Sept. 6 1915 the 1st tank rolls out

[Valin]

History.com

 

On this day in 1915, a prototype tank nicknamed Little Willie rolls off the assembly line in England. Little Willie was far from an overnight success. It weighed 14 tons, got stuck in trenches and crawled over rough terrain at only two miles per hour. However, improvements were made to the original prototype and tanks eventually transformed military battlefields.

 

The British developed the tank in response to the trench warfare of World War I. In 1914, a British army colonel named Ernest Swinton and William Hankey, secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence, championed the idea of an armored vehicle with conveyor-belt-like tracks over its wheels that could break through enemy lines and traverse difficult territory. The men appealed to British navy minister Winston Churchill, who believed in the concept of a "land boat" and organized a Landships Committee to begin developing a prototype. To keep the project secret from enemies, production workers were reportedly told the vehicles they were building would be used to carry water on the battlefield (alternate theories suggest the shells of the new vehicles resembled water tanks). Either way, the new vehicles were shipped in crates labeled "tank" and the name stuck.

 

The first tank prototype, Little Willie, was unveiled in September 1915. Following its underwhelming performance--it was slow, became overheated and couldn’t cross trenches--a second prototype, known as "Big Willie," was produced. By 1916, this armored vehicle was deemed ready for battle and made its debut at the First Battle of the Somme near Courcelette, France, on September 15 of that year. Known as the Mark I, this first batch of tanks was hot, noisy and unwieldy and suffered mechanical malfunctions on the battlefield; nevertheless, people realized the tank's potential. Further design improvements were made and at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, 400 Mark IV’s proved much more successful than the Mark I, capturing 8,000 enemy troops and 100 guns.

 

(Snip)

 

 

[Draggingtree]

Prelude to World War I

Mises Daily:Friday, September 07, 2012 by Ralph Raico

[Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (2010)]

 

With the World War mankind got into a crisis with which nothing that happened before in history can be compared.… In the world crisis whose beginning we are experiencing, all peoples of the world are involved.… War has become more fearful because it is waged with all the means of the highly developed technique that the free economy has created.… Never was the individual more tyrannized than since the outbreak of the World War and especially of the world revolution. One cannot escape the police and administrative technique of the present day.

Ludwig von Mises (1919)[1]

The First World War is the turning point of the 20th century. Had the war not occurred, the Prussian Hohenzollerns would most probably have remained heads of Germany, with their panoply of subordinate kings and nobility in charge of the lesser German states. Whatever gains Hitler might have scored in the Reichstag elections, could he have erected his totalitarian, exterminationist dictatorship in the midst of this powerful aristocratic superstructure? Highly unlikely. In Russia, Lenin's few thousand Communist revolutionaries confronted the immense Imperial Russian Army, the largest in the world. For Lenin to have any chance to succeed, that great army had first to be pulverized, which is what the Germans did. So, a 20th century without the Great War might well have meant a century without Nazis or Communists. Imagine that. It was also a turning point in the history of our American nation, which under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson developed into something radically different from what it had been before. Thus, the importance of the origins of that war, its course, and its aftermath.

Introduction

In 1919, when read more http://mises.org/dai...-to-World-War-I

 

Valin not that this had anything to do with the tank but I thought I would add it for the time period

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

Something Victor Hanson wrote a couple of years ago (I paraphrase) The worst nightmare for a Western General is the thought of fighting another western army. I'd say WWI gives us reason to believe that is true.

 

28 July 1914 the day the world changed....and not for the better I might add. You could say that war really ended on 31 December 1991 when the USSR dissolved itself.