Show Notes
On September 15, 1916, German troops defending towns in France’s Somme Valley heard a strange new sound above the usual boom of artillery and crack of rifle and machine gun fire: a deep, throaty rumbling, accompanied by a high-pitched metallic squeaking. Peering over the parapets of their trenches, they gasped as they beheld a terrifying sight: a line of giant, armour-plated vehicles, rolling on caterpillar treads and bristling with guns, heading straight for them. The tank had arrived on the battlefield.
While the results of history’s first armoured assault were mixed, with nearly two-thirds of the British Mark I tanks deployed that day breaking down or getting stuck before they could reach their objectives, the psychological impact of the new vehicle was undeniable. By the end of the war, the technology had been greatly improved, with tanks playing a key role in the final Entente victories leading up to the Armistice.
The tank soon became an integral part of modern warfare, with any nation unable to field armoured vehicles finding itself at a significant disadvantage. But tanks require a lot of money and industrial capacity to develop and mass-produce - resources many nations simply do not possess. Take New Zealand, which at the outbreak of the Second World War found itself cut off from outside sources of military equipment and facing imminent invasion by the Japanese. But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and determined to defend their islands, whatever the cost may be, the enterprising Kiwis cobbled together a home-grown armoured fighting vehicle which, while admittedly resourceful, was also hilariously inept, and still ranks as perhaps the worst tank ever built. This is the story of the Bob Semple Tank.
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