Читать книгу The Tank Corps онлайн

66 страница из 102

On the right with the 14th Corps, ten Tanks were to work with the Guards Division, and seven with the 6th and 56th Divisions, their objectives being Ginchy and the Quadrilateral.

On the left eight Tanks were allotted to the 3rd Corps, operating through High Wood and East of Martinpuich. The 15th Corps had seventeen Tanks attached, and the Reserve (5th) Army—fighting between Pozières and Martinpuich—had six tanks.

With all these groups of Tanks the preliminary moving up into the first-line positions—in the pitch dark, through the mud and in and out of the shell-holes of badly crumped ground—proved most arduous, and a good many Tanks broke down in the process. One Tank Commander who struck a narrow sunken road remarks:

“It was full of the bodies of dead Boches, and my driver did not like going along it.”

For the Tanks’ crews the remainder of the night passed in a final tightening of loose tracks and adjustment of the engines, and in listening to the steadily increasing crash and roar of the British bombardment.