[Illustration: _“The Autocar” illustration._
A “CHARRON” ARMOURED CAR WITH MACHINE GUN.]
[Illustration: _“The Autocar” illustration._
A “SCHNEIDER” ARMOURED CAR WITH QUICK-FIRING GUN.]
Armoured cars carrying powerful lights are no doubt very effective for reconnoitring during the night. The lights can be switched on quite suddenly and some damage inflicted upon an enemy, and the light switched off again before there is time for fire to be returned or the machine to be located effectively. The car can then be moved rapidly to some other point, and the manoeuvre repeated. In general, the armoured car has been used as a kind of advance guard in front of the screen of cavalry which performs the double duty of concealing the movement of its own infantry and locating the forces of the enemy. Just as the Germans employed cavalry for this purpose to an unprecedented extent in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and so gained an enormous advantage over their opponents, so the attempt has been made on this occasion to utilise a still more rapid and effective means towards the same ends. As already suggested, any advantage that may have accrued from the utilisation of a new method of this kind need only be a purely temporary one, since any desired quantity of the enormous number of available machines can--if it appears desirable--be converted into armoured cars for our own use or that of our allies at very short notice. One would imagine that events will prove that the armoured motor is valuable as an irritant rather than as a means of locating hostile forces or screening one’s own, since both these latter ends are very much affected by the use of aeroplanes, which make it practically impossible to move large bodies of men secure from observation, and correspondingly easy to gather fairly accurate information as to the whereabouts and strength of the enemy.
So far we have touched only upon extemporised armoured vehicles as distinct from those actually designed in the first instance for this specific duty. The first armoured car was produced as long ago as 1896. The design was published in _The Autocar_ only a week after the Act which permitted a motor car to exceed four miles an hour on British roads, and to dispense with the man walking in front with a red flag, came into force. The suggestion emanated from the late Mr. E. J. Pennington, and the machine, the mechanism of which was necessarily somewhat primitive, was arranged to carry two small machine guns the cranks of which were to be driven by the car engine with a view to increasing the rapidity of fire. In those days, the machine gun was usually hand-cranked. At intervals since that time various designs had been brought out, the general principle being to employ a completely armoured car, the driver of which would in most cases be in considerable danger of accident, owing to the way in which the protection provided for him obscured the view of the road on either side. In the majority of cases, the vehicle was designed to carry one machine gun mounted in a turret above the roof. Thus, in a design got out by the Charron Company some time back, the machine gun was contained in a rotating turret a little way forward of the rear axle. The joint between this turret and the roof of the car involved a flange and a thick rubber ring. The turret rotated on a central vertical shaft, and on this shaft was a screw wheel. The effect of turning this wheel was to raise or lower the turret. When the machine gun had been drawn into the right position with the turret raised, the wheel was turned bringing the turret down hard against the rubber ring which held it securely, and prevented it from shaking about while the gun was being fired.