# 100 years of the battle tank



## Brian G Turner (Sep 15, 2016)

A piece at the BBC about the beginnings of the tank in WWI:
Tank at 100: Baptism of fire, fear and blood - BBC News

Shame it doesn't go into more detail about the technological development to the present day, though.

What's ironic is that after WWI, the British effectively abandoned their own invention - while the German and Russian military were desperate to learn what they could from it.


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## Foxbat (Sep 15, 2016)

Quest have recently been showing a series on the greatest tank battles with some excellent first-hand accounts. My favourite was the Sherman commander who saw the barrel of a Tiger tank peeking through the bocage in Normandy only feet away from his own turret. He fired round after round at the Tiger but to no avail. the Tiger fired one round and gouged a hole right through the sherman turret. Talk about lucky to survive that. Definitely worth watching.


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## Gramm838 (Sep 18, 2016)

Given that the word 'tank' was picked simply because the things could be explained away because they almost looked like a water tank, its a good job someone at the war Department didn't give them a different name..."Commode", "Wardrobe" and so on.

Can you imagine serving in the "2nd Royal Commode Regiment", lol


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## HareBrain (Sep 18, 2016)

Brian Turner said:


> What's ironic is that after WWI, the British effectively abandoned their own invention - while the German and Russian military were desperate to learn what they could from it.



A lot of groundbreaking early work on the possibilities of mechanised warfare was done by Major General JFC Fuller, but his own army failed to take them up. Instead, the Germans developed them into the idea of Blitzkrieg -- perhaps not to Fuller's complete displeasure, since by then he had become a fascist himself.

He was also an enthusiastic occultist and disciple of Aleister Crowley.


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## Venusian Broon (Sep 19, 2016)

HareBrain said:


> A lot of groundbreaking early work on the possibilities of mechanised warfare was done by Major General JFC Fuller...He was also an enthusiastic occultist and disciple of Aleister Crowley.



I think the list of people from that era _*not* _connected to Aleister Crowley would be shorter and easier to compile


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## Justin Swanton (Sep 21, 2016)

HareBrain said:


> A lot of groundbreaking early work on the possibilities of mechanised warfare was done by Major General JFC Fuller, but his own army failed to take them up. Instead, the Germans developed them into the idea of Blitzkrieg -- perhaps not to Fuller's complete displeasure, since by then he had become a fascist himself.
> 
> He was also an enthusiastic occultist and disciple of Aleister Crowley.



The British army never got the idea of armoured divisions punching holes through enemy lines. Their tanks were built around infantry support and reducing fortifications, hence heavily armoured but undergunned and slow (and dispersed throughout the infantry). But it was the Russians under Zhukov, not the Germans, who were the first to use tanks in massed formations, against the Japanese in 1939, to great effect.


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## Tirellan (Sep 27, 2016)

The tank museum at Bovington in Dorset is very well worth a visit.


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