THE LUCKY ONES
1917: British soldiers enjoy a respite from the killing fields of Ypres. Now, after painstaking research, historians have found that ALL of them, miraculously, survived. So what happened when they went home?
PLAYING cards, listening to a record player and relaxing with their pet dogs, the scene is one of tranquil relaxation and camaraderie. Were it not for the uniforms, it might be taking place in a back garden or village green anywhere in Britain. Yet this remarkable photograph shows a group of officers in Flanders, briefly escaping the carnage of the World War I front line where the Allies were slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands.
The tank commanders are in their camp at La Lovie, near the Belgian town of Poperinge, where they could try to forget — for a time — their forays into the notorious killing zone known as the Ypres Salient.
The names and stories of the officers in the picture, held at the Imperial War Museum, which was taken on September 26, 1917, can now be told, thanks to years of research by a group of friends in a historical society who have been investigating the lives of the first men to fight in tanks.
The men shown would have remained anonymous were it not for a letter in The Tank journal in the Fifties, in which a veteran identified his old comrades.
And perhaps against the odds, all of the men — whose stories are told in a new book on tank warfare — survived the war, though some were wounded. Several served again in World War II. 1) Second Lieutenant Frederick King, the company’s reconnaissance officer, was known as Jumbo — possibly in reference to his pre-war career as a policeman in Africa. After the war, he returned to what is now Southern Rhodesia and resumed his police career. King died in 1963 and is buried in what is now Harare. 2) Lieutenant William Struthers was born in Stirling and worked as a bank clerk in Glasgow, before joining up in 1914, initially in the infantry. He joined D Battalion of the Tank Corps a few months before this photograph was taken and was soon to command his first tank at the Battle of Cambrai, in November 1917.
This was the first successful mass tank attack, but Struthers’s machine was knocked out by a direct hit. He was wounded, but survived the war. He served as commandant of a prisoner of war camp during World War II, and died in the Fifties. 3) Major Richard Cooper was second-incommand of the company, consisting of 12 fighting tanks and more than 200 officers and men. He was wounded at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, and twice won the Military Cross for bravery.
The son of a wealthy landowner from Derbyshire, after the war he moved to the U.S., where his father had established a highly profitable meat business in Wyoming. He became a big-game hunter and a close friend of Ernest Hemingway and the professional hunter Baron Bror Blixen. Cooper died in 1952. 4) Captain Wilfred Wyatt was brought up in Gravesend, Kent, where his father was a Trinity House pilot. He was severely wounded in the Battle of Cambrai when bullet splinters and pieces of his tank became embedded in his lung. He never returned to action and, after the war, became a solicitor. He served as Mayor of Gravesend and died in 1989, aged 93. 5) Lieutenant Gerald Edwards came from Bristol and joined the cavalry as early as 1912. He started the war in Egypt and volunteered for the tanks after being wounded in the Battle of the Somme. He commanded tanks in a number of actions, the last of which he described tersely as ‘hell with the lid on’.
In 1918, he transferred to the Indian Army and served with them throughout World War II. He retired with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and died in London in 1948. His son and grandson both subsequently became tank commanders. 6) Second Lieutenant Gerald Butler was the son of the Rev Hercules Scott Butler, vicar of Preston in Lancashire. After the war, he became head of a school in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh.
In 1949, he became joint headmaster of a school that had been set up by his brother in Liverpool with just four pupils in 1926. The school moved to the Lake District during World War II and they ran it together until Gerald’s death in 1967. He is buried in the Cumbrian village of Hawkshead, where his headstone says: ‘He spent his life helping boys to be men.’
7) Lieutenant Edward Sartin was the son of a Somerset publican and originally joined the Grenadier Guards, before becoming a tank commander.
He won the Military Cross in 1918 after leading his tanks forward under heavy machine gun fire, surviving a war in which two of his three brothers were killed. He returned to Yeovil and became managing director of a glove company until his death in 1965. 8) Second Lieutenant Daniel Stevens came from London and studied engineering, but joined the Royal Army Medical Corps when the war broke out, taking part in the ill-fated Gallipoli Campaign before transferring to the tanks.
Two weeks after the picture was taken, he was thrown into a desperate attack in which the entire force was wiped out by shellfire or sank in the swampy ground, and his driver was killed beside him. He later transferred to the Indian Army and survived the war, becoming the manager of a tobacco company in North London. He died in 1969.
9) Captain David Morris was a clerk for a Cardiff shipping company before joining up at the beginning of the war, and was in charge of a section of three tanks. Before the Battle of Cambrai, he told his section that the commander-inchief of the Tank Corps was also taking part and urged them to race him.
Perhaps because of this, he went into the attack riding on top of a tank, only to be shot by a German sniper. Luckily, he survived this, and another accidental shooting later in the war. He became director of a building supplies company and died in London in 1954.
10) Captain Christopher Field was a vicar’s son from Dorset who joined the newly formed Army Cyclist Corps in 1914. He was known as ‘Happy Fanny’ in reference to the popular American entertainer Happy Fanny Fields.
He first commanded a tank in the disastrous attack at Bullecourt in April 1917, and won the Military
Cross for rallying the crews of his destroyed tanks at the Battle of Cambrai. After the war , Field became a civil servant in Reading , but rejoined the Royal T ank Regiment in W orld W ar II and served overseas as a liaison officer . He died in Reading in 1959. 11) Captain Hugh Skinner was the son of an Edinburgh solicitor and was severely wounded at Gallipoli, before joining the tanks. He won the Military Cross after his tank was destroyed in the enemy-held village of Bullecourt in May 1917, and was wounded again two weeks after this picture was taken. After the war , he became a tank instructor in India and returned home in Thirties, running gunnery ranges during W orld W ar II. He retired after the war as a LieutenantColonel and died in 1951. 12) Lieutenant Harold Puttock was born in Guildford, Surrey, where his father was in the motor trade, which made Harold an obvious choice for the new world of mechanical warfare. He commanded a tank at the Battle of Bullecourt earlier in 1917, and again in the Ypres Salient, but his active service ended two weeks after this picture was taken, when he was severely injured in a poison gas attack. After the war , he went into motor engineering and died in Guildford in 1966. 13) Second Lieutenant Horace Birks was planning a medical career , until his studies were interrupted by the war. He joined up as an ordinary rifle - man in 1915, before becoming a junior officer in the Tank Corps and fighting in the Battles of P asschendaele and Cambrai. He stayed in the Army and commanded an armoured brigade in North Africa during World War II, playing a key role in stopping Rommel’s attempts to capture Tobruk.
After this, he commanded an armoured division and took part in the fighting in Italy in 1944. He was lucky to survive when his aircraft crashed in the Alps just after the war — he lay on a mountainside for 24 hours with a broken leg before being rescued. After this, he retired from the Army as a Major -General and became secretary of a London medical school. He was a crucial source of recollections about the early days of tank warfare, and died in 1985. 14) Unidentifiable (face hidden by foliage).
n Deborah and The War of The Tanks, by John Taylor, is published by Pen and Sword.