Tank Killing

About this book

The genesis of the tank can be said to be a thought which occurred to Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Swinston of the British army who, driving across France in the winter of 1914 en route for England and mulling over the impasse caused by the two lines of trenches running from Switzerland to the North Sea when the mobile phase of the First World War (1914-18) had been replaced by static warfare, envisaged 'a power-driven, bullet-proof, armed engine capable of destroying machine-guns, of crossing country and trenches, of breaking through entanglements and of climbing earthworks'.