Who won the Battle of Cambrai?
Neither side won outright. On 20 November 1917 British tanks and infantry broke through the Hindenburg Line to a depth of three to four and a half miles. But a German counterattack on 30 November took back most of that ground, and each side lost roughly 45,000 men. The Imperial War Museums judge that it had little strategic impact.1
At 6:20 on the morning of 20 November 1917, without the usual days of preliminary shelling, hundreds of British tanks crawled out of the mist southwest of Cambrai and rolled over the wire of the Hindenburg Line. By nightfall the Third Army had broken through to a depth of three to four and a half miles (the official history says three to four, Haig some four and a half), and within days church bells rang in London. Ten days later a German counterstroke took most of the ground back. Our 20 November page gives the day in brief; this is the full story.2
Cambrai came at the end of the year of Passchendaele, on the British sector of the Western Front in World War I, and its methods pointed toward the Hundred Days Offensive of 1918. For the two armies behind it, see the military histories of Britain and Germany.3
Why did the British attack at Cambrai?
By the late summer of 1917 the British offensive in Flanders had sunk into mud, and the tanks with it. The Tank Corps commander in France, Brigadier General Hugh Elles, and his chief staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, were convinced that their machines would never show what they could do among the water-filled shell craters around Ypres. In August Fuller proposed a large tank raid on dry, unbroken chalk downland south of Cambrai, to destroy as many German guns as possible and then withdraw.4
A second idea came from the artillery. Brigadier General Henry Tudor, artillery commander of the 9th Division opposite Cambrai, wanted to restore surprise by laying the guns on their targets from maps and survey instead of the usual trial shots, while tanks crushed the wire. That way no gun need fire before the moment of attack. General Sir Julian Byng of the Third Army took up both ideas and enlarged them into an offensive.5
Haig agreed in the autumn. In his despatch he explained the aim as a sudden local success where the enemy did not expect it: break the German defense systems, secure Bourlon ridge to the north and the flank toward Cambrai, and then pass cavalry through. He also told Byng that he would stop the attack after 48 hours unless the results justified going on, because German reinforcements were expected to arrive by then. The Italian defeat at Caporetto in late October gave him another reason to strike: to draw German strength away from the Italian front.6
To get across the wide trenches of the Hindenburg Line, each tank carried a fascine on its roof, a huge bundle made of about 75 faggots of brushwood, bound with chains, to drop into the trench in front of it. The tanks were moved up by rail and hidden in Havrincourt Wood and the villages behind the front.7
How did the Germans see Cambrai before the attack?
For the German army, the Cambrai front was a quiet sector of the Siegfried Line, which the British called the Hindenburg Line. It belonged to General Georg von der Marwitz's Second Army in the army group of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who also oversaw the defense of Flanders. Ludendorff later admitted that the line was only weakly held: to feed the battles in Flanders, Rupprecht's group had thinned it to tired or Landwehr divisions.8
The British official historian, Captain Wilfrid Miles, who drew on German records, describes the 54th Division opposite the main attack as having come south from Ypres to recover in what troops from Flanders called the “Flanders sanatorium”. Its artillery was short of ammunition, but its gunners were trained to fight tanks and had already beaten off French ones in April. The German command trusted the depth of the position and expected any British attack to be announced by days of bombardment.9
That expectation was the weak point. Ludendorff wrote that on 20 November “we were surprised by a fresh blow at Cambrai”. Reinforcements were on their way, among them the 107th Division from the Eastern Front, whose first trains had just arrived when the attack began.10
What happened on 20 November 1917?
