Landships British Tanks of the First World War

 

Evolution, experimentation and implementation. Illustrated throughout with b/w photographs and line drawings of all the tanks in service.

 

On Friday, 15 September 1916, near the village of Ginchy in France, a new, menacing shape moved in the early morning mist and turned its nose towards the German lines. Tank number D1 was the solitary spearhead of the first tank attack in history. Forty-five minutes later it was followed by some thirty or more of its companions, intent on breaking the German trench line. Over the next two years it was followed by many hundreds more while D Company, Heavy Branch, Machine Gun Corps grew to become 4th Battalion, Tank Corps, one of twenty-five such battalions which were in being at the time of the Armistice.The tank was conceived as an answer to a specific problem, the mass slaughter and stalemate of the trenches. Its development, from a primitive caterpillar tractor to a sophisticated weapon system, is the subject of this book. Every type of tank built for the British Army during this period is illustrated and described against the background of the battles in which they fought and the organization which supported them. To the German soldiers who faced them for the first time on that misty morning they were devils incarnate, to the men who fought in and beside them they were archangels of deliverance.

 

David Fletcher

Softcover large format 60pp HMSO 1984 1st Ed

 

Near Fine

Book Code:  SH2915