Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, WED, DECEMBER 29, 1926 TRIUMPH OF THE TANKS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16227, 29 December 1926, Page 6

Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, WED, DECEMBER 29, 1926 TRIUMPH OF THE TANKS

Perhaps .the most striking impres-' sion that the Dominion Prime Ministers will carry away from the Old Country will be their recollection of the day spent at Camberley. The review in the Soleiit was a remarkable spectacle of Britain’s naval efficiency, but it would scarcely have created ’the wonderment that must have come upon them when the British army of to-morrow, in the vigor of its mechanical operations, was set before them. It has been described as a display which, as in a blaze of sudden light revealed the triumph which man’s brain has created, and, by contrast, showed up the pitiful insufficiency of his puny hand tools, the infantryman’s rifle and bayonet. After it a soldier such as Mr. Gordon Coates, looking back on the war of 1914-191 S, might .well feel like a modern sailor viewing museum specimens of the ancient Briton’s coracles. “It is the most banal of commonplaces,’’ writes a military correspondent of the Observer, “to say that tactics change every ten years, but yesterday the commonplace leaped to the eyes as a startling truth. Ten years ago the first tanks came into being at the Battle of the Somme, and yesterday it was clear that mechanisation has not only changed but revolutionised war.” Another writer regards the display as a stroke of genius on the part of General Milne and his colleagues of the Army Council, for it eclipsed all verbal arguments as a means of hastening the modernisation and mechanisation of the military forces of the Empire, whereas traditional secrecy would have been not merely a negation of Imperial partnership but a brake on progress. The display began with a “mechanised” march past. There were tanks galore—heavy tanks, light, medium, three, two and even a one-man tank. There wete artillery dragons. There were roadless tractors. There were artillery transporters. There were armored cars. The woods round Camberley seemed as if alive with pro-historic monsters. Nor is it tactics alone which have been changed. Motor vehicles have revolutionised strategy. Imagine the effect which can be produced on concentration [ by wheel-eum-track vehicles which can do their twenty to thirty miles or so on roads, and in a' minute can fit tracks for cross-country work, or field artillery with dragons which can reel off eighty miles a day. “The genera! impression produced,” says the Observer writer, “was one of bewildering efijciency. The tanks, dragons and track machines moved hither and thither at speed manoeuvring and zigzagging with uncanny precision. At one moment they seemed to be dancing quadrilles, at .another to be playing polo, again to be taking part in a fearsome duck-hunt regatta, in which the quarry was represented by gallant little one-man tanks. They climbed impossible hills with disdain, and dashed headlong down them with whirring raptures. To the power and. punch of tanks and other mechanised vehicles ono had become accustomed from description, but the extraordinary handiness and manoeuvring capabilities were something of a revelation.” One of the most striking of the displays was that given by the whccl-cum-track car of 1926. The feature of this vehicle is that, it proceeds along roads on wheels at the speed of any ordinary motor ear, and that when cross-country work is necessary a track is substituted. It takes only one minute to change from wheels to track and vice-versa, the change being made by means of the engine power in the vehicle itself. With the development of this system, it is within.t]ie bounds of possibility that in the near future infantry maystart off in the morning, and, after a 200 mile journey, may be brought not merely up to the zone of operations, but actually into the battlefield in the afternoon. “From Lilliput tc Brobdingnng —on the heels of the mosquito craft,” says the Daily Telegraph's writer, “came the newest development of all—a true battle cruiser of the land, so ‘hush-hush•' hitherto that those who knew of if were not supposed to whisper of its existence even. As large, although a shade less heavy, as the war-time tank, or even larger, it swept through the mud-churned waves at a speed as high as the Vickers light tank. Here was power embodied, the suggestion of irresistible force. On the forepart of the deck, between the tracks, was a large cupola-shape, revolving turret, from which projected a 3-poundcr gun and a wart-like excrescence which was presumably the commander’s control tower. Studded round it, two in front and two behind, were four smaller machine-gun turrets. If the fundamental purpose of this tank would seem to be as the offensive base of the light, tanks’ action —as capital ship to their destroyer-role—its immediate object is to fill the present need for a machine more powerful and more suitable than the Vickers for breaking down a strongly-entrenched resistance, and so prevent, a trench-warfare 'Stalemate setting in, as in 1914. We have a display of the new military power that must have convinced the toughest adherent of the ‘bow and arrow’ school; we were now to lu>vo a Taste of the tank’s physical power. A Vickers climbed up a sft-high pile of tree trunks, see-sawed for a moment on the crest, and then crawled down the far side to crash through a barbed-wire entanglement, next cleared a trench, and finally butted into a foot-thick brick wall, emerging beyond in a cascade of falling bricks and still adorned with the victor’s garlands—of barbed wire. Joyful as was this renewal of nursery pastimeson a larger scale, a still more spectacular thrill followed when dragons, with guns in tow, dashed headlong down the precipitous slopes of a heather-clad hill, to climb as surely, if more slowly, up another hill. And last, four Vickcr tanks wore released, to hurtle ia a wild, breathless charge down rugged slopes, so recklessly that it. seemed they must capsize, and pass from sight, crashing through a thin belt of pine trees.” Yet more wonderful was the bridging of rivers for tho passage of tanks. A little 11. E. tank appeared carrying on its back two steel girder sections of 30ft span, which, by engine power, it pushed forward and over the stream to rest on the far bank, and it then crossed its own bridge. Then we had the latest brain-wave of that ceaseless inventor. Major Kartell. Some men emerged from tho bushes, pushed over the river an infantry assault bridge, ran across, and hauled on lino to draw through the stream a eoncentina-like structure of wooden trestles. The

.whole was completed in two and a half minutes, and a Vickers tank rushed over at a speed that seemed reckless and yet was secure, for as its weight forced down the floating trestles they stood firm on the riverbed. Any river 'not more than Bft deep can be instantly crossed by this device. “Viewing the speed with which tanks can now work across country, and bearing in mind'that no man by taking thought can add even a mile an hour to his normal pace,” adds the Observer’s correspondent, “it is difficult to resist the conclusion that tanks and mechanised vehicles generally have ‘got away’ from the foot soldiers. The great war with its static operations, its short rushes, and its gains measured but in thousands and sometimes hundreds of yards still influences military thought. There is no mention in our field service regulations of any Teal co-operation between cavalry and tanks,. With characteristic thoroughness the French have swung away completely from their pre-war visions of shock action by cavalry masses. Tho horse is regarded essentially as a mCans of movement, enabling rapid cyncentrations of dismounted fire power to be effected. The tank and the horse are to be partners. Seeing that the British cavalry has for years been in a class by itself in dismounted action, it is curious to find oi\ the most recent regulation no appreciation of the fact so far as co-operation with tanks is concerned. If the display at Camberley brings home to people that the arm to co-operate with tanks and dragons must have more than a tfiree-mile-an-hour mobility, it will not have been held in vain. Of course, if mechanisation develops to the extent that there will be no foot, soldiers at all and all combatants will be carried in cross-country vehiffes, that is another story. War is certainly trending that way. ’ ’