“In July, 1914, I heard that Mr. Benjamin Holt, of Peoria, Ill., had invented a tractor which possessed the ability to make its way across rugged and uneven ground,” he stated. “But several years before that a plan for a military engine practically identical with the tank had been sketched upon paper, when a tractor of another make was tried out in England. That first plan came to nothing. We weren’t ready for it then.
“The reports of the Holt tractor served to stimulate my interest in the idea all over again, and when I went to France with Lord French in August, 1914, and saw what modern warfare was like, I became convinced that an armored car, capable of being independent of roads and of traversing any terrane to attack fortified positions, was a necessity for the offensive.”
The Colonel, with a quizzical smile, here called attention to the fact that the principal German weapon of slaughter was the invention of an American—Hiram Maxim—and he thought it quite fitting that the weapon to combat it should be credited, at least in part, to the American inventor of the tractor. Continuing, he said:
“By October, 1914, I had a fair conception of the kind of engine which might be relied upon to neutralize the growing German power in machine guns, combined with the most elaborate fortifications ever built on a grand scale. You see, their fire ascendency in the meantime had enabled them to dig in with their usual thoroughness. In October I returned to England to try to interest the authorities at the War Office in my idea. I had my troubles, but I did not have as many troubles as I might have had, because other men of their own accord were working along the same lines.
“You must get this very straight, mind. Whatever credit there may be for inventing the tanks belongs not to any one man, but to many men—exactly how many nobody knows. It is even rather unfair to mention any names, my own as well as those of others. For, besides those men who actually worked to perfect the tanks, there were others who had conceived very similar ideas.
“Still another proof of the plurality of tank inventors is the fact that while one group of us were endeavoring to interest the War Office in the idea, another group of men, entirely ignorant of what we were doing, were trying to get the Admiralty to take up a similar line of experimentation. And it is no more than fair to point out that the first money provided for experimentation with landships, as we called them, came from Winston Spencer Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. But he was only one of a number of men who played parts in the development of the finished engine. For example, there were two men in particular who worked out the mechanical problems. I wish I could give you their names, but I cannot.”