Horace Leslie Birks The Great War Interviews

BBC Four collections - specially chosen programmes

from the BBC archive.

For this collection, Max Hastings has selected interviews

with Great War veterans

filmed in the 1960s.

More programmes on this theme and other BBC Four collections

are available on BBC iPlayer.

This was the first time I'd actually

commanded

a tank in action

and I was petrified.

I hoped the whole way up

that I should

sprain my ankle,

or something like that,

that we should never get there,

or the whole thing would be called off.

We had no luck at all,

and

the ghastly hour got nearer and nearer.

And the worst moment of all was

when we started up our engines,

and they would backfire, and you got

a sheet of flame out of the exhaust.

Everybody calling each other a bloody fool

and waiting to know what was

going to happen.

However, nothing did happen

and we climbed into the tank.

The gearsmen got into their places

and then the side gunners got in.

And then the driver gets in

and then the officer gets in through the top,

and we started off.

We had to close down, because we were

within very comfortable machine-gun

range

and once we were shut down we were

completely isolated from the world.

We had no means of communication at all.

The thing got hotter and hotter and hotter.

The only ventilation was concerned with

the engine and not with the crew.

You could only see forward

through

a little slit in the front visor.

And if you wanted to see out the side

you

looked through steel periscopes,

which gave you

a sort of translucent outside light, all distorted.

And the tank inside itself

was

steeped in Stygian gloom.

It was all gloomy, hot and steamy.

My particular tank never went

until the engine had boiled.

And once it had boiled, you kept it boiling,

and it was jolly good.

It went on quite well after that.

The noise inside was such that

you could

hear nothing outside at all,

and people made little

gestures to you, rude or otherwise.

That was all you could do

- your sole means of communicating.

When this barrage came down,

you could distinguish that quite easily

because any shell bursting

within a

few yards

of the tank

got tremendous back pressure,

and you felt it all the way through.

In fact, a shell bursting between the horns

of the tank seemed to lift it up in the air.

And then the machine guns started.

And they were quite easy to discern,

because they were just like peas on a tin can, rattling away.

Well,

we moved up to our tanks in the lying-up area,

by St Julien farmhouse

in the middle of the night.

And then we had a brew-up and unsheeted,

did our pre-battle maintenance

and loaded our guns

and saw that everything was shipshape.

And then took our camouflage nets off.

And then we warmed our engines up

and then we started to get ready to go off,

hoping nothing was going to happen.

Nothing did happen.

It was a dead quiet night, there was

hardly any machine gun fire, no shelling at all,

and it gradually got light, and we moved

off at six o'clock for a 6:15 zero.

There were ten tanks there.

Only one failed to start,

and he never lived it down, of course.

But poor chap, it wasn't

his fault, it was the engine.

We went off line ahead.

My own tank was the fourth.

Three ahead and six behind,

if my arithmetic's right.

We moved off at 100-yards intervals.

It then turned into a really cold, beastly drizzle,

which made these pave setts

frightfully slippery. They were like ice.

And as our tracks very nearly

spanned

the causeway,

we had to go very, very, very carefully.

I was so windy that we went too cautiously

and we lost the three in front.

And we went jogging along and

after a bit

we came round a corner

and there I saw two of them stuck.

There was an enormous tree across the road.

The Germans had taken

a habit of blowing up the trees.

Whether it was shellfire or the Germans,

I

don't know, but it was some tree.

And the only way to take

the tree

was to climb over it.

The first tank had got away with it,

and he'd gone on ahead.

The second tank had slid off,

possibly on account of the mud

left on the tracks of the first tank,

and he was

sideways off the pave, quite out of action.

The second one was stuck half across.

And that presented a problem

because he was obstructing

the road

and he couldn't get on.

And we got out and had a talk.

It was still perfectly quiet.

No shelling, no noise at all.

And he agreed to really sacrifice himself.

He drove his tank off into the mud,

and that cleared the road for me.

And I had a first-class driver

and, with consummate skill, he got over the log.

He drove up it, and then swung slightly

right so that he was directly at right angles

to it, and dropped down with a frightful crash

onto

the pave at the other side, and we were off.

That delayed us about 20 minutes.

And we'd only got about another

ten

minutes along the road

when I thought the world had come to an end.

We ran straight into the counter

barrage of the Bosch.

He'd evidently seen our leading tank,

which was some way ahead, and we caught it.

I've never been

so frightened in my life. I think everybody was.

There were blues and reds and yellows,

all the pyrotechnic colours in the world.

And then there was the most almighty crash

and a sheet of flame came up on the

starboard side and we'd had a direct hit.

My driver... It was his side.

