In August 1917, a British tank crew got stuck in the mud right in the middle of no man’s land.

What followed over the next three days is nothing short of a horror story.

But what actually happened to them, and did they survive? By the end of 1914, the Western Front had become something that nobody really planned for.

You had this continuous line of trenches running all the way from the coast of Belgium down to the Swiss border, and the war that everyone thought would wrap up in a few months had ground to a complete halt.

The issue was pretty simple when you think about it.

Weapons had gotten much better, but the way armies actually fought hadn’t caught up yet.

Machine guns and artillery could tear apart anything that moved across open ground.

So, soldiers on both sides just dug in and stayed there.

What you ended up with was mile after mile of trenches, craters, and thick tangles of barbed wire with a strip of destroyed earth between them that everyone started calling no man’s land.

The traditional approach of massing infantry and sending them forward or using cavalry charges to break through just didn’t work anymore.

Defenders sitting behind machine guns could wipe out entire waves of attackers before they got anywhere close.

Both armies were completely stuck, facing each other with no clear way to change the situation.

Naturally, the generals tried all sorts of things to break out of this mess.

The first idea was just to use more artillery, pound the enemy trenches for hours or even days, destroy the wire, collapse the dugouts, and then send the infantry across.

But it rarely worked the way they hoped.

The Germans had built deep concrete shelters where they could wait out even the heaviest bombardment.

And the moment the shelling stopped, they’d come back up with their guns ready.

On top of that, all those explosions turned the ground into a muddy nightmare of overlapping craters, which actually made it harder for the attacking troops to advance.

Other approaches were tested, too.

Poison gas, small teams of specially trained trench raiders, and night attacks.

None of it made much difference.

The fundamental problem stayed the same.

How do you move men across a few hundred yards of open ground when everything on the other side is designed to kill them? By the time you get to the big offensives of 1916 and 1917, it had become painfully clear that without something genuinely new, any advance would cost an enormous number of lives and probably wouldn’t even last.

This is where people started thinking in a different direction entirely.

What if you could build some kind of machine that would just drive across all of that? Something covered in armor that bullets couldn’t penetrate, heavy enough to flatten barbed wire, and designed to roll right over trenches instead of getting stuck in them.

If you could do that and mount some guns on it, you’d have a way to bring firepower directly to the enemy positions without losing thousands of men in the process.

The idea wasn’t completely original.

A writer named HG Wells had imagined something he called land ironclads back in 1903.

But it took the actual experience of trench warfare to create the motivation to build one for real.

And by this point, the technology had caught up enough to make it possible.

Engines had become powerful enough.

Track systems already existed for farm equipment, and you could manufacture steel plate for armor.

Everything needed was available.

It was just a matter of someone putting the pieces together.

The British ended up being the ones to do it.

Though the whole thing happened in a rather unusual way.

Late in 1914, an officer named Ernest Swinton started arguing for some kind of armored tractor that could handle trench crossings.

He eventually got the concept to Winston Churchill, who at that point was running the Admiral T, meaning he was in charge of the Navy, not the Army.

But Churchill immediately saw the potential.

In early 1915, he wrote a memo explaining that you could take tractors and fit them with armored compartments for men and machine guns, make the whole thing bulletproof and use a tracked system that would let them cross trenches without any trouble.

He was describing pretty much exactly what a tank needed to do.

Churchill set up a secret committee within the Admiral Ty to actually start building prototypes.

He called it the landships committee, which is how you end up with the strange situation of the Royal Navy developing a weapon that would fight on land.

Meanwhile, the actual army wanted very little to do with any of it.

So, the Admiral T just kept everything quiet and moved forward without telling the War Office what they were doing.

When the army did eventually take over the project in late 1915, secrecy had become such a priority that they needed a cover name.

The solution they landed on was to call these vehicles tanks, as in water tanks, storage containers.

If anyone asked what was inside those big metal shapes being moved around by train, the official story was that they were water systems being sent to Russia and the name ended up sticking permanently.

Development kept moving forward despite all the skepticism and soon they got the first prototype.

They called it Little Willie and it was a boxy compact machine with tracks wrapped around its body.

It could move and carry a crew but it couldn’t reliably get across the wide trenches that were standard on the Western Front.

So they redesigned the whole thing.

The new version was longer and had a distinctive diamond shape with tracks that wrapped completely around the hull and extended into raised points at the front and back specifically so it could climb in and out of trenches.

They called this one mother.

