b3ta.com challenge: robots in history

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Robots in History (This challenge is now closed)

Images of the Hadrian's Wall-building robot, medieval jousting engines, the great Titanic sinking machine, showerbots from WWII... Robots, in History, do it now!

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Fraser has joined the Moomins., Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:29)

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My granddad died in 84.
So I don’t remember him that well. I knew he fought in WW1, but he kept most of it to himself. All I did know was that he signed up at 16 and joined the Nothumbrian Fusiliers and saw action at Passchendale. It was when I helped my parents move house my dad showed me these, along with the little diary granddad had kept while he tried to survive in that mess of blood and mud.

He had never taken a photograph before in his life, but Spuddy Redpath, had found a camera in the what was left of a Chemists shop in the ruins at Mesines and granddad won it off him at cards. The next day the reinforcements were brought up from the rear, rumour had been flying round that some special new machines where being brought up that would finished the Hun here, and start the breakout across the Ypres salient.

When they arrived they where a bit of a shock, 3 great metal men, made by Armstrong-Whitworth in Newcastle. The army designated them Autonomous expeditionary force (AEPs) But the lads soon christened them Tom, Dick, and Harry. Strong as 20 men each they where! They helped pull the tanks out of the mud at Poelkapelle, other than that we didn’t know what they could do. On 31 July they got their chance and went over the top in the assault at Pilckem ridge. Harry took a 12lb shell to the chest in that one, Geordie Jackson said he looked like a popped mine boiler, with springs and cogs all inside him.

Tom, and Dick stood guard for the next 3 weeks waiting for the Bosch counter attack that never came. That was all through the rains that turned the ground to mud, and the mud to soup.

Tom, slipped off of one of the duckboard walkways and sank into a shell hole, they said he must have sunk down some 20 foot or more never to be seen again.
Granddad, got his last photo, on the 26 September, when his battalion, went over the top to take Polygon wood. He said he saw Dick run straight across no-mans land that chest cannon of his popping all the while, him and the rest of the lads came up behind him onto the trenches at the edge of the wood. Dick had ploughed straight through all the Bosch machine gun posts. Granddad never really like eating meat much after that, and what he saw that day meant he could never abide the sight of liver or kidneys….

The last they saw of Dick, was him crashing into the German positions right at the top of the ridge never to be seen again. Of course when the top brass saw what he had done that day they hushed it all up saying it wasn’t really a British way to go about fighting a war.