He got out his extinguisher and he put the

fire

out, and then we had a look around,

and of course the engine

was

completely broken up,

and we were immobile

in the middle of the road.

The shelling was still going on.

It was still, if anything,

more intense

than if it had been machine guns.

Well, we had a drill then,

you evacuate a tank just like you evacuate an aeroplane.

I had three men wounded.

One had got his leg blown off

and he died later on that night.

And we got the whole lot out

with

the tank between us and the Germans,

and then sat down to take stock.

We didn't know what to do exactly.

And then looming out of this murk

came the tank behind me,

commanded by a great friend of mine.

I stopped him, we crawled up

and told him what had happened.

He didn't stand a hope of getting on.

If he'd gone off the pave

he would have stuck too.

No communication at all.

One could only shout to each other.

And we decided the best thing

to do was to go back

and warn the others

to avoid

a complete debacle.

I got my crew inside the second tank.

There

were 16 of us in the tank then,

and the driver of that tank

was

again a very skilful man.

He eased that tank

round on that ten-foot causeway.

It was a most extraordinary feat.

Got it round, and away we went back.

We'd gone on for a few hundred yards,

and then we saw

why there was

no other tank coming.

The whole lot was stuck on this tree trunk.

They'd all gone round, they were all ditched.

One had had a direct hit, and there was the company.

Well, then we had to make up our mind

what

we were going to do.

We put on the unditching beam,

and that has rather short chains to the tracks,

so if you want to turn round,

you

have

to

carry out

a very wide sweep indeed,

because the variation

in the track

steering is so slight.

Well, of course, we got stuck.

And the only thing to do then

was to call it a day.

And I got my crew out, we walked back

and found a duckboard track to a dressing station.

We were very lucky in finding a very gallant

team of RAMC stretcher bearers,

who had no right to be up there at all.

They took on this poor chap with the leg off

and took charge of him,

and we went back

and evacuated our wounded

and then went back to the lying-up area,

where

I expected to get an almighty rocket from

my company commander,

instead of

which he was

delighted

to see me,

thought we'd all been written off.

So we turned out heroes in the end.

The interesting thing about the front tank,

it had only got round the corner from me

when it was also hit and broke a track,

and they had to evacuate too.

So that meant that ten tanks were

written off, well, nine written off.

None were recovered.

And nothing was achieved at all.

And that was the last tank

attack in the Passchendaele battle.

After the conclusion

of the Passchendaele

debacle,

as far as tanks were concerned,

there was a serious consideration

whether they should wash them out altogether

or whether they could use them

in some other shape or form.

And the tank people put up a plea to have

one

big attack on good going, open terrain,

with all the tanks they'd got.

And, after a good deal of argument,

that was

accepted

and

we all moved south,

where we concentrated and refitted

and got equipped with things called fascines.

The attack was to be

made in the Cambrai area,

and the German line there was known as the Hindenburg line,

was over 12 feet deep.

And everyone was frightened

that the

tank tails would slip

when they were coming out

and you'd get ditched.

So we fitted ourselves with a fascine,

which

weighed a ton and a half, carried them on

the top of the tanks, and the plan

was to drop

them in the trench

to stop your tail dropping.

Well, we got that fixed up

and then we moved

up to a place called Havrincourt wood,

which was within 2,000

yards of the German front line.

The move was made at night, and dead slow.

We went a mile an hour.

Everything seemed to be going

well till some silly arse

got his valise on top of the tank,

on the exhaust pipe, and it caught fire.

Of course the whole column stopped,

there was almost a court martial on the spot.

However, we went on. Nobody saw it.

The Germans didn't.

And we crept in under cover,

camouflaged ourselves,

and observed the strictest possible

precautions about secrecy.

There were no fires by day or night.

We brewed up inside the tanks,

which was quite prohibitive.

And the troops were really more

uncomfortable than the officers,

because the officers

did get out in small

batches

to make a reconnaissance.

There, for the first time in our lives,

we saw a battlefield which was completely unscarred.

Everybody pointed out

where the

enemy were.

You could see damn all, nothing, except an

enormous belt, a great big black mass,

which was heavy barbed wire.

The German trenches

were about 1,000

yards away,

and by 5:30 we were

all

lying up

in the front trenches with our gear,

ready to go, consumed with anxiety,

because the rum and soup

that a fat sergeant called Tootsie Hands had promised

hadn't arrived.

Thank God it came before we started,

and then it was too hot to drink.

We started off to come out at Havrincourt

wood the night before the attack,

crawling along very quietly,

very carefully along taped lines

which had

been put out beforehand.

No sooner had we got clear of the wood,

everybody sweating on the top line,

the gunners came in - they made a filthy noise,

jingling and jingling,

and the horses making noises both ends.

