#FIST OF THE FATHER TANK BUSTER FREE#

Holt returned to Stockton and, utilizing his knowledge and his company's metallurgical capabilities, he became the first to design and manufacture practical continuous tracks for use in tractors. Holt paid Alvin Orlando Lombard US$60,000 (equivalent to $1,809,556 in 2021) for the right to produce vehicles under Lombard's patent for the Lombard Steam Log Hauler. The centre of such innovation was in England, and in 1903 he travelled to England to learn more about ongoing development, though all those he saw failed their field tests. Both of these were rejected by their respective governmental administrations.Īmerican tracked tractors in Europe Ī Holt tractor in the Vosges in early 1915 serving as an artillery tractor for a French army De Bange 155 mm cannonīenjamin Holt of the Holt Manufacturing Company of Stockton, California was the first to file a US patent for a workable crawler type tractor in 1907. In 1912, the Australian civil engineer Lancelot de Mole's proposal included a scale model of a functional fully tracked vehicle. In 1911, the Austrian engineering officer Günther Burstyn submitted a proposal for a fighting vehicle that had a gun in a rotating turret, known as the Motorgeschütz. In the years before the Great War, two practical tank-like designs were proposed but not developed. They crawled level along the ground with one foot high upon a hillock and another deep in a depression, and they could hold themselves erect and steady sideways upon even a steep hillside.' This arrangement gave them the maximum of adaptability to the contours of the ground.

#FIST OF THE FATHER TANK BUSTER FREE#

'They were essentially long, narrow and very strong steel frameworks carrying the engines, and borne upon eight pairs of big pedrail wheels, each about ten feet in diameter, each a driving wheel and set upon long axles free to swivel round a common axis. Wells, in his short story The Land Ironclads, published in The Strand Magazine in December 1903, had described the use of large, armed, armoured cross-country vehicles equipped with pedrail wheels (an invention which he acknowledged as the source for his inspiration), to break through a system of fortified trenches, disrupting the defence and clearing the way for an infantry advance: Wells' December 1903 The Land Ironclads, showing huge ironclad land vessels, equipped with pedrail wheels With the advent of trench warfare in World War I, the Allied French and British developments of the tank were largely parallel and coincided in time. Numerous concepts of armoured all-terrain vehicles had been imagined for a long time. When self-propelled artillery, the armoured personnel carrier, the wheeled cargo vehicle, and supporting aviation - all with adequate communications - were combined to constitute the modern armoured division, commanders regained the capability of manoeuvre. With increased firepower and protection, these mechanised forces would, only some 20 years later, become the armour of World War II. This was the internal combustion engine, which had made possible the development of the tank and eventually would lead to the mechanised forces that were to assume the old roles of horse cavalry and to loosen the grip of the machine-gun on the battlefield. ' The armoured tank was intended to be able to protect against bullets and shell splinters, and pass through barbed wire in a way infantry units could not hope to, thus allowing the stalemate to be broken.įew recognised during World War I that the means for returning mobility and shock action to combat was already present in a device destined to revolutionise warfare on the ground and in the air. 'It was a weapon designed for one simple task: crossing the killing zone between trench lines and breaking into enemy. The tank was originally designed as a special weapon to solve an unusual tactical situation: the stalemate of the trenches on the Western Front. The great weakness of the tank's predecessor, the armoured car, was that it required smooth terrain to move upon, and new developments were needed for cross-country capability. World War I generated new demands for armoured self-propelled weapons which could navigate any kind of terrain, and this led to the development of the tank. The tank still provides the backbone to land combat operations in the 21st century. The Cold War saw the rise of modern tank doctrine and the rise of the general-purpose main battle tank. By World War II, tank design had advanced significantly, and tanks were used in quantity in all land theatres of the war.

Though initially crude and unreliable, tanks eventually became a mainstay of ground armies. The history of the tank begins with World War I, when armoured all-terrain fighting vehicles were introduced as a response to the problems of trench warfare, ushering in a new era of mechanized warfare.

Fist of the father tank buster