The new battle was to be fought in the area which lay between the rivers Somme and Scarpe, and for his selection of this particular place Sir Douglas Haig in his Despatch gives two reasons.
“The enemy did not seem prepared to meet an attack in this direction, and, owing to the success of the Fourth Army, he occupied a salient, the left flank of which was already threatened from the south. A further reason for my decision was that the ground north of the Ancre River was not greatly damaged by shell-fire, and was suitable for the use of Tanks. A successful attack between Albert and Arras in a south-easterly direction would turn the line of the Somme south of Péronne, and gave every promise of producing far-reaching results. It would be a step forward towards the strategic objective St. Quentin-Cambrai.”
It is interesting to see how high a place Tanks now held in the estimation of the General Staff, and how carefully their peculiarities were considered.
But it was not only the British High Command which had begun to busy itself with the natural history of the Tank.
Since the lesser battles of July and the greater battle of August 8, the attitude of the German G.H.Q. had entirely changed.
When we first began to use Tanks it will be remembered that the Germans, though perfunctorily alluding to them as “cruel and detestable,” had in effect sneered at them as makeshifts by which we hoped to supplement our scanty supply of more legitimate munitions of war.
Besides, their contempt for all we did being sincere, the Tanks’ British parentage damned them without further investigation.
“Search and see, for out of Galilee cometh no good thing.”
The Germans themselves made their attitude perfectly clear.
“The use of 300 British Tanks at Cambrai (1917) was a ‘battle of material,’ and the German Higher Command decided from the very outset not to fight a ‘battle of material.’”