And when they tested it in early 1916, it actually worked.

That shape became the basic template for what a tank would look like.

The government ordered a hundred of them before the design was even finalized for production.

By the middle of 1916, the first production models were ready.

These were the Mark1 tanks and they came in two versions.

The ones they called males had a pair of six pounder cannons mounted in sponssons on the sides along with machine guns.

The females carried only machine guns intended mostly for dealing with enemy infantry.

All of them were shipped to France under complete secrecy that summer.

Now the British didn’t wait long to see what these machines could actually do.

In September 1916, right in the middle of the SO offensive, they decided to try them out for real.

49 tanks were supposed to go forward in an attack on a place called Flare Corsellet.

But the problem started before anyone even reached the enemy.

These early tanks were so unreliable that less than half of them actually made it to the starting line when the assault began.

But the ones that did make it forward caused something close to panic on the German side.

Soldiers who had spent two years fighting a war they thought they understood suddenly watched these enormous metal shapes come crawling toward them out of the smoke, grinding over shell craters, flattening wire and spraying machine gun fire as they moved.

A lot of them simply turned and ran or threw their weapons down and surrendered right there in the trench.

So the psychological effect was very real and a few of those tanks did help capture their objectives.

But it wasn’t the breakthrough that some people had hoped for.

The machines were painfully slow, maybe three or four miles an hour at best, and they kept breaking down.

The Germans, once they got over that first shock, figured out pretty quickly that artillery could destroy these things if you could land a direct hit.

Afterward, German commanders publicly dismissed the whole thing as primitive and ineffective.

The British kept working on the design anyway.

By 1917, they had a new version called the MarkV, which became the main tank for the middle part of the war.

It looked more or less the same, but underneath there were real improvements.

thicker armor, a fuel tank that had been moved to a safer position to reduce the fire risk, and mechanical components that were somewhat less likely to fail at the worst possible moment.

They also strapped something called an unditching beam to the roof, which was basically just a large wooden beam that the crew could attach to the tracks if the tank got stuck in mud.

By November 1917, the British had enough tanks and enough confidence to try something bigger.

At Comre, they masked over 370 of them for a coordinated surprise attack against the German Hindenburg line.

On the first day, the results were dramatic.

The tanks punched through multiple trench lines and in some places advanced more than 5 miles.

After years of offensives that measured progress in hundreds of yards, bought with tens of thousands of lives, 5 m in a single day was almost unbelievable.

For a moment, it really did look like tanks might be able to break the whole thing open.

But then the familiar problem set in.

Tank after tank broke down or got knocked out by German artillery once the defenders recovered.

The British hadn’t brought enough infantry reserves forward to hold all that captured ground.

And 10 days later, the Germans counteratt attacked and took most of it back.

So, let’s walk through what it was actually like inside these early tanks.

Because once you see the conditions in there, you’ll understand what that crew facing 3 days in no man’s land was really dealing with.

A MarkV carried eight men and they were all packed into a steel box roughly 8 m long and 2 and 1/2 m wide.

There was no separate engine compartment.

No wall between you and the machinery.

The engine, this roaring 100 horsepower petrol motor, sat right there in the middle of the crew space where everyone was working.

The moment it started up, the noise was so loud you couldn’t hear anything else.

Crew members had to shout directly into each other’s ears just to communicate basic commands.

Then there was the heat.

Temperatures in the crew compartment regularly hit 40 or 50° C, which is well over 120 Fahrenheit.

And on top of the heat, the fumes had nowhere to go.

You had carbon monoxide from the engine and exhaust and oily smoke in the air.

And every time someone fired a gun, you got cordite fumes on top of that.

All of it just accumulated in that enclosed space.

After any extended operation, crew members would come staggering out desperate for fresh air.

A lot of them vomiting, some of them collapsing completely.

They called it tank sickness.

And the men who experienced it said it was worse than the most extreme seasickness you could imagine.

Driving one of these things was its own kind of ordeal.

There was no steering wheel.

The driver sat up front with a set of clutch and brake levers, but he couldn’t actually turn the tank by himself.

Two other crew members called gearsmen each controlled one of the tracks, and making a turn meant coordinating between all three of them through shouted commands or hand signals in near total darkness.

one mistake from anyone and the tank would either stall or throw a track and leave you stranded in the open and you couldn’t see much of anything either.

When the tank was buttoned up for combat, the driver was looking through a slit maybe a few inches wide.

He could barely make out what was directly in front of him.

