“I saw one fellow in a shell hole holding his rifle and sitting down,” Patton later wrote. Mihiel “was a most irritating sight.” He decided to take his frustrations out on an American infantryman they passed. The light tanks frequently became mired in the muck surrounding the trenches, halting forward progress while they waited for the combat engineers who escorted them to extricate them from the morass.įor the always irascible Patton, the picture of these magnificent war machines stuck in the mud near St. However, WWI technology didn’t always meet expectations. Sixteen feet long and about six feet wide, the FT-17s were nimble enough to navigate French forests and eliminate German machine-gun nests while their armor plating protected the crew inside. relied heavily on the French-made Renault FT-17, a revolutionary vehicle that was the first to feature a fully rotating turret and have the crew compartment up front and the engine in the back. The Americans’ goal was to reduce a salient, a bulge in the lines where the enemy had pushed into Allied territory.Īhead of his time, Patton recognized that tanks would one day be a tremendous force on the modern battlefield, and he had been largely responsible for establishing and training the country’s nascent tank force. One hundred and three years ago, in the summer of 1918, Patton led 144 FT-17 tanks into battle against the Germans near St.
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