Tanks And The Dream of Victory

After more than a century of action these machines defy the naysayers

The mighty Mark IV at Bovington tank museum

To mark the publication of my latest book I’m posting this essay on why from the Somme in 1916 to Ukraine today, these war machines won’t go away.

Sceptics vs Believers

A tank is the ultimate symbol of warfare in the machine age. Immoral, inexorable in its progress, like any machine it serves dictatorships and democracies alike.

It represents, at one and the same time, an oppressive beast of war bearing down on people pleading for freedom, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968, or Tiananmen Square in 1989, and at another, a vessel of hope or liberation. For those on the streets of Paris in 1944 or Kuwait City in1991, the arrival of tanks marked the end of brutal occupation.

From the Somme in 1916, when late in that disastrous campaign, the tank made its first appearance, to the Ukrainian Southern Front in 2023, we see that the tank stands for apparently contradictory things on the battlefield too.

The first is the promise of victory and the idea that the use of these machines will save lives and bring success more quickly. Writing in June 1915 to one of those developing the tank idea, Earl Cavan, commanding a Guards brigade that had just been through another bloody debacle charging German machine guns, pleaded, “I welcome any suggestion in this extraordinary war that will help to take an enemy’s trench without a cost of fifty per cent of the leading company, and seventy five per cent of that company’s officers”.

But the second idea, voiced no sooner than the tracked ironclad killing machine makes its appearance, is that it is too vulnerable, a death trap, and that either it will never catch on or that its days are numbered. Departing early from a demonstration of the new secret weapon at Hatfield Park in February 1916, Lord Kitchener, the war minister, pithily dismissed it as, “a pretty mechanical toy, but without serious military value”.

So even prior to the tank's earliest use in battle and its first triumph, for example, at Cambrai in November of 1917, those two contradictory ideas coexisted as generals, real and armchair, debated their merits.

After an ineffective first outing, the Tank Corps marshalled more than 300 of these machines, so called Mark IV tanks, to push forward in November 1917 on a section of the German line where they achieve complete surprise.

And in the first heady hours of that battle, they advanced several miles, gaining what months of fighting and hundreds of thousands of casualties had failed to do elsewhere. The Germans were panicked, fleeing their trenches. It was success on a breathtaking scale. But even as it was unfolding, there were places where German artillery was able to knock out the tanks quite easily.

So, after that extraordinary day church bells rang in England, and the Tank Corps’ leading thinker, Colonel J.F.C. Fuller declared it, “a stunning success”. But picking over the wrecks of the burnt out machines the German commanders reached opposite conclusions.

After its initial gains, the British advance had been thrown back, and German lines re-established. Surveying a burnt out British Mk IV one of the their commanders commented, “I do not regard these things in their current form as battleworthy… however perhaps they can be improved”.

That hint spoke to why the Kaiser’s generals, after initially pooh-poohing the tank began trying to produce their own and to reconcile them to their own designs for victory.

And you see the arc of hope, disappointment and adaptation 106 years later in Ukraine, with the benighted 2023 counteroffensive. That was the dream of victory for Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

He had been pleading for months for Western tanks to turn the tables and allow him to recapture land that the Russians had taken.

In the early months of 2022 he had pressed his case for the best armour the west could offer, saying, “we must form a tank fist, a fist of freedom whose blows will not let tyranny stand up again”.

The between Cambrai and the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023, military opinion yawed back and forth.

Tanks, or more generally armoured vehicles were seen at times to be the key to victory. For example, the Blitzkrieg of 1940 or the Israelis big advances during the Six Day War of 1967. Armoured divisions at those moments fulfilled their promise, achieving dramatic results, at a fraction of the human cost suffered in earlier conflicts.

Then there were the moments where everything seemed the other way around. From the appearance of handheld anti-tank rockets late on in the Second World War to the advent of nuclear weapons, and then the arrival of anti-tank missiles in the 1973 Middle east war. At these times people predicted the end of the tank, and indeed we've seen it more recently with the use of drones in the Azerbaijan-Armenian War of 2020 and of course in Ukraine.

Somewhere between these two extreme views, key to victory or obsolete death trap, there is a sense of realism among the military professionals. The successful use of armoured divisions became a matter of close coordination with all of the other players on and over the battlefield – that was the essence of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg 1940 in France – as well as unleashing these behemoths in open terrain where there could best succeed, such as the Sinai desert in 1967.

And it was an authoritative piece of writing by none other than George Patton, at the time a colonel, but later a general who stormed through France in 1944 at the head of his armoured divisions, who in 1933, gave some idea about how these two ideas, the meaning of the tank, could be reconciled and what the weapon actually stood for, “history is replete with military implements each in its day heralded as the last word – the key to victory – yet each in its turn subsiding to its useful but inconspicuous niche”.

For the truth remains now as it did in 1917, that if you want to close the gap between your position and the enemy’s – whether that’s to drive them out of your homeland or wage a war of conquest – your soldiers are much more likely to survive if they cover that distance under armour, protected from the bullets, bombs, and shells sweeping the battlefield.

