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Lieutenant-General Sir Giffard Le Quesne Martel, KCB, KBE, DSO, MC, M I Mech E (10 October 1889 – 3 September 1958) was a British Army officer who served in both World War I and World War II. He was the son of Brigadier General Charles Philip Martel, C.B., Chief Superintendent of Ordnance Factories. He married Maud Mackenzie on 29 July 1922 and they had two children, a son, Major Peter Martel, MC, born 1938 and a daughter, Gillian, born 1941. Familiarly known as "Q Martel" or just "Q", he was a pioneering British military engineer and tank strategist. Giffard Le Quesne Martel entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in 1908 and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 23 July 1909. Martel was instrumental in the establishment of The Royal Navy and Army Boxing Association in 1911 and was Army and Inter Services boxing champion both before and after World War I. ==World War I== In 1916, as a sapper officer with direct experience of the first British use of tanks on the Somme, Martel was put in charge of recreating a wide replica of the British and German trench systems, complete with no man's land, at Elveden, Norfolk, as part of a tank training ground. There he developed a keen interest in tank theory believing them to be the future of warfare and in November 1916 he wrote a paper, ''A Tank Army'', suggesting an army composed entirely of armoured vehicles. As J. F. C. Fuller's GSO3 the wide-ranging ideas set out in this paper profoundly influenced Fuller's thinking which at the time simply regarded the tank as no more than a useful adjunct to infantry on the battlefield. Martel was also interested in the construction of wire net roads as deployed in the British Army's 1917–1918 campaign in the Sinai and Palestine and their use in supporting tracked vehicles. In late 1916, Martel was on Hugh Elles' staff at Bermicourt in France assisting Fuller on the operational planning〔''Men, Ideas, and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903–1939'' By J. P. Harris, pg. 80〕 that culminated in the British tank tactics employed at the Battle of Cambrai. In addition to his MC (1915) and DSO (1916), in the course of the war Martel was mentioned in dispatches five times.〔"The Army Director Of Personal Services" ''The Times'', Saturday, Jan 22, 1938; pg. 7; Issue 47899; col G〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Giffard Le Quesne Martel」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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