Three Stooges from Ninth Circus Postpone Chad Punch to Save Rat Boy and Pancho from Barbecue
Posted on 09/15/2003 3:46:48 AM PDT by snippy_about_it
No if Davis stays or Bustamente wins.
Three Stooges from Ninth Circus Postpone Chad Punch to Save Rat Boy and Pancho from Barbecue
The idea of an armoured tracked vehicle that would provide protection from machines gun fire was first discussed by army officers in 1914. Two of the officers, Colonel Ernest Swinton and Colonel Maurice Hankey, both became convinced that it was possible to develop a fighting vehicle that could play an important role in the war.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Colonel Swinton was sent to the Western Front to write reports on the war. After observing early battles where machine-gunners were able to kill thousands of infantryman advancing towards enemy trenches, Swinton wrote that a "petrol tractors on the caterpillar principle and armoured with hardened steel plates" would be able to counteract the machine-gunner.
Swinton's proposals were rejected by General Sir John French and his scientific advisers. Unwilling to accept defeat, Colonel Ernest Swinton contacted Colonel Maurice Hankey who took the idea to Winston Churchill, the navy minister. Churchill was impressed by Swinton's views and in February 1915, he set up a Landships Committee to look in more detail at the proposal to develop a new war machine.
The Landships Committee and the newly-formed Inventions Committee agreed with Swinton's proposal and drew up specifications for this new machine. This included: (1) a top speed of 4 mph on flat ground; (2) the capability of a sharp turn at top speed; (3) a reversing capability; (4) the ability to climb a 5-foot earth parapet; (6) the ability to cross a 8-foot gap; (7) a vehicle that could house ten crew, two machine guns and a 2-pound gun.
Eventually Lieutenant W. G. Wilson of the Naval Air Service and William Tritton of William Foster & Co. Ltd. of Lincoln, were given the task of producing a small landship. Constructed in great secrecy, the machine was given the code-name tank by Swinton. The first prototype landship, nicknamed Little Willie, was demonstrated to Ernest Swinton and the Landship Committee on 11th September, 1915.
Little Willie, with its Daimler engine, had track frames 12 feet long, weighed 14 tons and could carry a crew of three, at speeds of just over three miles. The speed dropped to less than 2 mph over rough ground and most importantly of all, was unable to cross broad trenches. Although the performance was disappointing, Ernest Swinton remained convinced that when modified, the tank would enable the Allies to defeat the Central Powers.
Although the performance of the first tanks, Little Willie and Mark I, had proved disappointing in battle, Colonel John Fuller, chief of staff of the Tank Corps, remained convinced that these machines could win the war. After the Battle of the Somme, Fuller persuaded Sir Douglas Haig, Commander in Chief of the British Army, to order another 1,000 tanks.
The British had 60 tanks in service by the spring of 1917. Improvements were made and the new Mark IV tank was strong enough to withstand the recently developed German anti-tank rifles. The Mark IVs were used at the Battle of Messines in June 1917 but those used at Passchendaele later that year tended to get stuck in the mud before they reached the German lines. Other problems encountered during this period included poor visibility, noxious fumes and high temperatures inside the tank.
At the autumn of 1917 a lighter tank called the Mark A was ready to be used on the Western Front. Nicknamed the Whippet, it was faster than previous tanks but was still unreliable and vulnerable to artillery fire.
The Mark V tank became available in July 1918. It contained a new Ricardo engine that had been specially designed for the tank. With new transmission and better gears, the tank could travel at nearly 5 mph. To help the tank tackle the wide trenches of the Hindenburg Line, cribbs were carried. This was a braced cylindrical framework which when dropped in the trench acted as a kind of stepping stone.
At Amiens Colonel John Fuller managed to persuade General Henry Rawlinson to use 342 Mark V and 72 Whippet tanks, followed by soldiers and supported by over 1,000 aircraft. The strategy worked and the Allies managed to breakthrough the German frontline.
World War I was a defensive war. Troops who went "over the top" of the trenches soon found that an infantry advance against entrenched machine guns was not very successful. Casualties in offensives were outrageously high and usually the result was very little gain. A stalemate soon settled in along the western front which lasted most of the war.
What they needed of course was a tank. A Colonel in the British army developed the idea when he noticed that the only vehicles that could navigate the rough terrain were caterpillar tractors with moving treads. He realized that if such a vehicle were covered with armor, it might be just the very thing to get into and over the other side's trenches.
He passed the idea along to the government and Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, got it. He was intrigued by the idea and started a project to develop the idea.
