry–tank co-operation. The best what-ifs are Harper committing his reserve brigade early at Flesquières, the Masnières bridge holding, or the cavalry arriving in time to push past Noyelles.

The counter-attack of 30 November reverses the roles. The German player has a short, intense bombardment and storm troops trained to bypass strongpoints; the British player has a tired salient, scattered headquarters and the Guards Division in reserve. La Vacquerie and the Bonavis ridge are the objectives in the south, Bourlon Wood in the north. A campaign game linking the two phases, with tank and reserve losses carried over, lets players test whether Haig should have stopped on 21 November.

Maps and pictures

Pictures from the time

Photographs by the armies' photographers and the press, and drawings made at the time: free-to-use pictures from the battle's category on Wikimedia Commons. Each opens its file page there, with the full caption and source.