The Mark 1 would be driven to towns and cities all across the UK, and people would donate, or buy these war bonds to help fund the war effort. The public loved the tanks, and the Government needed money to buy new ones - so they started to sell war bonds, and held "tank bank" events up and down the country. In WW1, the British Government of the time saw how popular tanks were, and decided to take advantage of them. Go back and make as many more tanks as you can." But why bring a tank to Trafalgar Square? It's just another way for Wargaming to bring history back to life. As British Commander Douglas Haig remarked: "Wherever the tanks advanced, we took our objectives, and where they did not advance, we failed to take our objectives. Where there was a stalemate, the tank was the difference maker that tipped the balance in the British Army's favour. The significance of the Mark 1 tank is that it managed to break through enemy lines. And ever since that day, every army has seen the importance of having tanks on the battlefield."Īt one point, Churchill's grandson and current Conservative MP, Nicholas Soames turned up to talk about his granddad's involvement in the tank's creation. I don't even know if I can put into words how it must have felt - like us seeing a space ship or something! It wasn't successful, and it had some mechanical problems, but what it did do was demonstrate there was a need for something like this. "The whole thing was surrounded in secrecy, so nobody knew what was coming", Richard enthuses, "and from the enemy's perspective, seeing that coming on the horizon must have been absolute terrifying. Even the name of the "tank" itself is a product of this secrecy - the story is that everyone, from those working on the tank all the way up to those almost at the very top, were convinced they were simply working on a movable water tank, to properly hydrate the troops. Under the guidance of a new branch of Government, known as the "landships committee", a crack team got to work on a project that would be developed entirely in secret. "The idea of the tank was really, not so much the firepower, but to cross these obstacles - impenetrable obstacles to infantry, like barbed wire, the trench systems." With the backing of Winston Churchill, a man named Ernest Swinton got to work on a slightly crazy idea, to make an armoured vehicle that would run on caterpillar tracks. And as it turned out, that thing was the tank. Faced with a battle that been raging for months, with neither side really making any progress, the British army were in desperate need of a difference maker - something to turn the tide. " Some 57,000 British troops were lost on the first day of the conflict alone, such was the severity of the battle, and the conditions. Whenever people talk about WW1, you automatically think trench warfare - nothing was moving, nothing was going anywhere. "So, the Battle of the Somme has been raging for some time, it's a stalemate. To get some sort of context, it's probably best if we start from the beginning of the tank story, as Wargaming's resident historical and military expert, Richard Cutland explained. As with so many things they do, this was an event designed to bring history back to life, in more ways the one. So, that's how the games will be celebrating the creation of the tank - but the event Wargaming threw, together with Bovington Tank Museum was about much more than that.
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