We have said that only a few minor Tank actions were fought during the last part of May and the month of June. Two of these small encounters, however, were rather interesting. To begin with, the 17th Armoured Car Battalion fought its first action in company with the French on June 11. At 9.30 on the morning of June 10 orders were received by Colonel Carter, commanding the Battalion, to report to the 1st French Army at Contay. At Contay instructions were issued for the Battalion to proceed to Ravenel, near St. Just. The Battalion got this order by telephone, and although the night was very dark and wet, and the roads crowded with traffic, it reached Ravenel after a sixty miles’ journey by five in the morning of June 11. That same day it went into action with the 10th French Army in its counter-attack at Belloy. Two sections of the Armoured Cars engaged the enemy with machine-gun fire, but unfortunately the roads here were piled high with every sort of débris. This prevented the cars from being as active as they were to prove themselves later.
The second small action was a night raid, interesting as the first in which Tanks had ever been engaged. Here the 10th Battalion fought in conjunction with the 4th Corps. We were endeavouring to capture a series of posts near Bucquoy, only five Platoons of infantry and five female Tanks being employed. The raid began at about half-past eleven at night. We were met with a heavy barrage from trench mortars and machine-guns, and the infantry were held up. The Tanks, however, managed to push forward, and carried on the attack in the pitch dark by themselves. As they advanced they met with a number of large parties of Germans, into the “brown” of which they fired. The Tanks certainly accounted for a great many of the enemy, though it being, as we have said, extremely dark, it was impossible to make a very exact computation of the “bag.” Curiously enough, not a single Tank was damaged by the trench mortar barrage, which was extremely heavy. One Tank was swarmed over by a particularly bold party of the enemy and the crew shot them down with their revolvers. Later on this same Tank managed to rescue a wounded infantry officer who had earlier been taken prisoner by the Germans. The raid is interesting as it demonstrated the possibility of manœuvring Tanks in the dark through the enemy’s lines—not a single machine lost direction—and also showed how much protection was afforded to the machines by their invisibility.
IV
By the middle of June the British High Command had grown anxious to make some test of the position of things on the enemy’s side of the line. This they proposed to do by a more or less limited and tentative attack, an attack which might, if it was successful, be utilised as a dress rehearsal for larger ventures, or which, if it failed, would not commit us too deeply. The Australians had been constantly harassing their vis à vis on the Villers Bretonneux Front, and the High Command gave out that for this and other reasons they considered that a better place than the sector opposite Villers Bretonneux could hardly be found from which to launch our ballon d’essai. What those “other reasons” were did not appear for nearly a month after the battle had been fought. It was proposed that between sixty and seventy Tanks belonging to the 5th Brigade should be employed. Our attack was to have a strictly limited objective, its ostensible purpose being to capture the spur running from the main Villers Bretonneux plateau towards the Somme, on the east side of Hamel, and thus to gain important observation and incidentally a useful jumping-off place for any subsequent advance. “Z” day was to be on July 4.
Directly the attack had been decided upon, Tanks and Australians began their combined training in the area of the 5th Tank Brigade. Tank units were at once permanently affiliated to corresponding Australian infantry units with whom they were to fight, and by this means a very close comradeship was cultivated. It was (tradition relates), most necessary that some special steps should be taken to ensure the confidence of the Australian infantry in the Tank Corps, for, in the absence of artillery preparation, upon the Tanks would almost entirely depend the success and prestige of the Australians in this first Allied offensive since the March disaster.
Now the Australians, though having, as it were, a natural affinity for the activity and surprise of a Tank as against a prepared artillery attack, were not inclined to bestow their approval on the Tanks without due cause being given.
They still had vivid memories of the tragedy of errors of the Bullecourt incident in 1917.
They were, however, very open-minded, and the battle partners had not long been in training together before their relations were particularly cordial.
Coy and hard to please as were the Australians in the beginning, the triumphant success of their partnership in battle left them no memory of their earlier shyness, and made them vociferous in their praises of a combination that the Tanks had long felt would prove notably effective.
The plan of the attack soon took exact shape. It is worth more or less detailed consideration, as it was upon the lines of the Battles of Cambrai and Hamel that all set Tank attacks were afterwards based.