tank
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tank, any heavily armed and armoured combat vehicle that moves on two endless metal chains called tracks. Tanks are essentially weapons platforms that make the weapons mounted in them more effective by their cross-country mobility and by the protection they provide for their crews. Weapons mounted in tanks have ranged from single rifle-calibre machine guns to, in recent years, long-barreled guns of 120- or 125-mm (4.72- or 4.92-inch) calibre.
This article discusses the development of tanks from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. For articles on related military platforms, see amphibious assault vehicle and armoured vehicle.
Earliest developments
The use of vehicles for fighting dates to the 2nd millennium bce, when horse-drawn war chariots were used in the Middle East by the Egyptians, Hittites, and others as mobile platforms for combat with bows and arrows. The concept of protected vehicles can be traced back through the wheeled siege towers and battering rams of the Middle Ages to similar devices used by the Assyrians in the 9th century bce. The two ideas began to merge in the battle cars proposed in 1335 by Guido da Vigevano, in 1484 by Leonardo da Vinci, and by others, down to James Cowen, who took out a patent in England in 1855 for an armed, wheeled, armoured vehicle based on the steam tractor.
But it was only at the beginning of the 20th century that armoured fighting vehicles began to take practical form. By then the basis for them had become available with the appearance of the traction engine and the automobile. Thus, the first self-propelled armoured vehicle was built in 1900 in England when John Fowler & Company armoured one of their steam traction engines for hauling supplies in the South African (Boer) War (1899–1902). The first motor vehicle used as a weapon carrier was a powered quadricycle on which F.R. Simms mounted a machine gun in 1899 in England. The inevitable next step was a vehicle that was both armed and armoured. Such a vehicle was constructed to the order of Vickers, Sons and Maxim Ltd. and was exhibited in London in 1902. Two years later a fully armoured car with a turret was built in France by the Société Charron, Girardot et Voigt, and another was built concurrently in Austria by the Austro-Daimler Company.
To complete the evolution of the basic elements of the modern armoured fighting vehicle, it remained only to adopt tracks as an alternative to wheels. This became inevitable with the appearance of the tracked agricultural tractor, but there was no incentive for this until after the outbreak of World War I. A tracked armoured vehicle was proposed in France as early as 1903 but failed to arouse the interest of military authorities, as did a similar proposal made in England in 1908. Three years later a design for a tracked armoured vehicle was rejected by the Austro-Hungarian and then by the German general staffs, and in 1912 the British War Office turned down yet another design.
World War I
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 radically changed the situation. Its opening stage of mobile warfare accelerated the development of armoured cars, numbers of which were quickly improvised in Belgium, France, and Britain. The ensuing trench warfare, which ended the usefulness of armoured cars, brought forth new proposals for tracked armoured vehicles. Most of these resulted from attempts to make armoured cars capable of moving off roads, over broken ground, and through barbed wire. The first tracked armoured vehicle was improvised in July 1915, in Britain, by mounting an armoured car body on a Killen-Strait tractor. The vehicle was constructed by the Armoured Car Division of the Royal Naval Air Service, whose ideas, backed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston S. Churchill, resulted in the formation of an Admiralty Landships Committee. A series of experiments by this committee led in September 1915 to the construction of the first tank, called “Little Willie.” A second model, called “Big Willie,” quickly followed. Designed to cross wide trenches, it was accepted by the British Army, which ordered 100 tanks of this type (called Mark I) in February 1916.
Simultaneously but independently, tanks were also developed in France. Like the very first British tank, the first French tank (the Schneider) amounted to an armoured box on a tractor chassis; 400 were ordered in February 1916. But French tanks were not used until April 1917, whereas British tanks were first sent into action on September 15, 1916. Only 49 were available and their success was limited, but on November 20, 1917, 474 British tanks were concentrated at the Battle of Cambrai and achieved a spectacular breakthrough. These tanks, however, were too slow and had too short an operating range to exploit the breakthrough. In consequence, demand grew for a lighter, faster type of tank, and in 1918 the 14-ton Medium A appeared with a speed of 8 miles (13 km) per hour and a range of 80 miles (130 km). After 1918, however, the most widely used tank was the French Renault F.T., a light six-ton vehicle designed for close infantry support.
When World War I ended in 1918, France had produced 3,870 tanks and Britain 2,636. Most French tanks survived into the postwar period; these were the Renault F.T., much more serviceable than their heavier British counterparts. Moreover, the Renault F.T. fitted well with traditional ideas about the primacy of the infantry, and the French army adopted the doctrine that tanks were a mere auxiliary to infantry. France’s lead was followed in most other countries; the United States and Italy both assigned tanks to infantry support and copied the Renault F.T. The U.S. copy was the M1917 light tank, and the Italian was the Fiat 3000. The only other country to produce tanks by the end of the war was Germany, which built about 20.
