Cambrai: The Tank Corps Story | The Tank Museum

[Music] [Music] a hundred years ago a major battle took place all around here were in calm Brae in the northeast corner of France this was where a major attack took place in November of 1917 using well over 400 tanks [Music] [Music] today we consider the tank an essential part of any modern fighting force but that's not always been the case a hundred years ago soon after its invention there were serious questions as to the validity of the tank on the battlefield is it actually effective does it do its job calm brave changes all that for the first time the tank shows its full potential on the battlefield and that changes everything [Music] the Battle of Conway is more than just about these fighting mark for tanks Conway is now seen by a number of historians as perhaps the first all arms battle calm Bray was the test bed for new technology and tactics it would eventually help win the war for the Allies surprise was critical to success in secrecy was paramount to ensure air superiority almost 300 Royal Flying Corps planes were assembled to prevent enemy reconnaissance and to identify an attack ground targets the artillery would use new techniques to accurately register powers without the need to fire ranging killers over 1,000 artillery pieces would instead deliver a sudden lightning involvement to soften resistance without alerting the enemy to an impending attack days or even weeks in advance of zero our six infantry divisions were ready to attack they would be supported by two divisions of cavalry who would wait in reserve should a breakthrough come but the tank corps would lead the way with nine battalions consisting of over 400 tanks this is their story the first time the tank is used in action is September of 1916 that's under a year since the first tank ever has been built the famous little Willy the tank crews were hurriedly put together they were trained in secret and then rushed out to France to take part at the end of the Battle of the Somme with the hope they might make a difference to that long attritional battle and see some form of victory before the end of the year whilst that first tank attack had some limited success the tank still had real problems it was at the cutting edge of contemporary technology but it was unreliable it was unwieldy and in many ways it was still an unproven weapon yet there was great potential in what they may be capable of and Haig ordered a thousand women to understand the Battle of Calm Bray you really need to know about the mark for tank the mark 4 is the tank Britain makes the most of in World War one over a thousand of these are made it follows on that classic rhomboid shape that you see with the mark one tank the rhomboid shape it's there so it can crush the wire down underneath as it goes forwards and hopefully as well in the early models this would allow you to actually cross the width of a German trench what they improve on with the mark 4 is they make the armor thicker it's now about 12 millimeters thick the tank goes pretty much at the same speed as the mark 1 about 3.7 miles an hour at top speed still got a crew of eight we're still armed with 6-pounder guns although on the mark four these are shortened and we still have female tanks as well which are just armed with machine guns inside the mark 4 they would have been an eight-man crew for a guys are needed just to drive the vehicle and there's two men each side on the sponsons they're Manning the guns now the engine this is a hundred and five horsepower Daimler engine it's a petrol engine once it starts running all conversation in the space ceases it's just so noisy so everything has to be done by hand signals kicks or shouting in people's ears the exhausts that run through the top of the engine into the roof they glow red-hot after about half an hour's running they've had temperatures recorded up to a 120 Fahrenheit or about 50 degrees centigrade that is dick you lessly hot one of the hottest places on earth was recorded as that so the guys themselves are going to get very warm very quickly now here is a differential I'm actually sitting on the starting handle for the soldiers are needed just to turn that to get this engine going and there is no suspension at all so when we maneuver along everything we're going to feel we're going to be rocking all over the place and as you can see this is very much pre health and safety this vehicle it's empty of most of its kit sometimes they put extra fuel on the roof there's a bit of a risk there as you can imagine if they're hit by shellfire or penetrated by machine guns that petrol can run down onto things such as hot exhausts I'm sitting now in the drivers position we'd be going in this direction driver sits here the commander normally a young officer a second left tenant would sit in this seat again looking forward and there be two extra soldiers to drive the tank gears men who are at the back and quite simply it's a very complex piece of equipment to drive and we've got to alert the attention of the gears Minh if we want to turn left or right and normally that was done by the officer with something like a spanner in his hand to bash the metalwork and then give a hand signal 1 or 2 left or right to the gears Minh to indicate we're going to turn and then the driver has to disengage the clutch pedal down here the commander would actually use one of the levers in front of him to pull back to brake on one side of the track and you can see here the gear levers they would be using to maneuver and disengage the engine drive from the rear sprocket that's driving those tracks along allowing us to turn just in front of the gears modes position just here this is where we have two Gunners on either side and you've got a loader they'd be picking up the six pound arounds just about this size six pounds of a weight a shot of the projectile nowadays we judge the gun on the size of the