Talk:ARMOR-CAVALRY: Part 1; Regular Army and Army Reserve/Tanks in World War I

This source is outdated (1968) and the opening five paragraphs are error-strewn. Parts of it are dangerously misinformed. I shall correct or remove false information. Hengistmate (talk) 10:45, 27 April 2019 (UTC)


 * @Hengistmate: Just so you know, this is Wikisource, not Wikipedia; correcting factual errors in the original book is not something we do here. Suzukaze-c (talk) 10:50, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

Then why is there an edit facility? So Wikisource publishes sources whether they are right or wrong? Then let's explain the errors here and hope that people read this before they are misled by the source:

Swinton's influence on tank development is overstated. He had been told of the Holt caterpillar tractor (which was big, not small) before the outbreak of the War, not in late 1914, but did not see one in the flesh until mid-1916. He should not be given sole credit for the idea - there were many other candidates, in Great Britain and elsewhere, and Swinton repeatedly failed to persuade anyone to take up his idea. It's even suggested that the idea might have come from another officer altogether. The Royal Navy developed tanks, not "at Churchill's urging" but at his instruction and with his department's financial support. Churchill set up the Landship Committee to design an armoured fighting vehicle, and Swinton was unaware of its existence for several months. Tanks were not labelled "tanks- for use as water tanks by Russia." That's a confusion of two episodes, one of them being that Swinton and another officer chose the word "tank" as a code-name for the finished vehicle. The other is that some were initially labelled with Russian lettering as a ruse. The French used 128 tanks in their first action, not 196. And so on.

Hengistmate (talk) 11:20, 27 April 2019 (UTC)


 * The edit facility is to allow correction of typos or punctuation mistakes that were not present in the published source. It is not present for the insertion of new content. All works on Wikisource are checked against the published original for a match. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:08, 27 April 2019 (UTC)