the introduction of tanks on the Frontline battlefields during the first world war completely revolutionized ground Warfare they provided mobility and speed allowing for quick advancements and flanking maneuvers all of which was accompanied by large caliber Firepower and thick armor essentially a close- range and highly precise artillery weapon which could easily decimate enemy machine gun nests and other fortifications besides its combat efficiency as a weapon there was also the sheer psychological impact these imposing mechanized beasts had on the enemy soldiers who found themselves fleeing their positions abandoning everything that would slow them down in the desperate
hope of escaping with their lives while the sight of one of these metal monsters bearing down on you would terrify anyone out of their wits there is curiously a lesser known possibly even more unnerving aspect of tank encounters that have been reported by many soldiers as well as even civilians exploring battlefields long after the wars have ended while the actual detailed anecdotal accounts are admittedly hard to come by it otherwise seems that reports of spectral sightings or paranormal experiences relating to tanks and military vehicles are not that uncommon in the realm of shall we say
military folklore this is the smoke pit and these are true stories of encounters that soldiers Marines and others have had with for want of a better term ghost [Music] tanks speaking about tanks I'd like to thank War Thunder for sponsoring this episode during my time in the Marines you know I've ridden in all sorts of Transport Aircraft and military vehicles but never a tank since I'll probably never get the opportunity to ride in one and my days of getting to blow things up are sadly over gaming is certainly one way to still escape from my
rather lackluster reality if you aren't already aware War Thunder is a top tier military action free-to-play multiplayer game with land sea and air vehicles which much like the reports of ghost tanks in this episode span an entire Century of warfare the game is available on PC PlayStation and Xbox War Thunder allows you to play the way you want break through the front line in a tank cover ground vehicles from a helicopter or participate in fighter battles among the clouds different types of equipment fight together on the same map in War Thunder all advanced military Technologies
are available guided missiles active Protection Systems smoke screens night vision devices and more as well as reconnaissance and strike drones and even a nuclear strike that can flatten the entire map with the recently released massive update air superiority Advanced military equipment has been added to the game the famous t90m the Sue 27 the new modification of ABR Tusk 2 the legendary fighter grippin and the F-15 Eagle explosion and fire effects have been completely reworked the new volcano Valley map for air battles inspired by Kamchatka allows you to test the latest aircraft in battles among volcanoes
download War Thunder for free by using the link in the description all new players and those who haven't played War Thunder for half a year or more will receive some special bonuses rentals for the P40 echo1 aircraft and M4 tank for a week along with free unique skins for for them a special decorator Eagle of Valor 100,000 silver Lions three premium vehicles for free a week of premium account and even more gifts hurry up the American vehicle bonus season will end soon have you ever wondered why they call them tanks the Germans call them panzers
which translates to the word armor the French called them sha de which at least suggests the term assault vehicle but the English term tank is interestingly a name that just stuck as it was originally a name given to these vehicles during World War I by the British military to conceal their true nature as terrifying armored assault vehicles the British referred to them as tanks in official documents hoping to create the misleading impression that they were developing Mobile water storage units units or containers in case these classified reports were intercepted by the enemy from there the
name tank just stuck and has been widely used until today to describe tracked armored vehicles however as far as tanks that can appear and disappear or move silently or otherwise can be heard but not seen the term ghost tank is not necessarily written in stone Phantom tanks might might be another good title as I mentioned detailed anecdotal accounts of ghost tanks from eyewitnesses are hard to come by human Ghost Encounters by soldiers sure no problem but when you try to research something like ghost tanks what usually comes up our historical accounts of the American Ghost
Army of World War II this was a top secret operation where during the summer of 1944 American military units fighting in Europe began using inflatable tanks and other vehicles combined with falsified radio reports and loudspeakers that blasted tank sounds and other troop noises all in a deceptive effort to confuse Nazi aerial reconnaissance into believing they had massive forces on the ground well that operation worked the Nazis were fooled and it was a massive success but of course those inflatable tanks weren't a literal spectral ghost Army the point being the effort of than trying to find
personal accounts of actual ghost tank encounters which are more than likely buried in books Diaries or other Memoirs this gets muddled up by all the documented accounts of the inflatable tank stories fortunately though the reason that there is an episode like this is that I have found a few eyewitness accounts of ghost tanks ghost tanks in the UK this first account is more of a localized legend that has persisted in its telling that of a ghost tank that has been cited multiple times along the road from nebor house Lodge to codot in Hertfordshire England the
