After some reflection they decided it was best to leave the initiative to the Americans. The two men directly responsible for British tank production, Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt and Lieutenant-Colonel Albert Gerald Stern, initially considered sending a delegation to the United States immediately, to convince the new ally to start production of a British tank design. When the United States of America declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, many in Britain hoped this event would solve all these problems. The output in Britain was limited by labour shortages due to the manpower demand of the armed forces and a rocketing national debt. Of the Allies, only Great Britain and France had been major industrial nations in 1914 and the latter had lost 70% of its heavy industry when the Germans overran that part of Lorraine that they had not already occupied in 1871. Early development Īs the First World War progressed, the industrial production capacity of the Entente was taxed to the limit. A few tanks that had not been scrapped by the start of World War II were offered to Canada for training purposes. In practice, manufacture was slow and only a few vehicles were produced before the end of the war in November 1918.Īfter the war, 100 vehicles assembled in the US were used by the US Army until more advanced designs replaced them in 1932. The planned production levels would have equipped the Allied armies with a very large tank force that would have broken through the German defensive positions in the planned offensive for 1919.
Production at a site in France was expected to take advantage of US industrial capacity to produce the automotive elements, with the UK producing the armoured hulls and armament. The Mark VIII tank also known as the Liberty or The International was a British-American tank design of the First World War intended to overcome the limitations of the earlier British designs and be a collaborative effort to equip France, the UK and the US with a single heavy tank design.
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