Britain
Ernest Swinton
1868–1951 Tank pioneer
Ernest Dunlop Swinton was a Royal Engineers officer and author who went to France in 1914 as the army's official war correspondent, writing under the name 'Eyewitness'. Struck by the problem of trench warfare, he proposed in October 1914 a tracked armored vehicle, drawing on the American Holt tractor. He lobbied Hankey and Churchill, and helped to form the Landships Committee. He bitterly criticized the premature use of tanks on the Somme in September 1916. He later became Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford and lived to see tanks dominate the next war.