THE LAND DREADNOUGHTS.

Taranaki Daily News, 9 November 1916, Page 7

THE LAND DREADNOUGHTS.

PROMISING DEBUT OP THE "HUSHHUSH BRIGADE.". " ' London, September 20. The secret of the "tanks," these heavy armored ears that are being variously described, not inaptly, as the Dreadnoughts of the trenches of His Majesty's Land Navy, has been kept well. As a result they were abie to make a debu; undev the most favorable conditions. While the Army at the Front had styled them "tanks," a name which is. likely to stick not so much, for its aptness but because of its brevity, those who had to deal with evolving the new Jules Verno arm at home have all styled it the "Hush-hush Brigade," because they had to keep so mighty secret about all they were doing. As the secret was kept there was little to show for it for many moons, therefore their fellovrs in the Services revenged themselves by dubbing those concerned the "Hush-hush Brigade." And the silent men of mystery have scored amid the grim facts of war even as they score still more frequently and easily in popular fiction of sortc

But it must not be imagined that the advent of this new class of heavy armored car is going appreciably to shorten the duration of the war. These monstc:armoied motor ferrets will have more to do with dislodging the Germans and causing them to shift their ground than with the time factor as such.

The much-peppered "tanks" have don" tremendous execution, and on the occas -ion of "their being first used they did not emerge wholly unscathed. The fact that this class of machine is vulnerable, however, is not discouraging, because every .weapon of war up to a superDreadnought also proves vulnerable when brought into action against an adequately equipped and handled foe. All that matters-in this .connection is the proportion of vulnerability attained in practice. For instance, we sea that the Germans are very bold with their Zeppelins —in any area—up to the point at which they begin to lose them. But you can build these very heavy armored cars and man them in vastly greater quantities and very much more quickly then' yoi. can make Zeppelins and train crew; for them. You can also make sure of the fact that when an armored ear docs any damage it will be of immediate and wholcly military value. Km- obvious reasons one cannot go into l\v manv fascinating mechanical details o f this latest and most ambitious version of what was always an obvious and inevitable Mechanical weapon.

Undoubtedly we shall her. - more of the use of this new weapon as the war goes on. for the initial te-,t has proved the value of it—firstly, for saving enormously the infantry employed to take enemy trenches.that have li«cn heavily shelled; and. second, to de.il with the remaining enemy units to be found in those trenches, and especially with ttie deadly maehine-guns and t'.'cir crews there; also with those snipers who lurk in shell craters, and so forth. But the contention advanced from at least in v. quarter that these and other of our lat-ter-day mechanical instruments of warfare have left our infantry with practically nothing to do, or in any ease, with "a'soft job." requires to be irdignantly and instantly repudiated as an utter lie. We are not advancing too cheaply, though, we are quite thankful that we are advancing at a much less cost than we might have had to pay hrul we not equipped ourselves with a wide variety of fighting machinery for paving ihe waj for the advance of the infantry. In fine, now that the fact of the existence of "tanks" has been made known to the public, we must not let. ourselves imng'ine that those new '•iistniments have solved the problem of the war in the regard of saving of infantry or any other aspect. All that has happened is that they have proved a practical and useful auxiliary; so much so, indeed, that if the war endures for a sufficient period undoubtedly our enemy, no lesj than our Allies, will add some variant of this device to his equipment Meantime, though he has damaged some of our "tanks," seemingly so fai he has not captured a specimen for analysis, despite the intrepid way will which the gallant members of the "Hushhush Brigade" advanced, in some eases no less than 1300 yards across country in front of our lines. Small wonder that, in the current phrase, they are being spoken of as having sprung "Somme surprise" on the Huns.