Tanks to the Navy!

[Joe C-P]

(This would have been my One Week Group Build, but I came up with the idea a week later after having forgotten when we were doing that build.    )

In 1919, after the war to end all wars, the US military now had a collection of armored tracked vehicles that had taken the nickname "tanks" due to a bit of misdirection on the part of the British Army.

While the US Army had most of these odd inventions, being that they were also named "land ships" and armed with naval guns the US Navy took somewhere between 22 and 27 (records aren't clear), crewed them with naval personnel, and began experiments in tactics.

Over time the landships were groups in squadrons of varying sizes from 2 to 6, tasked with learning the vehicles advantaged and weaknesses and developing methods and tactics to advance the former and lesson the latter.

Included in this work were painting and camouflage experiments, each ship's crew encouraged to find their own inspiration, as long as they could find the supplies in the surplus.

Ship #16 happened to end up with a "captain" (a lieutenant in rank) from New Jersey, Leeds Halsey, who'd served in home waters on the older predreadnaught battleships. He remembered seeing the battleship named for his home state, which happened to be Battleship 16, and so took his inspiration from that ship for his landships camouflage scheme. In addition he set up a small mast just behind the after hatch, and devised a set of signals to be sent between ships in a squadron, given the impossibility of communication by sound inside the noisy hulls.

Today the small experimental group is all but forgotten, though naval terminology has stuck to tanks' structure.

Here we see "Captain" Halsey's landship, unofficially Christened "(Jersey) Devil May Care" in her namesake-inspired camouflage, with the signal for "Advance on the enemy" hoisted aloft.

[Weaver]

Splendid idea! 

You could probably pass that tale off as true, given the number of oddball things that happen in the early days of any new technology.

[PR19_Kit]

A cracking idea, I love the signal flags too. 

[Gondor]

Sounds very plausible 

Gondor

[Old Wombat]

Well, they were a Royal Navy development under Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty.

[NARSES2]

That looks good