hole on the bow about a 57-millimeter is a six pounder gun and you can see all around the vehicle there's stowage points for the six pound or ammunition now if you want a female tank you would have nice guns or Hotchkiss guns here on the sponsons and again this space is all around for boxes of ammunition to supply those weapons the six pounder here loader and gunner the gunner is looking through this site it's a two time site and he'd be using this piece here to push and elevate or depress the gun and from side to side he leans his body weight on it to get Traverse now the truth is one of these guns here the gunner is going to find it very very hard to find a target to actually fire out he uses this little pistol grip here to actually fire when he's seen something and the problem there of course is is on those First World War battlefields not only is it hard to actually see anything in the front line to fire act you're actually going from a very very unbalanced position you're going to be feeling everything as you go over so the only chance this gun was really god of hitting something accurately is if he gets the commander's attention stops the tank or sometimes it was the other way around the commander would stop the vehicle indicate to the gunner where he can fire his six pounder rounds now we've actually got a seat up here at the front of visibility through this aperture which would be closed when we were going into action would be very minimal because we end up then looking through a tiny periscope going forward the front here we get a bit of fluff air coming through from the front the rest of the crew is slowly going to be poisoned by carbon monoxide those fumes are coming out the engine all the time they don't all make it through the exhaust into the roof so again that was another thing that just had to be aware of slowing down during the course of a day in a tank as you're inhaling all this poisonous carbon monoxide fumes the chaps only realize they'd got that when they got outside afterwards if they survived of course the battle they get outside they breathe in fresh air and you start vomiting that's a classic symptom of carbon monoxide poisoning the conditions inside the tanks were very basic and they were also a logistical nightmare to deploy but as the tank crews fought in these vehicles they gained experience and they realized there was more they could do with them unfortunately the High Command found those lessons harder to absorb at the Battle of Arras they were deployed in small groups to support the infantry but they made tempting targets for the German artillery at Passchendaele the tanks sank in the mud and the infantry lost confidence in them morale in the tank corps is an all-time low [Music] after the conclusion of the Passchendaele debacle as far as tanks were concerned there was a serious consideration whether they should wash them out altogether and the tank people put up a plea to have one big attack on good going with all the tanks he'd got and after a good deal of argument that was accepted after the costly failure of the Battle of Passchendaele Haig is keen to see some form of success before the end of 1917 and the suggestion of a raid at convoy whose to meet that requirement it was the choice of a splendid one it hadn't been fought over the gain was very good and the runner le couldn't ask for better conditions Cambria was a major town and transport hub behind the German lines the intended battlefield was protectively flanked on either side by the San Quentin canal to the east and the unfinished canal du Nord to the west the British line ran five and a half miles between the two and it was across this front that the tank corps would attack primary objectives included the villages of River call flesh queer and grain core which fell on the path to one of the main objectives the high ground at bawlin but if calm Brae itself was to be captured key crossings of the San Quentin canal had to be secured at mark Oien and maze Nia with these secured the door would be wide open for the cavalry to exploit and they are for the first time in our lives we saw the battlefield routes are completely unscarred it was really quite exciting because we had an awful pasting up of Passchendaele we knew there's no end result was here did seem something too worthwhile going for but the German defenses here were formidable this was the famous Hindenburg line we're standing now on what a hundred years ago the Germans called the Siegfried Stella or for the British who are about to attack them and the Commonwealth forces something that we called the Hindenburg line in the spring of 1917 the Germans retreated from for what they considered slightly more awkward to defend positions back to this pre-prepared great depth fortification almost you could call it they built the Siegfried Stellan with a series of trenches and massive amounts of barbed wire everybody pointed out where the enemy were you can see a demo or nothing except an enormous felt great big death mess which was heavy barbed wire I had never seen such a depth of hardware I suppose it was ten yards deep and about four feet high and so dense and who could barely poke a broom handle through it the Hindenburg lined was typically several lines of trenches deep some trenches were widened specifically to act as anti-tank obstacles thick belts of barbed wire fold attacking infantry into killing zones dominated by concrete machine gun emplacements if the first line of trenches was overrun defenders would retreat into the second line slowing the attack concrete bastions were sited to provide cover for other defensive strongpoints and redoubts success at calm Brae meant getting the tank through and beyond the Hindenburg Line the tank all had to come up with a number of innovations to help them attack the Hindenburg line one of which was the 15 to help them cross those wider German trenches now to cross that Hindenburg