CHAPTER 1 – THE EARLY HISTORY OF TANKS
British Mark IV tank of the First World War.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR: APPARITION AND FIRST STEPS.
What we now call a ‘Tank’ was mostly born out of the butchery of World War 1 trench warfare, when soldiers were faced with the murderous task of attacking through a no-man’s-land of open terrain swept by machine gun and artillery fire and with deep lines of barbed wire blocking the approaches to enemy trenches. Both the Allied armies and the German army repeatedly lost thousands and tens of thousands of soldiers in order to gain only insignificant amounts of ground. While searching for a way to diminish those painful losses, the British, inspired by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, set up in 1915 the ‘Landships Committee’, to explore the subject of cross-country armored vehicles. The name ‘tank’ was used by the Landships Committee to hide the real purpose of their work. The first iteration, ‘Little Willie’, appeared in 1915 but did not see combat. The first armed ‘landships’ to be successfully tested appeared in early 1916, armed with two naval 57mm guns and three machine guns. Nearly simultaneously and quite independently from the British efforts, the French also started developing their own models of tanks. Those British and French first tanks were crude affairs, lightly armored, very slow and unreliable and with very limited autonomy. Their main task was to help the infantry assault enemy trenches, not to fight other armored vehicles.
The first use of tanks in combat by the British was on 15 September of 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, when 49 tanks went on the attack. However, they were committed in small groups and not as a coherent, concentrated unit and they achieved little success, apart from terrorizing the German soldiers who first saw them. The British learned their lessons from that failure and struck in force at Cambrai on 20 November of 1917, when 476 British tanks attacked on a concentrated front in a surprise assault which achieved a spectacular success. However, that success in Cambrai also demonstrated the slowness and lack of range of the early British tanks. The British then introduced into service a lighter and faster tank, the Medium A, which was first used in combat in Amiens in August 1918 as part of a 600-strong tank force. In the meantime, the French Army produced over 3,000 of its own tanks, the great majority of which were Renault FT light tanks, designed and built to accompany and support assaulting infantrymen. It did well in that role but had no capability to engage other armored vehicles. While the first tanks were mostly immune to rifle and machine gun fire, their first serious enemy proved to be artillery guns, firing either in indirect or direct fire mode, a fact that the Germans were quick to seize on. A direct artillery shell impact on an early model of tank invariably resulted in the utter destruction of the vehicle. The slowness and lack of agility of those tanks only made them easier targets to artillery gunners, resulting in significant losses, with the notorious mechanical unreliability of the early tanks adding to the casualty count.
THE INTERWAR YEARS: INFANTRY TANK; CRUISER TANK; HEAVY TANK.
When World War One ended in 1918, the Allies found themselves with thousands of early tank models in their inventories. The United States and Italy had also built tanks copied from British and French designs. Military thinkers then started working on improving both the designs and the combat doctrines and uses of tanks. In Great Britain, the British tank doctrine evolved into classifying tanks in two main categories: the infantry tank, slow but well armored, meant to accompany assaulting infantrymen; and the cruiser tank, a faster vehicle meant to push into enemy lines and penetrate deeply. One such infantry tank developed during the interwar years was the French Renault R-35, which became the most numerous French tank type by 1940.
The concept of using tanks in massed, concentrated units rapidly spread, but the notion of dividing tank designs in ‘infantry tanks’ and in ‘cruiser tanks’ remained, especially in Great Britain. The British formed tank brigades, meant to closely cooperate with the infantry, and armored divisions designed to exploit in-depth penetrations of enemy lines. The French similarly adopted two types of tank formations: the ‘Divisions Légères Mécaniques{1}’, meant to rush through holes in enemy defenses; and the heavier, more powerful ‘Divisions Cuirassées’{2}, whose principal role was to assault enemy positions. On their part, the Soviets divided their tank forces into light tank battalions, maneuver brigades and mechanized brigades. In contrast, the German Army created its first Panzer divisions in the mid-1930s, but also adopted new doctrines meant to closely integrate the operations of all its arms, combining great firepower and high mobility. Its defined roles were rapid concentrations of fighting power, breakthroughs, deep penetrations on wide fronts and destruction of the enemy.
Before the First World War ended in 1918, work had started on the development of much heavier tanks than before, armed with 75mm guns and weighing twenty tons or more. In France, this eventually produced by 1937 the 27-ton CHAR B.1, designated as a ‘Char de Bataille’{3}. On their part, the British produced the INDEPENDENT heavy tank, an aberration with no less than five separate turrets, with the Soviets following suit with their own T-35 heavy tank.
WORLD WAR 2: EVOLUTION FROM COMBAT EXPERIENCE.
By the time World War 2 started in 1939, Great Britain operated two main types of tanks: the MATILDA II infantry tank and the CRUSADER cruiser tank. The Germans, on their part, operated a mix of light and medium tanks at first, then concentrated on producing medium and heavy tanks of increasingly more powerful and better armored designs. In 1939, the mainstays of the German Panzer divisions were the PANZER II light tank, armed with a 20mm cannon, the PANZER III medium tank, armed with a short 50mm gun, and the PANZER IV, armed with a short 75mm gun.
On the French side, the war was started with a mix of light, medium and heavy tanks: the Renault R-35 light tank; the Somua S-35 medium tank and the CHAR B1-bis heavy tank. Of them, the CHAR B1-bis proved the most troublesome to the Germans, while the S-35 also gave a good account of itself. Unfortunately, the French doctrine concerning the use of tanks greatly hindered their efficiency in combat by diluting them into small groups while facing the concentrated punch of the German Panzer divisions.
The Soviets, who were attacked by the Germans in 1941, also started the war with a mix of light, medium and heavy tanks, the most famous of which was the T-34 medium tank, which would prove to be a very nasty surprise to the Germans, as its design philosophy was quite close to that of the modern main battle tank, with a good balance of firepower, mobility and protection. It also was one of the first tanks to fully use the concept of sloped armor in order to augment the protection against armor-piercing projectiles. Its only main drawbacks were its 2-man turret, which overloaded its crew and particularly its commander, and its total lack of crew comfort features. In turn the apparition of the T-34 pushed the Germans into hastily designing and producing a counter, the PANZER V PANTHER, which would itself become famous (or infamous, depending on whose side of it you ended up). At about the same time as the PANTHER entered service at the end of 1942, the German Army fielded a new heavy tank, the PANZER VI TIGER, another tank that would make a lot of ink (and blood) flow. At the same time, the Germans rearmed their older medium tanks with longer, higher velocity guns, so they could pierce the armor of the Soviet medium T-34 and heavy KV-1 tanks.
In comparison, the United States started the war behind the other nations, fielding at first a number of light and medium tanks of dubious designs, before finally settling on the M4 SHERMAN as its main tank type. It had a short 75mm gun, inadequate protection and very high silhouette, the latest a distinct tactical disadvantage in combat. Despite its shortcomings, the SHERMAN was massively produced during the whole war, in order to capitalize on its reasonable weight, which facilitated its transport overseas, and on the huge industrial capacity of the United States for mass production. While the SHERMAN too often ended with the short end of the stick when facing the PANTHER or the TIGER, it eventually ended up winning through sheer weight of numbers.
By the end of World War 2 in 1945, all the combatants had produced or had designed medium and heavy tanks which incorporated the numerous lessons of the war about armored warfare and tank design and doctrinal use. However, due to the huge number of older models produced during the war and to the high costs of the conflict, which produced large war debts, the widespread fielding of the newer models after 1945 proved to be slow, although much work went into the study and design of more advanced tanks which would conform to what we would now call main battle tanks.