British Mark IV Tank

Osprey New Vanguard #133

by David Fletcher, Tony Bryan (Illustrator)

Amongst the first ever mass-produced tanks in history, the British Mk IV has been classified as one of the most successful heavy tanks to have fought in World War I.

Mechanically similar to its predecessors, the Mark IV embodied various improvements, suggested by experience with earlier variants, including better armour, improved weapons and easier transportation.

It proved its worth at the landmark battle of Cambrai in November 1917, when 460 Mark IVs were deployed for the first time against the enemy with great effect. Arguably changing the nature of war on the Western Front, the Mark IV was one of the first vehicles in the world to partake in a tank duel when, in 1918, it met the German A7V in combat.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished photographs and new information on its operational abilities, this fascinating exploration of the British Mk IV includes detailed descriptions of the tank and its variants, such as the mine-clearing tank, the Tadpole tail device, and the tank created for towing airships, to complete the picture of this crucial vehicle and its deployment on the Western Front.

48 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2007

About the author

David Fletcher is a historian at the Tank Museum at Bovington and has written a great number of books on British armour.

Reviews

[Dimitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the Historian of the Bovington Tank Museum pedaling the gearbox, the lack of a bibliography is a minor blemish.

The Mark IV was the tank for 1917, sitting between the experiments of autumn 1916 and the more mobile last year of the war. By then the Mark V had delegated his precedessor wholly to the supply role, dragging sledges. It was fitted with every experimental technology that could possibly answer the needs of the WW1 battlefield except speed and foreshadowed the possibilities for the next war. XL fascines to fill trenches, cranes, wireless to communicate with the Royal Flying Corps... Cambrai was built around them, even if most infantry divisions barely noticed their presence. For Passchendaele, they were shipped aboard pontoons that would've sent them LST style up the Belgian beaches as amphibious support of a breakthrough.

Quite some pages are devoted to the spontoons on the side which housed the machine guns or specially shortened guns, since these had to be taken off for each rail transport. It lends a sense of awe to the logistics involved in deploying a small number of cutting edge technology machines amidst millions of riflemen.

Fletcher has a mechanic's passion. His plate commentaries go over every nut and bolt as his corpus goes over every upgrade in transmission, fuel injection, horsepower andsoforth.

The ingenious German recovery and repurposing of Cambrai hulks as "Beutepanzer" is fitted in sideways. It's obvious this booklet cannot stand alone without the New Vanguard Titles on the Mark I and the AK7*.

There's a short note on the development of the Heavy Section of the Machine Gun Corps, but life inside the hill or the units around it are stories beyond this scope. I recommend Band of Brigands** to ease into that.

* British Mark I Tank 1916 by David Fletcher
German Panzers 1914–18 by Steven J. Zaloga
** Band of Brigands: The First Men in Tanks by Christy Campbell

[Roy Szweda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Osprey do a great job to get experts like Mr Fletcher to write for them augmented by some neat art and decent selection of snaps with useful captions to tell the story of what might be called the most important tank in the history of warfare.
It might look absurd in comparison with what most tanks later looked like but it was built that way to cross trenches. Maybe not so useful in crossing ground churned to a morass by the over use of artillery as is briefly told here but an expedient that no one else had come up with. Whether these machines were used to their best (and that of the troops) is still being argued about and likely always will. Such is how things too often can be with revolutionary approaches to warfare. It is truly astonishing the pace of work to bring them into action at all; in 1914 all we had were a few armour-plated buses and limos etc but by 1917 the Hun were being terrorised by these landcrawlers spitting bullets and shells….. it is a story worth the retelling and they do a great job here.
Now, as others have pointed out, there is the matter of value for money. I think that this book is fine even tho it is a short read. But I have read it three times now; it is one of those to take down from the Osprey collection and just thumb through too. A way of efficiently warming over my knowledge of the time because as viewers of the Youtube vids Mr F and co do for the Bovington Tank Museum find, the man knows his onions. Yet if you were to buy the set of WW1 tank books brand new you’d get little change from 50 quid likely. But we all have to make a buck and Osprey is a publisher we should support.
This review is of the print book as I still prefer much of my non-fiction for the bookshelf. The centrepiece artwork suffers a bit from being in the crease so maybe should have been done a different way.