line it was quite impossible because they're enormous they widened deep so the ingenuity of our headquarters staff reduced the answer which was to provide enormous bundles of brushwood about five feet in diameter and we carried on the nose of the tank and as the tank came to the trench this bundle was released it fell into the bottom of the trench and this enabled the tank to nose down rest on it and crawl up over the other side and in this way the uncrossable Hindenburg line was crossed it was quite terrifying that becomes it was about seven feet high very very thick wire and there were 120 yards deep in places and of course if we'd have stopped in that or got our track ripped off then we should be for it another the innovations for the Battle of Kong Bray is these grappling hooks these cleared they were for the russified driving into the wire to brace dropping their anchors turning away from each other and going down the length of the were dragging the anchor after them result for us to cleared the ground as a clean as a whistle there wasn't a scrap of anything they're not even weeds before the battle could begin the tank corps had to move their men and all their machines up to the front line it was a major logistical operation here we're at eat rest where there's an abandoned railway station behind me and this is where the tanks of D G and E battalions were offloaded ready to move off to their hide points and then later to go on to their attack points thirty-six trains alone were needed just to bring the different tank battalions forward one of the issues a tank corps had to face was planning the routes forward for the battle they had to get their tanks off the railway stations up to forming up points camouflaged and hidden and then forward to the relevant start lines now to do that they use reconnaissance officers who went forward and marked some of those routes with white tapes with a black line running through the middle the idea there was so that the tanks would be moving in the dark the officer would walk in front of them to follow the tanks sometimes holding a cigarette or a light so the driver could follow him and the important thing was to get those tanks moved overnight sometimes with planes flying over above to hide the sound into the position ready for that 6:20 a.m. start one of those young reconnaissance officers was Norman Dillon and he was going ahead of the tanks with tape in one hand and the stick in the other he was testing the ground and to this day Royal Tank Regiment officers have as a symbol of their office an ash plant a stick and that dates back to the Battle of Cambrai now many years later Norman Dillon gave the tank museum a number of items including the stick that was in his hand that day and on it he annotated the story of what happened to him that morning out of a blue came a bullet and slipped I'm coming to knock my walking stick miles out of my hand and the thought is very annoying I don't know where it came from or who fired I never have made it out this who's missed that it was tied around and local racing station rested for me selected them knew on the night before the 20th on all the fields round beau camp the hamlet behind me tanks were being readied Ellis the commander issues order number six he's special order number six and that's read out to all the men tomorrow the tank corps will have the chance of which it has been waiting for many months to operate on good going in the van of the battle all that hard work and ingenuity can achieve has been done in the way of preparation it remains for unit commanders and tank crews to complete the work by judgment and pluck in the battle itself in the light of past experience I leave the good name of the Corps with great confidence in your hands I propose leading the attack of the center division and in that he's trying to inspire them and to say this is our opportunity this is our chance on the following morning and Ellis also says that he's going to go forward in one of the tanks he realizes is after all the preparation that after all the briefings there's very little else he can actually do on the morning of the attack so he decides to do something fairly inspirational and say he's going to go ahead and actually lead the attack in one of the tanks and that's true now really for all tank commanders they are part of the tank and the crew they're not leading from a rear wood or a distant position the attack was led by general who edits in person and it shows a spirit event they were determined to do something which they'd been frustrated so much in the past another amazing item that survives from the Battle of Cambrai is the calm brave flank there's different stories about how this is put together but qsr Ellis is the inspiration behind it it's whether his wife goes to a milliner shop or Hugh himself but these are the only colors that seemed to be left you've got brown red and green and he puts them together as a flag and the tank all then interprets that and still does to this day as through mud blood to the green fields beyond that flag was carried by Alice into action in the morning in doing so Hugh Ellis set a standard for leading from the front the tanks had assembled on the rear would slope of bow can't reach and at 6:20 a.m. they started heading off through the British lines that will be passing now down the slope towards river core and on the left-hand flank heading towards flesh career Ridge all the preparation that have been going on for weeks beforehand this was the moment the crews they'd be heading forward at about this pace we're going about 3 miles an hour that was the speed of a tank as it went full pelt across country started off crawling along very quietly very carefully long tape lines which been put out beforehand we had rough compasses in the Tings and we got our course and we set course for the enemy line was there no answer from Germans have told him for