Landships II

I came across this site and thought it might be of interest: https://warspot.ru/1408-tvortsy-tankovogo-mira-ernest-suinton

A translation of a Russian description of Ernest Swinton's role in the invention of the tank:

At the end of World War I, the British Royal Commission for Inventions denied Ernest Swinton the right to be called the creator of the tank, giving the palm to industrialist William Tritton and Major Walter Wilson.

But Swinton is really not a British Kulibin [1], he is taller, he is a demiurge [2], the creator of the idea of ​​a tank and the conductor of its embodiment. It was Swinton who came up with what kind of technical base is needed for its construction, he proposed to use the very word “tank” (“tank”), only thanks to his authority and reports to the Ministry of War, the development began, he was entrusted with the preparation of the first tank crews, and, finally, he created the first tank memo (with exquisite English humor), which has not lost its force to this day.

How many excellent technical ideas perished in those years under the cloth of the military ministries of the warring countries! But Swinton was lucky: his proposal to create a new powerful weapon, taking the “Holt” tractor as an example, hit the table of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Funds were allocated and a special committee was created, which included, in particular, William Tritton, Executive Director of Foster & Sons. This company, which also produced agricultural machinery, built the first English tanks.

A year and a half of development and testing was required to create a prototype of the Mark I. This prototype, lovingly called “Mother”, was successfully tested on February 8, 1916 in the presence of King George V. Forty cars were ordered right away, but the persistent Swinton achieved the production of a hundred.

Although the main inspirer and promoter of the British tank building was a military engineer and journalist Ernest Swinton (he "punch" a tank project in the War Department and proposed using American Holt tractors as a technical base), the Royal Commission for the Promotion of Inventors in 1919 recognized the tank inventors William Ashby Tritton ( William Ashbee Tritton, 1875–1946) and Walter Gordon Wilson (1874–1957).

[1] Ivan Petrovich Kulibin, an eighteenth/nineteenth century Russian mechanic and inventor.

[2] In Platonism, a deity or creative force that shaped the material world.

Swinton himself could have written it . . .