INVENTOR OF "TANKS."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVI, Issue 17294, 18 October 1919, Page 11

INVENTOR OF "TANKS."

BRITISH INVESTIGATION. A CHANCE WORD AT DINNER. LONDON. Oct. 7. Evidence before the commission which is to decide who is entitled to a bonus as the inventor of the tanks showed that Lord Kitchener experimented in February, 1915, with caterpillar tractors with the idea of conveying men, goods and guns over fire-swept zones. He abandoned the idea in June because the tractors would not cross 12ft. trenches. Sir Gordon Hewart, the Attorney-Gene-ral, said that Mr. Churchill originated the idea in January, 1915, in a, letter to Mr. Asquith, pursuing t« with imagination and energy until results were achieved. Mr. Churchill, Minister for War, in his evidence, stated that the Admiralty's experiments under Sir Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt, produced a mother tank in 1916. The idea was much assisted by a guest's chance use of the word landslips at the Duke of Westminster's dinner party. This fired the imagination that led to action. The old idea was to build underlay tanks, which Mr. H. G. Wells visualised years ago. It was impossible to say that anyone invented the weapon which was the culmination of numerous processes, but Major-General Swinton first visualised the place of the tank in modern warfare. Mr. Churchill added that at the end of the war tanks were being fitted with apparatus which would enable the discharge of great volumes of smoke.