It was so top secret that the workers were told that they were working on water carriers - naturally, they began to call them "tanks," short for water tanks, and the name stuck.
The tanks weren't used in battle until the end of 1916, but then the first batch was tried. Unfortunately most of them broke down before they got very far, but a few did get past the enemy trenches. The army saw the potential and got production underway. A year later, in November of 1917, they were for the first time used effectively to break through the enemy lines.
British Mk.1 tank.
french St. Chamond tanks.
US army operating Renault FT-17 tanks
The first tank-versus-tank battles took place 24 April 1918. It was an unexpected meeting engagement between three German A7Vs and three British Mk.IVs.
Charron, Girardot & Voight Armoured Car
Charron car's main features were : weight 3 tons, 30 hp engine capable of 45 km/hr on route (30 km/hr on field), fully armoured (6 mm nichel/steel plates Lebel Big Rifle's bullet resistant), armed with a Hotchkiss MG mounted on a 360 degree traverse turret (designed by Guye, a French Navy officer). Wooden wheels were protected by steel plates and its tyres, stuffed with special material, could work even burst. The car was equipped with portable U-shaped tracks for trenches and two headligths for night operations.
The use of vehicles for fighting dates to the 2nd millennium BC, when horse-drawn war chariots were used in the Middle East by the Egyptians, Hittites, and others as mobile platforms for combat with bows and arrows. The concept of protected vehicles can be traced back through the wheeled siege towers and battering rams of the Middle Ages to similar devices used by the Assyrians in the 9th century BC. The two ideas began to merge in the battle cars proposed in 1335 by Guido da Vigevano, in 1484 by Leonardo da Vinci, and by others, down to James Cowen, who took out a patent in England in 1855 for an armed, wheeled, armoured vehicle based on the steam tractor.
But it was only at the beginning of the 20th century that armoured fighting vehicles began to take practical form. By then the basis for them had become available with the appearance of the traction engine and the automobile. Thus, the first self-propelled armoured vehicle was built in 1900 in England when John Fowler & Company armoured one of their steam traction engines for hauling supplies in the South African (Boer) War (1899-1902). The first motor vehicle used as a weapon carrier was a powered quadricycle on which F.R. Simms mounted a machine gun in 1899 in England. The inevitable next step was a vehicle that was both armed and armoured. Such a vehicle was constructed to the order of Vickers, Son and Maxim Ltd. and was exhibited in London in 1902. Two years later a fully armoured car with a turret was built in France by the Société Charron, Girardot et Voigt , and another was built concurrently in Austria by the Austro-Daimler Company.
To complete the evolution of the basic elements of the modern armoured fighting vehicle, it remained only to adopt tracks as an alternative to wheels. This became inevitable with the appearance of the tracked agricultural tractor, but there was no incentive for this until after the outbreak of World War I. A tracked armoured vehicle was proposed in France as early as 1903 but failed to arouse the interest of military authorities, as did a similar proposal made in England in 1908. Three years later a design for a tracked armoured vehicle was rejected by the Austro-Hungarian and then by the German general staffs, and in 1912 the British War Office turned down yet another design.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 radically changed the situation. Its opening stage of mobile warfare accelerated the development of armoured cars, numbers of which were quickly improvised in Belgium, France, and Britain. The ensuing trench warfare, which ended the usefulness of armoured cars, brought forth new proposals for tracked armoured vehicles. Most of these resulted from attempts to make armoured cars capable of moving off roads, over broken ground, and through barbed wire. The first tracked armoured vehicle was improvised in July 1915, in Britain, by mounting an armoured car body on a Killen-Strait tractor. The vehicle was constructed by the Armoured Car Division of the Royal Naval Air Service, whose ideas, backed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston S. Churchill, resulted in the formation of an Admiralty Landships Committee. A series of experiments by this committee led in September 1915 to the construction of the first tank, called "Little Willie." A second model, called "Big Willie," quickly followed. Designed to cross wide trenches, it was accepted by the British Army, which ordered 100 tanks of this type (called Mark I) in February 1916.
Simultaneously but independently, tanks were also developed in France. Like the very first British tank, the first French tank (the Schneider) amounted to an armoured box on a tractor chassis; 400 were ordered in February 1916. But French tanks were not used until April 1917, whereas British tanks were first sent into action on Sept. 15, 1916. Only 49 were available, and their success was limited, but on Nov. 20, 1917, 474 British tanks were concentrated at the Battle of Cambrai and achieved a spectacular breakthrough. These tanks, however, were too slow and had too short an operating range to exploit the breakthrough. In consequence, demand grew for a lighter, faster type of tank, and in 1918 the 14-ton Medium A appeared with a speed of eight miles (13 kilometres) per hour and a range of 80 miles. After 1918, however, the most widely used tank was the French Renault F.T., a light six-ton vehicle designed for close infantry support.
