Behind me here is an example,
or actually, THE example of the Mark I. So this is the first tank ever to see action, and this is the only surviving example
here at the Tank Museum in Bovington. You'll notice that it's got a quite
funky camouflage pattern on the side. That was designed by a famous artist of the day,
but the later tanks are much plainer and green. They found that the tanks got so splattered with mud that
that acted as a, if anything, more effective camouflage and so they didn't bother with
this funky camouflage later on. At the back you can see these big wheels
that only appear on the Mark I. The idea was that they were to help with steering,
but actually they didn't help all that much. And they were another thing to get caught
in barbed wire, of which of course there was a huge amount on
the Western Front, so they got rid of it. So the Mark I, a very significant tank
because it was the first ever to see action. But they made great improvements over this. So let's have
a look at some of the later tanks that followed this one. Do you know what the word for tank in Russian is? It's ... tank. The Russians called tanks 'tanks'
because the British called tanks 'tanks'. And the British invented the tank
and these were the first tanks. They were called 'tanks' because the people who
made them thought they looked a bit like water tanks. It's a large box with boiler plate riveted on
the outside of it. And it was useful for security. So they carried on calling them 'tanks' because
they didn't want the Hun, who is always listening, to know that the British were
moving around this new weapon of war. So if you called it something harmless, like 'tank',
they perhaps wouldn't be so suspicious. The British called their tanks 'males' and 'females'. The
males had these guns on. This is a naval 6-pounder gun. Why naval gun? Well, actually the original tanks
were built by the navy, they were land-ships. It was later that tanks became an army thing. This side thing is called a 'sponson', and it's similar to
the thing that you might see on a dreadnought of old. And you can see that it's got a rotating turret, and this could be rotated to fire directly sideways,
or even a little bit backwards. So as this crossed a trench it could
fire sideways along the trench, and discourage any Germans from
sneaking up with mines or anything like that. You may be wondering what this great big
bundle of sticks on the top is, it's called a 'fascine'. And the idea is you drop that into a ditch in order to
block it, and you can then cross in the tank. Now this is nothing new, people were
using fascines in war ... since ancient times to fill up moats and so forth around castles,
and ditches around fortified cities. But this was a new use for it with tanks.
By all accounts they didn't last very long, once you'd had a few tanks go over one
they were so wrecked they weren't very useful. But if you're trying to get across a wider trench,
... and more quickly, if you drop a fascine in, of course you've only got one, so it's a one-shot thing.
And the enemy quite often had five trenches in succession that you had to get across,
a fascine was very useful. This one is unusual in that it's quite dense.
So you can see it's a very dense bundle of sticks. ... Typically they had a smaller number of bigger logs,
and they often put pipes in. In fact I've seen some modern fascines
which are entirely made out of pipes. And the principal reason for that is water. If you're dropping something into a canal
or something that has water flowing along it, you want the water to be able to go through the
fascine rather than to back up, wash the fascine away, and cause a load of flooding all around the trenches, which
is not going to be very convenient for anyone following up. So, there you go, it's a fascine. This is the first tank that was really used
effectively in battle as a weapon of war. It's the first tank that was made in significant numbers,
they made about 1,200 of these. And 100 years ago, at the Battle of Cambrai, they used
these en masse for the first time on the right sort of ground. They didn't get bogged down, well, not too many of them
got bogged down, because they picked the right bit of turf to crawl across in these monsters that of course
terrified the Germans. The Germans didn't have tanks. And this shape is designed with one purpose,
it's for crossing trenches. Because this is for breaking the
deadlock on the Western Front. So both sides are fighting quite a static war,
they're in these deep trenches. By the time these came out, both sides had
got very, very good at building trenches and bunkers. So what could break this agonising deadlock that was
mowing down so many of the flower of youth in Europe? Well, this was the idea. You have this
huge front angled section that rears up. And the length of the tank is enough so that
it can cross the whole of a trench in one go. But they had no suspension, these were early days. This is just a frame with plate ... riveted onto it. So it would cross the trench, and at some
awful moment there would be a great crash as the front of the tank would
hit the other side of the trench. And this was quite inconvenient for the people inside. There's a famous piece of film where a
tank back in Britain at the testing station is being demonstrated in front of the King. And the tank goes up a crazy angle of slope
and then it comes crashing down in an impressive way and then is able to carry on.
