Which Tank Map For Iron Europe?

Thinking about this a little more, the Mark I tank saw limited action on the Western Front.

They were used at Flers (4 tanks), Thiepval (2 tanks but historically one tank broke down), Mouquet Farm (2 tanks but there the two tanks broke down), I think also at Morval (I'm not really an expert on all the Somme battles).


Then, I think they were replaced by the Mark IV tank in 1917, and the Mark IV was used in the Cambrai offensive. I think there were some also used at Passchendaele but with less success due to the mud.

So we could end up making just one tank, both, or I guess none.



Here was an old PM I sent to CrazyThumbs about Cambrai; over a year ago, someone said they were going to model a tank for us, but unfortunately the person never made the tank:

[QUOTE]I flipped through my WWI book by H.P. Willmott for a good tank battle, and found a real interesting one in the Battle of Cambrai, which occurred between November 20- December 4, 1917; Cambrai was a French town, a major rail center, about 50 miles south of Lille, "where the Germans defenses on the Western Front were at their strongest."

The tank used however was a Mark IV, and Willmott says "[t]he tank that fought at Cambrai in 1917 was not very different from the Mark I of 1916, but it did have a better radiator, a silencer, and tracks with better grip. It dispensed with the rear wheels."

Here the British decided to assault the German defenses, which they believed to be undermanned and not expecting an attack, with 381 tanks and a number of infantry units along a 6 mile sector of the German frontlines.

The tanks smashed through the barbed wire (that will have to be fixed, because in vanilla RO tanks can't drive through barbed wire), and the Germans were overwhelmed.

In a single day, the British advanced 5 miles, taking 7,500 prisoners.

"There was jubilation back in Britain, where church bells rang for the first time since 1914 and the newspapers proclaimed the greatest British victory of the war."

There is a special feature with these tanks however.

In order to advance through the trenches and not get stuck, these tanks were equipped with fascines. These large wooden bundles were dropped into an enemy trench, enabling the tank to get across.

It appears from the photo I'm looking at that the tank has a lever mechanism on top of which the bundle of wood at least 5 feet tall sits, which pushes down and drops the bundle.

However, the very next day, a German division, relieved of duty from the Eastern Front due to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, arrived. Fighting occurred in a village called Fontaine for the next few days, but the British tanks didn't work too well in the narrow village streets, and many were destroyed.

With the British having less than 90 tanks left, the Germans launched a counterattack. The British had to retreat.

The upshot was that the battle was essentially a draw. The British still retained around 7 or so miles of their initial advance from the first and second days, but had lost fresh ground to the south.

Each side had about 45,000 casualties a piece.

I admit the wood dumper lever mechanism sounds a little complicated, but instead of doing the initial assault (which undoubtedly would make a great map), you could have a map centering on the fighting around Fontaine. Hopefully, they dumped the wood bundles by that time (which I imagined they did; afterall, I doubt you can fight in the streets of a village with a 5 foot stack of wood on your tank).

There's a book (which I don't have) which would describe the battle more: Cambrai: The First Tank Battle (publisher Cerberus Ltd.) by Terry C. Treadwell.

If the tank modeler doesn't want to design a Mark IV and insists on a Mark I, tanks were introduced into combat at the Battle of the Somme in July?, 1916, and an engagement from that battle would be the Mark I map.

But I thought I would float the Battle of Cambrai first to you and the modeler since it sounds like it was the big tank battle of WWI. If it isn't feasible to map it now, perhaps then in a future release.

[/QUOTE]


Both Thiepval and Fontaine sound somewhat similar (tanks in a village).


Although both battles were important, Thiepval was probably, strategically speaking, the more important battle, since Thiepval and the Schwaben Redoubt (which would not appear in the proposed Thiepval map) were the lynchpin of the German defensive line on the Somme.


We could just do Thiepval, or wait until the Second Release, Iron Europe: 1917-1918, and make a Mark IV instead, or we could do both scenarios.

The difficult part though is not so much making the tank, since N!ghtmare wants to and can do that, but it is animating the tank.

And we need an Animator to do that.