Landships II

Did a quick translation through Babel Fish and it came back as "Wooden dummy tank. Mock-up will sail along the river and serves as target for the exercises in the artillery shooting". Sounds reasonable.

The dummy itself resembles some of the earliest sketches done by the Germans of the Mk. I's that appear in Hundleby and Strasheim's A7V book.

Small astonishment for me: the apparantly original captions to these photo's on this Russian site are in Dutch! It's in the Dutch spelling of before WW2, so my guess is that these photo's originate from a Dutch newspaper or magazine. The Babelfish translation covers the original text pretty good.

Michel.

Roger Todd wrote:

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Centurion wrote: Which suggests that if they were laying on artillery shooting practice at moving tank targets the Germans probably took the first appearance of the tank a little more seriously than has sometimes been stated. Although perhaps the target practice using the wooden dummy was only arranged at local level, which wouldn't be inconsistent with the view that at higher levels the Germans didn't take it terribly seriously.

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Which takes us back to the original question - Why? Why would some local level organisation be organising an artillery shoot at a tank dummy - were they expecting a tank invasion (unlikely)? (And was there a 'local level' artillery?). More likely that the reservists would be used in the same way as the Home Guard was sometimes used in Britain during WWII exercises - to provide a foil for the regulars. Indeed I know of one exercise at Tatton Park in Cheshire when the newly formed British airborne force from Ringway (now Manchester airport) 'dropped in' and dealt with wood and canvas panzers manouvered into place by 'Dads Army'

..not commonly understand by many students of this conflict was the wide avenue of flexible training, and tactical approach of each individual Korp.   This is largely due to period writers who felt a need to be emphatic about rigid "Prussian" training and discipline.  This was certainly not factual.  The truth is, though exactly armed and dressed, each Korp was responsible for their own training.  Hence, a local divisional staff, or even battalian could have arranged for the special training of their organic artillerie batteries.

The Crown Prince was in truth, an able leader, and was quick to examine tactical inovations in the field.  The same can be said of many Divisional and battalian leaders who were swift to adapt to behaviors that promised better surviability of their combat units.