And it was altogether a matter

of great

concern for those of us

who were going into battle.

However, nothing happened.

We got up onto our starting places,

and the plan, very roughly,

was to go forward in three lines

and the 320 tanks

on the same frontage as Passchendaele.

Zero was 6:15 and the first tanks

were

due off at six o'clock.

And we went off on time.

It was really quite exciting,

because we'd had an awful pasting up at Passchendaele.

We knew there was no end result,

whereas here it did seem

something

worthwhile going for.

We got in, shut down our tanks,

and away we went.

We had rough compasses in the tanks

and we got our course

and we set course for the enemy line.

The first thing that happened -

it was

dead silent, there wasn't a word,

until we got to the enemy wire,

which was zero hour for the guns.

And that again was first class, you know.

The Crystal Palace had nothing in it at all.

No answer from the Germans at all.

For the first time in our lives, we saw

the Hun being blown up all over the place.

Bits of thing going everywhere.

The troops were frightfully pleased.

No machine gun fire.

So we opened up our tanks,

and then we got into this belt of wire.

It was quite terrifying, because it

was about seven feet high, very, very thick wire,

and it was over 120 yards deep in places.

And, of course, if we'd have stopped in that,

or got our tracks ripped off,

then we should have been for it.

Instead of that, the tanks made

great swathes in the wire

and the Jocks who were playing with us,

they came through the gaps we'd made.

And we all emerged the other side into

a deep

valley known as the Grand Ravine.

Before we got there

we had to cross this Hindenburg line,

and the tanks

worked in groups of three.

The first tank dropped his fascine in.

The two other tanks crossed in over it.

And then, when it came to the second line,

the second dropped his and three crossed

over and then left one in reserve.

And we all arrived, every tank,

as far as I could see, at the Grand Ravine.

There was the most extraordinary sight.

The Germans had just finished breakfast.

They were completely taken by surprise.

They were running about

with their hands up, hands down, hands everywhere,

and we collected them and sent them back.

The Jocks took on the prisoners,

because we couldn't do it.

And we had a wait there of 15 minutes

to

enable the barrage to lift

and people to sort themselves out,

and we had anticipated a

great deal of trouble, which never materialised.

So we had this pause,

which was unfortunate in the after event.

My crew got out for a smoke

and to have a look round

and when the time came to go on

I found

I had no crew at all.

They were all looting.

However, we got them back.

I had two men from Scotland in the crew.

They came back with pistols,

binoculars and all sorts of things.

I was furious with rage and they presented

the best pair to me and off we went again.

And we got pulled out of the Grand Ravine

and the accompanying Jocks were getting

a bit tired by this time,

because we'd come quite a long way,

and we went up

the slope towards a place called Flesquieres.

And here, the thing wasn't quite such a cakewalk.

We met batches of Germans

who

were firing machine guns.

We accounted for those, but they did

hold up

the accompanying infantrymen.

Then I noticed, on the right,

that one or two tanks were going up in flames.

When the one on my immediate right

went up,

I

thought the time had come to steer a little left.

And we found afterwards

that I'd run into the battery manned by the German major

who shot out seven of our British tanks

with

one other crew to help him.

He was mentioned in Haig's book.

We then went on further up the top

and came

to the Flesquieres ridge

with its thick belt of trees,

which

were getting rather

difficult to get through.

And here we met the most

intense machine gun fire.

It was so hot,

one had to

completely close down,

and we had no infantry accompanying us then.

They'd fallen back on account of exhaustion

and there were insufficient

reserves to come through.

So we were just tanks

prowling around in the

wood,

which didn't do any good at all.

Eventually I had three men wounded,

and then I was wounded myself,

and then we got short of petrol,

so we decided to go

back to our rallying point to refuel and refill.

Halfway back,

I ran into the

commanding

officer

and I thought I should get a rocket,

and he looked at my tank and told me we'd

better go back to the lying-up place,

and we got to a village called Trescault,

and there I ran into an Indian cavalry brigade.

It was the most extraordinary sight,

the first time I've ever seen

a horsed

cavalry brigade

ready for action.

And they were waiting for orders

which,

unfortunately, they never got.

And I found out what had

happened to the tank.

The front visor was cut right

through by machine gun fire.

The rails were both hanging down -

they'd been cut through by machine gun fire.

The front Lewis gun,

the barrel

itself was

bent,

so intense had the machine gun fire been.

And the louvres,

which are on the

side

of the tank

to protect the engines,

where you get the...ventilation from,

they were cut to ribbons.

And so I left my tank then to go to hospital

and the tank went to hospital too.

And that was the end of Cambrai.

And...cut.