now this is the mark IV tank of 1917 and it's really the first mass-produced
tank in the world we built about 1200 of them index in almost at the end of 1918
by the time we finished and they were built all over the country the mark 4 is
mechanically the same as the mark 1 it's what the same Dehner engine inside
the same gearbox and the same transmission so it still requires four
men to drive it plus to acting as gunner and blow it on each side and a male tank
now there are differences for a start the armor is a bit thicker on the mark
for that is on the mark one not really shows you notice but enough to keep
anti-tank bullets out the other thing is the sponsons have been modified you can
now push the sponson inboard the rail travel but the mark one if you had to go
anywhere by rail you had to unbolt the sponsor and lift
it off and that caused all kinds of problems
so they made the sponson here push inwards you'll also notice that the guns
on this tank is shorter they're 23 calibers long instead of 40 calibers
long they found that the longer guns were unnecessary they kept bashing into
things and burying themselves on the ground so they decided to go for shorter
guns it doesn't make any difference as the tanks concerned it's still dished
out a reasonable amount of firepower the gun trains for about 90 degrees from on
the beam to dead ahead but the sponsons if you can look up both
of them at the same time she's very difficult they're not actually mirror
image of one another there are slight differences and that's because the
gunner and the loader always had to stand in exactly the same place relative
to the gun in either side and there's a risk of the check being squashed flat if
he was he was on the wrong side so that's a slight difference the other big
difference with the mark 4 is the fuel on the mark 1 you had 225 gallon tanks
up in the nose of the tank and it wasn't - either a very good place either it's
not really convenient for filling and it was a terrible threat if the tank
was hit because the tankers blew up at once on the mark for the petrol is
outside in a container between the rear horns there's no title so you can fill
up the gap in the back there quite easily and it takes 70 gallons of petrol
it's in an armored container so it can't be penetrated by shells and it's low
down beneath the the sort of firing line of anyone shooting at it and in those
days petrol was sucked into the tank by a device known as lauterback and then it
trickled down into the engine so the actual feed was quite good it worked
quite well but also you've got 70 gallons and this one against 50 in there
and since the tank could do or should we say roughly half a mile to a gallon that
extra 20 gallons made quite a difference when the tank could do a bit of decent
cross-country running they were most famous for their participation in the
Battle of Cambrai which is in November of 1917 and it
meant that about 300-400 tanks were launched against the Germans and they
actually blew a great big hole in the German line they were fitted with a
fasten device on top of the cab there which you could tip into trenches and
use as a stepping stone to climb over the trenches but they were only ever
used it some Cumbrae so if you see a Tankleff have seen on it must be taking
part in the complex and somewhere along the line and they normally also have I'm
ditching beam rails on top with a beam for getting them out of the mud you
chained that to the tracks this one hasn't got those it was actually only a
Devorah training tank in Britain as far as we know so it didn't have all these
fittings added to it at the time but it is still in working order and I've
actually driven it the trouble is like all the early tanks it has no suspension
at all it's just rollers running on the tracks themselves it clutters and bangs
along the ground it's very uncomfortable but you can mollis it along in it and
the people at the front at least have somewhere to sit again everybody else is
standing or touching the Gatins and all over the
place the engines right in the middle making a terrific noise and giving off
loads of fumes the actual conditions inside our vial and you wonder how the
people stood it that they did because they were a lot safer in there than they
were wandering about in the trenches
you