When a WWI Tank Crew Fought for 3 Days Surrounded

When a WWI Tank Crew Fought for 3 Days Surrounded

This video tells the full story of “Frey Bentos,” the British Mark V tank that got stuck in no man’s land in August 1917 and turned into a stranded strongpoint for nearly three days. It begins with why tanks were built in the first place, walking through the stalemate on the Western Front, failed attempts to break trenches with artillery and infantry alone, and the improvised birth of the first British heavy tanks under the Landships Committee. You will see how early Mark I and Mark V machines actually worked, what it was like inside them with heat, fumes, noise, poor visibility, and mechanical strain, and why crews had to fight not just the enemy, but the vehicle itself.

From there, the video follows Frey Bentos into the mud of Passchendaele. It covers how the tank slid into an unseen shell hole under fire, how the first attempts to free it cost one crewman his life, and how the remaining men were forced to hold out alone between the lines with one track buried, one gun usable, and German infantry trying to get close with small arms and grenades. It explains how they fought off repeated approaches, dealt with friendly fire from their own side, and endured wounds, exhaustion, hunger, and “tank sickness” in a tilted steel box while the front moved around them. Finally, it shows their night escape after almost 72 hours, the decorations that followed, and the fate of the crewman who never made it back, placing the Frey Bentos episode in the wider story of early tank warfare and the human cost of those first armoured experiments.

Chapters:

00:00 – Stuck in no man’s land
01:13 – Why tanks were born
05:35 – Inside a Mark V tank
11:16 – Frey Bentos hits the crater
16:48 – Three days trapped, one way out