The ability to do that depended critically on the interplay of three things: protection, mobility and firepower. And it's those factors, the eternal triangle of tank design, that has punctuated this whole story.

In 1915, at the very outset, the British Admiralty’s Landship Committee looked at ideas that could have come out of H.G. Wells sci-fi or some steampunk fantasy for vast ironclad machines that would have weighed hundreds or even thousands of tons.

They might have had plenty of firepower, but wouldn't they just sink in the Flanders mud? And how would you get something like that, a landship, to the battlefield in the first place?

Instead, the early designers became focused on the issue of crossing that short space of ground between two trench lines on the Western Front. No Man's Land in places was just a hundred metres wide yet men who tried to cross it were quickly cut down by machine guns and shells, their way blocked by barbed wire.

So, the British and French armies (they both started work in 1915, but in ignorance of each other) didn't need a machine that could go far or travel very fast. They just needed to break that awful stalemate.

The British Mark IV tank was used at Cambrai. It had several weapons and needed four men to drive it, so ended up with a crew of eight. But the French Renault FT, entering service in 1918, perhaps the outstanding design of the First World War, was much smaller. It mounted just one weapon, a machine gun or a light cannon, and needed just two soldiers to operate.

By the time the First World War was over, the Mark IV slipped quietly into redundancy. But the Renault FT became a sort of starter tank for armies around the world, being exported to 16 different countries and carrying on in use for decades.

Why was it more successful? By cutting the crew to two they reduced the internal volume. That meant they were able to have thicker armour, 16.5mm in places, compared to just 12 millimetres on the Mark IV.

And yet the Renault weighed just 6.5t compared to the Mark IV's 28 tonnes. It also, by virtue of its 40 horsepower Renault engine, had a much better power to weight ratio, which meant it could go faster – though even then it only rumbled along at 5 miles per hour.

The Renault thus emphasised mobility and protection, but compared to the British design, sacrificed firepower.

During the interwar years, advocates for armoured forces realized the possibilities of those machines. Forget trench warfare, what if you broke through the enemy lines and just kept driving?

In a blueprint for future war called Plan 1919 the leading British exponent, Colonel JFC Fuller noted, “every principle of war becomes easy to apply if movement can be accelerated and accelerated at the expense of the opposing side”.

For these theorists of armoured warfare, the type of machines designed to go a short distance were no longer suitable. You would need new tanks able to carry on motoring and exploit the possibilities of breaking into the enemy's rear areas and sowing havoc, causing the collapse from within of their armies.

Unfortunately for Fuller and his fellow apostles of mobility in the British army, it was the Germans, Adolf Hitler's generals, who were able to grasp and implement these ideas before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The Panzer IV, for example, came into service in 1939. It had a crew of five, weighed 20 tons, and could travel up to 120 miles on roads without being refuelled. It could also manage a speed of up to 18 miles per hour becoming a key component of blitzkrieg. Uniquely for a tank in the Second World War, it remained in production from the first day of that conflict until nearly the last. Though that success was not in itself decisive for in the end, the 1940s tank war was won as much by industrial capacity as it was by the cleverness of any designer.

Quality vs Numbers

T-34 - the triumph of clever design and quantity over build quality

The German Tiger tank may have struck terror in the hearts of Allied tank crews once it had appeared late in 1942, but only 1300 or so were made. The Nazis had failed to prepare in one key respect, which was to expand their industrial capacity sufficiently to make big enough numbers of tanks.

Instead, even in 1941, when signing off on the Tiger project, Adolf Hitler argued that quality could beat quantity, “technical superiority is of decisive significance… even small series of superior weapons can be decisive”. But in the Second World War industrial competition reached its zenith, and the production techniques adopted from automobile lines in Detroit would have far more effect than the Führer imagined.

What that number of Tigers, or just over 8,500 Panzer IVs being produced, could not achieve was to overmatch the huge numbers being fielded by Allied armies. The Americans ended up producing 49,000 Sherman tanks, the Soviet Union 58,000 of various versions of its T34.

It was fortunate for the Allies that Hitler failed to grasp the importance of mass and insisted Germany produce ever smaller numbers of heavy, complex, vehicles. But he did get one thing right about tank design, he appreciated early on that the development of a new type of ammunition could create serious problems for the armoured vehicle.

This was the so-called shaped charge. Killing tanks up until that point had relied on firing a solid shot, a piece of metal travelling at speeds so high that it would smash through the armour of enemy vehicles.

The shaped charge involved creating a conical liner inside a high explosive shell. That cone shaped piece of metal flipped into a molten bolt once it exploded. This effect could propel the metal through great depths of armour.

Once you an alternative to a big gun firing a solid shot at high velocity, it opened all sorts of possibilities, including arming infantrymen with handheld weapons like bazookas that could be used to knock out even the heaviest tanks. The shaped charge shell was first used by the Wehrmacht in 1942, but it has remained a headache for armour crews ever since, being the basis for example of roadside bombs used to kill British troops in southern Iraq during the recent campaign there.

