The Culture of the Tank, 1916-1918

“For some time past,” wrote John Gould Fletcher in 1918, “various people have been clamoring for a new religion, without seeing that a new one was being born under their noses.” The new religion has been created in the newspapers, and its god, says Fletcher, is the tank. The tank “has seized upon our imaginations”:

Writers continually hymn for us His virtues. Short stories, sonnets are dedicated to Him. His picture appears everywhere in our papers. Artists paint Him as he appears upon the battlefield, and inventive children experiment with model Tanks in wood and cardboard. ¹

This god was invented in Britain during the First World War and first used at the Somme in September 1916. The military and technical history of the tank has been well documented; much less is known about its cultural significance, especially among civilians. ² How did this new weapon alter the ways in which Britain imagined itself, its citizens, and its relationship to the war? The tank was one of the few innovations in which Britain was more successful than Germany; this alone gave it considerable ideological force. But its significance was far greater than its military value. For Fletcher, its “commanding personality” had “captivated” the civilian imagination. If the tank won the war, as its champions claimed, it did so through the mobilization of fantasy rather than on the battlefield. This paper attempts to show how.

The tank was developed to answer a serious military problem: to break the deadlock on the western front. Not long after the war began, the western front had become paralysed. Two powerful armies faced one another in trenches which extended from the Belgian coast to the Swiss Alps, a distance of nearly five hundred miles. Each side was equipped with machine guns and artillery and was separated from the other by impenetrable barbed wire. Neither side could advance; unprotected troops trying to struggle through the barbed wire were mowed down by machine guns and artillery fire. The war settled into the terrible stalemate of 1915, followed by the failed pushes of 1916. The killing continued, but the war itself was immobilized. To break the deadlock, some kind of armored vehicle was needed to break through or crush the barbed wire, knock out the enemy’s gun emplacements, and allow the infantry to advance—to transform stasis into movement. This need was answered by the tank. Its champions envisaged hundreds of technically efficient tanks launched in a sector of hard ground. The tank was Britain’s secret weapon, and would, it was hoped, overwhelm the Germans with surprise and terror as well as technical mastery.

By the late summer of 1916, the high command was desperate for a success at the Somme, following the hundreds of thousands of deaths since July of that year. After intense political struggles within British military circles, tanks were brought into action in September 1916—about six months before they were ready—at one of the wettest, muddiest sectors of the front (see Fig. 1). ³ By this date, only sixty machines had been manufactured. Transporting them to the front was a huge undertaking, and many of the crews were physically exhausted before they reached the battle. Several tanks were damaged in transit; others broke down on their way to the starting line. Several more became bogged or broke down, and only eighteen actually took part in the assault. ⁴ The tank crews were bitterly disappointed; the other troops were skeptical (TW, 37). But hardly anyone actually saw this failure, and it was reported in the newspapers as a remarkable success.

Figure 1.

An early tank on the front. Courtesy the Imperial War Museum, London.

The newspapers were one of the most important sources of propaganda in the Great War, as many historians have documented. ⁵ They were also a key site in which civilians’ fantasmatic relationship to the war was mobilized—and to some extent produced. When the first tanks went into battle, the Daily Mail announced a success for “our glorious infantry, airmen, and gunners, and . . . the...