![]() ![]() The machine could navigate almost any terrain-including trenches. The tractor ran on a continuous band of treads driven by inner wheels. He also knew of the American-made Holt caterpillar tractor. Swinton, assigned as a war correspondent, had seen the bloody battlefields of France. In early 1915, British Lord of the Admiralty (the Royal Navy) Winston Churchill was looking for a new idea, and he found one.īritish Army Lieutenant-Colonel E. Repeated assaults on heavily defended trenches caused still more carnage. Battlefronts settled into static trench systems. ![]() This form of combat produced carnage on an unprecedented scale. ![]() One weapon, however, developed as a direct result of the fighting in the war: the armored combat vehicle known as the tank.īattles in World War I tended to be fought by men charging through barbed wire into machine gun and artillery fire. Airplanes, too, already existed, as did observation balloons, submarines, hand grenades, and flame throwers. Machine guns, heavy artillery, barbed wire, and poison gas all existed before World War I (1914-1918). Credit: © The Illustrated London News Picture Library Here's your chance to rank the most powerful and important WW1 tanks.(pc060845) British tank in World War I. Armored commanders didn't understand how best to deploy them, and those Mark I's were used piecemeal, giving Germany time to adapt, develop tank-killing weapons, and eventually their own tanks.īy the time the war ended, thousands of tanks had been built, and both sides were developing faster and heavier models that would have been instrumental in breaking the stalemate on the Western Front. In practice, tanks of the First World War didn't work exactly the way they were meant to, with the machines being slow, prone to breakdowns, and most importantly, often deadly to their crews. They deployed the first tank, the Mark I, in September, 1916, and the world was forever changed. The British realized that they'd need new technology to break the stalemate, and began the "Landship Project" to develop the equivalent of a ship to operate on land. World War 1 tanks were the first in history, great machines armed with cannons and machine guns, and designed to plow through barbed wire and trenches. ![]()
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