Landships II

Unfortunately, the war diary for the EEF detachment of E Co. HBMGC does not list the WD numbers of their tanks. The E/5th Bn. war diary available from Bovington dates from July 1917 onwards, so this doesn't seem to be a probable source of numbers for the tanks which were despatched to Egypt in Dec. 1916. 

Thanks Phil, Rhomboid and Gwyn.

I took Gywn's advice and tried a process of elimination, focussing on the Mark Is, but haven't managed to narrow things down very far I'm afraid.

The 150 Mark Is were built during the period June to Oct of 1916. C and D Coys went to France in August, and A Coy in September, each with 25 tanks, with a further 10 tanks in reserve (85 tanks).

Both C and D Coy held early WD numbers, suggesting that only a small number of the first vehicles off the production line were held beyond August in the UK as training stock. In Tanks and Trenches, Fletcher mentions that the 15 Mark Is used for initial training were so worn out that they had to be sent back to Fosters in batches of 5 to be reconditioned. 

One could assume then that A, C and D Coys 85 tanks came from the first two thirds (100 tanks) of the production run. Fletcher says that production reached 25 vehicles a week at the end, but suffered delays initially. By August its unlikely that much more than half the fleet of 150 had yet been produced, so tanks were obviously in short supply.

So much so that B Coy went to France in Oct without tanks and apparently were not issued any until Jan 1917, when they received "a few surviving Mark Is for training".

Is it also safe to assume that since the 45 boilerplate Mark IIs were all(?) sent to France (less the 5 Oldbury trial vehicles), no servicable and better protected Mark I hulls were left in the training fleet at Bovington at the end of 1916 (even the 15 reconditioned vehicles)?

If each Coy had 25 vehicles, then 100 would have been needed for A,B,C and D Coys from a potential total of 141 (8 to Gaza and one experimental - WD 555). Of course, the total of 141 may have been reduced by vehicles damaged or completely worn out in initial training in either the UK or France.

In the September and November battles, a relatively small number of vehicles were ditched beyond recovery or destroyed. Attrition on the rest of the fleet must have been high, as by April 1917 only 15 Mark Is were still serviceable.  This number seems very low, given that the workshops had several months to work on the fleet. The majority of tanks must have been considered beyond repair and cannabalised for parts, but its hard to understand why men were sent into action in boilerplate hulls at Arras when so many Mark I hulls must have been worn out or damaged but available for repair.

The E Coy EEF detachment arrived in the Middle East in Jan 1917, so its 8 vehicles must have come from the second half of production and perhaps even the last few WD numbers.  On the other hand, I think I read somewhere that the EEF vehicles were not new, but had been used as training vehicles before deploying to Egypt.  So I can't rule out that they might have come from the initial training stock of vehicles that had been reconditioned.

I have Trevor Pidgeon's book giving C and D Coy WD numbers, but can't go much further without the A and B Coy numbers. Even then I guess that it will only be possible to narrow down the Gaza WD numbers to a potential group of 20 or 30?  I'd welcome some help.

Dave

Interesting clue. The only photo I can find of a Somme tank with the space armour bolts is of WD 548, D13. On the other hand, Sir Archibald, Tiger and War Baby all had the bolts (and the other photos I have of Gaza tanks don't show the roof so they may also have bolts).