Ken DivjakOp het eeuwfeest van de Grote Oorlog onderbreken we onze normale programmering om een eerbetoon aan de wereldredders van weleer te brengen. Soldaten van over heel de wereld, die naar Europa in het algemeen en België in het bijzonder kwamen om de vrede te herstellen.
Minder bekend is dat ook de prille auto-industrie zijn steentje bijdroeg aan het verloop van WOI, door middel van gepantserde voertuigen zoals deze Armoured Car van niemand minder dan Charles Rolls en Henry Rolls:
The Rolls-Royce Armoured Car was a British armoured car developed in 1914 and used during the First World War.
The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) raised the first British armoured car squadron during the First World War. In September 1914 all available Rolls Royce Silver Ghost chassis were requisitioned to form the basis for the new armoured car. The following month a special committee of the Admiralty Air Department, among whom was Flight Commander T.G. Hetherington, designed the superstructure which consisted of armoured bodywork and a single fully rotating turret holding a regular water cooled Vickers machine gun.
The first three vehicles were delivered on 3 December 1914, although by then the mobile period on the Western Front, where the primitive predecessors of the Rolls-Royce cars had served, had already come to an end. Later in the war they served on several fronts of the Middle Eastern theatre. Chassis production was suspended in 1917 to enable Rolls-Royce to concentrate on aero engines.
The vehicle was modernized in 1920 and in 1924, resulting in the Rolls-Royce 1920 Pattern and Rolls-Royce 1924 Pattern. [Bron: Wikipedia]
[Check het YouTube-kanaal van The Great War voor meer achtegrond]