And then the doors open and out come just a few crewmen, and stand there bolt upright to attention
to be inspected by His Majesty. Why didn't all 8 men come out? Because the
rest of them had all been knocked unconscious. Being on the inside of one of these when it came
crashing down with no suspension was somewhat uncomfortable. Now, we're going to take a look inside,
and you may be amazed at the conditions in there. I'm inside, in a gunner's position. There would be
two men operating this 6-pounder in the side sponson. So there'd be a man here, a man where I am.
And the man here would also have access to this, which is a Lewis gun port.
There would be a machine gun going rat-tat-tat there. And all around the tank there are loads of
these little oval holes, those are pistol ports. Because you know the Hun sometimes got dangerously
close, and you needed to shoot at some extreme angle. So you could get the muzzle of your Webley revolver
through there and give him what for. There are quite a few of those in the ceiling as well,
because sometimes they would climb on top. These things are only moving
at walking pace, don't forget. Now, there are 8 men in here.
So we've got two on this gun, and then just here there's a gear operator. And he's operating the gears
here according to the instructions: low, high, in, out, in. And there's another one on the other side.
But how does he get his instructions? Well clearly someone has to attract his attention,
so they could just whack him on the shoulder, "Oh, what? What does the commander want?"
Well, the commander will be sitting up here
looking forwards through this hatch. And perhaps he sees some need to change gear,
something's coming up, "Oh, oh." So he needs to attract ... attention. So he could
physically kick someone to get their attention, or he could get a spanner and whack it
onto something hard to make lots of noise. And then there was a system of hand
signals for this gear, that gear, and so forth. If he needed to signal to another tank,
he could poke flags up through the hole. There's a pistol port here for instance
for shooting back along the top of the tank, but you could stick a flag through there
and wave it to signal to another tank. But what if he needed to send a message back to HQ?
Well, that's when the pigeons come in. You see there would be a basket somewhere.
And in that basket would be some pigeons. Whether they'd be in the peak of condition, what
with all the heat and the fumes and everything is ... well, it's unlikely one would imagine. But you would attach the message to the pigeon's leg
and let it go, perhaps out of the door out of the back. And as long as a German sniper didn't see this
and shoot it, there was a chance, there was a chance that it would get back to HQ
and give them the good news. Conditions were primitive, and perhaps nothing
illustrates how primitive things were in here better than the fact that they haven't invented the idea
of putting the engine in a separate compartment. The engine is this big exposed thing
in the middle of the room. This will of course get scalding hot, and as men are being
thrown around sometimes they would get a horrible scald. I imagine much of the time they probably
weren't wearing much clothing in here, because it might get up to 53 degrees Celsius in here. And the sweat would be pouring off you,
so you'd need lots of water. So they had water bottles everywhere, as well as all
their personal kit, their rifles, their webbing and so forth. There'd be loads more ammunition, not just
stowed like here. This is 6-pounder ammunition, this is machine gun ammunition here. But there'd be more rounds on the floor,
and spent rounds of course coming out of here. Every time this fired more fumes coming in
and filling the place up. Every time anyone fired a machine gun or a pistol,
more fumes again. And you might have to be here for a very long time.
So you've got all the smells associated with 8 men
that are in a hot box all day. Conditions were very grim indeed. And it is often said that the commonest cause of death
in a World War [One] tank was carbon monoxide poisoning. However, it's probably just one of
those things that gets repeated a lot. It's likely that they would have noticed that a lot of
people were dropping dead of some mysterious cause, and the extractor fan probably wasn't beyond them
at the time. They had invented the propeller. But it's one of those things that gets said a lot but it's probably
spurious. But certainly men physically suffered in here. And I imagine from the heat, from the exhaustion,
from the fumes, from the dehydration perhaps you might have got a fair few casualties that way. Now if we come over here, you can see the
starting handle. So this is just a physical crank. And you can see here how it engaged with the engine.
