Cambrai. The First Great Tank Battle 1917

By 1917 the First World War had reached a point of stalemate. Two vast armies, larger than had ever before been put in the field, faced each other in opposing trenches stretching in virtually unbroken lines from the English Channel to the Swiss border. The machine gun was the weapon of the hour. Time after time thousands of men, Allied and German, had gone "over the top", only to be mown down by the merciless hail of bullets. That "corner of a foreign field" was beginning to look more like the quarter of a foreign land. Then came the "Miracle Weapon" of the First World War - the Tank. But a new weapon of such revolutionary potentialities necessarily demands new strategic, tactical and logistic thinking to back up its employment.
Jack Smithers, whose earlier books have established him as a leading authority on what has certainly been the most revolutionary advance in land warfare since gunpowder took over from arrows, brings his wide knowledge of the subject to this reassessment of the Battle of Cambrai, where the new super-weapon was first used by the English in the way its designers intended.
His conclusions are often controversial and sometimes surprising, but, as readers of his earlier books will doubtless expect, certainly never dull. As he says, "No land battle of this century surpasses Cambrai in importance. The methods used made obsolete everything that had gone before and laid out the ground for each serious operation of war from Amiens to the Gulf. Grasp what happened at Cambrai and the rest will explain itself."