The story is fiction, but the events are not. It happened ninety-nine years ago this Sunday.

Enemy Ace: Iron Monsters

On November 19th budding German flying ace Hans von Hammer was forced down over No Man’s Land on the Western Front near Cambrai. After a perilous day spent in hiding, he was able to make his way that evening to safety with a battalion of Germany’s 54th Reserve Division. The unit’s commander, Major Adelbert Tannenwald, gave Hammer shelter in his command dugout and made plans to evacuate him to the division’s rear area with a returning supply party the following evening. But, as Hammer relates in this excerpt from his memoir, Hammer of Hell, he was not to get away from the front line so easily….

The bombardment began around dawn. The shells fell thick and fast. I had heard front-line fighters refer to such bombardments as “drum-fire.” I now saw first-hand the terrible aptness of that term. It was as though some Titan were beating a tattoo upon the Earth itself. Even within our deep shelter I could hear and feel the bursts. Now and then after an especially close hit a bit of soil would sift between the joints of the ceiling and rain down upon us.

For all that I had often before been in harm’s way, I found this sitting in a confined space, unable to maneuver or to take any sort of action, most trying. The bombardment was, for all its intensity, rather short by West-Front standards. It seemed to me to go on for days. My companions in the shelter observed my apprehension and assured me that we were reasonably safe where we were. “It’s when they stop firing that your troubles begin!” one said. “That’s when the real attack comes.”

When the drum-fire ceased the abrupt silence seemed to me a relief. To my companions it served rather as an alarm call. They seized their gear and rushed up the steps. It was a frantic race to man the defensive positions before the enemy infantry approaching through No Man’s Land under cover of the bombardment could complete the final dash to our line.

I, of course, had no designated position in the line. Some instinct told me nonetheless that the dugout was no place for me with the main enemy attack coming on. I followed the last man up the steps, not displeased, after spending hours in the close and stale environment of the dugout, to get out into the fresh air.

I found a spot on the trench’s firing step between a rifleman on one hand and a Spandau crew busily readying their weapon to fire on the other. The rifleman kept muttering to himself “God smite England! God smite England!” I suppose the repetition of this quasi-prayer served to steady his nerves. The state of my own nerves was such that I did not think to ready my side-arm. It was just as well, for all the good my Luger would do me in the action that followed.

I kept my head low and listened for the enemy’s approach. From in front of the line I heard the most extraordinary symphony of mechanical sounds—petrol engines roaring, gears clanking, metal scraping and screeching upon metal. The whole racket slowly, steadily drew ever closer.

Unable to restrain my curiosity, I poked my head above the parapet. Smoke filled No Man’s Land, the English having dropped a great deal of smoke-shell in the final stage of their bombardment. Emerging from the smoke I could see great forms. Great metal boxes, vaguely rhomboid in shape, propelled by tracks that ran along the entire perimeter of each side. From smaller boxes on the sides of some protruded the barrels of fifty-seven-millimeter artillery—what the English called “six-pounders.” Others had Lewis guns in place of the six-pounders. Each vehicle carried on top a large bundle of brush that wobbled alarmingly as the machines lurched across the shell-torn ground.

I had, of course, heard already of these armored vehicles, known to the English by the incongruously innocuous name of “tanks.” They had made their combat debut the previous year, during the latter stages of the Somme. I had heard it said that the English had got the idea for them from a tale called “The Land Ironclads” by Wells, their noted writer of speculative fiction.

Hitherto armor had been employed in small numbers in local attacks. On this morning the English were sending an entire “Tank Corps” of several hundred machines against the lines before Cambrai. It was the first-ever armored attack on such a scale. I was a first-hand witness to the making of history. As was usually the case, I found it history of a sort I would rather not have witnessed. It seemed to me, contrary to the hopes of my nearby rifleman friend, that it was the English who were about to do the smiting this day!

The Spandau to my side opened up. Nearby riflemen also fired. I actually saw rounds glancing from the side of the vehicle nearest me. They seemed to have no effect. The monstrous machines continued their slow, inexorable lurching toward our line. Now and then they paused to fire their own weapons. We ducked behind the parapet whenever they did so.

From a point a little down the trench I saw a rocket rise straight into the air and explode in a burst of star-shell. It was a signal of some sort. But a signal of what? I got my answer almost immediately when I felt a tug at my sleeve. It was Ure, Tannenwald’s batman, whom he had detailed to serve as my minder until I could be sent to the rear. “If you please, Herr Flieger, that’s the signal to withdraw. We’d best be on our way.”

