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Invasion Literature
The Land Ironclads
Published 1904
Written in 1904 by H.G. Wells, The Land
Ironclads is a short story prescient of the First World War. The
Ironclads are 100 ft long machines with remote controlled guns and
accommodation for 42 soldiers, including 7 officers.
They move with small wheels with feet called "Pedrails", and attain a
maximum of 8 mph. Many politicians during WWI wished to apply the concept
and make real Ironclads. The First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill
and the Landships Committee developed the first tanks in WWI without Wells'
involvement, Wells was embittered and developed an aversion to politics for a
short time. It is said that this story was the starting point of tanks in
World War I.
Leonardo da Vinci had also designed a proto-tank, but Wells' chief
inspiration seems to have been Ironclad warships, which also feature
significantly in one incident from The War of the Worlds.
An important
book in the invasion literature genre, it predicts the breakthrough in
trench warfare which was still not to be achieved until late in the Great
War..
Few science fiction works were as uncannily
accurate in fortelling the future as this short story published in 1903 by
H.G. Wells. It portrays a conflict remarkably similar to the trench warfare
of the First World War, in which the two sides face each other across a
no-man's land. Wells describes the invention that breaks the stalemate
between the combatants -- an armoured, all-terrain vehicle that can
withstand small-arms fire and cross trenches...the Land Ironclads.
Wells envisioned a huge, hundred-foot-long vehicle propelled by eight pairs
of pedrails, wheels ringed with flexible feet to give traction. He also gave
his vehicles innovative weapons: remotely controlled rifles with an advanced
sighting system that gave tremendous accuracy even while moving.
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