Talk:Female tank

Article should probably be renamed to something like Tank sexing. (cf. Chicken sexing). Drutt (talk) 20:07, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

• Agreed. Not "tank sexing", but something that covers all three genders under one topic. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:29, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

• Support makes more sense, and brings the concept into one article. PrussianOwl (talk) 10:37, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Diary excerpt.

That had no right to be here, for a number of reasons. RS, OR, self-referencing, etc. It's not a secondary source. The alleged diary entry by the implausibly-spelt doctor appears to exist nowhere but here. It's just an example of use, not an authoritative source. Hengistmate (talk) 17:54, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't remove it quite so speedily as I think there is some value to it. However it needs to be sourced as a primary source (is this diary published as a book?) and ideally some secondary comment on it. Mostly though, it might show that female tanks were described as such on that day, but it's no indication at all that this was their first use. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:24, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Is the article correct?

I read in the past, I believe, that female tanks were to be made with artillery guns to protect the male tanks from attacks from enemy artillery, and male tanks were to have only machine guns, the better to kill enemy infantry, and that even prior to production the decision was made to only make female tanks, that is, tanks having both machine guns and artillery guns. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.3.203.119 (talk) 20:08, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Your terminology is incorrect. It was the Male tanks (the first examples were Male) which had 6 pdr artillery. They may have carried light machine guns as well, but not in fixed mountings. It was the Female tanks which were MG only. As the sponsons were removable anyway (so that the tanks would fit within the railway loading gauge for transport) it was then an easy matter to assemble them as Hermaphrodites, with one sponson of each type.

It would be a useful expansion to describe the tactical use of these, which is currently very lacking.

My understanding (and there are a couple of editors here who know this better than I do) is that the purpose of the tanks was to breach the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front. This did not entail 'killing infantry' so much as crossing the territory of No Man's Land against MG fire (fatal to walking infantry), to be able to cross enemy trenches on arrival, and then to kill infantry within those trenches and to destroy or disable the dug-in machine gun positions which made those trenches so unapproachable for infantry otherwise. The intention had been to use the 6 pdr against the dug-in positions, but in fact LMG fire could stop them, at least temporarily. The tank concept (at least in WWI) was not to be a mobile MG post, defending against waves of infantry. Hence the four Vickers belt-fed, water-cooled heavy machine guns of the Mk I Female tank were replaced by Hotckiss or Lewis light machine guns (the same weapon that the Males had already carried in loophole mounts). There was just no need for the Vickers' sustained fire. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:23, 12 February 2019 (UTC)