Liliputin- 5147

Mr. President, I'm not in the tank for General Patton, I swear to God ... "
General Eisenhower

Liliputins. What, the heck, is this?
http://stihi.ru/2021/11/24/7101

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in the tank
Also found in: Dictionary, Financial.
in the tank
1. Plummeting, as of prices.
Housing prices around here are in the tank right now, so I doubt we'll get the price that we want if we sell.
2. Available for use.
I always keep an extra box of cereal in the tank for the kids.
If you don't eat well before the game, you won't have enough energy in the tank to play well.
3. Very much in favor of someone or something.
I'm not in the tank for anyone, I swear—I'm completely neutral!

See also: tank
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
in the ;tank (American English, informal, business) (about the price of shares, bonds, etc.) falling quickly: Technology stocks are doing well, but everything else is in the tank.
See also: tank
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary © Farlex 2017
in the tank
1. In reserve: a runner who didn't have enough in the tank to hold the lead.
2. In a state of decline or failure: Stocks have been in the tank for months.
3. Enthusiastically partial; strongly favoring: a reporter accused of being in the tank for a candidate.
See also: tank
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.**


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EXPLAINER
Explainer Goes in the Tank
An unbiased etymology.
BY JULIET LAPIDOS
OCT 24, 2008

COMMENT
A new study on media coverage of the presidential race suggests “that the press is in the tank for Barack Obama,” the Boston Globe reported yesterday. Is a “top medical journal in the tank for Obama?” reads a recent Portfolio headline. John McCain, according to a story in Thursday’s Guardian, “didn’t even give the press a chance, trashing it on the assumption that it would be in the tank for Obama.” How did in the tank come to mean supportive (when you really ought to be impartial)?

Aquatics by way of pugilism. In the 19th century, Americans called swimming pools “tanks” and thus “go into the tank” was synonymous with “to dive.” As far back as the 1920s, the phrase go into the tank became associated with intentionally losing a boxing match by diving onto the canvas and pretending you’ve been knocked out—a sense perfectly illustrated by this sentence from a 1928 New York Times article: “Pansy came out of jail and his manager, thinking him ‘all washed up,’ signed him up to ‘take a dive,’ or, more technically, ‘to go into the tank’ for a bird named Sailor Gray.” (For more on the pugilistic origins of into the tank, see William Safire’s April column on the subject.)

and how you define this project of taking seriously the intentions and the actual language


By the mid-20th century, go into the tank, in the sense of rolling over for someone in a rigged contest, extended into political usage. Thus in 1960, syndicated columnist Bob Ruark set up a boxing metaphor to describe the run-up to that year’s presidential conventions: “I am having a tiny touch of difficulty with the American news lately, having gotten it slightly mixed up with the prize-fighting business. But if I read it right, the presidential nomination conventions have been bagged in advance … with all the other competitors rigged to go into the tank for Jolting Jack Kennedy and Richard the Ripper Nixon.”

While taking a dive still refers to self-sabotage, the meaning of go into the tank gradually shifted toward working on someone’s behalf, often with the hint of backroom deals or at least inappropriate devotion. As such, people weren’t as likely to go into the tank as they were to be found there after the fact; i.e., they’d simply be in the tank. In a 1987 Boston Globe article by David Nyhan on the Robert Bork nomination process, we get: “Will he be in the tank for Reagan? Ted Kennedy says yes, Bork says no. I’m afraid Bork hasn’t convinced me.” And, also from the Globe’s David Nyhan, a 1983 example of the phrase applied to a journalist: “It turns out [George] Will coached Reagan in debate, privately advised him on issues, regularly praised his presidency in print and on TV, and only rarely uttered the bare minimum of criticism that decency and appearance require. As a result of the recent commotion, Will bears the Scarlet Letter of having been in the tank for Reagan.”

Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Grant Barrett of the American Dialect Society and Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus.

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Tank
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Tank (disambiguation).

A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle intended as a primary offensive weapon in front-line ground combat. Tank designs are a balance of heavy firepower, strong armour, and battlefield mobility provided by tracks and a powerful engine; their main armament is often mounted within a turret. They are a mainstay of modern 20th and 21st century ground forces and a key part of combined arms combat.

