Lies Agreed Upon: November 20, 1917

Landships: Or the Day the Cavalry Died.

At the beginning of the week, we briefly discussed the reluctance early flight faced from conservative military minds. Today the calender offers us the opportunity to examine another aspect of modern warfare we take for granted, but was met with the same skepticism as aviation. As is our goal with most of the topics we attempt to cover at Lies Agreed Upon, today we look at an event that had a far reaching affect on the conduct of war as a whole.

Despite continual evidence to the contrary, many leaders during the First World War believed the key to breaking the stalemate in the trenches lied with mounted troops exploiting gaps in the enemy front. In battle after battle, commanders envisioned their horse cavalry galloping through breaches in the line and rolling up the enemy's flanks. Cavalry charges, along with chivalrous images of mounted medieval knights, had been the norm on battlefields for thousands of years. But the tangles of barbed wire and the deathly efficiency of machine guns on the Western Front had relegated most cavalrymen to fighting in dismounted roles by 1917.

Dead horses often littered the battlefields of the Western Front during World War I.

Both sides had experimented with alternatives to mounted cavalry since the beginning of the war. Oddly enough, it was the Royal Navy who first proposed the idea of a "landship", a heavily armored moving gunship that used tracks instead of wheels to roll over any obstacles. These supposedly impregnable fortresses were intended to do the job of both the infantry and the cavalry; blasting a hole in the enemy line and then using mobility to exploit its own gains. Commanders believed the answer to their prayers had arrived.

The first modern tanks that appeared at the front during the Battle of the Somme, however, found little success. The tracked chassis often stalled in the mud, the armored interiors were hot and smokey, and troops found the art of moving and shooting difficult to master. The first tanks were little more than armored deathtraps. Nevertheless, tank advocates insisted that if the right number of vehicles was used on the right battlefield, the long awaited breakthrough on the Western Front could be achieved.

On November 20, 1917, in front of the French town of Cambrai, the plan was put into action. For the first time in history, tanks were massed on one sector of the line and featured in the main assault. In the early morning mist, 378 British Mark IV tanks slipped the cover of Havrincourt Wood and made their way toward the German line. Just the sight of the slow, loud, smoke-spitting beats caused most of the enemy to flee from their trenches, and the British we able to penetrate five miles in just 10 hours (a huge gain by Western Front standards).

A British Mark IV tank during a training exercise, 1917.

The battle is important for several reasons, some more obvious than others. The tank was not the only new innovation on display at Cambrai. After the initial British gains, the nature of the German defensive line allowed them to reform in positions to the rear and eventually halt the attack, a practice that is seen in most modern day defensive plans. Furthermore, in the ensuing counterattack the Germans unveiled their new stormtrooper tactics to push back the British. This approach had been developed on the Russian front, and proved to be extremely effective at breaking through trenches during the German Spring Offensives the next year.

The British attack lasted less than ten days, and within a month, the front line punctured by the tanks had been restored. Nevertheless, the tank had arrived. Working in teams of three, the tanks had covered each other, plowed through barbed wire, and bridged trenches so the infantry could follow behind. The Allies would not attempt another large-scale tank assault during the war, but the Battle of Cambrai was one of, if not the first combined arms operations in history. Today, most conventional military tactics are based on the combination of tanks and supporting infantry.

As usual, such military progress was not immediately recognized. In fact, during the battle stubborn British leaders had horse cavalry waiting behind the lines to be deployed should the tanks fail. The new German tactics in the counter attack were seen as more important, since it now seemed possible for the enemy to breach Allied trenches, even without tanks of their own. Stormtroopers, teams of shock troops using grenades and automatic weapons, indeed became a force to be reckoned with for the remainder of the war. The notion of combined arms would take another generation to prove its worth, when German stormtroopers, following behind tanks, launched the first blitzkrieg across Poland in World War II.

Military minds are traditionally very slow to react. Nevertheless, it was clear modern weaponry had rendered horse cavalry obsolete. Furthermore, the time and money it took to train, feed, and care for the animals used by an ineffective branch of service soon became an obvious excess. While the horse was used to move supplies and the wounded during the Second World War, its days as a weapon were numbered. The Battle of Cambrai, while doing little to decide the outcome of the war, still shaped the face of all ensuing conflicts. Cavalry was gradually phased out and replaced by tanks. Even today in the United States Army, many modern tank outfits are designated as "Armored Cavalry."