At 6:20 a.m. the tanks and infantry of six divisions attacked on a front of about six miles, from east of Gonnelieu to just beyond the Canal du Nord. The British guns opened fire only at zero hour, with smoke shells to blind the German batteries. In all 476 tanks took part: 378 fighting tanks, with the rest carrying supplies, wire-pulling grapnels, bridging gear or radios.11
In the first three hours, the Tank Museum notes, the British advanced farther than in three months at Passchendaele. The tanks flattened lanes through the wire, crossed the trenches on their fascines and drove the defenders to ground, while the infantry behind them cleared the dugouts. Haig reported that three German defense systems had been broken through to a depth of some four and a half miles on a wide front, with over 5,000 prisoners taken on the first day. The Australian War Memorial describes a hole almost ten kilometers wide and six deep.12
The day also showed the limits of the new weapon. The official history counts 179 of the 378 fighting tanks out of action by the evening: 65 hit by artillery, 71 broken down and 43 ditched or stuck; the Imperial War Museums put it at over half of the tanks. Infantry who had attacked since dawn were exhausted, and the guns could not keep up along the narrow roads.13
On the right, a tank crossing the canal bridge at Masnières broke through the half-destroyed span and fell in, and with it went the main route for the cavalry. One squadron of the Canadian Fort Garry Horse got across at a lock, where, by the official history's account, local people helped make a passage for horses, charged a German battery beyond the Masnières line and held out in a sunken road until dark. Its commander was killed and Lieutenant Harcus Strachan, who led the squadron on, was awarded the Victoria Cross.14
What happened at Flesquières?
In the center the 51st (Highland) Division under Major General George Harper was held up on the ridge in front of Flesquières. As the tanks topped the crest they came under direct fire from German field guns at short range, and many were knocked out. The village held until the next morning, leaving a dent in the middle of the British advance.15
Haig's despatch spread a legend: that most of the hits came from a single German artillery officer who served a field gun alone until he was killed at it. The Tank Corps history of 1919 even says sixteen tanks fell to that one gun. The British official history rejects the story: the losses, it says, could never have been inflicted by one gun or even one battery. It credits several batteries of the 54th Division's artillery, which had been trained to fight tanks, and names an under-officer, Krüger, who served one gun alone.16
What happened at Bourlon Wood, and why did church bells ring?
On 21 November Flesquières fell and the advance resumed, but the 48 hours were up and the high ground of Bourlon Wood still overlooked the British gains. Haig chose to go on: without the ridge, he argued, the new positions north of Flesquières could not be held, while taking it might force the Germans back along a wide front. Two divisions earmarked for Italy were now at his disposal.17
It became a grinding fight. On 23 November the 40th Division took Bourlon Wood after more than four hours of fighting, but the village beyond and Fontaine-Notre-Dame changed hands again and again, and on 27 November the Guards briefly retook Fontaine before being thrown out. Ludendorff wrote that the British blow had already been parried on 22 and 23 November along the line Moeuvres, Bourlon, Fontaine, Noyelles and Masnières, much of it by the newly arrived 107th Division.18
At home the first day looked like a great victory. The Tank Museum, working from the newspapers, says the decision to ring the bells appears to have come from the Lord Mayor and the Bishop of London, and that the joy bells rang on 23 November; Lloyd George later wrote that the War Office had ordered every church bell in London rung. Within two weeks the celebration looked premature, and both sources record the criticism that followed.19
How did the German counterattack of 30 November work?