Modern tanks are versatile mobile land weapons platforms whose main armament is a large-caliber tank gun mounted in a rotating gun turret, supplemented by machine guns or other ranged weapons such as anti-tank guided missiles or rocket launchers. They have heavy vehicle armor which provides protection for the crew, the vehicle's munition storage, fuel tank and propulsion systems. The use of tracks rather than wheels provides improved operational mobility which allows the tank to overcome rugged terrain and adverse conditions such as mud and ice/snow better than wheeled vehicles, and thus be more flexibly positioned at advantageous locations on the battlefield. These features enable the tank to perform in a variety of intense combat situations, simultaneously both offensively (with direct fire from their powerful main gun) and defensively (as fire support and defilade for friendly troops due to the near invulnerability to common infantry small arms and good resistance against heavier weapons, although anti-tank weapons used in 2022, some of them man-portable, have demonstrated the ability to destroy older generations of tanks with single shots[1]),[disputed – discuss] all while maintaining the mobility needed to exploit changing tactical situations.[2] Fully integrating tanks into modern military forces spawned a new era of combat, armored warfare.

Until the invention of the main battle tank, tanks were typically categorized either by weight class (light, medium, heavy or superheavy tanks) or doctrinal purpose (breakthrough-, cavalry-, infantry-, cruiser-, or reconnaissance tanks). Some are larger and more thickly armored and with large guns, while others are smaller, lightly armored, and equipped with a smaller caliber and lighter gun. These smaller tanks move over terrain with speed and agility and can perform a reconnaissance role in addition to engaging hostile targets. The smaller, faster tank would not normally engage in battle with a larger, heavily armored tank, except during a surprise flanking maneuver.

Etymology
The word tank was first applied in a military context to British "landships" in 1915 to keep their nature secret before they entered service.

Origins
On 24 December 1915, a meeting took place of the Inter-Departmental Conference (including representatives of the Director of Naval Construction's Committee, the Admiralty, the Ministry of Munitions, and the War Office). Its purpose was to discuss the progress of the plans for what were described as "Caterpillar Machine Gun Destroyers or Land Cruisers." In his autobiography, Albert Gerald Stern (Secretary to the Landship Committee, later head of the Mechanical Warfare Supply Department) says that at that meeting:

Mr. (Thomas J.) Macnamara (M.P., and Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty) then suggested, for secrecy's sake, to change the title of the Landship Committee. Mr. d'Eyncourt agreed that it was very desirable to retain secrecy by all means, and proposed to refer to the vessel as a "Water Carrier". In Government offices, committees and departments are always known by their initials. For this reason I, as Secretary, considered the proposed title totally unsuitable.[a] In our search for a synonymous term, we changed the word "Water Carrier" to "Tank," and became the "Tank Supply" or "T.S." Committee. That is how these weapons came to be called Tanks.

He incorrectly added, "and the name has now been adopted by all countries in the world."

Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Swinton, who was secretary to the meeting, says that he was instructed to find a non-committal word when writing his report of the proceedings. In the evening he discussed it with a fellow officer, Lt-Col Walter Dally Jones, and they chose the word "tank". "That night, in the draft report of the conference, the word 'tank' was employed in its new sense for the first time."[6] Swinton's Notes on the Employment of Tanks, in which he uses the word throughout, was published in January 1916.

In July 1918, Popular Science Monthly reported:

Because a fellow of the Royal Historical Society* has unintentionally misled the British public as to the origin of the famous "tanks", Sir William Tritton, who designed and built them, has published the real story of their name ... Since it was obviously inadvisable to herald "Little Willie's" reason for existence to the world he was known as the "Instructional Demonstration Unit." "Little Willie's" hull was called in the shop orders a "water carrier for Mesopotamia"; no one knew that the hull was intended to be mounted on a truck. Naturally, the water carrier began to be called a "tank". So the name came to be used by managers and foremen of the shop, until now it has a place in the army vocabulary and will probably be so known in history for all time.

(*F.J. Gardiner, F.R.Hist.S.)


D'Eyncourt's account differs from Swinton's and Tritton's:

... when the future arrangements were under discussion for transporting the first landships to France a question arose as to how, from a security point of view, the consignment should be labelled. To justify their size we decided to call them 'water-carriers for Russia' —the idea being that they should be taken for some new method of taking water to forward troops in the battle areas. Lt.-Col. Swinton ... raised a humorous objection to this, remarking that the War Office pundits would probably contract the description to 'W.C.'s for Russia', and that we had better forestall this by merely labelling the packages 'Tanks'. So tanks they became, and tanks they have remained."[8]

This appears to be an imperfect recollection. He says that the name problem arose "when we shipped the first two vehicles to France the following year" (August 1916), but by that time the name "tank" had been in use for eight months. The tanks were labelled "With Care to Petrograd," but the belief was encouraged that they were a type of snowplough.

