Battle of Cambrai begins

At 4.30 a.m. on 8 October 1918 the British Third Army of General Julian Byng, and forty minutes later the Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson, attacked the Germans on a front of more than 27 kilometres, from Sequehart north of Saint-Quentin to the southern outskirts of Cambrai. Five days earlier the Fourth Army had broken into the Beaurevoir Line, the last prepared position of the Hindenburg system. Now all that stood before the British and the American 30th Division fighting at their side were unfinished trenches, villages turned into machine-gun nests and the reserves of worn-out German divisions. By evening the Allies had advanced five to six kilometres and taken several thousand prisoners. At Niergnies, south of Cambrai, one of the last tank-versus-tank clashes of the war took place, as the Germans threw previously captured British tanks into a counter-attack. The Battle of Cambrai had begun, the last of the battles of the Hindenburg Line.

Before the attack

The attack was to be planned without haste. On 6 October Field Marshal Douglas Haig sent his chief of staff to Rawlinson with instructions not to begin until all the divisions were ready. The date of 8 October was then fixed. For XIII Corps alone, ammunition was brought up on six hundred lorries over two days. The same day Haig went to see Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who greeted him with a newspaper in his hand. It carried the note in which Germany asked President Wilson for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points. Foch believed that before any talks could even begin, the Germans had to fall back behind the Rhine. He approved Haig’s plan but did not give him the American divisions he had asked for.

British airmen and intelligence were gathering signs that the Germans were preparing to withdraw. The airfields west of the Saint-Quentin–Le Cateau railway stood empty, the large ammunition dumps at Fresnoy-le-Grand and Brancourt had been cleared, and British prisoners who had escaped saw columns of guns moving east and civilians being evacuated. The British official history notes, however, that the Germans had reasons to make one more stand in the centre: as long as they held on here, they could withdraw the armies on the wings, from Lens to Flanders and the area of Reims, in good order.

Night attacks

On the evening of 7 October it poured from seven to ten, which helped the infantry to conceal themselves in their assembly positions. The northern sector of the Beaurevoir Line was still in German hands, so at one in the morning the British 50th Division and the 38th (Welsh) Division of the Third Army attacked it in the dark. A battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry took Villers Farm, but the Welsh, who had reached the edge of Villers-Outréaux, had to fall back at dawn. The alerted Germans shelled the British positions right up to the morning and bombed them from the air. Even so, the attack went in on time.

At Villers-Outréaux the issue was decided by the determination of a single battalion. At about five the 2nd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, which was only meant to mop up the captured village, ran into intact wire and a hail of bullets. When three tanks arrived and an artillery battery commander, who was with the infantry with a telephone, promised fire support, Lieutenant-Colonel C. C. Norman decided to attack. The tanks flattened the wire, and the Welsh crossed the trenches of the Beaurevoir Line and took the village. In the afternoon their division also took Malincourt.

The Fourth Army and the Americans

At 5.10 the Fourth Army moved off. On the right wing the British 6th Division quickly took Mannequin Hill and Doon Hill, and one of its battalions, the 2nd Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, took more than 450 prisoners and six field guns. The division’s right flank, however, was long under fire from Cerise Wood, which lay in the French sector. The French First Army did not move off until six, and its XV Corps was held up in front of Bellecourt Farm. Only when the commander of the French XV Corps learned that the British were already in Brancourt did he order his objectives taken at any cost. In the afternoon the farm surrendered with five hundred prisoners, and the French took Fontaine-Uterte.

In the centre attacked the American 30th Division, of the National Guard of Tennessee and the two Carolinas, which on 29 September had broken through the Hindenburg Line above the tunnel at Bellicourt. This time, as the British official history puts it, it got “a clean start” and moved off together with the barrage. It was supported by tanks of the American 301st Battalion and sixteen light Whippets of the British 6th Battalion, and covered by the artillery of the Australian Corps, which the Australians had left to the Americans. The Americans took Brancourt-le-Grand, full of machine guns, with the help of tanks before eleven, and before two in the afternoon reached the line set for the exploitation. When the large village of Prémont held out, the Whippets drove across in front of it to distract the defenders, and the infantry took it. The Americans took more than 1,500 prisoners from four divisions and 30 guns, but their losses were heavy, and of the twenty tanks of the 301st Battalion half came back.

