I hope readers will find the story as gripping and as revealing as I have. I wanted also to describe the bravery and suffering of the crews, the personalities of the pioneers and their opponents, the machines themselves and the struggle to build them in competition with the demands for aircraft, guns, locomotives and other vital munitions etc.
The clash of personalities and prejudices under the pressures of war resulted in disastrous delays and often bizarrely naive experimental machines, but they led to ultimate triumph on the battlefield.
What emerges with absolute clarity is the fact that behind the tank's shooting war lay another series of often bitter conflicts between the military and the weapon's visionaries and builders.
It has taken six years to research many hundreds of personal recollections and official files and reports of the period. I particularly wanted to write this account of the tank's birth in World War One and the men behind it, because astonishingly, the full story has never been told.
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