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General Eisenhower

Supreme Allied commander and Operation

In December 1943, President Roosevelt decided that Eisenhower – not Marshall – would be Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. The following month, he resumed command of ETOUSA and the following month was officially designated as the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), serving in a dual role until the end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945. He was charged in these positions with planning and carrying out the Allied assault on the coast of Normandy in June 1944 under the code name Operation Overlord, the liberation of Western Europe and the invasion of Germany. Eisenhower, as well as the officers and troops under him, had learned valuable lessons in their previous operations, and their skills had all strengthened in preparation for the next most difficult campaign against the Germans—a beach landing assault. His first struggles, however, were with Allied leaders and officers on matters vital to the success of the Normandy invasion; he argued with Roosevelt over an essential agreement with De Gaulle to use French resistance forces in covert operations against the Germans in advance of Operation Overlord. Admiral Ernest J. King fought with Eisenhower over King's refusal to provide additional landing craft from the Pacific. Eisenhower also insisted that the British give him exclusive command over all strategic air forces to facilitate Overlord, to the point of threatening to resign unless Churchill relented, which he did. Eisenhower then designed a bombing plan in France in advance of Overlord and argued with Churchill over the latter's concern with civilian casualties; de Gaulle interjected that the casualties were justified, and Eisenhower prevailed. He also had to skillfully manage to retain the services of the often unruly George S. Patton, by severely reprimanding him when Patton earlier had slapped a subordinate, and then when Patton gave a speech in which he made improper comments about postwar policy.

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General Patton

George Smith Patton Jr. (November 11, 1885 – December 21, 1945) was a general in the United States Army who commanded the Seventh Army in the Mediterranean Theater of World War II, and the Third Army in France and Germany after the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Born in 1885, Patton attended the Virginia Military Institute and the United States Military Academy at West Point. He studied fencing and designed the M1913 Cavalry Saber, more commonly known as the "Patton Saber". He competed in the modern pentathlon in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. Patton entered combat during the Pancho Villa Expedition of 1916, the United States' first military action using motor vehicles. He fought in World War I as part of the new United States Tank Corps of the American Expeditionary Forces: he commanded the U.S. tank school in France, then led tanks into combat and was wounded near the end of the war. In the interwar period, Patton became a central figure in the development of the army's armored warfare doctrine, serving in numerous staff positions throughout the country. At the United States' entry into World War II, he commanded the 2nd Armored Division. Patton led U.S. troops into the Mediterranean theater with an invasion of Casablanca during Operation Torch in 1942, and soon established himself as an effective commander by rapidly rehabilitating the demoralized II Corps. He commanded the U.S. Seventh Army during the Allied invasion of Sicily, where he was the first Allied commander to reach Messina. There he was embroiled in controversy after he slapped two shell-shocked soldiers, and was temporarily removed from battlefield command. He was assigned a key role in Operation Fortitude, the Allies' military deception campaign for Operation Overlord. At the start of the Western Allied invasion of France, Patton was given command of the Third Army, which conducted a highly successful rapid armored drive across France. Under his decisive leadership, the Third Army took the lead in relieving beleaguered American troops at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, after which his forces drove deep into Nazi Germany by the end of the war. During the Allied occupation of Germany, Patton was named military governor of Bavaria, but was relieved for making aggressive statements towards the Soviet Union and trivializing denazification. He commanded the United States Fifteenth Army for slightly more than two months. Severely injured in an auto accident, he died in Germany twelve days later, on December 21, 1945. Patton's colorful image, hard-driving personality, and success as a commander were at times overshadowed by his controversial public statements. His philosophy of leading from the front, and his ability to inspire troops with attention-getting, vulgarity-laden speeches, such as his famous address to the Third Army, was received favorably by his troops, but much less so by a sharply divided Allied high command. His sending the doomed Task Force Baum to liberate his son-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John K. Waters, from a prisoner-of-war camp further damaged his standing with his superiors. His emphasis on rapid and aggressive offensive action proved effective, and he was regarded highly by his opponents in the German High Command. An award-winning biographical film released in 1970, Patton, helped popularize his image.