After arriving in Paris in June 1917, he established committees to study tank warfare. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), approached the weapon with an open mind. Luckily, for America’s allies, General John J. When the United States entered the “War to End all Wars,” it was behind the curve. Army employed modern technology effectively in its 1916 retaliatory expedition against Poncho Villa, utilizing reconnaissance planes, armored cars, trucks, and motorcycles, it had yet to employ tanks. Having no previous experience with tanks, Patton went through a two-week crash course at the French Light Tank Center and later visited the Renault Tank Works. Patton, Jr., was commanding the AEF Headquarters Company at Chaumont in the fall of 1917 when he was assigned the job of establishing an AEF tank school in France. It was not until 1918 that the first German tanks, in very limited numbers, appeared on the battlefield. Germany, although on the receiving end of the tanks’ destructive power, remained unconvinced of their worth. Nevertheless, their impact was enough to provide hope for an end to the bloodletting in the trenches.Īfter the Somme, Great Britain and France worked at improving the mechanized behemoths. These massive, intimidating, metal hulks debuted to mixed results, as they were prone to mechanical malfunctions and were easily impeded by rough terrain.
Great Britain and France developed prototypes simultaneously, but the British were the first to deploy their “landships” (as they were referred to in early development) at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. While the idea of an armored vehicle equipped with cannon can be traced as far back as Leonardo De Vinci’s fifteenth century sketches, the production of such a contraption did not occur until necessitated by the stagnation of trench warfare on the Western Front. World War I, in particular, heralded the introduction of numerous formidable and terrifying technologies: flamethrowers, poison gas, combat aircraft, and tanks, to name a few. For better or for worse, war often drives innovation.
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