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The Rolls-Royce armoured car was a British armoured car developed in 1914 and used in World War I and in the early part of World War II. ==Production history== The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) raised the first British armoured car squadron during the First World War.〔''First World War'' - Willmott, H.P., Dorling Kindersley, 2003, Page 59〕 In September 1914 all available Rolls Royce ''Silver Ghost'' chassis were requisitioned to form the basis for the new armoured car. The following month a special committee of the Admiralty Air Department, among whom was Flight Commander T.G. Hetherington, designed the superstructure which consisted of armoured bodywork and a single fully rotating turret holding a regular water cooled Vickers machine gun. The first three vehicles were delivered on 3 December 1914, although by then the mobile period on the Western Front, where the primitive predecessors of the Rolls-Royce cars had served, had already come to an end.〔 Later in the war they served on several fronts of the Middle Eastern theatre.〔Rolls S.C. (1937). ''Steel Chariots in the Desert''. Leonaur Books.〕 Chassis production was suspended in 1917 to enable Rolls-Royce to concentrate on aero engines. The vehicle was modernized in 1920 and in 1924, resulting in the Rolls-Royce 1920 Pattern and Rolls-Royce 1924 Pattern. In 1940, 34 vehicles which served in Egypt with the 11th Hussars regiment had the "old" turret replaced with an open-topped unit carrying a Boys anti-tank rifle, .303-inch Bren machine gun and smoke-grenade launchers. Some vehicles in Egypt and Iraq received new chassis from a Fordson truck and became known as Fordson Armoured Cars. Pictures () show them as equipped with what appear to be turrets fitted with a Boys ATR, a machine gun and twin light machine guns for anti-aircraft defence. 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「Rolls-Royce Armoured Car」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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