Wi/INDOW 



What's Inside of a "Tank?" 



first account of the 

 revolutionary land drea 



By Joseph Brinker 



Here we have the first account of the construc- 

 tion of the famous revolutionary land dreadnoughts 



GUN COMPARTMENT 



, IDLER 

 SPROCKET 



MACHINE GUN 



DIRECTION OF 

 CATERPILLAR MOTION 



IDLER 

 GUIDES 



TWO 51X an NDER MOTORS 

 DRIVING GEAR 



PIVOTED TRAILER 

 FOR STEERING 



FRAME 



C0MPRt33l0N 

 SPRINGS 



AMMUNITION 

 Inside of a caterpillar tank, showing the stations of the crew and the propelling mechanism 



THE tanks! What new worlds of fear 

 and wonder these British juggernauts 

 of the battlefield opened up as they 

 ponderously shoved their noses toward the 

 enemy's trenches on the Somme! 



Spitting fire as they came, they crossed 

 No Man's Land amid the smoke and dust 

 of bursting shells. Down and up shell 

 craters they kept steadily on their courses. 

 Nothing mattered. Even trees and boul- 

 ders were brushed aside by the monsters 

 as so much paper. Still on and on they 

 ■came to what .was left of the German wire 

 -Entanglements, crushing these as so much 

 putty under their huge frames. And still 

 on and on they came until they reached 

 what remained of the first German line of 

 trenches. There in several places, they sat 

 themselves complacently astride it and 

 swept it in both direc- 

 tions with their guns. 



Not even there did the 

 tanks stop, but forged 

 ahead to seek out the 

 hidden German machine- 

 gun squads prepared to 

 mow down the Allied in- 

 fantry but not to fight 

 steel monsters off whose 

 sides their bullets skipped 

 like pebbles thrown 

 against tin billboards on 

 our city streets. These 

 machine-gun emplace- 

 ments, which had cost the 

 British thousands of lives 

 in similar attempts to ad- 



vance without the tanks, were mere child's 

 play for the huge Leviathans of the land. 

 This done, the infantry advanced, occu- 

 pied what remained of the German trench 

 and immediately began to dig itself in. 

 Some of the tanks, however, strayed too 

 faf beyond the first line of trenches, ran 

 out of gasoline and found themselves 

 stalled between the recently captured 

 trench and the German second line. One 

 such monster, named Creme de Menthe, was 

 marooned beyond her objective inside of 

 the German lines but was not captured be- 

 cause the Germans could find no way of 

 getting into her or of penetrating her 

 alligator-like hide of steel. A second tank, 

 Willie, as the British Tommies familiarly 

 named it, by a bold dash scattered the 

 Germans and rescued her sister craft by a 



Awe-inspiring monsters that they were to the Germans, the 

 tanks were almost as much of a mystery to the British troops 



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