the first time in our lives that we saw there the Hun being blown up all over the place troops of practically every tank that was at the disposal of the tank or attacked at once there were no tanks in reserve surprise had been achieved but now the tanks for approaching the Hindenburg Line the wire alone remained a significant obstacle both for the tanks and the infantry supporting them the tanks made great sways in the wire and the job who are paying with us as they came through the gaps we'd made the tanks went through it and I've listened to followed the tracks and walked straight through who had any travel the tourism has been a carpet we all arrived into a deep ballet known as the grand reveal River course at in the grande ravine which was far from the obstacle that its name implied having expected to encounter more difficult terrain and considerable resistance in the village the tank arrived ahead of schedule and they were forced to halt whilst the artillery barrage continued the Germans of just finished papers they were completely taken by surprise they're running about their hands up hands down hands everywhere and we had a wait there of 15 minutes to enable their bare hours to lift and people sort themselves out and my crew got out for a smoke and have a look round and when the time came to go on I found I had no croteau they're all looting we started off at bootcamp farm that's in the distance now just on the horizon and the tanks have OnStar down to the ground ravine and then continued up their attack to River call which is just behind us it was here at less creer Ridge that the trouble began we went up to slope towards a place called freakier and here the thing wasn't quite such a cakewalk so after the delays back in River core the tanks of D and H battalion continued up the slopes behind us towards here flesh Korea Ridge and along here German machine gun positions were hidden behind the chateau Park wall as well as two batteries along the ridge of German artillery and they took out up to about 30 tanks as they came forward that we then went on further top and came to the trachea ridge of whether it's a belt of cream and here we met the most intense machine-gun fire it was so hot one had to completely close down and we had no infantry accompanying us here they'd fallen back on account of exhaustion and there were insufficient foragers to come through it eventually I heard that female wounded and then I learned it myself and then we got short of petrol we decided to go back to really pure oil and refill without the support of infantry the tanks were finding themselves increasingly exposed and the loss of surprise allow the German anti-tank Gunners to do their work they fired on open sights picking off the slow-moving targets one by one with momentum waning and the forward tanks now having to pick their way past the wreckage of their comrades it would have taken considerable courage just to keep going but that's just what one D battalion tank named Deborah did her commander Frank Gustav heap won a Military Cross that morning and today Deborah is on public display as a unique memorial to the tank men of calm Bree Philippe calls in ski is Deborah's proud custodian he tells her story when the bra appear on on the village most of the tanks which were next to her were all destroyed or as to his draw so she was the only tank on the morning of the 20th of November to enter the village of lakiya which show great resistance because of its German garrison but also because of the German Field Artillery which was particularly active they have in fact the phylactery was the the best weapon which showed great efficiency against tanks and the evidence was that flicky of course Debra during the fighting at flesh square advanced through the village she turned right and came down this road towards me we're just about here she was hit by a field gun four of the crew members were killed and they were subsequently buried at the military cemetery behind me the think Amanda escape from that escape that tragedy and it was able to correct to other of his boy with surviving boys the others were killed and he brings them back to the British line in spite of sniper fire in spite of machine-gun fire and you appear in to his line and of course when the report was given clearly it is a highly the Military Cross Debra sat in a street at Fleck ierra the village changed hands several times at the end of the war the tank was buried in a deep hole filly found it and carefully excavated it it has since been displayed in a new museum open for the centenary on the left flank of the battle field guns and the news coming from flicky air slow down the advance here a grain court further north from the attack at flesh square they actually halted the tanks because of the problems that were going on further south the number of tanks were being knocked out at flesh Korea worried them and they were thinking of actually taking tanks from this sector to support the flesh gray air attack but it was here at grain court that an iconic item was captured from the Germans in the fields behind us a German 77 millimetre field gun was firing at the British a tank called gorgonzola 2 commanded by Albert Baker managed to come round behind the gun and they captured it and that was towed off as a trophy and this is grain colt gum Albert Baker hitches it up to gorgonzola to his tank and it's dragged off the battlefield and after the war it's actually brought back to Britain handed over to the tank corps and it's one of those classic trophies of the Battle of corn brave that survived and here we've got what the Germans would call an na 96 gun it goes into service in the late 1890s it's a 77 millimeter gun and it's typical of those batteries that were facing the British tanks at the Battle of Cambrai this particular gun was part of a battery at grain core we think it knocked out at least two of Albert Baker's G battalion