LAND IRONCLADS

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 48, 24 February 1917, Page 9

LAND IRONCLADS

THEIR FUNCTION IN WAR

A VISION OF THK FUTURE.

"The young of;even the most horrible beasts have something piquant and engaging about them," says Mr. H. G. Wells, in the course of an article on the tanks, ''and so I suppose it is the way of things that the land ironclad, which opens a new and more dreadful and destructive phase in the human folly of warfare, should appeal 1 first as if it were a joke. "Never has any such thing completely so masked its wickedness' under an apnearance. of. genial silliness. The tank is a creature to which one' naturally flings a pet name;, the live or.six I was shown wandering, rooting, and climbing over obstacles, round'a large.field near • X., were as amusing, as disarming as a litter of lively young pigs. "War is a thing that changes very rapidly, and. we have in the tanks only the first of a great series'of offensive developments. k They are boitnd to be improved at a great pace. The method of using thenii will change very rapidly. Any added invention will necessitate the scrapping of old 'types and the production '■ of new patterns in quantity. It is of supreme necessity to the Allies, if they are to win this' war outright, that the lead in inventions and enterprise which the British have won over the Germans in the matter should be retained. It is t our game.now to press the advantage for all it is worth. We have to keep ahead to win. We cannot do so unless we have unstinted men and unr stinted material to produce each new development as its use is realised. •

THE LAND IRONCLAD IDEA.

" What lies behind the tank depends upon, this fact: there is no definable up.ward limit of mass. Upon that I would lay all the stress possible, because everything turns upon that.

" You cannot make a land ironclad so big and heavy but that you cannot make a caterpillar track wide enough and Strong enough to carry it forward. Tanks are quite possible that will .carry ■20-inch or 25-inch guns, besides minor armament. Such tanks'may be undesirable, the production may exceed tho industrial resources of any empire to produce; but there is no inherent impossibility in such things..' There a.re not even the same limitations as to draught and docking accommodation that set bounds to the size of ba.ttleships. It follows,, therefore, as 'a necessary deduction 1 that if the world's affairs are so left at the end of the war that the race of armaments- continues, the tank will develop steadily ..into a tremendous instrumental warfare, driven by engines of scores ra thousands of horse-power, tracking on. a track scores of, hundreds of yards wide, a.nd weighing hundreds or thousands of tons. Nothing but a. world agreement not to do so can prevent this logical development of the land ironclad idea. Such a structure will make wheel-ruts scores of feet deep; it will plough up, devastate, and destroy the country it passes over altogether. Tor my own part I never imagined the land ironclad idea would .get loose into war. I thought that the military intelli- . gence; was essentially unimaginative, and that such an aggressive: military Power as Germany . dominated by military people, would neyer produce anything of the sort. I thought that this war would be fought out without tanks, and that then war would come to an end. For, of "course, "it'is mere stupidity that makes people doubt the ultimate ending of war. I have been so far justified in these expectations of mine that it is not from military sources that these things have come. They have been thrust upon the soldiers from without. But now that they are loose, now that they are in war, we have to face their full possibilities, to use our advantage- in them and. press on to tho end of the war.' 'In support of a photo-aero directed artillery,' even our present, tanks ,can be .used to complete an invincible offensive. • We shall not so much push as ram. It is doubtful if the Germans can get anything of the sort into action before the spring. We ought to get the war on to German soil before the tanks have grown to more than three or four times their present size. Then it will not matter so much how much bigger they grow. It will be the German landscape that will suffer. '"-.••■ A FLAYED STRIP OF NATURE. After one has seen the actual, tanks, : it /.is not very difficult to close one's. I eyes and figure the sort of tank thatgiven the assent of our military leaders— may be arguing with Germany in a few months' time abouf the restoration of Belgium and Servia and France, the restoration of the sunken tonnage, the penalties of the various Zeppelin and submarine murders, the freedom of the seas and Jand alike from piracy, the evacuation and reunion of Poland, and the guarantees for the future peace of Europe. The machine will be, perhaps, ; as big as a destroyer, and pore heavily armed and equipped. It will swim over and through the soil at a pace of ten or. twelve'miles an hour. In front' of it will be corn land, neat woods, orchards, pasture, gardens, villages, and towns, [t. will advance upon its belly, with a swaying motion, devouring the ground beneath it.. , Behind it masses of soil and rock, lumps of turf, splintered wood, bits of houses, occasional streaks of red, will drop from 1 its track, and it" wilt leave a wake, six or seven times as wide as a- high road, from which all soil, all cultivation, all- semblance: to cultivated or. cultivable' land will' have disappeared.. It will, not even be. a track soil.. It will be a track of subsoil laid bare It .will be a flayed strip of nature.

. In the course of its fighting, the monster may have to turn, about... It will then halt and spin slowly;, round, grinding out an area of' desolation with a circumference equal to its .length. If it has to retreat and .advance again, these streaks and holes of destruction will increase and multiply. Behind the fighting line these monsters will manoeuvre to and fro, destroying tlhe land for all ordinary agricultural purposes for ages to come. The first imaginative - account of; the land ; ironclad that was ever written concluded with the words : " They are tho reductio, ad absurdum of war." They are and it is to the engineers, the ironmasters, the workers, and the inventive talent of Great-Britain and France that we must look to ensure that it is in Germany, the great modern war propagandist, that this demonstration of war's ultimate absurdity is completed. ■