Mark Urban

And the breakthrough at a British company in Lincoln, Foster's, late in 1915, in managing to make a track that holds together and doesn't keep slipping off the wheels and the idlers that it's running over, that was a problem they had with lots of early prototypes.

So they basically made a sort of flange to run over the wheel so the track would stay on, a bit like a railway wheel staying on a railway line.

And that is the eureka moment in a way.

And that person who sent the telegram in the war office announcing it talks about proud parents and this being the sort of birth moment of the new war machine.

And once you can put things on track, you can build these big lozenge shaped tanks that the British had in the First World War.

And they are that strange shape because they're designed to cross big gaps.

So they sort of tip forward, and then the front part bites on the far end of the trench, and then the whole machine can flow across.

And sure enough, that's what they made, these odd sort of rhomboid-shaped tanks.

And they went into action for the first time in September 1916.

And the early results were not too good.

You have to wait over a year, November 1916,

1917, before the Battle of Combré and the first mass use of tanks, something like 350 on quite a narrow front, to see a real breakthrough, a breakthrough of several miles.

And that's when everybody realises they've been in at the birth of something quite special.

Yeah, that's an interesting question.

And, you know, at the birth of it, as you say, they are used in the very late stages of the Somme battle in September 1916.

And it's something around four dozen.

And they say, oh, yes, you know, the New Zealand division can have a few and the guards and exactly as you say.

And, of course, a lot of the debate within the officer corps, the general staff, is

had to be couched in terms of helping the infantry.

These were the people who were dying in such terrible numbers in these attacks.