CHAPTER 2 – THE EMERGENCE OF THE MAIN BATTLE TANK
A British CENTURION tank during a field exercise in the 1950s.
WHAT MAKES A MAIN BATTLE TANK?
The official military definition of a main battle tank, or MBT in short, is ‘a mobile, protected gun system’ possessing a mix of firepower, mobility and protection. The ratio of each of those three elements will vary quite a lot between the various types of modern tanks which entered service after the end of World War 2, with that ratio greatly influenced by the national tank philosophy and thinking about tank design and doctrinal use particular to each country concerned. Ideally, a good MBT would possess all three qualities in a judiciously balanced way. However, what makes a good tank in one country will not always be similar to what is believed or accepted in another country.
FIREPOWER
War is like Christmas: it is better to give than to receive. (CHALLENGER 2)
MOBILITY
How do I get out of here? HELP! (T-72)
PROTECTION
(Or the constant requests for more of it!)
Things are getting a bit hot around here! (M1 ABRAMS in Iraq)
POST – WORLD WAR 2: FIRST TANK COMBAT EXPERIENCES
It didn’t take long after the end of WW2 before more wars gave the opportunity to combatants to test their new tanks and doctrines in combat. First came Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, pitting the newly created Jewish state of Israel against its Arab neighbors. However, that war, following so close after WW2, involved mostly old, second-hand weapons and vehicles. So, few valuable lessons were taught by it, apart from showing again the importance of resolve and belief in a cause. Next was the Korean War of 1950, a much more vast and complex affair pitting American and British equipment against Soviet equipment. As armored warfare was concerned, the results of tank duels during that war showed again that competent handling and good tactics often gave the edge over a resolute and numerically superior but poorly trained enemy tanker force. The American M-26 and M-47 tanks proved more than a match for the T-34/85s of the North Korean Army and so was the case for the British CENTURION tanks which fought in Korea. Another lesson relearned then was that tanks fighting without infantry support were vulnerable to infantry swarm tactics, especially at night. In truth, a seasoned infantryman will tell you that a tank with hatches closed may be scary, but that it is also a big but myopic beast when dealing with foot soldiers surrounding it.
The next series of wars, around the Middle East and in Indochina, while bloody and intense, did little to teach new lessons about armored warfare, until the Yom Kippur War of 1973 that is. That war, fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states during nineteen days in October of 1973, featured two important events which heavily influenced the future of armored warfare. The first one was the successful mass use for the first time of anti-tank guided missiles by the Egyptian Army against Israeli tanks. The second was the intense and bloody fighting opposing hundreds of Israeli and Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights and opposing Israeli and Egyptian tanks in the Sinai Peninsula. While the tank battles on the Golan and in the Sinai, which pitted Israeli CENTURION and SUPER-SHERMAN tanks against Syrian and Egyptian Soviet-made T-54/55 and T-62 tanks, were epic, the true shocker for the tanker world was how Egyptian infantrymen equipped with portable AT-3 SAGGER anti-tank guided missiles and RPG-7 anti-tank rocket launchers managed to stop cold the Israeli tank counter-attacks meant to repel the Egyptian forces which had crossed the Suez Canal. After crossing the Suez Canal, the Egyptian anti-tank teams were told to run as fast and as far as they could and then stop and set up anti-tank ambushes. When the Israeli tankers, mostly equipped with CENTURION and SUPER SHERMAN tanks, rushed forward without proper infantry support, they were decimated and stopped cold by dense AT-3 missile fire from distances of up to 3,000 meters. On its part, the fighting on the Golan Heights featured for the first time the mass use of infra-red night vision equipment mounted on the Syrian tanks. The Egyptian and Syrian forces also showed good interarm tactics by keeping at first their ground forces under a dense anti-aircraft umbrella provided by SA-6 surface-to-air missile batteries and by ZSU-23-4 radar-pointed self-propelled anti-aircraft guns. While Israel eventually prevailed in this conflict, the alert had proved to be an unsettling and costly one for the Israeli forces, especially for their tank units and fighter-bomber squadrons. The lessons from the Yom Kippur War were thus carefully noted around the World and contributed to the development of future main battle tanks.