THE WORLD'S FIRST TANKS
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Armour is as old as history itself, witness the shield and helmet worn by warriors of the ancient world. And armoured vehicles, such as mobile battering rams, were in use as early as Assyrian times, as we know from bronze ornaments on the city-gates of King Shalmaneser III dating from 824 B.C. Over the centuries since then many other types of battle-car were designed, and some were actually produced, the object always being to protect the attacking force as it advanced up to and hopefully through the enemy's lines. Even that great genius of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, tried his hand at designing a suitable vehicle but in his case, as in so many others, an effective method of propulsion was lacking. Only the advent of the internal combustion engine in the late 19th century rendered possible the creation of a truly viable weapon, known to us now simply as the 'armoured car'.
But this, like all its predecessors, was still a wheeled vehicle, needing a relatively level, firm surface on which to travel. The Great War of 1914-1918 was no more than a few weeks old when it became evident that such conditions were becoming increasingly rare and that the conventional armoured car had only a limited role to play on battlefields now criss-crossed by trenches and ploughed up by shells. The ground on the Western Front over which the armies had to fight could only be traversed by a vehicle running on tracks or bands of metal plates able to spread its weight over a broader area, and provide a kind of bridge over holes and uneven surfaces. Thus was born the tank, conceived by its advocates in Britain not only as a means of crossing difficult ground, but more especially as a weapons platform capable of defeating the deadly trio of trenches, barbed wire and machine guns which had so far made every attempt by the French and British to eject the German invader such a costly affair in terms of dead and wounded.
The Mark I tank - the world's first tank to be used in war - was designed at Lincoln in late 1915. A prototype, affectionately known as 'Mother', was ready by January 1916. Britain's Commander-in-Chief in France, Sir Douglas Haig, was enthusiastic from the start and pressed the production team in England to produce as many as possible as fast as possible. In the event, the factories were at first able to produce the machines in small quantities only, and none at all in time for Haig's great Somme offensive which opened on the 1st July 1916. Following initial setbacks, this offensive soon degenerated into relatively small but costly engagements which advanced the line by only small distances.
To disguise the nature of the new weapon, the tanks were known as the Heavy Section of the Machine Gun Corps, the MGC being the unit from which most of the recruits were drawn. The first 150 machines were organised into six companies, A - E, each of 25 tanks, each of these having a crew of seven men plus an officer. The first two companies to go to France were C and D, but casualties meant that only 36 reached the front line. They were deployed along a front of just over 6 miles (10kms), stretching from Leuze Wood near Combles across to Courcelette, and were shared out among ten infantry divisions.
Poor tactical use of the machines, plus mechanical problems and, above all, the appalling terrain over which they were required to operate, meant that on this occasion the tanks failed to achieve all that their inventors had hoped for, but there is no doubt that they achieved far more than their detractors proclaimed. We now have a far clearer idea of the route taken by each tank, its contribution to the battle and the conditions under which its crew had to fight. We can follow them almost yard by yard over the blood-soaked battlefields of the Somme, using contemporary eyewitness accounts, original trench maps and air photographs to guide us along their path as they carved out for themselves a place in history.