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Stories from the Trenches: Funny Tales the Soldiers Tell

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[122] <h2>HE TAUGHT THE “TANK” TO PROWL AND SLAY</h2> ALONG with many other things with finer names, for which credit is due him, Col. E. D. Swinton, of the British Royal Engineers, will go down in history as the father of the tank, that modern war monster and engine of destruction which made its professional début on the Somme battlefield and which did such effective work in French and British drives. Colonel Swinton is a pleasant, mild-mannered gentleman, the last person in the world one would expect to bear any relationship to the tank. In fact, the virtue of modesty in him is so well developed that he refuses to accept all the glory, and insists upon sharing the parental honors with an American, Benjamin Holt, inventor of the tractor. “I don’t mean that the Holt tractor is the tank by any means,” he says, “but without the Holt tractor there very probably would not have been any tank.” Arthur D. Howden Smith, writing in the New York Evening Post, declares: It is practically impossible to get Colonel Swinton to admit outright that he is the parent of the tank; yet father it he did, and he was also the first captain of the tanks in the British Army; he organized the tank unit in France, and he launched the loathly brood of his offspring in their initial victory on the Somme battlefield. If any man knows the tank, he does, for he created it and tamed it and taught it how to prowl and slay. [123] Colonel Swinton began to think about tanks several years before Austria sent her ultimatum to Servia, but he is scrupulously careful to say that many men were thinking more or less vaguely along the same lines at the same time. Indeed, the proposal of the tank as an engine for neutralizing the effect of machine gun fire was actually made by two sets of men, one to the War Office and one to the Admiralty, and neither group was aware that the other was working along the same lines. Still, we may believe unprejudiced testimony which gives to Colonel Swinton the principal credit for convincing the higher authorities in London that mobile land-forts were practicable. “In July, 1914, I heard that Mr. Benjamin Holt, of Peoria, Ill., had invented a tractor which possessed the ability to make its way across rugged and uneven ground,” he stated. “But several years before that a plan for a military engine practically identical with the tank had been sketched upon paper, when a tractor of another make was tried out in England. That first plan came to nothing. We weren’t ready for it then. “The reports of the Holt tractor served to stimulate my interest in the idea all over again, and when I went to France with Lord French in August, 1914, and saw what modern warfare was like, I became convinced that an armored car, capable of being independent of roads and of traversing any terrane to attack fortified positions, was a necessity for the offensive.” The Colonel, with a quizzical smile, here called attention to the fact that the principal German weapon of slaughter was the invention of an American—Hiram Maxim—and he thought it quite fitting that the weapon[124] to combat it should be credited, at least in part, to the American inventor of the tractor. Continuing, he said: “By October, 1914, I had a fair conception of the kind of engine which might be relied upon to neutralize the growing German power in machine guns, combined with the most elaborate fortifications ever built on a grand scale. You see, their fire ascendency in the meantime had enabled them to dig in with their usual thoroughness. In October I returned to England to try to interest the authorities at the War Office in my idea. I had my troubles, but I did not have as many troubles as I might have had, because other men of their own accord were working along the same lines. “You must get this very straight, mind. Whatever credit there may be for inventing the tanks belongs not to any one man, but to many men—exactly how many nobody knows. It is even rather unfair to mention any names, my own as well as those of others. For, besides those men who actually worked to perfect the tanks, there were others who had conceived very similar ideas. “Still another proof of the plurality of tank inventors is the fact that while one group of us were endeavoring to interest the War Office in the idea, another group of men, entirely ignorant of what we were doing, were trying to get the Admiralty to take up a similar line of experimentation. And it is no more than fair to point out that the first money provided for experimentation with landships, as we called them, came from Winston Spencer Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. But he was only one of a number of men who played parts in the development of the finished engine. For example, there were two men in particular who worked out the[125] mechanical problems. I wish I could give you their names, but I cannot.” To the suggestion of the writer in The Post that it seemed strange that so many minds should have been working out the same idea at the same time, Colonel Swinton replied emphatically: “Not when you consider the situation. The tank, after all, is merely an elaboration, the last word, of military devices as old as the history of military engineering. Its ancestors were the armored automobile, the belfry or siege tower on wheels of the middle ages, and the Roman testudo. The need for the tank became apparent to many who studied the military problems demonstrated on the Western front. That is often so in the history of inventions, you know. A given problem occupies many minds simultaneously, and generally several reach a solution about the same time, even though perhaps one receives the credit for the invention above all the others.” “You spoke about the mechanical problems of the tanks. What were they?” “Ah, there you are getting on delicate ground. I am glad to tell you all I can about the tanks, but I can’t describe them—not beyond a certain point, that is. I will say just this—the peculiar original feature of them, upon which their efficiency most depends, is the construction of their trackage. It is the feature which enables them not only to negotiate rough and broken ground, but to surmount obstacles and knock down trees and houses. But the full description of the tanks cannot be written until after the war.” Colonel Swinton described the uproarious mirth of the[126] British infantry on that morning when they had their first sight of the unwieldy tanks clambering over trenches, hills, small forests, and houses, spitting flames as they rolled, lolloping forward like huge armored monsters of the prehistoric past. “It gave our men quite a moral lift,” he said. “They forgot their troubles. But they soon came to see that the tanks were more than funny, for wherever they attacked the infantry had comparative immunity from machine gun fire, and it is the German machine gun fire which always has been the principal obstacle for our troops.” The name of the tank Colonel Swinton explained was originally a bit of camouflage. People who saw them in the process of erection variously described them as snowplows for the Russian front and water tanks for the armies in Egypt. The latter name stuck. And it may not be generally known that this mechanical beast of war is divided into two sexes. “Some tanks are armed with small guns firing shells,” said Colonel Swinton. “These are used especially against machine gun nests. They are popularly known in the tank unit as males. Other tanks carry machine guns and are intended primarily for use against enemy infantry. They are the females. There is no difference in the construction.” Colonel Swinton was detailed from his post in the British War Cabinet to act as assistant to Lord Reading in his mission to the United States to tighten the bonds of efficiency between the two countries in their war programs. During the fall of 1914, Colonel Swinton was the[127] English official eye-witness of the fighting in Flanders and France. Before that he was perhaps best known to the general public as a writer of romances in which was skillfully woven the technique of war. One of his stories, “The Defense of Duffer’s Drift,” is used as a text-book at West Point. <hr class="tb" /> <h3>NOT A SELF-STARTER</h3> “Sam, you ought to get in the aviation service,” a Chicago man told a negro last week. “You are a good mechanic and would come in handy in an aeroplane. How would you like to fly among the clouds a mile high and drop a few bombs down on the Germans?” “I ain’t in no special hurry to fly, Cap,” the negro answered. “When wese up ’bout a mile high, s’pose de engine stopped and de white man told me to git out an’ crank?” <hr class="tb" /> <h3>TRY IT ON YOUR WIFE</h3> Extract from lecture by N. C. O.: “Your rifle is your best friend, take every care of it; treat it as you would your wife; rub it thoroughly with an oily rag every day.” <hr class="tb" /> <h3>HE WAS GOING AWAY FROM THERE</h3> He—“So your dear count was wounded?” She—“Yes, but his picture doesn’t show it.” He—“That’s a front view.” <hr class="chap" /></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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