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Tanks for the memories - 90th anniversary

From the BBC:

Ninety years of the tank
Tanks. The very word conjures up an image of armoured monsters emerging from the smoke of war or morning mist, trundling their way across the battlefield, turrets searching for targets.

Or perhaps long columns of panzers clattering along tree-lined French roads in that long, hot, disastrous summer of 1940.

They were first deployed September 15th 1916, 90 years ago. The history of their development has some fascinating turns:

An agricultural manufacturer came up with the idea of an armoured trench-crossing tractor, moving on caterpillar tracks, but the Army rejected it.

An engineer officer with vision, Lt-Col Ernest Swinton, took a similar American design to First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, known for his fondness of wacky military gadgets.

Headed by Churchill, a Landships Committee of soldiers, manufacturers and politicians was formed in 1915 to design a "mobile machine-gun destroyer".

Needing a code name to conceal their real use from the Germans they were labelled "mobile water tanks for Mesopotamia" (the campaign in what is now Iraq) and the name stuck. They did indeed resemble a water tank - large and box-like, made from boiler-plate and peppered with rivets.

This is a technology that has come a long long way and done many things. The UAVs and battlefield robots will be replacing a lot of tanks but there will still be a call for them for some time. Posted by DaveH at September 14, 2006 10:17 PM