And so that's how you get things started. This massive thing here is the differential,
and you can see a differential brake which is controlled from the front by that big red lever. One odd thing that does show on the outside
of the tank is that they're not symmetrical. I said before that these were naval guns, and they were. And it doesn't matter on a naval ship particularly that all the
gunners would be on one side, and all the loaders on the other. But in a tank when you've got things on either side,
perhaps you would redesign the guns, but they didn't. So the gunner is on the same side
the loader's on the same side on both sides. Which meant that in order to accommodate
the space that those men needed, they're not actually completely symmetrical,
and that shows on the outside of the tank. These side sponsons were designed such that
very quickly they could be brought into the tank to make the entire tank narrower so it
could be put on a train and go through train tunnels. It was much easier to transport, and that's
one of the many improvements of the Mark IV, which is this tank, over the Mark I. I can't stand up by the way, literally.
I am tall, but you can see that even an ordinary height man has no
chance of standing up in this space. In one year the British learned a
lot of lessons about how to make tanks. And this is a much better tank in lots of ways.
It's got a better engine. It's got more convenient crew positions.
It's slightly better armoured. They'd worked out that putting the petrol tanks
where they were vulnerable before to enemy fire and causing internal fires was bad.
So they put the petrol tank at the back on the top. You'll notice that the front of the nose here,
the front horn, is just plain green. There's the tank number.
Whereas on this later tank, this is the Mark V, we'll see a difference. Because on the front
of the horn here we have white and red stripes. These were introduced because so many tanks got
captured by the Germans, and then used by the Germans, that there was a danger that [a Hun] tank
would be mistaken for a friendly tank. So the British started saying,
"No, no, no, honestly, this is British." And they starting putting those on.
The Germans meanwhile painted big crosses on theirs. The Mark V was a significant
improvement over the Mark IV. Externally, it looks pretty much the same,
but internally it was quite different. They had a much better engine,
and they'd sorted out the gearing problem. So though this also has a crew of 8,
you don't have two men operating gears. Instead those two men are freed up to be gunners.
So it was a more efficient vehicle. On the top you see this big slab of oak, a big beam,
and some short very very heavy chains on this bit of rail. That's an un-ditching beam. If things went very badly
and you ditched, you got stuck in a trench, or some very thick mud, or a crater or something, some poor soul had to get out of this
door here, climb up on the tank, and attach that very strong
short chain to the tracks. At which point the beam would be dragged
over that rail and then in front of the tank, and, all going well, would be dragged under the tank. And it would then claw its way out of the trench,
ditch, crater, or wherever it was that it was stuck. So that's an un-ditching beam. The sight of these monsters crawling across the ground
into action for the first time during the Battle of the Somme on September the 15th 1916, must have
been terrifying for the defending Germans. Bullets bounced off the tanks, trenches and wire did
not stop them, many Germans just panicked and fled. But though the tanks scored a victory for morale that day,
it did not produce the decisive results hoped for. Too few had been used on the wrong sort of ground,
and they were too unreliable. Of the 49 Mark Is deployed that day,
all but 25 broke down before even getting into action. Oh, but I promised to tell you about
The Great Courses Plus, my sponsor. It's a repository of knowledge: they have oodles, oh yes,
oodles of lectures on all manner of things in video form. Never stop learning, absolutely. Now you
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type that into the search engine and ... ba-ba-ba-bah bingo! 8 courses by 5 professors.
And look here, 50 lectures across many courses. A quick look at the lecturers. Why does it say PhD like that in inverted commas? It does it for them all.
