Think Tank! - Smarter Every Day 11

Hello my friends! Hey, it's me Destin. I'm at the ordnance museum; let's go learn something. I'm just kidding! This is a Russian tank, a T-34.

Hey, this is the first tank, or actually the first vehicle to be called "tank." This is the um, the Mark 4. The British made this in 1917; this is the female version. It just had machine guns on the side. The male version had cannons at the side.

Anyway, the reason it was first called a tank is because the British tried to hide the fact from the Germans that they had an armored vehicle to go against the trench warfare that was going on in World War I. Anyway, they called it a tank to make the Germans think that it was a mobile water tank they were using to supply the troops out front. That's why we call armored vehicles "tanks" today, or at least some of them. There, now you know. Guten Tag!

So, back before armored glass existed, they did something pretty interesting to protect against bullets in armored vehicles. Here you can see on an Italian tank they had a slit, and that's what the driver would look through. Also, on the sides, there are little holes for guys to stick their weapons out of.

This is a really, really tiny armored vehicle. I'll go show you that slit on another vehicle over here. Okay, this is a German vehicle, and you can see it had the same (slit). This is early turn-of-the-century stuff. You can see that's where these guys could see; this armored block was moved.

This was 1937; I was wrong, not the turn of the century. Pretty awesome! Captured in Korea. My granddaddy helped do this. Yeah, God bless America!