Barrel Roll Offensive
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Barrel Roll Offensive is a military attack in Harry Turtledove's fictional Great War trilogy. The attack was directed against Confederate Army entrenchments and fortifications outside of White House, Tennessee by the US First Army under Lieutenant General George Custer on Remembrance Day, April 22, 1917, during World War I.
The offensive is notable in history for being the first occasion in warfare where barrels (tanks) were used en masse to break through enemy lines and achieve a tactical and strategic breakthrough. Over three hundred barrels were collected by Custer and lined up along a two mile stretch of front. After a short but intense artillery barrage, the barrels charged forward and ripped a wide hole in the Confederate line, forcing the Confederates to fall back and retreat toward the Nashville line, where the offensive ends and resettles into trench warfare. The offensive carried First Army to within artillery range of Nashville, and within the battle's end shelling of the capital of Tennessee commenced .
General Custer was under orders from the General Staff to use the barrels in a formation prescribed by the War Department, which had the machines stretched out piecemeal over the entire army front and supporting local infantry attacks. Custer, a former cavalryman who'd graduated last in his West Point class, thought differently. He arranged the barrels as he thought fit, lying about it to Chief of Staff Leonard Wood and even President Theodore Roosevelt, claiming that he was making the formation order of operations up to confuse alleged Confederate spies. When the Barrel Roll Offensive (named so after a popular tourist spot in Niagara Falls) proved wildly successful, the War Department quietly changed their barrel doctrine.
