The First Tank Crews: The Lives of the Tankmen Who Fought at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, 15 September 1916

By Stephen Pope

Helion & Company Ltd., 2016

Ron Drees, Reviewer

Successful Tank D-17, Crew, and Supporting Infantry
After Fleres-Courcelette

The First Tank Crews does not have a narrative that moves the reader into and through a campaign or even a battle. Rather, it is a description of the individual episodes of the tanks that participated in the battle of Flers-Courcelette, followed by biographies of the tank crews, enlisted and commissioned, varying in length from a paragraph to several pages. Men were followed from their birth through the war if they survived (83 of 500 did not), to adulthood. Many were teenagers during the war and then went on to marriage, a working career and final passage. Several men survived the Great War only to serve in WWII. One was so old that he was mandatorily retired in 1944.

For the geographically challenged, such as me, Courcelette is six miles northwest of Albert while Flers is three miles east of Courcelette. No reason was given for these villages to be military objectives. Perhaps they were convenient points on a map.

First Official Photos of Tanks Released November 1916

The shipping weight of The First Tank Crews with packaging amounted to 2.45 lbs., making it the heaviest book I have ever reviewed. It is well illustrated with photos of the men and tanks along with ten color maps. The appendices list deaths by name and date, crew names by tank, the naming of tanks, and tanks by section with crew members listed. What is needed is more information about tanks concisely stated. What are male and female tanks? We finally learn in Appendix B: male tanks have a cannon; female tanks have a Vickers or Lewis machine gun if they are British.

The steering of a 1916 Mark I tank is done by a couple of wheels that trail behind the tank that are the size of bicycle wheels. I wish there was a drawing of a tank showing the major features and a few specs, such as size, weight, and armament. Yes, the book is about the crews, but a little information about the tanks would have been appropriate and useful.

The difficulties of waging war in a 26-ton tank are discussed here. Almost half of the 49 tanks assigned to this battle did not get to the starting point. Underpowered tanks got caught in shell holes and mud. Heavy rains caused some tank assaults to be cancelled. Eight-men crews in a tank found them insufferably hot, and without a muffler they were deafeningly noisy. The Germans had learned that tank armor could not stop armor piercing bullets and so many crew members became casualties from such ordnance. Mechanical breakdowns were frequent. Yet there were times when tanks contributed to victories by clambering over trenches and scaring away or killing enemy troops.

Read The First Tank Crews if you want to learn about the variety of men who were willing to serve in an experimental situation where risks were rampant with this new mode of war. Ironically, despite the contribution of tanks to Allied victory, it was the Germans who studied, designed, manufactured, and exploited the use of tanks in the next war. I imagine the first crews were roiled by that turn of events. 

Ron Drees