personal stories of tank battles during the battle of the bulge

In the History of the Great War, the British official historian Wilfrid Miles and modern scholars do not place exclusive credit for the first day on tanks but discuss the concurrent evolution of artillery, infantry and tank methods. On the second day, only about half of the tanks were operational and British progress was limited.

Īfter a big British success on the first day, mechanical unreliability, German artillery and infantry defences exposed the frailties of the Mark IV tank. The French and British armies had used tanks en masse earlier in 1917, although to considerably less effect. General Julian Byng, commander of the Third Army, decided to combine both plans. Fuller, a staff officer with the Tank Corps, looked for places to use tanks for raids. Major General Henry Tudor, Commander, Royal Artillery (CRA), of the 9th (Scottish) Division, advocated the use of new artillery-infantry tactics on his sector of the front. The town of Cambrai, in the département of Nord, in France, was an important supply centre for the German Siegfriedstellung (known to the British as the Hindenburg Line) and capture of the town and the nearby Bourlon Ridge would threaten the rear of the German line to the north.

The Battle of Cambrai ( Battle of Cambrai, 1917, First Battle of Cambrai and Schlacht von Cambrai) was a British attack in the First World War, followed by the biggest German counter-attack against the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) since 1914.

Personal stories of tank battles during the battle of the bulge