road is reportedly haunted by a second world war tank motorist traveling on the road have reported seeing a spectral tank with a helmeted soldier motioning frantically to them from the open hatch before the tank then suddenly vanishes from sight her fure was extensively bombed not only during the blitz campaign but during the entire period of the war from 1940 to 1945 perhaps this young tanker met an untimely end in that very way while frantically attempting to warn motorists of an incoming German air raid and then there's this next story from the aisle of Portland 130
Mi to the Southwest while walking his dog one quiet morning in May of 1976 a Mr Murphy stated that he suddenly found himself surrounded by tanks jeeps and American soldiers walking around then as suddenly as they' appeared the scene vanished leaving both Murphy and his dog terrified and very confused he later speculated that he must have fleetingly witnessed soldiers making final preparations for D-Day Landings history would again indicate that sure enough the small tide Island was used as a staging area for American troops prior to D-Day these two uk-based apparitions appeared to resemble other incidents
in the UK where people have reported seeing and hearing things from previous points in history something that has been called a time slip or a crossing of Dimensions the Nazi ghost tank of Brians Russia Alex Alex [Music] y this next account was translated from an article on a Russian news website under the subheading of Science and Mysteries the author Dimitri sudakov writes a few years ago the so-called black archaeologists were extremely active these were people conducting independent excavations at the locations of World War II battles looking for precious War trophies sometimes during their searches they
would report experiencing very strange phenomena alexe a black archaeologist who used to excavate in the woods near Brians where the Russian front was located in 1942 to 1943 told an interesting story he writes we excavated the bodies of six Russian and 11 German soldiers four of which were Vermont soldiers in a swamp trench shelter we cut the logs and discovered decomposed German boots with bones sticking out then we began a more careful excavation and found pelvic bones a spine and ribs little by little we dug out remnants of four people it was getting dark we
left the skeleton at the trench and camped out on a meadow about 200 yard away at night something happened we were woken up by Valera a guy on duty he told us that something weird was going on we got up and started listening carefully we could hear German speech songs laughter and the distinct clatter of tracks it was very scary in the morning we returned to the trench it looked the same as when we left it but when we walked a little further we saw tank ditches and most amazingly fresh tank tracks the black ghost
of Libya this next story authored by James Haye comes from another news article this one found on the McCay Jesuits online publication called The Shield his story is one good example of how despite these ghost tank Stories being vaguely known to exist they can be very difficult to source as he says this story was told to him by his grandfather who heard it from his father an Australian soldier who fought in North Africa during World War II and to whom this bizarre story was originally conveyed by a German P that they had captured James writes
there are many Legends myths and stories surrounding World War II some of these are missing aircraft or ships but none of them top the relatively unknown one of the ghost tank a bit of backstory on the conflict during the North African campaign in Libya the UK could not allow an Italian victory in North Africa as that would cut the UK off from its Asian and oceanian colonies most notably the British Raj Australia and New Zealand Commonwealth forces shorthand for forces of the British Empire held the Border up until mid 1940 this changed however when the
German reinforcements in the form of infantry and Panzer forces under the command of Iran raml arrived the commonwealths were pushed back but formed a new defensive line around the city of toook this was then broken on April 10th 1941 when the Germans surrounded the city and besieged it this caused complete chaos among all the Commonwealth forces and it is from this battle where the legend of the ghost tank begins this story was told to me by my grandfather he was told the story by my great-grandfather who said it was later told to him by a
p the P was captured during a Counterattack to try and relieve The Siege at toook my great-grandfather was there as he was in a small contingent of men from the Australian forces that was not in The Siege proper the legend goes that sometime around January there was a small German Garrison stationed on the defensive line to the east of the Egyptian desert all of a sudden they hear the rumbling of tank engines everyone jumps to their feet they get to the pack at gun and grab an anti-tank rifle They seized in a previous battle they
radio to the mortar team and fire a star shell that illuminates the enemy they begin to aim and see all but one tank moving towards them slowly it is different though it's painted black they recognize it as a Matilda and open fire both weapons seemingly go right through it they fire again and again but the shells just go right through this mysterious tank they radio to call an artillery and it lands all around this tank but again nothing happens despite being shot at from all directions it has not fired a single shot it just keeps