tanks before they're captured and basically around this big onto a mark 4 tank it's going to do an awful lot of damage [Music] on the right side of the battlefield the advance of the tank corps came to a sudden and dramatic halt here at Maz ne'er the tanks were going to have to cross the Saint Quentin canal now the tanks advanced to the edge of the village of Maz near and they'd taken control by major Philip Hammond of F battalion and he tries to get tanks across to the far side when we got to the Hindenburg's the port line we got some tanks and went bald headed over the open for the bridge at Maz near unfortunately just as we came into the village the Bosch managed to blow a hole in the bridge so Hammond sent forward a tank called flying fox 2 which got across the bridge but further charges were then detonated we then started across our guns delivering the goods as fast as we could slap the shells into the breaches I was laying the right gun and it was great houses full of the swine at about 50 yards range one couldn't miss we had almost got across when crash the Boche blew the far end of the span in and we dropped smack into the canal that really stopped any chance of tanks progressing across the San Quentin Tinnell and going north the commander of flying fox Walter Farrow received a Military Cross for his action dat Maz near the crew all survived the fall but the loss of the bridge was a major setback in a few short hours the tanks had achieved one of the biggest breakthroughs and advances of the war they traveled up to five miles captured over 4,000 prisoners and had penetrated the supposedly impregnable Hindenburg Line it was an unprecedented achievement and the final breakthrough was now tantalizingly close but where were the reserves where was the cavalry to exploit it and we got to a village called a crater and there I ran into an Indian cavalry brigade it was a most extraordinary sight the first time I've ever seen a horse carefully burgade a ready for action and they were waiting for orders which unfortunately they never got as stunning as a tank or advance was the gains could not be held without fresh infantry support and cavalry to exploit the gaps the opportunity to achieve a breakthrough was waning it could have been imagined British victory I don't think they're enough troops on the ground partly because a lot of troops have been sent to support the Italians those troops should have been taking part of it in Canberra and should have been the Bekaa it's the camera corps had been on the spot there never would have been a different matter the tank men felt let down particularly by the failure of the cavalry to arrive where are the cavalry are really gonna burst through expecting to see them coming through in horns said there is no gap and you haven't taken it and then of course a lot of they were feeling exist to this very day and tanks versus cavalry the cavalry would argue there was little more they could have done that day the canal crossings had not been secured and flaky air at the center of the battlefield was still in enemy hands at nightfall whilst the tanks were well on their way to ball on the woods would be the sight of a stubborn German defense over the next few days the situation at the end of the day was in truth a confused one on the one hand a stunning its success had been achieved with a five mile advance at relatively little human cost the tank men knew they had done something no one had managed to do before and here it was plain for all to see tremendous success we had no sudden we told you so attitude may be fronting open defect pet of butter and pleased at wrapping the area of his horse generals eager to boost the mood of a war-weary nation the British government ordered that the church bells be rung out in celebration when news of the achievement arrived but on the other hand a strategic victory was far from complete at the end of the first day over half the tanks across a start line in the morning were out of use either through enemy fire or mechanical failure crews were exhausted many of them hadn't slept for 24 hours in fact the entire British Army was exhausted and when battle began the following morning there was far less to show for the efforts small gains were made but surprise and the minton were gone and the German defenders had now reorganized so fighting returned to an attritional slog worse was to follow when ten days later a major german counterattack pushed the british right back to where they started what had appeared to be a great victory saw a major reverse conway wouldn't be taken until october 1918 so how should we remember the Battle of Cambrai a hundred years on the tank course all calm rays of vindication for all the efforts of their men and new machines despite the fact they had over a thousand casualties their performance secured their future and whilst the value of the tanks was finally proven lessons about their limits were learnt - such as a need for infantry support and reserves Canberra is considered a key point in the development of the British Army where it tried and proved the all arms tactics that it would use with immense success the following summer at the Battle of Army on [Music] you [Music] [Applause] you [Music] you

Channel: The Tank Museum

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Rating: 4.9267125 out of 5

Keywords: world war one, first world war, tanks, tank, mark iv, the tank museum, cambrai, tank corps, battle tanks, WWI, history, army, ww1, royal tank regiment, battle of cambrai documentary, royal tank regiment documentary, guy martin tank, guy martin ww1 tank, ww1 tank documentary, royal tank regiment cambrai, ww1 tank

Id: DX_BnN4cWbo

Length: 36min 34sec (2194 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Its_All_Me]

Fucking hell , just as dangerous as going over the top. That said ; a great invention from the British that shaped the course of future warfare