Is this Richard Kurin, so-called PhD? I'm pretty sure that these men do actually have PhDs,
it's just weird punctuation. Anyway. Lectures you see. It all cross-references,
so what you see here are lectures about World War One in various different
courses which are mainly about other things. This one is from a course on the British in India.
There's a lecture in that course about World War One. Sorry, I had to check something quickly. How's his scholar's cradle?
That's just a basic fingertip grasp, I'm not impressed. Here we have one lecture on World War One
in a course about American Indians. Another quick check here for the scholar's cradle,
because you never know. Okay, some basic parallel hand waving. Oh dear, that's very basic. Here's World War One's effect on the
world economy in a course about economics. Checking ... oh wow! Straight in there, look at that!
Straight in with the front cage. He's holding it well. Oh he's confident with it. Oh straight to the finger prow. Holding the finger prow. This is good stuff.
... Oh, a count off. Oh, and back to the full cage. Oh, and bouncing. Hah, this is good. Here's one on the home front, which is part of
a course on the so-called Long 19th Century. Whoa, he didn't hang about did he? I like the colour of his jacket too. Another from a course on American history. Yeah, parallel hand waving, hand clasp.
Nah, not the best. Here's World War One covered
in a history of Eastern Europe. That bald guy is going to be difficult to beat.
Okay, we got some basic parallel hand waving. Nothing too inspiring here, but he gets there in the end.
Watch for it. Bang, there it is. Here's one on the war in the desert,
you know, "Aqaba from the land" and all that, from "Turning Points in Middle Eastern History". Ooh, straight away I can see this guy's confident.
Oh, a little fingertip grasp there. He's threatening a front cage.
Oh lovely asymmetry there. Did you see that? Nearly on the cage there.
But oh, some independent hand work as well. It's good to play with it. And he's going to go for a cage,
ah, there are the fingertips, there are the fingertips. And oh, nearly an interlace. Oh, more asymmetry. He's just
playing with this. Oh, he's good, I could watch him for hours. One on Industrial Warfare, 1914 to 1918,
from a course on the Industrial Revolution. Okay, let's see what this guy's got. Oh, he's going to use a thumb
there. There's the thumb bind and into a full cage, very good. And even a course on baseball has
a lecture on the effects of the war. Oh sitting position, that is a challenge. He's just gone
for a basic hand clasp there, I do understand. So you see you can come at
a subject from many angles. It's quite a rabbit hole to wander down. And all this can be
trialled free if you but click the link in the description, or type in www.TheGreatCoursesPlus.com/Lindybeige. Right, back to the tanks. The Mark IV was used en masse at the Battle of Cambrai. Cambrai started in 1917. This year is,
as I'm recording this, 2017 and so it's 100 years since the first major battle with tanks
in which tanks made a breakthrough. And quite a breakthrough too.
They attacked on something like a 9-mile front against the much-vaunted
and heavily-fortified Hindenburg Line. Which had been a quiet sector for a long time,
so the Germans had had a long time to defend it very thoroughly, and in depth. And in one day, 350 Mark IVs and a total of
437 British tanks formed up in nine battalions, and supported by aircraft and artillery and lots of
infantry, were able to advance five miles in one day. That is quite extraordinary. To give you
an illustration of quite how extraordinary it is, in three months of fighting in Flanders twice as
many men had died and hadn't got anything like as far. So this was such an extraordinary victory that
church bells were rung in England in celebration. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite the tremendous
war-winning victory that it could have been, because there weren't enough reserves.
So the British weren't able to follow up. They only had one infantry division and
three - rather optimistically- cavalry divisions standing by ready to follow up.