moving forward the Fight Continues and the Germans radio in for the Quick Response Unit Two squads of Panzer grenadiers arrive and move in they attempt to lay satchel charges on the tank but the charges fall right through then all of a sudden they hear a huge bang the tank begins firing all of its guns comprising the two machine guns and the main gun it fires at a rapid rate while still moving firing its main gun multiple times per second and begins charging the Garrison it's about to run through the defenses and then all of a
sudden One Last Shot goes through it and all the sound stops The Garrison fires another star shell to find that it has disappeared they gave it the name the black ghost James would go on to offer his own thoughts about the story he stated this story is rather unknown partially because of the sheer amount of History made in the North African campaign it was a rare story to begin with and is never told today this is likely just a flash of imagination of some soldiers perhaps German or perhaps Commonwealth probably made up but it is
still fascinating despite the amount of far-fetched as to this ghost story I am going to say what it might have been if it is somewhat true the tank could have been an experimental version of the black prince tank this tank was a Matilda that was unmanned and instead piloted by a radio some things are still classified from this campaign so it's possible that this was the tank in question it may have been equipped with an auto Cannon which could explain the Fast Fire rate even granting all these things it is unlikely it could have disappeared
or vanished out of sight before the next star shell fired no one knows where exactly this was or if it even happened as James said whether fact or fiction this story is still fascinating if not only because it reveals that some among the Waring nations of the 1930s and 40s were indeed experimenting with unmanned radio controlled tanks reports from 1941 indicate that the Red Army was experimenting with them calling them telet tanks and even attempting to onboard television transmitters which would give them remote viewing access while controlling the vehicles if not for assaulting pill boxes
and machine gun nests then the suggestion was to use these experimental Vehicles as sacrificial Scouts to farad out minefields and anti-tank weapons however it's believed to be highly unlikely that these tanks ever saw actual combat so if not an experimental tank as James suggested the tail of the black ghost lives on ghost tanks on Marine Corps base camp leun [Music] this final and much more recent story takes us back across the globe to the United States As Told by a young Marine stationed on the East Coast it is one among many strange and unexplained stories
featured in the tales from the grid Square books which I'll link here and in the description section he writes so I want to start this off by saying this was my second or third month in the Jacksonville North Carolina area I had just been stationed on Marine Corps Air Station New River but I wanted to explore Lun because I knew I would have to go there from time to time to perform my duties and such so one night around midnight I get in my car and head over to Lun and drive around exploring and learning
my way around the base at around 0300 I decided to head back to my barracks and I plug it into my GPS long story short I get lost and I end up on a long road down towards one of the bases decommissioned Gates way back near Hubert if you spent any time in the enow area on leun you know that the wee hours of the morning can get pretty foggy and it creates an overall uneasy feeling I realize my mistake I turn around and I start heading back the way I came as I'm driving back
my car starts to suddenly rattle and Shake I guess that one of the artillery battalions was running a night op close by or something wild I keep going down this road and it's lined by street lights maybe 100 ft or more spaced apart Illuminating the street through the fog just enough all of a sudden it felt like I was on a drawbridge and I you not three tanks vintage looking maybe Vietnam era come rolling from the tree line on the right about 300 ft away from me they travel across the road and into the tree
line on the other side they had men Manning the turrets and everything I could only make out the men from the shoulders up but they weren't wearing our modern Kevlar helmets instead it looked like they had the old GI helmets with no fabric covers on them from from the way the street lights were reflecting off of the tops after they passed I immediately thought I might have accidentally ventured into a restricted part of the base like a tank range or something but when I finally pulled up to the part of the road where they had
crossed there were no signs of them there's no M track marks on the road and both of the tree lines were super dense you couldn't even fit a squat of guys through there without at least hacking a few saplings down I don't know what I saw but those tanks and soldiers looked like they were straight out of [Music] Vietnam I know Camp leun has some bad stuff in the water but this story is wild and this one is also very reminiscent of the UK tank stories like this Marine had also momentarily slipped Through Time back
to a point when the area he was driving through was a training ground for guys about to be shipped out to Vietnam maybe when there was no trees in that area or you know maybe that portion where the tanks were used to be a trail of some kind The Unexplained shuttering of his car and the bizarre sensation of driving over a bridge that he described without offering any theories as to why that happened they do seem to indicate some weird change in the environment at least from his perspective I think I know what he means
