With the wounded man in tow, he then made his way back to friendly lines armed with nothing more than his issue Mk VI Webley revolver.
#WEBLEY REVOLVER DATES OF MANUFACTURE DRIVER#
Blowers nonetheless still returned to the burning Dolphin to rescue his driver trapped inside. Blowers took a piece of shrapnel to his head that he ultimately carried with him to the grave. The Webley Mk VI revolver LT Blowers carried during the Battle of the Somme is currently on display at the Bovington Tank Museum in England. By now the tank was on fire, and the crew was forced to abandon it.
With the Dolphin immobilized by artillery, Blowers and his men burned through the entirety of their belted ammunition for all five of their machineguns. However, their appearance on the battlefield signaled a paradigm shift in the nature of ground combat. Most of the British tanks were eventually disabled or destroyed. German artillery in the direct fire mode took a toll as well. They made excellent progress at first, but eventually the Boche begin swarming the vehicles.
Arthur Blowers showed tremendous valor in leading his crew back to friendly lines during the Battle of the Somme.īlowers and his crew guided the Dolphin across No Man’s Land as part of a coordinated assault against the German trenches. He called his radical new armored war machine “Dolphin.” Lt. Blowers was born on November 5, 1891, in Knodishall, Suffolk, the 13 th of 14 siblings. Lieutenant Arthur Herbert Blowers commanded D5, one of the female tanks. The noxious fumes from their primitive internal combustion engines quite literally poisoned the crews at times. Both contraptions were little more than death traps. These things were crammed with machinegun ammunition and served to support the cannon-armed Male versions as well as friendly infantry. 303-in Vickers guns as well as one French Hotchkiss. The “Female” version weighed 27 tons and carried four. The Mk 1 “Male” tank was the cannon-armed version of the basic British heavy tank of World War I. This version was called the “Male.” Sporting a top speed of 3.7 miles per hour and an all up weight of 28 tons, the Mk I Male packed the heaviest punch. One version sported a crew of eight, three Hotchkiss 8mm machineguns, and two 6-pounder cannons. The Mk 1 tank came in two broad variants denoted by the strangest terminology. The lessons learned from this early armored assault shape land warfare to this very day.
In a war characterized by a ghastly protracted stalemate, these advanced wonder weapons were expected to be the catalyst that got the Tommies up and out of their trenches and into the mobile fight. The British Mk 1 tanks used during this engagement were intended to provide mobility. While the Battle of the Somme established any number of milestones in mankind’s timeless effort to annihilate itself, it also saw the first massed employment of tanks. The Webley Mk VI was prized for its innate accuracy as well as the knockdown power of its massive. The Battle of the Somme was one of the costliest conflicts in human history. Some three million men tore at each other, spilling a veritable sea of blood. This assault precipitated the third phase of the Battle of the Somme, World War I’s largest engagement on the Western Front. As dawn broke on this fateful day, the French 6 th and British 4 th Armies squared off against the Imperial German 1st Army in France.