This caused problems that don’t get talked about very often.

Tanks occasionally drove right over wounded soldiers lying in shell holes or even over their own infantry and all that noise and chaos.

When a bullet or shell fragment hit the outside of the tank, the impact would knock metal splinters off the interior surface.

And these fragments could fly across the compartment and wound anyone they hit.

They called this spoing.

There was also the problem of lead splash.

If a rifle bullet struck the armor and didn’t penetrate, the lead could melt from the impact and spray through the vision slits.

Many men were blinded this way.

To deal with this, the British eventually started issuing special face masks made of steel plates with chain mail hanging down to protect the lower face and neck, and they looked almost medieval.

But wearing a steel mask inside a compartment that was already 120° with no air circulation and fumes building up around you was just too much for a lot of men.

They’d leave the masks off, and some of them paid for it with their faces.

Meanwhile, the Germans had been working out how to kill tanks.

In the beginning, they had nothing because standard rifle rounds just bounced off the armor.

But by 1917, they developed armor-piercing ammunition, rounds with hardened steel cores that could go through thinner armor at close range.

When that stopped working against the thicker plates on the MarkV, they brought in a large anti-tank rifle, a 13 mm weapon that fired a heavy steel cord bullet capable of going through 20 mm of armor.

Artillery worked even better since a direct hit from a field gun would destroy a tank outright.

So, what happened to the crew of a tank called Frey Bentos in August of 1917? The tank was a MarkV male, and like most crews did back then, the men inside had given it a nickname.

They called it Frey Bentos after a brand of canned meat that was popular at the time.

It was assigned to support British attacks near a village called St.

Julian, just northeast of Epris.

And this was during what most people now know as Passanddale.

If you’ve heard anything about that battle, you probably know it mostly for the mud.

The weather had been unusually wet, and the ground had turned into something that wasn’t really ground anymore.

No man’s land was a swamp of overlapping shell craters filled with water and soft earth deep enough to swallow men whole.

And this is what Frey Bentos was supposed to cross on the morning of August 22nd.

The crew set out before dawn, moving forward with the infantry at 0our around 4:40 in the morning.

Almost immediately, a German machine gun opened up from a fortified position that the British had cenamed Som Farm.

So, the crew did what they were trained to do.

They brought the left sponsson six pounder around and fired into the position until it went quiet.

They continued toward their next objective.

Another strong point called Galipo that sat on a slight rise ahead of them.

It was around 5:45 when they got close and another German machine gun began firing at them from that direction.

Then, while they were moving toward the position, the tank found something hidden in the churned up mud.

A deep shell crater that was impossible to see until you were already in it.

Frey Bentos lurched forward, slid into the hole, and tilted hard to one side with one track coming partially off the ground while the other sank into the soft earth.

They were stuck.

At almost the same moment, a bullet came through one of the vision slits and hit Second Lieutenant George Hill in the neck.

He fell off his seat, bleeding badly.

Captain Donald Richardson, who was in command, tried to reach the controls and correct the tank’s angle before they settled any deeper.

But Hill had collapsed onto the steering mechanism, and in that cramped space, nobody could sort things out quickly enough.

The tank slid further into the crater and stopped.

So now they were sitting at an angle somewhere between the two front lines with German fire already focusing on them.

Inside, the crew tried to work out what they were dealing with.

There were nine men that day, one extra because they had added someone to handle carrier pigeons, and three of them were already wounded from that first minute alone.

But the immediate problem was the tank itself.

You see, standard procedure when you got stuck was to use something called the unditching beam, which basically meant someone had to climb out and attach it to the tracks so they could drive themselves free.

Sergeant Robert Misson went out through the right sponsson door with a chain, and the moment he got outside, he could hear rounds hitting the armor right next to him.

He looked up and saw German soldiers about 30 yards away aiming directly at him.

So he got back inside before he could reach the beam.

On the other side, Lance Corporal Ernest Brady tried the same thing through the left sponsson.

He made it out and started working on the gear, but he was hit almost immediately by machine gun fire before he could finish.

Brady fell into the mud next to the tank and didn’t get up.

So with Brady dead and misinforced back inside, it was clear that nobody was going to free this tank while the Germans were watching.

Frey Bentos wasn’t going anywhere, but it could still fight.

Now, one of the six pounders was pointing into the mud because of the angle, but the other could still traverse, and they had Lewis guns.

So, Richardson decided they would stay and hold their position.

