But there was one form of weapon which was, we felt sure, bound to be evolved by the Germans. It was one which we were not at all anxious to encounter. We imagined a weapon which should practically be the machine-gun version of the anti-Tank rifle; that is to say, a weapon which could pour out a stream of high-velocity, large-calibre bullets at the rate of two hundred a minute. Actually it was almost precisely such an engine that the Germans had got in their “Tuf” machine-gun, of which an interesting account is given in Weekly Tank Notes.
The name was an abbreviation for “Tank und Flieger” (tank and aeroplane), for it was against these enemies that this machine-gun was intended. It was to consist of no less than 250 pieces, which were made by sixty different factories, of which the Maschinen Fabrik Augsburg Nürnberg, was the only one entrusted with the assembling and mounting. The projectile fired was to be 13 millimetres in diameter. From experiments made with captured Tanks, the Germans ascertained that these bullets could pierce steel plates of 30 millimetres in thickness. No less than six thousand of these guns were to be in the field by April 1919, and delivery was to begin early in the previous December—just a month too late.
However, when the Armistice was signed, the firms were already in possession of the greater part of the stores and raw material for the manufacture of the guns, a quantity of which were by then well on the way to completion. Immediately after the signing of the Armistice, all the factories were instructed by telephone to continue manufacturing the “Tuf,” and about November 20 they received confirmation in writing of this order, and were instructed to keep on their workmen at all costs. Our occupation of the left bank of the Rhine proved a serious drawback to a continuation of the manufacture, as it completely interrupted communication between several of the factories. The Pfaff Works of Kaiserlautern (Palatinate) and the great Becker steel works of Frefeld, which played an important part in the manufacture of the guns, had to close down, both being on the left bank of the Rhine.
The Minister of War throughout the period of its manufacture asked for daily and minute reports as to the progress of the “Tuf,” and it was given priority over both submarines and aeroplanes. But once more, as ever in all that concerned Tanks, the Germans were several months too late. We were never destined to face this particular weapon with the Mark V. The modern Tank fears it not at all.
III
Our chronicle has now reached the three last, and the decisive months of the war.
It was a period of continuous fighting, in which a battle begun in any particular sector would spread along the front on either hand, until at last, by the middle of October, the whole line was in roaring conflagration; and by the second week in November the blaze had swept on almost to the borders of Germany, and the forces of the enemy had withered and shrivelled before it.
At first we made a series of more or less set attacks. Then came the break through the Hindenburg Line after the Second Battle of Cambrai, and the hastily-organised running fights of October, which culminated in the complete overthrow of German arms.
The whole period is at the moment of writing exceedingly difficult to dissect and to classify into definite battles, it being usually a matter of opinion when one engagement can be said to have ended and another to have begun. The nomenclature even is still fluid. Take, for example, the vast inchoate battle which raged from August 21 and 23 and culminated on September 2. It was fought by three separate armies. There were at least three principle “Z” days, and the battle seems to be indifferently known as the Battle of Bapaume, the Second Battle of Arras, or even as the Battle of Amiens. Nor if the historian were to attempt to name it by date would it be clearly more proper to call it the Battle of August 23 or 21. There is a good deal to be said for the German plan of christening their battles by some fancy name, or dubbing them “Kaiserchlact” or “Clarence,” according to one’s taste. A campaign of nameless battles is apt to defy Clio’s efforts at dissection and tidy arrangement, and to defeat her longing to see a neat row of actions dried, classified, and labelled in her Hortus Siccus.
We have indicated the changes which had taken place in the attitude of our own and the German High Commands toward Tanks. Much had been learnt by the Tank Corps themselves, and much had been regularised and systematised in their methods. We find that by August, Tank Corps preparation for a battle had been so completely reduced to a routine that to attempt to chronicle the preparation for any of our set attacks would be to make a mere cento, whose pieces might be culled from particulars already recorded for Cambrai, for Hamel and for Amiens. We therefore trust that the reader, without hearing any enumeration of gallons of petrol, tons of grease, or acres of maps, will understand that each of these “formal” battles was preceded by the usual herculean tasks of preparation.