Tank costs

[cullbaggie]

while reading various books about the tank warfare!! and how many start a battle and the lack of them that finish a days battle! set my mind wondering about the cost of each one left rotting

in todays money - roughly how much did each one cost!!

[WhiteStarLine]

I doubt that this would be a rigid estimate, but at the time of Cambrai, around £5,000 UK pounds each, at the 1917 value. This would be a pure manufacturing cost, not including training large fighting and maintenance crew and shipping the machines from factory to front, equipping with first line ammunition etc. By war's end, with the Mark V*, around £10,000 UK pounds each.

My source is page 276 and 318 of "TANKS IN THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918", Brevet-Colonel J. F. C. FULLER, D.S.O., (Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry), published 1920.

[WhiteStarLine]

Just having a look at historical inflation rates. Sites give widely differing figures based on the core assumptions they made.

Using http://safalra.com/other/historical-uk-inflation-price-conversion/, £10,000 in 1918 is roughly equivalent to £590,000 in 2013, which contrasts with the £3.6 million Wikipedia gives as the initial production cost of the M1 Abrams tank in 1999.

Incidentally, they were not "left rotting" and as an example, Fuller [p286] describes the work of the Salvage Companies in the last 100 days of the war:

During this period no fewer than 1,993 tanks and tank armoured cars had been engaged on thirty-nine days in all ;

887 machines had been handed over to Salvage, 313 of these being sent to the Central Workshops, and 204 having been repaired and reissued to

battalions. Of the above 887 tanks, only fifteen had been struck off the strength as unsalvable.

[Sidearm]

The "cost" of something is itself an interesting question (if you're an accountant, anyway). Do you mean the cost of the Army to buy or the cost to the manufacturer to make, the difference being the manufacturer's profit? If you mean the latter, in 1917 the practices of cost accounting were relatively undeveloped and concepts such as depreciation and the apportionment of overheads etc were less well defined or understood than today. Today there are accounting standards but these didn't exist during WW1, so there were disputes between the manufacturer's assessment of what things cost to make, and what the Ministry of Munitions considered they should cost, and so what they were prepared to pay.

Gwyn

[centurion]

And when you say each one what does this mean? A Mk 1 with its thin armour plate and Daimler bus engine would have a different cost to a Mk V with a specially designed Ricardo engine and transmission, much better armoured plate. Did a Hotchkiss cost the same as a Lewis for example and they certainly cost less than a Vickers. Again one needs to consider the difference in production runs and the economies of scale not to mention the different costs of the some raw materials during different phases of the war. There are so many variuables - if you could narrow it down to a particular mark and a a particular time I can think of places to go and look

[Terry_Reeves]

In September 1919, the Disposals Commission, a branch of the Ministry of Munitions , offered for sale to Spain, 27 Mk V * tanks, complete with spares for £7, 500 each, the original cost apparently being between £8,500 and £9,000 each.

TR

[cullbaggie]

i am reading about High wood & Flers, so presume a mk1 possibly a mk2, i was not aware that we salvaged them after the war or for re-use during the war!

having seen many pictures on here of the rotting hulks lying around the battlefields! i assumed thats were they ended their days!

thanks sidearm - an accountant i am not! but might be wealthier if i was!!! lol and it was the intial buying that tripped my curiousity!!

Terry - were the tanks offered as one careful owner!!

[delta]

The tanks used in 1916 were recovered where possible; however there were few which could not be extracted and were therefore cannibalised.

The hulks were generally blown up at the end of the war but at least one remained alongside the village of Flers until the early 1940s

[Sidearm]

Wish I was wealthy...!!

[trajan]

On 30/07/2014 at 08:15, WhiteStarLine said:

My source is page 276 and 318 of "TANKS IN THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918", Brevet-Colonel J. F. C. FULLER, D.S.O., (Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry), published 1920.

 

Off topic to an extent, but thanks to Forum Pal "towisuk", a copy of this book can be found via the link he posted at:

 

[towisuk]

And a link straight to the book that trajan mentioned............

 

https://archive.org/details/cu31924027835168

 

and another interesting one.............

 

https://archive.org/details/companyoftanks00watsrich

 

another short booklet..........

 

https://archive.org/details/tanksbyrequestwi00swin

 

The above slightly off-topic but interesting all the same

 

regards

Tom

Edited 24 January , 2017 by towisuk