When World War I ended in 1918, France had produced 3,870 tanks, and Britain 2,636. Most French tanks survived into the postwar period; these were the Renault F.T., much more serviceable than their heavier British counterparts. Moreover, the Renault F.T. fitted well with traditional ideas about the primacy of the infantry, and the French army adopted the doctrine that tanks were a mere auxiliary to infantry. France's lead was followed in most other countries; the United States and Italy both assigned tanks to infantry support and copied the Renault F.T. The U.S. copy was the M1917 light tank, and the Italian the Fiat 3000. The only other country to produce tanks by the end of the war was Germany, which built about 20.
The Mark I ,Little Willie was designed by William Tratton and Walter Wilson in 1915.
Crew: 8
Weight: 28 tons
Dimensions: length 32', width 13', heighth 8'.
Speed : 3.7 mph
Picture is a Mark II
crew: 8
Weight: 27 tons
Speed: 3.7 mph
The Mark II and III were used at the battle of Arras in April 1917.
They were training tanks, plated but not bullet- proof and so they were used sparingly.
Mark IV in action
Crew: 8
Weight: 27 tons
Speed: 3.7 mps
The Mark IV was the most numerous produced tank in WWI. It did not show its worth till 1917 ,however, this was probably the date when the tank became instituted as one of the most essential parts of modern warfare.
In June 1917 a change of title from the Heavy Branch to the Tank Corps. A new cap badge,a male tank enclosed in a wreath replaced the crossed machine guns.
On the dawn of November 20th 1917, 381 tanks, made up of 3 Tank Brigades of 2 Battalions,assembled before Cambrai. Led by Brigadier Hugh Ellis, an attack was made on the Hindenburg line on a 6 miles front.
Close to the center of the 6 mile line of tanks stood a male Mark IV of 'H' Battalion, inappropriately named 'Hilda'. Through the predawn mist strode Brig. Ellis. Climbed aboard 'Hilda', and unfolded the brown, red and green flag. For a modern Field Commander to lead his troops into battle it was unheard of. A single gun shot sent men and machines in motion. A 3 mile advance was made,(never been achieved before), and created a major breakthrough. Though Cambrai was not taken the battle was deemed a success. So much so that church bells were rung throughout Great Britian. Each year the great battle is commemorated as " Cambrai Day".
Mark V
Crew: 8
Weight: 29 tons
Speed: 29 mph
The first Tank versus Tank battle took place near the village of Cachy on 24th April 1918.
A German AZV engaged 3 MarkIV's, damaging 2 but was knocked out by 2/LT Frank Mitchell.
On the 8th August the Tank Corps struck General Ludendorff's line at Amiens and stretched from Ancre to the Somme, part of Villers Breton to Luce.It was foggy and an immense success for the Whippet tanks.
By December 1918 there were 26 Tank Battalions. As well as serving in France a detachment from the Corps served with General Allenby at Gaz ,Palastine in 1917.
The Corps saw almost continuous action, winning 4 VC's.
Mark IX prototype tested on Armistice day 1918.It was fitted with large airdrums.movement in the water was by paddles fitted to the tracks.
After British tanks went into action on 15th September, 1916, the German Army immediately demanded their own landships. The German High Command appointed a committee composed of experts from leading engineering companies. Josef Vollmer was eventually chosen to design the German tank that became known as the Schwerer Kampfwagen A7V.
Powered by two Daimler engines, the tank was first demonstrated in the Spring Offensive of 1917. In addition to six water-cooled machine-guns, it had a 5.7-cm Sokol gun at the front of the vehicle. A hundred of these tanks were ordered and the first of these were ready in October 1917.
The Schwerer Kampfwagen A7V was first used at St Quentin on 21st March 1918. Although some of its features, such as the sprung tracks and the thicker armour, made it better than British tanks at that time, the A7V was less successful as a battle vehicle. The main problems concerned its mechanical reliability and the difficulty it encountered crossing enemy trenches.
The principal use to which these landships were put was to run over and crush the dreaded "Arianna Huffington anti-SUV Weapon" pictured here (viewer discretion advised):
Prayers offered for their souls.
The FReeper Foxhole Remembers The Battle for Peleliu (Sep-1944) - April 25th, 2003
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