Now all roads lead to France and heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead returning lightly dance.
Edward Thomas, Roads

Monday, September 29, 2014

Want to Break the Trench Deadlock? Build the "Trench Destroyer."



The scientifically minded were constantly brainstorming during the Great War to devise ways of breaking the deadlock. The magazine The Electrical Experimenter was an outlet for some of these ideas. The blog Airminded has an outstanding article on WWI "Super Weapons" at:

http://airminded.org/2009/11/29/the-superweapon-and-the-anglo-american-imagination-iii/

4 comments:

  1. The pictures on these covers are fascinating! What imaginations... David Beer

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  2. Awesome stuff.
    Hugo Gernsback was quite the visionary.

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  3. Big isn't always impossible. I've heard that Israeli combat engineers crossed the Suez Canal in the 1972 War with a huge rolling bridge.

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  4. The Russians actually built a prototype 'tank' somewhat similar to the "Trench Destroyer" illustrated. It has become known as the "Tsar Tank" or "Netopyr" and either search term will produce numerous web site pages. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the creature proved unworkable in practice and the project was abandoned.

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