Although this seemed to mark the end of the supremacy of the armoured vehicle, even that was not the final word, because the development in the 1960s of composite armours, in other words, protection that consisted of several layers and of different types of material, not just hardened steel, was to create possibilities for tanks that would be much better able to withstand the impact of shaped charge and other types of ammunition. Britain proclaimed its invention, so-called Chobham armour in 1976, though in fact the Soviet Army had put its version into service a decade earlier.

And this of course speaks to the unrelenting technological competition that has accompanied the tank story – the arguments about their value or vulnerability might have echoed repetitively for more than a century but the ingenuity of those trying to gain advantage continues.

Compare the Chieftain I commanded at the end of the Seventies to the Tiger. They were more or less the same weight and length. The design philosophy was similar too, both heavily protected and packing a powerful punch. Indeed, I sometimes suspected that Chieftain’s designers were men who had been scared to death by Tigers in 1944 and wanted one for themselves.

But the Chieftain, designed 20 years after the Tiger, had almost treble the thickness of armour on the front of its turret. And its hull, while only marginally thicker than that of a Tiger, was steeply sloped, which made it much harder to penetrate.

Comparing the performance of its 120mm gun to the Tiger's 88, the British tank could pierce treble the thickness of hardened steel at 1,000 metres. It maintained high penetrative performance up to 3,000m, something unthinkable for a Tiger.

So how had they created something so much better for a similar size and weight? One way was to reduce the internal volume of the tank. The Tiger's crew of five was replaced in tanks like the Chieftain by one of four. And it had a smaller engine compared to that of the older tank.

Each crew member eliminated saves anything around 1.5 to 2 cubic meters of space inside, which allows the enclosed volume to be reduced and thus the thickness of the armour to be increased for the same weight. The British 120mm gun embraced advances in metallurgy and the propellant used to hurl shells towards the enemy.

East vs West

T-64 at Yavoriv training area, western Ukraine, in 2024, still effective 48 years after entering Soviet Army service

The Soviet T-64, arguably the greatest leap forward in Cold War tank design, was produced in the same Kharkov factory that developed the T-34. The vehicle that entered service in 1966 was a great leap forward because it embraced so many new different technologies at the same time.

Its crew was reduced from 4 to 3 by installing an automatic loading system for the gun. T-64 was the first tank in the world to use composite armour, a laminate made up of different substances, not just stick steel, in order to improve what tank designers call mass efficiency, that is the amount of protection given for any given weight. And it also used a smaller engine, so it ended up weighing in initially at under 40 tonnes, one third lighter than the Chieftain.

It had a very powerful gun too, arguably more so than our tank. It was a real Cold War secret weapon, hidden by the Soviet army from the prying eyes of the west for many years and never exported, in order to protect its mysteries. It remained highly effective in February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, and the tank was still the mainstay of the Ukrainian forces.

But in common with some of the Western Cold war tanks, the T-64's great leap forward technologically produced many teething problems and a long gestation period. It was a good 10 years before the tank was fully effective once it had been brought into service.

Cost vs Survival

The Centurion cost more than four times as much as Shermans the British Army had bought less than five years before, so setting the pattern of Cold War increases and dwindling numbers

The US M1 Abrams was another case in point. By the time it was issued to units, it had been almost 20 years in coming. Compare that to less than six months for the Mark IV tank used at Cambrai in 1917 to progress from drawing board to working vehicle.

And the implications for cost? a wartime Sherman with all the equipment added on might weigh in at around $50,000, the production contract for M1 Abrams envisaged a price of $2.8 million per tank.

That was a function of complexity as well as the ambition of its designers. The M1 tank has something like 200,000 individual components compared to the Sherman's 4,500.

A late cold War tank embodied so many improvements of technology that it's almost a different weapon: from voice and data communications; advanced electronics for aiming the gun, stabilization systems, which are so effective that they mean the gun can be fired almost as effectively on the move as it can while static; to the developments of recent years, automated protection systems, in effect, the ability of giving the tank the ability to shoot down incoming anti-tank missiles.

These increases in complexity, cost and development time had meant that by the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, tank production was on the verge of extinction The US Marine Corps, disbanded its tank battalions in 2020, and the Royal Netherlands army got rid of them all too.

Production dwindled; the Russians, who had built three and a half thousand a year in the late Cold War, made 100 new tanks in 2021. Europe had almost completely closed down its production of these vehicles, and that same year produced something like 25 Leopard 2 tanks.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused everyone to think again. Trench lines reappeared, and with them stalemate. This is why Volodymyr Zelenskyy wanted tanks so much to spearhead his 2023 counteroffensive. Poland has ordered 1,000 new tanks from South Korea.

So as long as armies need to protect people crossing bullet swept fighting grounds in tracked vehicles something like a tank will continue to be needed. Arguably the trends we've seen up to now will force nations to choose between ever heavier, more costly and ponderous tanks that might weigh in at 80 or even 100 tons and something much lighter.

Following the logic of cutting crews from several soldiers a century ago to five in the Second World War and three in many tanks now, it might be that they dwindle to two or even one AI assisted operator. Ultimately though the advance of technology may take the people out of them altogether and to turn the battlefield over to robots.

To buy a copy of my new book, ‘Tank, the 10 War Machines That Changed the World and the Remarkable Men Behind Them’, click here