Interwar developments
The Renault F.T. remained the most numerous tank in the world into the early 1930s. Aware of the need for more powerful vehicles, if only for leading infantry assaults, the French army took the lead in developing well-armed tanks. The original 1918 French Schneider and Saint-Chamond tanks already had 75-mm guns, while the heavier British tanks were at best armed with 57-mm guns. After the war the French built 10 68-ton 2C tanks with the first turret-mounted 75-mm guns and continued to develop 75-mm-gun tanks, notably the 30-ton Char B of 1936.
In the meantime, Britain took the lead, technically and tactically, in developing the mobility of tanks. Even before World War I had ended, work had started on the Medium D with a maximum speed of 20 miles (32 km) per hour. Between 1923 and 1928 the British Army ordered 160 of the new Vickers Medium tanks. They were virtually the only tanks the British Army had until the early 1930s and the only tanks to be produced in quantity anywhere in the world during the mid-1920s. The Vickers Mediums stimulated the Royal Tank Corps to develop mobile tactics, and various experiments during the 1920s and early ’30s resulted in the general adoption of two categories of tanks. Mobile tanks were intended for the role performed earlier by horse cavalry, while slower but more heavily armoured tanks provided infantry support.
Before this division into mobile and slow tanks had crystallized, several different designs were tried. The British Independent tank of 1925, with five turrets, started a trend toward multi-turreted heavy tanks. Another trendsetter was a small turretless tankette, originated in Britain by Maj. Giffard le Quesne Martel and John Carden in the mid-1920s, and a slightly heavier, turreted, two-man light tank. The number of light tanks grew rapidly after 1929, as several countries started to produce armoured vehicles. The Soviet Union was by far the most important producer; on a much smaller scale Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Japan entered the field in 1930–31. Concurrently, tank production started up again in France and Italy. As tank production grew and spread among nations, the value of light tanks armed only with machine guns decreased, and heavier models armed with 37- to 47-mm guns for fighting other tanks began to displace them. An early example was the Vickers-Armstrong six-ton model of 1930, copied on a large scale in the Soviet Union (as the T-26). The most successful example was the BT, also built in large numbers in the Soviet Union. The fastest tank of its day, the BT was based on designs evolved in the United States by J.W. Christie, who in 1928 built an experimental model capable of 42.5 miles per hour. Christie’s vehicles could run on wheels after the removal of tracks and, far more significant, had road wheels independently suspended. This enabled them to move over broken ground faster than tanks with the earlier types of suspension.
Although they were relatively well-armed and mobile, tanks of the T-26 and BT type were lightly armoured (plates 10 to 15 mm thick) and were not, therefore, suitable for close infantry support. This was clearly demonstrated in 1937 during the civil war in Spain, where T-26 and BT tanks were used by the Republican forces. Even before this time, it had become clear that tanks that moved at the slow pace of the infantry and were therefore exposed to the full effect of antitank guns had to be thickly armoured. This realization led in the mid-1930s to such infantry tanks as the French R-35 with 40-mm armour and the British A.11 with up to 60-mm armour.
Apart from being lightly armoured, the Soviet BT, the equivalent British cruiser tanks, and the German Pz. III also required support from more heavily armed tanks if they were to engage in fighting of any intensity. The need for tanks with more powerful 75-mm guns was clearly recognized in Germany, leading in 1934 to the design of the Pz. IV. The problem was realized less clearly in the Soviet Union, even though the T-28 and T-35 multi-turret tanks with 76-mm guns were first built there in 1932–33. But the Russians recognized more quickly than others the need for the next step, which was to replace all the light-medium tanks armed with 37- to 47-mm guns by medium tanks armed with 75- or 76-mm guns. Thus, in 1939, while the Germans were still developing the Pz. III from a 37-mm to a 50-mm version, the Russians were already concentrating on the T-34 medium tank with a 76-mm gun.
Other armies were farther behind in producing well-armed tanks on the eve of World War II. All but 80 of the 1,148 tanks that Britain had produced between 1930 and 1939 were still armed only with machine guns. Italy was even worse off, with only 70 M/11 tanks with 37-mm guns while the rest of its total of 1,500 were small, machine-gun-armed tankettes. The United States had only about 300 machine-gun-armed light tanks. Most of the 2,000 tanks produced in Japan were equally lightly armed. By comparison, France had a more powerful tank force—2,677 modern tanks, of which, however, only 172 were the Char B, armed with 75-mm guns. The largest force was the Soviet Union’s, which, as a result of a massive production program started in 1930–31, had about 20,000 tanks by 1939, considerably more than the rest of the world put together.
