![]() Churchill established the Landships Committee to take the experiment further, and what followed were a numbered of utterly failed designs as the engineers attempted to get the wheels right. He thought there might be something to this concept of having a land vehicle that could sail over the terrain like a ship on water and, also like a ship, fire its own cannons. In 1915, the First Lord of the Admiralty in the British Navy, Winston Churchill, caught wind of a few abandoned British experiments involving 'trench-crossers' and 'machine-gun destroyers'. While the French did find some success with their mobile wire cutters, the potential for armoured and armed all-terrain vehicles on the battlefield eclipsed that narrow focus. However, the wheel-based chassis soon gave way to the modern caterpillar tracks already in use in US farming, as they provided more grip on the chewed-up terrain found in the French battlefields and the Belgian soon-to-be swamplands. ![]() Just as barbed wire was taken from the agricultural landscape and made into a deadly weapon for the war, so were the early tank-prototype chassis, which came from tractors. France's earliest attempts at using armoured vehicles on the battlefield were meant to clear away the seemingly endless swathes of barbed wire that had become a dangerous trench accessory from the very beginning of the conflict. First conceived primarily to transport heavy artillery over variable – and vast – terrain, once the tank's operational potential was realised, they were used to punch holes in static trench lines, lending much-needed mobility to armies that still felt capturing territory was king.ĭuring WW1, the Allies were the first to begin developing armoured fighting vehicles, with the French and the British leading the way with sometimes (to the modern eye) hilarious designs. ![]() To no-one's surprise, Leonardo Da Vinci drafted a primitive design for the first mobile armoured land machine way back in the fifteenth century, but the tank as it stands today is really a twentieth-century concept. ![]()
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