Land Battleships: The Tank Comes to the Western Front

Before dawn on 15 September 1916, on the churned ground outside a Picardy village called Courcelette, something crawled out of the fog that no soldier on earth had ever seen before.

A German infantryman, by one account, fled his trench screaming that a crocodile was coming. It was a tank. And the village it helped take that day was the same ground where, twenty-four hours later, Private Chip Kerr of Edmonton’s 49th Battalion won the Victoria Cross.

This episode tells the full story of the tank on the Western Front: the desperate idea dreamed up to break the deadlock of the trenches; the clanking, breakdown-prone, half-blind steel ovens the first crews fought and suffered inside; the terror and the failure of that first day at Courcelette; and the long road to Amiens on 8 August 1918 — the “black day of the German Army” — where the tank finally came of age with the Canadian Corps at the point of the spear.

It’s a story that runs straight through Canada’s war. Canadians were there at the tank’s combat debut at Courcelette, the day before Private John Chipman “Chip” Kerr of the 49th Battalion won his Victoria Cross on the same ground. And Canadians were the spearhead at Amiens in August 1918, where the tank finally came of age. Along the way, we climb inside the steel oven the crews actually fought in, and we hear from the men themselves. British tankers from the very first machines, and a private of the 24th Battalion who rode the tanks forward at Amiens.

*Wikipedia

In 1999, a Mark IV Female, D51: Deborah, was excavated at the village of Flesquières in France. It had been knocked out by shell-fire at the Battle of Cambrai (1917) and subsequently buried when used to fill a crater. Work is underway on its restoration. But that’s a story for a future episode!

Above is a series of First World War era Canadian Official postcards depicting tanks. They were found in my late Grandfather’s personal items several years after his passing.

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Sources & further reading

Books (primary scholarly anchors)

• Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914–1916 (Viking Canada, 2007).
• Tim Cook, Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918 (Viking Canada, 2008).
• Tim Cook, The Secret History of Soldiers: How Canadians Survived the Great War (Allen Lane, 2018).
• G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919: Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War (Queen’s Printer, 1962; reprinted McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).
• Stephen Pope, The First Tank Crews: The Lives of the Tankmen Who Fought at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, 15 September 1916 (Helion & Company, 2016).

Archives & oral history

• Imperial War Museums — Voices of the First World War, Episode 24: “Tanks on the Somme”: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-tanks-on-the-somme
• Imperial War Museums — IWM Sound Archive (oral-history interviews; Calvert, Brown, Reiffer, Hastie).
• Veterans Affairs Canada — Heroes Remember (James Neil MacLeod interview).
• The Tank Museum, Bovington — Battle of Amiens, 8–11 August 1918: https://tankmuseum.org/article/battle-of-amiens-8-11-august-1918
• The Tank Museum — Clement Arnold and the Musical Box: https://tankmuseum.org/article/clement-arnold
• Imperial War Museums — Cambrai / how the battle changed tactics: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-the-battle-of-cambrai-changed-fighting-tactics-on-the-western-front

Online references (used for verification)

• First World War.com — The Battle of Flers-Courcelette, 1916: https://www.firstworldwar.com/battles/flers.htm
• HistoryofWar.org — Battle of Flers-Courcelette: https://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_flers_courcelette.html
• 4th & 7th Royal Tank Regiments — 1916–1918 (D17 “Dinnaken”/Hastie): https://4and7royaltankregiment.com/1916-1918/
• CWGC — Battle of Cambrai 1917 facts: https://www.cwgc.org/our-work/news/battle-of-cambrai-1917-facts/
• The Long, Long Trail — The Cambrai operations, 1917: https://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/battles/battles-of-the-western-front-in-france-and-flanders/the-cambrai-operations-1917-battle-of-cambrai/
• Encyclopædia Britannica — Battle of Cambrai: https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Cambrai-1917
• The Western Front Association — Musical Box, the Tank Corps at Amiens 1918: https://www.westernfrontassociation.com/
• 1914-1918-Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War — Science and Technology (Canada): https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/science-and-technology-canada/

Memory and Valour is a Canadian First World War history podcast with a particular eye on Edmonton, the 49th (Edmonton) Battalion, and the Edmonton Regiment.

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