LETCLIFFE TANK 01
It's ten years since I looked at this subject and as I always tell you, research alters and expands the story. I've been tripping over the tanks in the thickets of general research and reading and there is much more to the story than my original offering. So let's go back and see if we can do a better job.
I'm sure there will be some people who haven't the faintest idea what I am talking about so I shall start at the beginning. Anyone who has been up to Letcliffe Park knows that there is a viewpoint with an engraved bronze plate showing the direction and distance of the major peaks visible to the North. This stands on a substantial concrete platform built out from the path and it's a popular and well-used feature. I wonder how many people wonder why so much trouble was taken to build such a massive platform. The answer is that the platform was originally built in about 1920 to accommodate a genuine WW1 tank which sat there for over ten years with its guns pointing out towards the Dales and the War Memorial which was also originally sited on Letcliffe. The question is why? How did it get there and what's the story behind it. As I uncovered the evidence it became obvious that it wasn't as simple and clear-cut as I thought ten years ago. It can tell us much about society and our hopes and fears stemming originally from the dark days of the Great War when so many of our young men were killed on the Western Front.
We must start by going back to the early years of the war, say about 1916. We are used to hearing the news of fatalities in Afghanistan at the moment. The difference between then and now is that whilst today's casualties are in single figures, in 1916 they were in the thousands and even tens of thousands. To give but one example, on the 1st of July 1916 the British Army suffered it's worst day of the war. There were over 57,000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and this included almost 20,000 dead. This was just one day! Of the 60 million European soldiers who were mobilised from 1914 to 1918, 8 million were killed, 7 million were permanently disabled, and 15 million were seriously injured. This scale of destruction and death is very hard for us to grasp these days but we must try to imagine what the reaction of ordinary people, like the inhabitants of Barlick, was as the daily casualty figures came in. The first thing to recognise is that despite there being no radio, film or TV war news was widely available in the newspapers and on announcements posted on public notice boards in the town. Many families got the dreaded telegram from the War Office informing them that there loved one was 'missing in action' and this news soon spread.
What caused these enormous losses, and remember the opposing armies suffered the same rate of attrition, was that military tactics were basically still the same as they had been in medieval times. Two opposing armies met and pounded each other until one gave up the struggle. The problem in 1914 was that each side had the benefit of modern artillery and machine guns but were not motorised, they were incapable of rapid movement. This meant that as soon as a soldier became visible he was a stationary target and almost certainly killed. The first reaction was to dig holes to shelter in and this developed by 1915 into a system of opposing, interconnected trenches, stretching from the Belgian coast to the Swiss frontier in the south. The tactics were a series of frontal assaults by each side on foot over perhaps a couple of hundred yards of 'no-man's land' and half these men were mown down by enemy fire before they reached the barbed wire defences facing them. The generals needed a breakthrough so that they could get their troops into open country behind the enemy lines. In the old days this was the role of the cavalry, mounted troops acting as a spearhead and punching a hole through the enemy lines, but in the conditions prevailing on the Western Front this was impossible. The consequence was that by 1915 there was a stalemate and no prospect of any decisive advance. Despite this the generals kept throwing their men against the wall of fire and this accounts for the enormous numbers of casualties. The problem was simple, how to get across a couple of hundred yards of the fire zone and through the wire without being killed by the machine guns. What was needed was an armoured fighting machine that could do the job.
In 1838 a man called John George and his son sent a petition to Parliament asking that their new invention, an armoured steam powered war chariot equipped with scythes and iron flails that would cut a hole 23 feet wide through the enemy ranks and was immune to musket balls and grape shot. They offered to take a model to London to demonstrate the machine but were totally ignored. The concept never died, many weird and wonderful machines were proposed but it wasn't until 1915 that the three vital components came together, bullet-proof armour, the internal combustion engine and caterpillar tracks. These monsters were thought of as 'land ships' and in February 1915 the Director of Admiralty construction formed 'The Admiralty Landships Committee'. At the same time the War Office were looking at their experience of lightly armoured cars and considering proposals for a 'machine gun destroyer', an armoured vehicle that could cross rough ground, surmount obstacles and break down the wire and enemy defences. By June 1915 all these initiatives came together and some American caterpillar tracks were sent to a traction engine maker, John Foster of Lincoln, a month later the first attempt at a armoured machine gun destroyer emerged from the factory for testing. In the search for secrecy the story was put about that Fosters were building water tanks and 'Tank' became the generic name for the vehicles. After a number of re-designs and improvements, the first recognisable tank was demonstrated to the government on the 29th of January 1916. On the 8th of February a special trial was arranged for the King and shortly afterwards a hundred machines were ordered. The modern tank had been born.
What has the viewpoint on Letcliffe Park got to do with WW1?
