HE TAUGHT THE “TANK” TO PROWL AND SLAY
ALONG with many other things with finer names, for which credit is due him, Col. E. D. Swinton, of the British Royal Engineers, will go down in history as the father of the tank, that modern war monster and engine of destruction which made its professional début on the Somme battlefield and which did such effective work in French and British drives.
Colonel Swinton is a pleasant, mild-mannered gentleman, the last person in the world one would expect to bear any relationship to the tank. In fact, the virtue of modesty in him is so well developed that he refuses to accept all the glory, and insists upon sharing the parental honors with an American, Benjamin Holt, inventor of the tractor.
“I don’t mean that the Holt tractor is the tank by any means,” he says, “but without the Holt tractor there very probably would not have been any tank.”
Arthur D. Howden Smith, writing in the New York Evening Post, declares:
It is practically impossible to get Colonel Swinton to admit outright that he is the parent of the tank; yet father it he did, and he was also the first captain of the tanks in the British Army; he organized the tank unit in France, and he launched the loathly brood of his offspring in their initial victory on the Somme battlefield. If any man knows the tank, he does, for he created it and tamed it and taught it how to prowl and slay.
Colonel Swinton began to think about tanks several years before Austria sent her ultimatum to Servia, but he is scrupulously careful to say that many men were thinking more or less vaguely along the same lines at the same time. Indeed, the proposal of the tank as an engine for neutralizing the effect of machine gun fire was actually made by two sets of men, one to the War Office and one to the Admiralty, and neither group was aware that the other was working along the same lines. Still, we may believe unprejudiced testimony which gives to Colonel Swinton the principal credit for convincing the higher authorities in London that mobile land-forts were practicable.
“In July, 1914, I heard that Mr. Benjamin Holt, of Peoria, Ill., had invented a tractor which possessed the ability to make its way across rugged and uneven ground,” he stated. “But several years before that a plan for a military engine practically identical with the tank had been sketched upon paper, when a tractor of another make was tried out in England. That first plan came to nothing. We weren’t ready for it then.
“The reports of the Holt tractor served to stimulate my interest in the idea all over again, and when I went to France with Lord French in August, 1914, and saw what modern warfare was like, I became convinced that an armored car, capable of being independent of roads and of traversing any terrane to attack fortified positions, was a necessity for the offensive.”