Missed Opportunity? The French Tanks in the Nivelle Offensive

Abstract

Writers of military history have often been keen to highlight missed opportunities in the campaigns and battles that they discuss. Indeed, there is a whole genre of military history books devoted to showing how campaigns and battles could have been much better conducted. Unfortunately, these works usually fail to acknowledge adequately the great benefit of hindsight and will often ignore many confounding factors in the original scenario. Perhaps no war has had so many alleged missed opportunities as the First World War. This chapter will consider whether there were any missed opportunities connected with the first combat engagement of the French tanks on 16 April 1917, including a consideration of a number of criticisms made about the engagement by Heinz Guderian, the German armour expert.¹ The tank engagement was widely seen as a failure at the time and afterwards; for example, Guderian argues in his 1937 book Ach hing Panzer that the French tanks should have given a much better showing on 16 April 1917. To claim this engagement was a missed opportunity, as Guderian does, is to strongly imply that there was a failure of vision, but this case study will show that it was not any lack of imagination in the tank officers’ plans but the hard reality of immature technology and a misjudged approach by the French commander-in-chief General Robert Nivelle to the offensive in general that caused the tank attack to fail.