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Modern tank battles6/20/2023 ![]() It was an American, Benjamin Holt, who perfected the caterpillar track - another classic feature of the modern tank. It was a good enough design to stay in use till after World War II in some armies. The Renault FT was also the only tank to see combat with the American Expeditionary Force in France, going into action for the first time in September 1918.Īmericans also made a key contribution to the development of the tank. It had less armor and as a result was more vulnerable, but it was mass-produced and designed to swarm the enemy. It was much more maneuverable than the British tanks, yet had effective firepower. The Renault FT light tank was probably the best tank of the war. The Renault FT was the first with that distinctive feature of modern tanks: a rotating turret on the top. (The British heavy tanks all had their weapons on the side.) Later in the war, the French car company Renault produced a new design. The armor was too thin on one, and the tracks too narrow on another. The early French tanks were even less well-designed than the first British ones. The British were the first to use them, but the French were also developing tanks in secret. Some historians have criticized the British High Command's decision to deploy the tanks, arguing there were too few of them to make a decisive difference, and that their principle advantage - shock and surprise - was somewhat lost as the Germans could begin preparing weapons and tactics to counter them.īut Germany only ever built 20 of their own tanks to counter the thousands eventually built by the Allies during World War I. ![]() But lack of communication (they had no radios) and lack of coordination with infantry and artillery stalled the attack. They managed to advance a couple of miles through two of the three German lines, inflicting heavy casualties. The journey from the UK had been stressful on the 30-ton machines, and almost half of them broke down before coming into contact with the enemy. Almost no British troops had seen a tank before, and British commanders had few tactical ideas about how to use a tank in battle. And the Germans weren’t the only ones surprised when tanks showed up. They were thrown into the attack on Sept. The first 50 tanks were sent to France in August 1916 to join the big British push that summer along the river Somme. The workers called them "water tanks" or simply "tanks" for short. And that's how the armored vehicles got their name. One of the British officers who helped develop the tank, Ernest Swinton, liked the nickname and made it official. The workers who built the first tanks were told the machines were mechanized water tanks, designed to carry water for the troops in the deserts of Mesopotamia, in what’s now Iraq. Even if an attack did succeed, it was almost impossible to exploit the breach before the enemy rushed in reinforcements to stabilize the front.Įarly British pioneers conceived of the tank as a "land ship." It was developed in intense secrecy. Military technology of the time favored the defense. The tank was developed as a means to break the stalemate on the Western Front in World War I. Inside the tank, the men suffered from the engine's heat and choked on a toxic fog from exhaust fumes. It was pretty daunting for those first British tankers, too. There was huge pressure on these men, most of whom were common infantry soldiers, to quickly win the war with an instrument that wasn't especially well-designed or easy to operate. (You can hear more voices from that day here.) One survivor said after the war he thought they would have to retreat all the way to Berlin. It was one of the few occasions in all of World War I when any defensive force broke off in terror. The Germans on the front line ran that day. What do you do? You can stay and die, or you can panic and run. You attack it with every weapon you have, but it simply can't be stopped. Then it starts spitting death from its cannon and machine guns. Then from off in the distance comes rumbling a giant machine, rolling over craters and ditches and crushing through the barbed wire obstacles that have stopped so many infantry attacks before. You're probably a pretty hardened soldier. Just imagine being a German soldier that day 100 years ago: You think you've seen every terror war can offer - machine guns mowing down your comrades, barbed wire traps, artillery blasting whole platoons to oblivion, poison gas torturing your friends who were too slow to put on their gas masks. 15, 1916, near Flers in northern France, during the Battle of the Somme in World War I. The first tanks were British, and they went into action against the Germans on Sept. These giant armored killing machines have been a central feature of combat ever since. One hundred years ago Thursday, when tanks went into battle for the first time, warfare changed forever.
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