"The Land Ironclads" is a short story by British writer H. G. Wells, which originally appeared in the December 1903 issue of the Strand Magazine. It features tank-like "land ironclads," armoured fighting vehicles that carry riflemen, engineers, and a captain, and are armed with semi-automatic rifles.
Plot summary
The story opens with an unnamed war correspondent and a young lieutenant surveying the calm of the battlefield. They reflect philosophically on the war between two unidentified armies. The time appears to be 1903 and the opponents are dug into trenches, each waiting for the other to attack, of the sort then common and being reported on daily from the Boer War. The men on the war correspondent's side are confident they will prevail, because they are all strong outdoor-types – men who know how to use a rifle and fight – while their enemies are townspeople, "a crowd of devitalised townsmen . . . They're clerks, they're factory hands, they're students, they're civilised men. They can write, they can talk, they can make and do all sorts of things, but they're poor amateurs at war." The men agree that their "open air life" produces men better suited to war than their opponents' "decent civilization."
In the end, however, the "decent civilization," with its men of science and engineers, triumphs over the "better soldiers" who, instead of developing land ironclads of their own, had been practising shooting their rifles from horseback, a tactic rendered obsolete by the land ironclads. Wells foreshadows this eventual outcome in the conversation of the two men in the first part, when the correspondent tells the lieutenant "Civilization has science, you know, it invented and it made the rifles and guns and things you use."
Impact
Contemporaries saw Wells' battle between countrymen "defenders" (who rely on cavalry and entrenched infantry) and attacking townsmen as echoing the Boer War, as well as being something of a re-tread of his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds which also featured a struggle between technologically uneven protagonists. But the story served to contribute to Wells' growing reputation as a "prophet of the future", something that many early socialists and newspaper editors were keen to promote, especially when real tanks first appeared on the battlefield 12 years later in 1916.
Wells's story did predict the use of armoured vehicles in combat, but numerous authors (for example Sam Moskowitz in Science Fiction by Gaslight) have mistakenly stated that he also described modern caterpillar treads on a tank and did so before the tank's invention. This is incorrect.
Inspiration
In his later War and the Future (1917), H. G. Wells specifically acknowledges Bramah Diplock's pedrail wheel as the origin for his idea of an all-terrain armoured vehicle in The Land Ironclads: