I like how at the start they broke down and weren’t very realiable but they were a very good psychological weapon.
I can’t remember where to find it but I remember a letter or something from a soldier where he wrote about soldiers running up to him and screaming that there was a metal crocodile in the trenches.
That would make me shit myself seeing a tank for the first time, even if it’s stuck in mud… but being IN the tank would scare me more. Bullets bouncing around you like razor blades while your ears are blown out from the intense noise? Naaaaaaaaah i’m right aye lol
The first time British tanks showed up, they were utterly devastating to German morale. Some troops threw down their weapons on the spot and surrendered. Armored cars were known, but they couldn’t cross the uneven ground of the trenches, and were vulnerable, in any case, to bullets. Those tanks, before any countermeasures were developed, might as well have been moving bunkers for all the Germans could do against them. The terrain was the real enemy those tanks were fighting! And their own primitive designs.
Funny enough, the French wanted the British to wait so they’d have that ‘first time’ effect with hundreds of tanks in a combined Anglo-French offensive, but the Brits wanted to test their own tanks in battle first… thus destroying the element of shock when the French rolled out a hundreds-of-tanks-large offensive the next year.
I like how at the start they broke down and weren’t very realiable but they were a very good psychological weapon.
I can’t remember where to find it but I remember a letter or something from a soldier where he wrote about soldiers running up to him and screaming that there was a metal crocodile in the trenches.
That would make me shit myself seeing a tank for the first time, even if it’s stuck in mud… but being IN the tank would scare me more. Bullets bouncing around you like razor blades while your ears are blown out from the intense noise? Naaaaaaaaah i’m right aye lol
The first time British tanks showed up, they were utterly devastating to German morale. Some troops threw down their weapons on the spot and surrendered. Armored cars were known, but they couldn’t cross the uneven ground of the trenches, and were vulnerable, in any case, to bullets. Those tanks, before any countermeasures were developed, might as well have been moving bunkers for all the Germans could do against them. The terrain was the real enemy those tanks were fighting! And their own primitive designs.
Funny enough, the French wanted the British to wait so they’d have that ‘first time’ effect with hundreds of tanks in a combined Anglo-French offensive, but the Brits wanted to test their own tanks in battle first… thus destroying the element of shock when the French rolled out a hundreds-of-tanks-large offensive the next year.
Artillery, K bullets, mortars, gas, anti-tank rifles, flamethrowers, bundled charges etc had nothing on mud lol