Landships II

Annoyingly, the 'search' facility on this forum appears to be b*ggered...

Or is it just on my computer?

Is this the thread you're looking for? WW1 Vehicle Cigarette Cards.

While I'm looking you might find this summarised history of the motorcyle carried machine gun of interest - its part of a larger work in progress of mine.

Ten years later the French firm of DeDion produced a motorised quadricycle (the late Victorian equivalent of the modern quad bike). This could carry a driver and a passenger. The first sat on a saddle and steered with handlebars whilst the passenger occupied a seat in between (and slightly ahead) of the two front wheels; this of course ensured that they would be first to the scene of any accident. This vehicle inspired the first of a long line of Renault cars. It was also either built under licence or copied in other countries. One producer was the British firm of Beeston Motor Cycles in Coventry. In 1899 the inventor Frederick Simms converted one of these vehicles into a motorised scout. The passenger seat was replaced with boxes for an ammunition belt and an air cooled Maxim machine gun was fitted on a tube steel frame in front of the handlebars. This had a relatively small armoured shield. The whole thing was a sort of early quad bike armed with a machine gun.

As an armed motor scout this vehicle would have been of problematic effectiveness. Its rider would have been extremely vulnerable to return fire and it would have been next to impossible to operate the gun and drive and steer at the same time. A scout vehicle’s prime task is to reconnoitre the enemy and report back, it is not to sit and fight, any gun carried is for defence. Given the forward pointing gun with limited traverse the Simms motor scout could only operate in an offensive mode. It was not adopted by any military organisation. However the idea of using motorcycles to carry machine guns was adopted. Initially the first true motorcycle to carry a machine gun was in service with the   Canadian 80th Militia regiment in 1908, they used a Harley Davidson motorcycle and sidecar combination with a forward facing Maxim gun. Its inventor, a Sergeant Northover, was to become better known as the inventor of the Northover projector issued widely to the British Home Guard in the 1940s. By the outbreak of war in 1914 the idea of using a motorcycle and sidecar combination to carry a heavy machine gun had been translated into material form by a number of British manufacturers the chief of which were Clyno, Enfield and Scott. As with the armoured car it was the Royal Navy that led the field but eventually such vehicles had been taken into service in the British Army equipping units of the Machine Gun Corps. These were machine gun carriers, much as was the Bren gun carrier of the Second World War. They were a means of getting a Vickers machine gun, its ammunition and crew as quickly as possible to the point where they were needed. The gun could be dismounted and deployed on a conventional tripod mounting (also carried on the machine) or from the sidecar itself whilst the vehicle was stopped. It was rarely, if ever, fired from a moving vehicle in action. The severe shaking and jolting would make aiming extremely problematical and any bullets arriving anywhere near the enemy would be the result of sheer chance. The gun was sometimes fired rearwards from the sidecar of the combination when stationary, this was a useful tactic when providing a rearguard for the vehicle could quickly roar off to a new position when the advancing enemy became too close.

At least one British motorcycle combination of 1914 was armoured, its make is not known. A photograph exists of bewhiskered and rather well fed French officers examining the vehicle and doubtless expressing some satisfaction that they would not be asked to ride in or on the dammed contraption. They make it difficult to see the details of the machine but it is obvious that the armour plate would only have protected the lower regions of its crew.

By mid 1915 it had become obvious that the war in France was for the foreseeable future going to be relatively static and trench based. There was little or nothing for the motorcycle combinations to do and eventually most of their crews were retrained and became tank crews.

Have we seen "Lola" before?

From http://shushpanzer-ru.livejournal.com/335832.html - originally from

http://shushpanzer-ru.livejournal.com/511412.html where there are many more, though mostly more serious and later.

Ah, good, not just me who couldn't see it then.

Yes, definitely a joke (unless PDA's dwarves were recruited/conscripted) but appears to be WW1 vintage (seems to be 1917).  The German military minds, being keen students of humour , would know that an effective way to remove the uncertainty and fear surrounding the introduction of the new terror weapon would be to mock it. 

And, who knows? maybe it was (also) used as a "firing solutions" dummy for AT gunner training.  Reduced-size models at correspondingly shorter ranges satisfy the same geometric solutions as do full-sized ones at the full range. I certainly wouldn't want to negotiate an obstacle course on that thing (presumably it can turn but I don't see how).

Here it is someones april fool joke perhaps, the trick is to search for "Lola"

http://www.activeboard.com/forum.spark?aBID=63528&p=3&topicID=18452751

Cheers