Inventions of the Great War

by A. Russell Bond

Press Illustrating Service

The German Tank was very heavy and cumbersome

At first the only means of combating the machine-guns seemed to be to destroy them with shell-fire; but they were carefully concealed, and it was difficult to search them out. Only by long-continued bombardment was it possible to destroy them and tear away the barbed wire sufficiently to permit of a charge. Before an enemy position was stormed it was subjected to the fire of thousands of guns of all calibers for hours and even days.

But this resulted in notifying the enemy that a charge was ere long to be attempted at a certain place, and he could assemble his reserves for a counter-attack. Furthermore, the Germans learned to conceal their machine-guns in dugouts twenty or thirty feet underground, where they were safe from the fire of the big guns, and then, when the fire let up, the weapons would be dragged up to the surface in time to mow down the approaching infantry.

It was very clear that something would have to be done to combat the machine-gun. If the necessary armor was too heavy for the men to carry, it must carry itself. Armored automobiles were of no service at all, because they could not possibly travel over the shell-pitted ground of No Man's Land. The Russians tried a big steel shield mounted on wheels, which a squad of soldiers would push ahead of them, but their plan failed because the wheels would get stuck in shell-holes. A one-man shield on wheels was tried by the British. Under its shelter a man could steal up to the barbed wire and cut it and even crawl up to a machine-gun emplacement and destroy it with a hand-grenade. But this did not prove very successful, either, because the wheels did not take kindly to the rough ground of the battle-field.

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And here is where we come back to Mr. Holt's mechanical elephants. Just before the great war broke out, Belgium—poor unsuspecting Belgium—was holding an agricultural exhibit. An American tractor was on exhibition. It was the one developed by Mr. Holt, and its remarkable performances gained for it a reputation that spread far and wide. Colonel E. D. Swinton of the British Army heard of the peculiar machine, and immediately realized the advantages of an armored tractor for battle over torn ground. But in the first few months of the war that ensued, this idea was forgotten, until the effectiveness of the machine-gun and the necessity for overcoming it recalled the matter to his mind. At his suggestion a caterpillar tractor was procured, and the military engineers set themselves to the task of designing an armored body to ride on the caterpillar-tractor belts. Of course the machine had to be entirely re-designed. The tractor was built for hauling loads, and not to climb out of deep shell-holes; but by running the traction-belts over the entire body of the car, and running the forward part of the tractor up at a sharp angle the engineers overcame that difficulty.

In war, absolute secrecy is essential to the success of any invention, and the British engineers were determined to let no inkling of the new armored automobiles reach the enemy. Different parts of the machines were made in different factories, so that no one would have an idea of what the whole would look like. At first the new machine was known as a "land-cruiser" or "land-ship"; but it was feared that this very name would give a clue to spies, and so any descriptive name was forbidden. Many of the parts consisted of rolled steel plates which might readily be used in building up vessels to hold water or gasolene; and to give the impression that such vessels were being constructed the name "tank" was adopted. The necessity of guarding even the name of the machines was shown later, when rumors leaked out that the tanks were being built to carry water over the desert regions of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Another curious rumor was that the machines were snow-plows for use in Russia. To give some semblance of truth to this story, the parts were carefully labeled, "For Petrograd."

Probably never was a military secret so well guarded as this one, and when, on September 15, 1916, the waddling steel tractors loomed up out of the morning mists, the German fighters were taken completely by surprise. Two days before, their airmen had noticed some peculiar machines which they supposed were armored automobiles. They had no idea, however, that such formidable monsters were about to descend upon them.

The tanks proceeded leisurely over the shell-torn regions of No Man's Land, wallowing down into shell-holes and clambering up out of them with perfect ease. They straddled the trenches and paused to pour down them streams of machine-gun bullets. Wire entanglements were nothing to them; under their weight steel wire snapped like thread. The big brutes marched up and down the lines of wire, treading them down into the ground and clearing the way for the infantry. Even trees were no barrier to these tanks. Of course they did not attack large ones, but the smallish trees were simply broken down before their onslaughts. As for concrete emplacements for machine-guns, the tanks merely rode over them and crushed them. Those who attempted to defend themselves in the ruins of buildings found that the tanks could plow right through walls and bring them down in a shower of bricks and stone. There was no stopping these monsters, and the Germans fled in consternation before them.