Yesterday Steven Zaloga posted a series of photos on his facebook account of various imitation tanks built during WWI and used as public displays for promoting war bond sales. He graciously agreed to let us post the photos here in a digital gallery. These are really quite fun, especially the rather nicely done imitation A7V shown on parade promoting the U.S. Tank Corps in New York City.
Gallery description from Steven Zaloga:
While working on a book in the Osprey New Vanguard series on early US tanks, I kept running into newspaper accounts of tanks on parade in various US cities in 1918, mostly for Liberty Loan drives. There were a handful of British tanks used for this purpose, but obviously not enough to go around. So a lot of cities built their own. This had led to some confusion, as some of these things were identified as real tank prototypes in various accounts. Obviously not judging from the photos of the Plywood Panzers. Here’s a sampling, courtesy of the files of NARA.
THE papers of a Somme tank commander who married his sweetheart in Farnham before fighting on the Western Front have been published for the first time by the National Army Museum.
Tank and AFV News 