They turned the working cannon toward Gallipoli Farm, where the machine gun fire was coming from, and began putting rounds into it, firing at anything that moved.

For now, that kept the Germans from rushing them.

Then, around 7:00 in the morning, the situation got worse.

The British infantry attack in that sector failed and the 61st division took heavy casualties and couldn’t hold the ground.

So they withdrew to their starting trenches.

This left Frey Bento sitting alone in no man’s land, tilted and half buried with no friendly soldiers anywhere near them.

The tank had basically become an isolated strong point surrounded by enemy territory.

The Germans understood exactly what they had.

Small groups began working toward the tank through the shell craters, trying to get close enough to attack with grenades, and the crew fought them off with what they had.

But here’s the thing, the angle of the tank created blind spots that the mounted weapons couldn’t cover.

When German soldiers crawled into an old trench directly in front of them, so close that the Lewis gun couldn’t angle down far enough to hit them, Miss and the others began shooting through the revolver port with rifles.

At one point, a German soldier actually climbed onto the hull and dropped a grenade through one of the openings, but the crew grabbed it and threw it back out before it went off.

By this point, almost everyone inside was wounded.

The injuries from the first minutes had been added to by new ones as bullets came through vision slits and metal fragments flew off the interior walls, and the only one who hadn’t been hit was a gunner named Binley.

Outside, Brady’s body lay in the mud where he’d fallen, visible through the slits, but impossible to reach.

And then the crew noticed something odd.

Bullets were coming at them from the direction of the British lines.

Their own side had seen the motionless tank sitting out there and assumed the Germans had captured it.

So now British snipers were shooting at them as well.

Miss decided to do something about it.

He climbed out of the tank, crawled across the open ground toward the British trenches, under fire from both directions, and told the infantry to stop shooting because his crew was still inside and still holding.

Then he turned around and crawled back to rejoin them.

That journey across no man’s land and back was recognized afterward as one of the most remarkable acts of individual courage in the entire war.

Night came on August 22nd and they were still there stuck and surrounded but alive.

The darkness brought some relief but the Germans kept sending up flares and shot at any sound.

The crew talked about trying to escape but the risk seemed greater than staying.

As long as the tank provided cover, it was safer than crawling across open ground with the enemy so close.

The next day, nothing changed.

German counterattacks moved through the sector on the 23rd and 24th, and each time their infantry tried to move past or destroy the stranded tank, the crew drove them back with whatever they could fire.

Flamethrower teams tried to get close enough to burn them out, but none of it worked.

Inside the tank, though, things were getting bad.

The food ran out and so did the water.

They’d only brought enough for a normal operation lasting maybe a day.

This was now the third day.

The heat during daylight was brutal, and the air was thick with blood, sweat, oil, and everything else that builds up when men are sealed in a metal container with no way to take care of basic needs.

Bud lost consciousness for 2 hours at one point from his wounds, and the others were exhausted, weak, and in pain.

Sleep was almost impossible because every time someone started to drift off, another burst of gunfire or the sound of a wounded man would wake them.

By the evening of August 24th, they’d been inside for close to 60 hours, and Richardson made the decision.

They couldn’t last another day, so when it got dark, they would leave the tank and try to crawl back.

Now, they had orders not to let the enemy capture an intact tank.

So, before leaving, they disabled what they could.

They removed the breach blocks from the six pounders so the guns would be useless, and they gathered the Lewis guns and the remaining ammunition and anything else that might be useful to the Germans.

Each man checked his revolver, and around 9 that night, they began climbing out.

One at a time, eight men crawled out of Frey Bentos and into the mud.

The British trenches were a few hundred yards away across a landscape of flooded craters with flares still going up and Germans still shooting at movement, so they went slowly.

They even dragged the Lewis guns with them rather than leave them behind.

By the early hours of August 25th, all eight had made it, and British sentries pulled them in one by one.

Before they collapsed, they passed word to a nearby infantry unit to keep firing on the abandoned tank so the Germans couldn’t salvage it.

72 hours they’d been inside.

One man killed, seven wounded.

Only Binley had come through without an injury, at least without a physical one.

When the reports were filed, the crew of Frey Bentos became the most decorated tank crew of the war.

Richardson and Hill received the Military Cross.

Miss and Mory received the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and Hatton, Arthurs, Bud, and Binley each received the military medal.

Brady, who died in the first hour trying to free the tank, received nothing.

His body was never found and his name is on the tine cot memorial along with nearly 35,000 others who disappeared into the mud around Epra.