the discernable difference between driving on a road to suddenly driving on a bridge like the ground suddenly just went Hollow beneath the car like you can feel that with regard to his GPS leading him down the wrong road I did want to confirm that this has happened to me several times Google I don't think isn't allowed to drive on the military faes to map the roads so there's no Google street imagery for instance so my guess is that they mapped everything with the satellite imagery and a few years back on Cent Pendleton Google Maps once
took me down a dirt road I had to go from the pgus area of the base uh over to somewhere near the flight line there's a road that takes you over there but I had never been to that part of the base and so Google Maps takes me down this dirt road which then suddenly became a very steep tank trail that I could not turn around on and it was I was going downhill and it was so steep I knew at that point that if I break too hard I was going to slide right off
this embankment and then it would just roll multiple times down to the bottom of the hill and that would probably be the end of me and if it had been who knows maybe Marines training on Pendleton at night would be saying they swore they heard a man screaming and then saw a white Honda Civic driving through the desert before suddenly disappearing but anyway as for these ghost tank stories from a rational perspective even from someone who had at least acknowledged the existence of ghosts or Spirits the idea of an entire mechanized vehicle becoming a ghost
that does seem arguably far-fetched like something that manifests itself not in the actual world but only in the mind of an exhausted and battle scarred individual or perhaps an entire group of men experiencing a shared psychosis I would still say either way whether a literal Phantom tank or a hallucination it doesn't really make their experience any less bizarre or terrifying for them does it hey guys hope you enjoyed this one as far as anything tank related and my own personal experience goes I do have this kind of funny video of Jimmy who I've talked about
in previous videos riding on a tank he was having some fun for me personally I've never been in a tank but my grandfather has and that's what anything tank related brings to my mind it wasn't until after I had enlisted in the Marine Corps and I was already maybe a Corporal at this point but I called my grandfather to just catch up with him and that was the first time in my entire life that he ever talked about his military experience and I don't know if I even knew he was in the Marines before that
he kept very quiet about it and come to find out that Not only was he in the Marine Corps and he fought in Korea he fought in one of the most iconic and highly revered battles that the Marine Corps teaches you about and that was the Battle of the chosen Reservoir and chesty puller and other guys that are kind of iconic to Marine Corps history have some sort of connection with that same battle and with kind of a sad heart I mean he told me how awful it was you know he said it was so
cold that the oil in their rifles was freezing causing their weapons to jam he said that some of the guys that had limbs taken off or suffered gun gunshot wounds they actually didn't die because it was so cold the blood clotted it froze immediately and so they didn't bleed out he otherwise just said that Unfortunately they did have to kill a lot of guys mostly Chinese soldiers I think it was I think he said that they were coming over the ridge lines like water but he actually served in a tank not because he was a
tanker he was a radio guy which I also thought was kind of coincidental because I ended up being a radio guy you know I was radio Recon but he told me that at some point during the war when they were going up into the mountains he needed to find a way to mount all of the command's radio equipment and keep it running in the freezing weather while they were moving so he had this idea to gut out the inside of one of these it was a Sherman tank and then install all the radio equipment run
all the antennas and wires out to the outside and then they had this mobile armored radio vehicle I did a little bit of researching to see if I could find any pictures I think this might actually be a picture of my grandfather's tank because this was the first Marine Division on their way to the chosen Reservoir and in my research I actually found that this tank is listed as one of the tanks that's considered a part of military history as my grandfather originally told me they called it the porcupine because of all the antennas that
were sticking out of it now when I read about the Tank on line there's no one attributed to being the original creator of the tank it just says that very few of these tanks were actually made and they were very impromptu so I do think that my grandfather had the original idea at least that's how he shared the story with me and I would give him credit for it because after he got out of the military he actually patented multiple different radio frequency devices antenna technology some of which is actually still used in some cell
phones today probably was adapted since then cuz this was several decades ago U but he was a very smart man uh he suffered a stroke a few years ago when we lost him but yeah he was I loved my grandpa very much and his story after he told it to me has just always been something that really stuck with me and I do miss being able to to talk to him about his experiences but with that being said thank you all for watching thank you for subscribing a sincere thank you to both my patreon and
YouTube channel members may God be with all of you no matter what you are dealing with and I will see you in the next episode