And that just wasn't enough. So after a short while
troops were ordered to dig in. And then the Germans launched one of
their extremely effective counter-attacks. And so an awful lot, in fact almost all, of the
ground gained was lost to the Germans again. But the British had learned
yet more lessons in combined arms. They were using new types of
artillery tactics and new fuses. They were using the Number 106 fuse,
for example, which had ... a detonator on the nose, which meant that
it went off the instant it touched something. Rather than air-bursting, which is great for
attacking personnel in the open, but doesn't cut wire. Or burying itself into the ground before exploding,
which is great against trenches and bunkers, but again does not cut wire. If you want to follow up with three divisions of cavalry
quickly, you need to get the wire out of the way. Tanks are very good at getting through wire,
they just crush it down. And some of them were equipped with great big grappling
hooks to drag up the wire behind them into great bundles, so that the cavalry can, all going well,
get through. And some did. But not fast enough,
and not in enough numbers. So Cambrai was a victory for new tactics. The artillery, for instance, used 'silent registering', which
is where you don't warn the enemy that you're coming by firing some ranging shots and then
using observers to report where they land and then gradually walking onto the enemy
and so zeroing in, and then firing for effect. By which time the enemy knows that
it's just about to be barraged, and so all the enemy just gets
down into deep underground bunkers. And instead silent registering used various
newfangled ranging techniques and lots of calculations, and you fired for effect straight away, all going well
hitting the target without giving the enemy any warning. They were also getting better at using something
that was fairly new called the 'creeping barrage'. At this point they were creeping the barrage
300 yards in front of the men. So the infantry were following behind a barrage that
was moving towards the enemy and keeping them safe. They were also given air cover and smoke cover. So in
terms of combined arms it was quite an impressive operation. The Allies ... were getting better at that sort of thing,
and they got extremely good at it by the end of the war. So Cambrai, though you could say was not
a tremendous success in the long term, the battle raged for 18 days, and the
counter-attacks were very strong and proficient. But they learned more lessons, some
of them they were learning not for the first time, for example, don't go into towns with tanks. The British went into a town with tanks
and the German defenders just hid in the town, let the tanks pass through, and then came out and ambushed
the infantry that were following with great slaughter. Tanks are also very vulnerable in towns,
and that remains the case today. You don't really want to fight in a densely
built-up area in a tank if you can possibly help it. So Cambrai, the first use of tanks en masse. And it was a spectacular breakthrough of the line,
so it showed that these things worked. Early in the morning, on the first attack at Cambrai,
Brigadier Hugh Elles, the commander of the tanks, got into his particular tank, which was called Hilda,
much to the surprise of a lot of people who didn't realise that he was going to be
going forwards at the front with his men on the day. And he got into his tank carrying something
furled up, and early on in the battle by all accounts he inspired men tremendously by poking that
stick up through a hatch on the top of his tank and unfurling the newly-designed banner of the Tank Corps. It had three horizontal stripes, one was
brown, one was red, and one was green. These were for the mud, for the blood, and,
all going well, for the green fields beyond. Here we see some of the medals that he won. Well, I say he won, actually he and his family,
as you can see, were pretty well-decorated. I haven't memorised his entire title, but you can
see it now scrolling across the bottom of your screen. This guy was certainly doing pretty well
in the gong department. And as you can see, some of them are... wow... impressive. I'm standing here next to a Mark V**. Essentially inside it's the same as any other Mark V,
but this one has a body that has been stretched. It's quite a lot longer. The reason they made them so much longer
was that it enabled them to cross a wider trench. The reason they needed to cross wider trenches is that
the Germans had started making their trenches wider in response to the fact that the British
had tanks that could cross trenches. They used to make 9 foot wide trenches,
but then they started making 12 foot wide trenches, hence the need for longer-bodied tanks. But even if you didn't attack the Germans in a sector
of the front where they'd made their trenches wider, you'd still done some good because by forcing
the enemy to make their trenches wider, you've also forced them to make their
trenches more vulnerable to your artillery. So the tank was doing some good even if it wasn't
attacking, because it *could* cross a 9-foot trench. This particular one is a female. The other tanks you've seen have got a
big long 6 pounder naval gun sticking out of them. But this one hasn't, this one has got a machine gun port.
