“When the German blow fell there was no time to hit and simultaneously to close the fingers.”
Out of 370 Tanks which were fit to fight, only 180 saw any action, a great many machines running out of supplies or being incapacitated by some temporary mechanical trouble, and so lost without having fired a shot.
The fault lay in the fact that the infantry Commanders under whom they were acting did not fully understand the functions and limitations of the Tank, or realise that as the final loss of a good many Mark IV. machines in such a retreat was inevitable, it would have been much better to give the Tanks a run for their money.
III
Villers Bretonneux
It was not till the German offensive had lasted for more than a month that opposing Tanks at last met in battle.
The enemy had pushed us back to within six or seven miles of Amiens, and he now planned a more or less full-dress attack upon positions on high ground, which were, in fact, the outer defences not only of the town, but of the vital Amiens-Paris railway. A break through on this sector would be a serious disaster, and the situation was an anxious one. The weather was unsettled, and the mornings often still misty in the Somme country.
At 6.30 on April 23 the river fog lay thick, and under cover of this mist the Germans attacked the whole of the line south of the Somme after a short and particularly intense bombardment.
A company of heavy Tanks of the 1st and seven Whippets of the 3rd Battalion had been hastily moved up into the domain of the 3rd Corps, north and south of Villers Bretonneux, where it was rumoured that the Germans were going to use Tanks, and, in fact, when at last the first little knots of German infantry appeared through the fog, three huge forms accompanied them.
It was over Tanks of this type, the “Schultz” and the “Hagan,” that the little boys of London scrambled so delightedly on the Horse Guards Parade in the spring of 1919. Now all we could see of them, as they lumbered slowly through the fog, was that they were a good deal larger and heavier than the heavy British Tanks, and that they were rather tortoise shaped, the armoured “shell” everywhere coming down over the tracks like a sort of crinoline.
They broke right through our line, opening a way for the infantry which was following them. But three of our Tanks, under Captain F. C. Brown, M.C., happened to be on their way to the very spot (Cachy) where the German Tanks had attacked. Unfortunately two of the three were females, whose machine-guns were not of much use against the new thick-skinned enemy.