To their left XIII Corps advanced through the farms and copses behind the Beaurevoir Line. In the 66th Division, re-formed in September after the March defeat from battalions brought from Salonika and Palestine, the South African Brigade attacked. The village of Serain was attacked from two sides by battalions of the Connaught Rangers and the Manchesters, and the last machine-gun nest was taken only at seven in the evening. The Cavalry Corps was to break out into the open, but its regiments, trying to pass along the Le Cateau road between Prémont and Serain and past other villages, everywhere ran into machine-gun fire. Near Brancourt two troops of the 19th Hussars rode with drawn sabres in among the German guns. At 2.40 p.m. the cavalry commander reported that it was impossible to get through without heavy fighting, which Haig did not want, and sent the divisions to the rear; on their way back they were bombed by German aircraft. That day the Fourth Army took more than 4,000 prisoners and 56 guns, and Rawlinson, whose artillery could not keep up with the infantry, halted further advance until morning.

Tanks at Niergnies

On the northern wing, XVII Corps of General Charles Fergusson was to outflank Cambrai from the south. The 63rd (Royal Naval) Division, made up of battalions of sailors and marines, took the first line with many prisoners at dawn, and soon after eight, after fighting the defenders of the cemetery and the buildings, took the village of Niergnies. At about 8.30 a German counter-attack of infantry and four tanks set off. They were captured British Mark IVs, which the Germans called Beutepanzer, or booty tanks. In the smoke and half-light neither the infantry nor the crews of the British tanks recognised them, since they were expecting their own machines, which were to outflank the enemy. According to the history of the Tank Corps, Captain Rowe realised whom he was facing when the first of the tanks was less than fifty metres from him, and still managed to hit it before he himself took two shells. The Germans knocked out three British tanks, and the infantry fell back from Niergnies. Lieutenant Martell, commander of the last machine, whose radiator was leaking, sent his crew away and, with an artillery officer, turned round a captured German field gun and hit one of the German tanks with it. A second was put out of action by infantrymen with a captured German anti-tank rifle, and the other two drove off. Hood Battalion retook Niergnies, and by noon the division again stood on its assigned line.

Similar counter-attacks with a few captured tanks fell that morning on the neighbouring VI Corps at Seranvillers and on the New Zealanders at Esnes. All were beaten off, and several German tanks were destroyed by British machines that arrived at the last moment. A German wireless communiqué presented the fight at Niergnies as a success: German tanks had supposedly surprised “the English standing about in disorderly groups”, and five English tanks had supposedly been set on fire by their own crews at the sight of the German ones. In reality the Germans had very few tanks. They had built only twenty of their own A7Vs, and of captured British ones, according to German studies, they had about thirty-five fit for action at the end of September. The counter-attack did not change the outcome of the day. XVII Corps took more than 1,200 prisoners, the 63rd Division alone 1,189, at a cost of 703 men, and its attack cut Cambrai off from the south.

Evening

In the afternoon Haig gathered the commanders of the First, Third and Fourth Armies at Byng’s headquarters near Bapaume. Reports showed that eight thousand prisoners had already been sent back to the cages. In front of the Fourth Army and the right wing of the Third Army resistance had been weak, while on Byng’s left wing the Germans had defended themselves well. Haig ordered the advance to continue the next day, and the Canadian Corps of the First Army to cross the Scheldt Canal north of Cambrai. The Canadians were to wait until the Third Army had taken the Niergnies–Awoingt ridge. By evening that objective was close but not reached, so their commander, General Arthur Currie, decided to attack at night.

On the German side the day was a defeat. Regimental histories speak of battalions averaging 150 men each, and the Bavarian official history of troops “completely used up and burnt out”, in which cohesion was maintained only by harsh measures. In the evening or during the night, according to different sources, the German command ordered a withdrawal to the Hermann Position, a new line along the river Selle that was still being built. According to German studies, the army group of General Max von Boehn, which had been defending between Saint-Quentin and Cambrai, was also dissolved that day, and its chief of staff, General Fritz von Loßberg, was recalled. During the night of 8–9 October the German armies between the Oise and the Sensée Canal began to withdraw, and the garrison left Cambrai. The same day in Washington, President Wilson sent the Germans his first reply to their request for an armistice.