Those Magnificent Men in their Fighting Machines: An Investigation into the Lives of WWI Tankmen

This thesis will look at the immense backlog of war diaries, journals, personal letters, government documentation, and oral histories left behind by British tank crewmen of the First World War. The purpose of this investigation is mainly to uncover the reasons that individuals were chosen for transferal into the Royal Tank Regiment, where they were transferred from, what their training consisted of before their deployment, and their combat history once they were sent into the battlefields on the Western Front. The goal of this project is to gauge the reaction to the emergence of this crucially important technology on a personal level, specifically from those who had to work in and around them during World War One. This thesis is a probe into the new and unique relation between man and machine that the First World War created. One of the key findings of this investigation is the unique way that class relations in the British Army were altered by the emergence of mechanized warfare. Working-class soldiers were given significantly more agency through the tank corps, and were able to engage in the sorts of tactical education and decision-making that beforehand would have been reserved for the upper-class corps of officers, as was the case with the infantry. This thesis finds that the training of these tank crewmen and their individual actions and newfound agency in mechanized forces contributed decisively to how well thesis vehicles performed in the field, and how they were remembered after the war had concluded.