There would have been a machine gun here, and another one there, another one in the door,
and the same on the other side. So this one had 6 or perhaps 7 machine guns,
and that's why it's called a 'female'. So the males had the 6 pounders,
and the females had the machine guns. They were both very very useful. And they were
made throughout the war in roughly equal numbers. Inside now, the front of the left-hand sponson,
this is a machine-gunner's position. I can't see how he would been able to see all that much
when there was a Lewis gun in that hole. Another Lewis gun position at the front. Commander
on the left, driver on the right. The cage is modern. The drivers controls. I'm not sure
which one was the brake and which one was the clutch. The horribly exposed central engine. Piston heads there, lots of noise, just think of the noise. This is the best shot I got of
the inside of one of the sponsons, sorry. Ammunition stowage, lots of ammunition storage,
and another machine gun position. How high was the ceiling? Um, not very. And you've got to remember that the whole thing
is shaking violently as you move around. So you couldn't be up against the ceiling,
you'd need quite a bit of clearance. And perhaps a helmet would be a good idea. So, how old is the concept of the armoured personnel
carrier, or APC? Well older than you might think. This is a Mark IX and it is, you could argue,
the world's first armoured personnel-carrier. It has no side-sponsons, and that meant that the entire
body of the tank could be made wider so it could carry more. You could get, at least in theory, 30 men in here. Or you could get supplies, food and ammunition,
for a very large number of men, perhaps as much as a battalion
for a whole day in one of these. So they could be used for bringing troops forward,
they could also be used for bringing supplies forward when the enemy was pounding you with artillery
and so forth. So it would keep you safe from shrapnel. It wasn't a tremendously successful vehicle,
they only ever built about 40 of these. Crew comfort was pretty horrendous.
The 30 men would have been largely in the dark, being shaken around in this box
which had no suspension. And they couldn't see a great deal out of it,
though there were all down the sides these rifle loops. So you could imagine in the Dad's Army style,
"Open 2 3, out 2 3, bang 2 3" and so forth. But the chances of hitting much or seeing much
out of loopholes like that will be pretty low. The modern ... British Army
doesn't put loopholes in its APCs. Although interestingly, the modern Americans
still do in their Bradleys. But the idea of trying to fight from an APC is
considered by a lot of military thinkers to be a bad one. And so they don't put in things like this, ... which
might tempt the people inside to try that sort of thing. Inside this one the engine is at one end.
And again, the fences here are modern. And the rest is a big cavernous ... cavern,
with pistol ports and machine gun ports as usual. This one is the Mark VIII,
also known as the 'International'. And this model has been painted in the original paint, well, it is thought that it's been painted in the original
paint that tanks in World War One were painted in. So this is the closest green to the shade, which
as you see is a very murky green, very sort of khaki-ish. But we don't actually have to look
at a model of the International, because we can look at the real thing.
Which is here. You'll notice that overall it's a bit narrower. The body is
certainly narrower, and the tracks are a little bit wider. And for reasons which I won't pretend to understand,
the entire front of it is much ... fatter and more rounded, rather than the
comparatively sharp horns of the earlier marks. It's called the International because this is the
first tank which was an international collaboration. This was built jointly by the British and the Americans,
and the French had a hand in it too. It didn't actually see action in World War One,
so it's not significant in military terms. But in terms of design cooperation
and manufacturing and so forth, it's one of the many stepping stones
in the development of the tank. The Tank Museum at Bovington does still have one
original World War One tank of this type that still runs, it's still a goer. But they decided a few years ago
not to use it anymore, because, well, every time they take it out something else
snaps off, and they wear it down a little bit more. And they are the long-term custodians
of this for future generations. So this, that you're looking at now,
is a modern reproduction. [ This video took three years to make. ] Lindybeige! [ Each time I went to the museum I remembered
to wear the same clothes, for continuity. ] [ You may have noticed, though,
that on one visit I got a sunburned face. ] [ Apologies for the departure from my channel's
usual style with the opening shot. I got carried away. ]
