The German machine gunners had never missed — until their bullets began bouncing off something that shouldn't exist.

The First Tank Attack in History: Flers-Courcelette's Iron Dawn

When Mark I Tanks Lurched Into Battle on the Somme

On September 15, 1916, tanks first entered combat on the Somme, terrifying German defenders and changing warfare forever.

At 6:20 a.m. on September 15, 1916, the fog still clung to the shell-cratered moonscape of the Somme when something monstrous emerged from the British lines near the village of Flers. Private Bert Chaney of the 7th London Regiment watched in disbelief as a massive iron rhombus, belching smoke and grinding over barbed wire as if it were grass, crawled toward the German trenches. 'We heard strange throbbing noises,' he later recalled, 'and lumbering slowly towards us came three huge mechanical monsters such as we had never seen before.'

The Germans were equally stupefied. Machine gunners who had mowed down waves of infantry for two years now watched their bullets spark uselessly off steel plates. Some fled. Others stood frozen, convinced they faced some demonic apparition. One captured German officer reportedly demanded to know 'what the Devil those things were.'

They were tanks — forty-nine of them committed to battle that morning, though only thirty-two reached the start line. Mechanical breakdowns, ditching in craters, and the sheer unreliability of these 28-ton prototypes meant that barely a dozen made it into actual combat. Their crews suffocated in temperatures exceeding 50°C…

💡 The crews nicknamed their tanks 'His Majesty's Landships' and the vehicles were originally codenamed 'water carriers for Mesopotamia' — shortened to 'tanks' to maintain secrecy.