![men of war tank battles men of war tank battles](https://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/17/16738/kilkiaa.jpg)
He had first learned of them from an early promoter, Winston Churchill, and by 1916 he yearned to put them to use in the summer allied offensive on the Somme. The new machines acquired their most important advocate early, in the controversial figure of Douglas Haig, Commander of the British Expeditionary Force. They were designing a water carrier, the authorities let it be known for secrecy’s sake, and they tried naming their brainchild a “reservoir,” a “receptacle,” a “cistern,” until they settled on the most mundane cognomen of all: “tank”. From early 1915 proposals in the British army for a “machine-gun destroyer” or “landcruiser” or “landship” - an armor-clad Dreadnought to ply the fields of Flanders - wound their way slowly through the bureaucracy, while a prototype emerged almost as painfully from elaborate simulations at Shoeburyness in Essex and on Lord Salisbury’s estate at Hatfield Park. In the summer and autumn of 1914 the reciprocal carnage wrought by the machine gun in the Great War and the impregnable trenches, earthworks, and gun emplacements that soon defined the lines of the Western Front lent new urgency to the designers’ reveries. The corpses in South Africa and Manchuria, left by the recent Boer and Russo-Japanese wars, convinced anyone who still needed convincing that exposed infantry could neither withstand nor break through modern firepower.
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The infantry will be able to follow, without losses or obstacle.” By the eve of the First World War inventors of various stripes and nationalities had come up with armored cars, guns on caterpillar tractors, and, at least on paper, notional machines, mobile steel boxes perhaps, that would overcome hostile fire or carry a human element safely through it. “I shall produce unassailable, covered chariots,” Leonardo da Vinci had written in 1482 to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, “which will enter the enemy lines with their artillery and will break through any troop formations, however numerous they may be. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.įor almost two years the British had been working fitfully on it. Photograph by British Government Photographer. And had it just disgorged the 40 men around it, or had they followed on foot? It was hard to say. How the thing propelled itself was unclear. From the remains of an infantry regiment near the village of Thiepval came a description of an egg-shaped machine, “5 or 6 meters long,” mounted with machine guns on its side and shovels on its front to push the earth aside. Ten days later the puzzlement on the Somme, if anything, had spread.
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That morning other reports from nearby announced sightings of an “extraordinary vehicle” mistaken for an ambulance until machine gun fire burst from its side of machines spewing smoke which the men mistook for poison gas of prehistoric or futuristic creatures, uncertain in gait and obscure in purpose. The British called them “tanks,” but he could not know this neither he nor any of his commanders had ever seen or heard of them. “And there, between them, spewing death, unearthly monsters.” To a Bavarian infantry officer on the Somme in the early morning hours of 15 September 1916, the rhomboid, tracked behemoths lurching at him amidst waves of attacking enemy infantry had no name.