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Show Tank Warfare Born in U.S.A. Huge rolling war tanks pushing through houses, knocking down fences, and filling the air with singing sing-ing red hot bullets that is a picture of the way the Axis overcame some of its weaker victims until the Allies forced a retreat with the same technique. tech-nique. This is motorized warfare. Many have credited the Nazis with being the first to. discover mechanized mechan-ized war equipment. But they were only the first to use this weapon. The war tank was born more than 40 years ago at the Northwestern Military and Naval academy, Lake Geneva, Wis. The institute was also the birthplace birth-place of the armored car and self-propelled self-propelled artillery piece. Some time near the start of this century, Col. Royal P. Davidson, superintendent of the academy, designed a three-wheeled three-wheeled contraption which looked something like a tricycle with a wide seat. In front was a steel plate through which a Colt automatic rifle poked its nose. The wheels were turned by a one-cylinder motor. The car was later converted into a four-wheeler. four-wheeler. After a practical demonstration dem-onstration in 1898, the year of the Spanish-American war, Gen. Nelson A. Miles, then the army chief of staff, recommended that five cavalry regiments be converted into an automobile au-tomobile corps. In 1900 Davidson designed a steam-operated car to carry a Colt automatic gun. Two cars of this design were built that year in the manual training shops of the academy. acad-emy. They made several trips, one as far as Washington, D. C, and were used in cadet training and maneuvers for several years. Two combat cars called "Balloon Destroyers," manned by academy cadets, made the 2,800-mile Glidden tour from Cincinnati to Dallas in 1910, and were among the nine out of 38 cars to finish with the original motors. Five years later a caravan of eight academy cars made a test trip to Los Angeles without accident or mishap. This cavalcade included a wireless car, hospital car, kitchen car, and also the first armored car ever built in this country. |