Ure did not have to twist my arm! I followed his lead along two or three traverses, until we reached a communication trench and joined the line of men zig-zagging their way toward the rear. We had not gone many meters before we approached a place where shellfire had collapsed the trench’s sides. We were forced to climb out into the open and crawl around the obstruction.

At a pause during this crawl I looked back and saw that the armored vehicles had by now reached our frontline trench. One of them was in the process of maneuvering itself into position to drop its bundle into the trench to serve as a crude bridge so that it could cross. Another had pulled up nearby and was sending bursts of Lewis fire in our direction. One of these bursts kicked up the dirt at an uncomfortably short distance. It occurred to me that in taking this backward glance I was in danger of suffering the fate of Lot’s Wife. I resumed scrambling for the next intact segment of trench.

Moments later I tumbled into the trench’s relative safety. The man behind me then tumbled down upon me. He would not get off. I saw that a bullet from another Lewis burst had drilled him through the head. The incident was deeply shocking to me. It was the first time I had ever seen a man killed at such close hand.

A bit farther on we ran into a barrage that the enemy had laid down to prevent our either escaping or reinforcing our front line. Somehow most of us made it through, though facing a drum-fire in the open proved far worse than waiting one out in the security of a deep shelter. I have wondered ever since how it could be that any front-line fighter who faced repeated action ever managed to survive with both hearing and sanity intact.

Eventually we made our way back to the ruined village of Flesquieres. There 54th Reserve Division’s artillery managed for some time to hold up the enemy’s advance. Walter, the divisional commander, had taken unusual measures to prepare his men, and in particular his artillery, against the novel prospect of attack by armor. Walter’s artillery did considerable execution against the English armor in the vicinity of Flesquieres.

I myself saw one of the machines hit. The monster vomited forth great quantities of flame and smoke. With its load of petrol and ordnance it must have been a veritable moving bomb beneath its metal carapace. At the time I found the sight rather heartening. Only upon later reflection did I think about the terrible fate of the machine’s crew—about the fact that an armored assault included, to paraphrase Wells, men in addition to mere ironmongery.

Despite 54th Reserve Division’s excellent performance, the English assault enjoyed general success. On that one day they advanced six kilometers or better in places—a remarkable feat by West-Front standards at that stage of the war. They could not repeat the result on subsequent days. It was fortunate for us that the “proto-tanks” employed at Cambrai were, by the standards of later generations of armored vehicles, little more than crude lash-ups. By the evening of the first day most had been immobilized by mechanical failure. Before long German counterattacks in an adjacent sector had taken approximately as much ground as had been lost before Cambrai.

I witnessed none of this. By evening I had made my way beyond the area of immediate danger. Though delayed for some time by all the frantic activity of re-supply and reinforcement behind the front lines, I was before too much longer able to return to the aerodrome and rejoin my squadron. My superiors decided that after my harrowing experiences I had some leave coming. I spent it most agreeably, partly at home, partly on a brief holiday in the Bavarian Alps.

While on leave I succeeded in sending a box of Swiss chocolates, a luxury most difficult to come by at that stage of the war, to Tannenwald and his officers in thanks for their hospitality. I had at that point no firm knowledge whether they had survived the action. Eventually I had the pleasure of receiving a kind note from Tannenwald thanking me for my gift. He informed me that the majority of the chocolates had managed the get past Ure and his cronies. I was pleased to hear that, though after the service Ure had rendered me I could hardly object to that worthy taking a bit of a commission on my gift to his master.

The English and their allies of course continued to experiment with armor. By the last months of the war, when they had the advantages of a bit of refinement of their equipment and tactics, and our own armies were nearing the end of their tether, the armored forces were able to make a significant contribution to our defeat. I, thankfully, had no more close personal contact with armor during the remainder of the war. In the following war, as commander of Luftwaffe ground troops, I was to have all too much more experience with it. We will deal with that in a later chapter.

Bump for the 100th anniversary of the real-life Battle of Cambrai.

This is so well written! Thank you.

Thanks, Simon! I've been keeping up with the World War I centennial. Some IMWANers like fan fiction stories about comic book characters, so I thought I'd write some "Enemy Ace" stories as part of the centennial. Wish I could come up with more good ideas for them, but I'm not much of an expert on World War I flyers. Well, I've got one more year to try before the 100th anniversary of the Armistice.

We're thinking about planting a World War I memorial tree at the library this spring. Several libraries around the state are doing that.