THE TANKS.

Taihape Daily Times, 17 November 1917, Page 2

THE TANKS.

GREAT FIGHT PEEDICTED. GERMAN'S BUILDING TYPE OF LAND MONSTER. WASHINGTON, Sept. 17. Herculean battles between droves of Allied and Teuton Tanks will be "as common as air fighting,'' on the Western front shortly. Colonel E. D. Swinton, commander of the first British Tank squadron in France, who is here with Lord Reading's Commission, originated the now famous British fighting monsters, and he believes the Germans are building these land cruisers, so that it will bo a question of survival of the fittest between Fritz and Teddy Tanks. "There will be both male'; and female Tanks —so called," he said, "Wo will have Mary and Molly Tanks along with their lords and masters, the big Teddy Tanks. The males will lumber into battle surrounded by their harems. With the destruction of machine-guns as his chief objective, the male Tank starts across "No Man's Land. Shell craters will be crossed Trenches and even small forests are no barrier. With his two sixpounders lie blasts his way forward. Being bullet-proof, it is seldom that ho is chocked until Tic has accomplished his mission—destroying moch;-ine-gun eniplaeen?ents; "However, he' h more or loss useless at close fightiug ; where ho cannot e:;-

tricate himself. It is here that his better halves get into the game. The female Tanks dubbed thus because of their man-killing propensitfies—tag. flilong tyehind, in advance, and on all sides, fighting like mad. They beat off the enemy trying to storm the big Teddy. Thus far, Tanks are the only means that have been devised in breaking the deadlock along strongly entrenched infantry fronts. Great improvements are being made in their construction and defects remedied. The Tank of the future will be a '"perfect" fighting maqhine capable of feats more startling than heretofore dreamed of," he said. Of the development of the crawling fortresses, which have changed modern warfare, Colonel Swinton said: "During that awful first year every soldier realised that something had to be devised to stop that carnage. The futility of a naked man attempting to cross No Man's Land was apparent to Allies and Boches alike. It was an impossibility to sweep that marked patch of Hell with men alone. I had seen one of your Yankee inventions —Holt's tractor. I remembered its feats in navigating rough country and simply applied the idea. About the same time someone else got a similar idea and wrote Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Independently of each other, the war and navy branches began perfecting the same idea. Navy officials, unkown to me, worked.on a land cruiser, while we struggled with the Tank. Then we got together, with the result you have read about."