Marwitz did not try to push the British straight back. Ludendorff credits him and, by name, his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Stapff, and describes their plan as a blow into the flank of the new salient: the main attack in the south toward Banteux and Gouzeaucourt, a second attack west of Bourlon heading south. By the evening of 29 November enough troops had been gathered, and the official history counts about 20 German divisions engaged in the battle in all.20
Between 7 and 8 a.m. on 30 November the Germans attacked after a short but intense bombardment, without the long creeping barrage that would have given warning. Assault groups, the storm troops, filtered through gaps and up the hollows of the chalk under cover of mist and smoke, while low-flying aircraft machine-gunned the British trenches. Gonnelieu, Villers-Guislain and Gouzeaucourt fell within hours, and the British batteries pushed forward to support the earlier advance were overrun.21
The line was patched. The Guards Division drove the Germans out of Gouzeaucourt about midday, cavalry closed the gap on its right, and three tank battalions that had been preparing to leave the battlefield came back into action. In the north the 29th Division, with its Newfoundland battalion, held Masnières, and the German attack on the Bourlon front failed with heavy losses.22
Americans were in this fight too. Men of the U.S. 11th Engineers, a railway regiment, were working on the line near Gouzeaucourt when the attack broke over them, and some of them held on with spades, tools and discarded rifles until British troops drove the Germans back. General John J. Pershing later wrote that Cambrai was of special interest because it was here that American troops first took part in active fighting.23
Ludendorff called it “at last an offensive victory on the Western front”, though not as complete as he had hoped, because one good division stopped to go through a British supply depot instead of pressing on. With Bourlon now a dangerous salient, Haig ordered a withdrawal to the Flesquières ridge, which began on the night of 4 to 5 December. The battle was over by 7 December.24
How many men died at Cambrai?
Both sides lost about the same. The British official history gives 44,207 killed, wounded and missing in the Third Army between 20 November and 8 December, including some 6,000 men taken prisoner on 30 November alone. The German official history counts 41,000 German losses, 14,000 of them in the counterstroke; adding the lightly wounded that German statistics left out, the British historian reached 53,300, and an earlier estimate from German regimental histories gave at least 45,000. The Australian War Memorial rounds it to about 45,000 British and 50,000 German dead and wounded.25
The British took 11,105 prisoners and 138 guns, by their own count; the German official history admits the loss of 145 guns. On 30 November the British lost 158 field and heavy guns. Of the tanks, the official history tallies 179 fighting tanks out of action on the first day alone.26
Who won the Battle of Cambrai?
On the map, nobody. The official history notes that the British kept a strip of the old German front about two miles deep, less than they had taken on the first morning, while the Germans pushed into the old British line by a similar depth further south. Ludendorff wrote that Germany “had won a complete victory over a considerable part of the British Army”. The Imperial War Museums are cooler: the battle had little strategic impact on the Western Front.27
In Britain it was a political defeat. The joy bells made the reverse harder to bear, and a court of inquiry was set up. Alaric Searle writes that public anger at what looked like a great victory thrown away by incompetence led to a purge at Haig's headquarters, including his chief of intelligence, John Charteris. Lloyd George blamed the lack of reserves: a quarter of the men “flung away” at Passchendaele, he wrote, would have been enough to win.28
For the German army the result restored some confidence. The official history notes that the counterstroke did much to repair German morale, shaken by the sudden loss of the Hindenburg front, and Ludendorff wrote that it had given “valuable hints for an offensive battle in the West” in 1918.29
Why does the Battle of Cambrai matter?
Cambrai is remembered as the first great tank battle, but the sources are careful. Michael David Kennedy, writing on tank warfare, stresses that the tanks were one part of a combined assault with infantry and artillery, and that the offensive finally failed through poor planning of the reserves meant to follow up. David Willey, curator of the Tank Museum, puts it plainly: “initially, the tank didn’t have the great impact that is sometimes claimed”.30
What changed was the method. The Imperial War Museums point out that both sides at Cambrai used the tactics of 1918: the British with tanks, predicted artillery fire and surprise, the Germans with short bombardments and infiltrating storm troops. Ludendorff, for his part, took from the counterstroke lessons for the German offensives of 1918. The Royal Tank Regiment still marks 20 November as Cambrai Day.31
Where was the Battle of Cambrai fought?
The battle was fought on the rolling chalk country southwest of Cambrai, in the Nord department of northern France. The attack front ran about six miles from near Gonnelieu, close to the Canal de l'Escaut (St Quentin Canal), to the Canal du Nord near Havrincourt and just beyond it, and the fighting spread north to Bourlon Wood and Moeuvres. The town of Cambrai itself was never reached; Haig called its capture subsidiary to the real aim.32
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