ALONG with many other things with finer names, for which credit is
due him, Col. E. D. Swinton, of the British Royal Engineers, will go
down in history as the father of the tank, that modern war monster and
engine of destruction which made its professional début on the Somme
battlefield and which did such effective work in French and British
drives.
Colonel Swinton is a pleasant, mild-mannered gentleman, the last person
in the world one would expect to bear any relationship to the tank. In
fact, the virtue of modesty in him is so well developed that he refuses
to accept all the glory, and insists upon sharing the parental honors
with an American, Benjamin Holt, inventor of the tractor.
“I don’t mean that the Holt tractor is the tank by any means,” he says,
“but without the Holt tractor there very probably would not have been
any tank.”
Arthur D. Howden Smith, writing in the New York _Evening Post_,
declares:
It is practically impossible to get Colonel Swinton to admit outright
that he is the parent of the tank; yet father it he did, and he was
also the first captain of the tanks in the British Army; he organized
the tank unit in France, and he launched the loathly brood of his
offspring in their initial victory on the Somme battlefield. If any man
knows the tank, he does, for he created it and tamed it and taught it
how to prowl and slay.
Colonel Swinton began to think about tanks several years before
Austria sent her ultimatum to Servia, but he is scrupulously careful
to say that many men were thinking more or less vaguely along the same
lines at the same time. Indeed, the proposal of the tank as an engine
for neutralizing the effect of machine gun fire was actually made
by two sets of men, one to the War Office and one to the Admiralty,
and neither group was aware that the other was working along the
same lines. Still, we may believe unprejudiced testimony which gives
to Colonel Swinton the principal credit for convincing the higher
authorities in London that mobile land-forts were practicable.
“In July, 1914, I heard that Mr. Benjamin Holt, of Peoria, Ill., had
invented a tractor which possessed the ability to make its way across
rugged and uneven ground,” he stated. “But several years before that a
plan for a military engine practically identical with the tank had been
sketched upon paper, when a tractor of another make was tried out in
England. That first plan came to nothing. We weren’t ready for it then.
“The reports of the Holt tractor served to stimulate my interest in
the idea all over again, and when I went to France with Lord French in
August, 1914, and saw what modern warfare was like, I became convinced
that an armored car, capable of being independent of roads and of
traversing any terrane to attack fortified positions, was a necessity
for the offensive.”
The Colonel, with a quizzical smile, here called attention to the fact
that the principal German weapon of slaughter was the invention of an
American—Hiram Maxim—and he thought it quite fitting that the weapon
to combat it should be credited, at least in part, to the American
inventor of the tractor. Continuing, he said:
“By October, 1914, I had a fair conception of the kind of engine which
might be relied upon to neutralize the growing German power in machine
guns, combined with the most elaborate fortifications ever built on a
grand scale. You see, their fire ascendency in the meantime had enabled
them to dig in with their usual thoroughness. In October I returned
to England to try to interest the authorities at the War Office in my
idea. I had my troubles, but I did not have as many troubles as I might
have had, because other men of their own accord were working along the
same lines.
“You must get this very straight, mind. Whatever credit there may
be for inventing the tanks belongs not to any one man, but to many
men—exactly how many nobody knows. It is even rather unfair to mention
any names, my own as well as those of others. For, besides those men
who actually worked to perfect the tanks, there were others who had
conceived very similar ideas.
“Still another proof of the plurality of tank inventors is the fact
that while one group of us were endeavoring to interest the War Office
in the idea, another group of men, entirely ignorant of what we were
doing, were trying to get the Admiralty to take up a similar line of
experimentation. And it is no more than fair to point out that the
first money provided for experimentation with landships, as we called
them, came from Winston Spencer Churchill, then First Lord of the
Admiralty. But he was only one of a number of men who played parts in
the development of the finished engine. For example, there were two men
in particular who worked out the mechanical problems. I wish I could
give you their names, but I cannot.”
To the suggestion of the writer in _The Post_ that it seemed strange
that so many minds should have been working out the same idea at the
same time, Colonel Swinton replied emphatically:
“Not when you consider the situation. The tank, after all, is merely an
elaboration, the last word, of military devices as old as the history
of military engineering. Its ancestors were the armored automobile,
the belfry or siege tower on wheels of the middle ages, and the Roman
_testudo_. The need for the tank became apparent to many who studied
the military problems demonstrated on the Western front. That is often
so in the history of inventions, you know. A given problem occupies
many minds simultaneously, and generally several reach a solution about
the same time, even though perhaps one receives the credit for the
invention above all the others.”
“You spoke about the mechanical problems of the tanks. What were they?”
“Ah, there you are getting on delicate ground. I am glad to tell you
all I can about the tanks, but I can’t describe them—not beyond a
certain point, that is. I will say just this—the peculiar original
feature of them, upon which their efficiency most depends, is the
construction of their trackage. It is the feature which enables
them not only to negotiate rough and broken ground, but to surmount
obstacles and knock down trees and houses. But the full description of
the tanks cannot be written until after the war.”
Colonel Swinton described the uproarious mirth of the British infantry
on that morning when they had their first sight of the unwieldy tanks
clambering over trenches, hills, small forests, and houses, spitting
flames as they rolled, lolloping forward like huge armored monsters of
the prehistoric past.
“It gave our men quite a moral lift,” he said. “They forgot their
troubles. But they soon came to see that the tanks were more than
funny, for wherever they attacked the infantry had comparative immunity
from machine gun fire, and it is the German machine gun fire which
always has been the principal obstacle for our troops.”
The name of the tank Colonel Swinton explained was originally a bit of
_camouflage_. People who saw them in the process of erection variously
described them as snowplows for the Russian front and water tanks for
the armies in Egypt. The latter name stuck. And it may not be generally
known that this mechanical beast of war is divided into two sexes.
“Some tanks are armed with small guns firing shells,” said Colonel
Swinton. “These are used especially against machine gun nests. They are
popularly known in the tank unit as males. Other tanks carry machine
guns and are intended primarily for use against enemy infantry. They
are the females. There is no difference in the construction.”
Colonel Swinton was detailed from his post in the British War Cabinet
to act as assistant to Lord Reading in his mission to the United States
to tighten the bonds of efficiency between the two countries in their
war programs.
During the fall of 1914, Colonel Swinton was the English official
eye-witness of the fighting in Flanders and France. Before that he was
perhaps best known to the general public as a writer of romances in
which was skillfully woven the technique of war. One of his stories,
“The Defense of Duffer’s Drift,” is used as a text-book at West Point.