The army behind the armyPowell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
History
The army behind the army
Powell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
United States. Army; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
During the last summer of the war two new types of tank were developed.
One of these was a two-man, three-ton affair, which the Ford Motor
Company guaranteed to produce at the rate of one hundred a day. Orders
were placed with that concern for 15,000 of these “flivvers” and the
first 500 machines would have been ready for delivery on January 1, but
upon the signing of the Armistice their production was stopped. The
other machine was a successor to the French Renault, but designed with a
view to quantity production. It carried three men instead of two and was
armed with both a 37-mm. cannon and a machine-gun, whereas the Renault
carried only two men and one weapon. The cost of production would have
been very much less than the Renault machine and the weight substantially
the same. One thousand of these had already been ordered and negotiations
were pending for a second thousand—the first to be delivered in January
and the entire two thousand by the end of March.
In addition to the above activities, the Ordnance Department had decided
to build 1,450 of the large Mark VIII tanks, including hull, guns, and
ammunition, entirely in this country. In fact, work on the interior
components for this lot of machines was well under way when the Armistice
was signed.
It was perhaps as well for the Germans that they contracted yellow fever
when they did, for had the war continued long enough to permit of America
launching the avalanche of tanks which she had under construction, the
Huns certainly would have had heart-failure. I doubt, indeed, if any
Americans, save the handful of officers directly concerned, realize
how tremendous was our tank programme. When the war ended, orders
had actually been placed for 23,390 tanks, representing an outlay of
approximately $175,000,000. This vast fleet of tanks was to be manned by
some 58,000 men—as many as there were in the entire American Army prior
to the war with Spain. _Had these tanks been placed side to side they
would have formed a moving wall of steel forty miles long._ Even the
comparatively few Tank Corps units which had an opportunity to get into
action gave the enemy a taste of what we were preparing for him. Their
crest was an angry cat. Their motto was “Treat ’Em Rough!” And they did.
IX
“GET THERE!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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