Salt Lake Tribune | 1919-03-09 | Page 34 | Tank Development Hastened War's End

THI OEWMOU i HASTENEDWAR'S El Holt Track-laying Devifce Made Army Juggernauts Jugger-nauts Possible. So lonx as artists shall picture the great war, .just so long will they depict the r'arin', crashing tank as the symbol of allied victory. That ponderous forward for-ward waddle, inspiring and sustaining to friend, menacing and terrible to foe, is representative of the irresistible force which gathered to crush the Hun. Erric-mn, Erric-mn, almost overnight, devised the "ciicesebox on a rait" which successfully success-fully removed" the peril of the first ironclad. iron-clad. But the German general staff in forty years of forethought failed to evolve a protection against the crosscountry cross-country battleship. The tanks "treated 'em rough" to the eleventh hour of the last day 's fighting. As tinio passes and the great forces of the war, which together brought victory, vic-tory, are seen in their true light, the allied nations will recognize yet more plainly the debt of gratitude which they owe to Benjamin Holt. His inventive genius evolved the engine which lays its own track. Without this one fundamental funda-mental idea, the tank would have been impossible and the huge tractors which dragged the heavy guns to the front would not havo been known. In the Holt plant at Peoria, III., at J the old plant of the same company at Stockton, Cal., in foundries, machine shops, automobile plants, structural shops and assembling establishments throughout the country, thousands of skilled workers have toiled day and night to bend Holts' invention to the task of beating the Hun. .o single mechanical invention in the great war did more in a mechanical way to bring ' victory than did this machine designed for the uses of peace. The plowing engine en-gine metamorphosed became the juggernaut.