The attack began on 20 November at 6.20 a.m. Preparations for the attack also broke with recent military dogma: there would be no preliminary heavy shelling in order to preserve the element of surprise, hundreds of tanks would be used to open up a route through the defences, and air support would intervene at the German rear to check the arrival of reinforcements. He proposed a frontal attack on the Hindenburg Line to create a breach in the German front which could be exploited by three divisions of cavalry which would go on to envelop and capture Cambrai. The plan of attack devised by General Julian Byng, commander of the British 3rd Army, was extremely sophisticated. The town was indeed protected on its western side by the powerful defences of the Hindenburg Line however British intelligence knew that the point of attack was held by troops who had been weakened by great losses at Ypres and subsequently transferred to a portion of the front which the Germans considered to be of minor importance. The town, one of the principal railway intersections and German garrisons of the Western Front, lay on a vast chalky plain which was ideal terrain for the tanks. From that moment on Haig counted on tanks to provide him with the decisive breakthrough expected by an Allied public opinion worried by the weakening Russian resistance.Ĭambrai was chosen by British command as the scene for the offensive. Repeatedly rejected by General Douglas Haig prior to Cambrai, a large tank operation became inevitable when the British realized that the Third Battle of Ypres was turning into a tragic failure. One of these officers was Lieutenant-Colonel John Fuller and he advocated using tanks en masse on dry terrain as opposed to the muddy fields of Flanders. However, on the British side, the officers of the Tank Corps made a determined effort to promote the use of their cumbersome machines, insisting that they could bring about the much hoped for breakthrough. German High Command was not slow to express its contempt for the new weapon either, judging it to be of little use and having no future. Attempts by the British to field them at Arras and Passchendaele and the French at Chemin des Dames Ridge ended in disaster. Fighting in 1917 seemed to confirm the growing doubts about these unreliable machines which were both slow and vulnerable to heavy artillery. Tanks were first used by the British in September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme and were revealed to be of little use once the enemy got past the initial element of surprise. The most spectacular of these was the British Army's use of tanks which were, for the first time, to be a decisive element in a battle however the new counter-attack methods employed by the Germans were probably the most important leap forward in the short and medium term. Nevertheless it revealed tactical innovations on both sides that would be used to great effect in the fighting of 1918 to end the deadlock which had paralysed the belligerents on the Western Front since 1914. The Battle of Cambrai, an attack launched against the Hindenburg Line in November 1917, was yet another bloody and pointless offensive on the Western Front.