Tanks in the British Army
This article on military tanks deals with the history and development of tanks of the British Army from their first use in the First World War, the interwar period, during the Second World War, the Cold War and modern era.
Overview
s first appeared on the battlefield as a solution to trench warfare. They were large, heavy, slow moving vehicles capable of driving right over the top of enemy trenches; thereby eliminating the need to send soldiers "over the top" only to be blasted to pieces by enemies. The British Army was the first to use them, who built them in secret to begin with. To keep the enemy from finding out about this new solution, the public were informed that the vehicles were large water carriers, or tanks, and the name stuck.The First World War established the validity of the tank concept. After the war, many nations needed to have tanks, but only a few had the industrial resources to design and build them. During and after the war, Britain and France were the intellectual leaders in tank design, with other countries generally following and adopting their designs. This early lead would be gradually lost during the course of the 1930s to the Soviet Union who with Germany began to design and build their own tanks.
While the First World War saw the first use of the tank as a weapon of war, it was during the Second World War that the tank soon became a dominant force on the battlefield. The British, American, German and Soviet armies all had different approaches to tanks and tank warfare, each with their fair share of successes and failures. The infantry tank was a concept developed by the British and French in the years leading up to the Second World War. Infantry tanks were tanks designed to support the infantry in the attack. To achieve this they were generally heavily armoured compared to the cruiser tanks, to allow them to operate in close concert with infantry even under heavy gun fire. The extra armouring came at the expense of speed, which was not an issue when supporting relatively slow moving infantry.
Once the infantry tank-supported attack had broken through heavily defended areas in the enemy lines, other tanks such as cruisers, or light tanks, were expected to exploit their higher speed and longer range to operate far behind the front in order to cut lines of supply and communications.
Background
No one individual was responsible for the development of the tank. Rather, a number of gradual technological developments brought the development of the tank as we know it closer until its eventual form was unveiled out of necessity by the British Army. The British Army designs were forced by the trench warfare in which neither side could achieve more than small incremental gains without heavy loss of soldiers lives, but tanks changed that. They were made to cross the trenches and quickly break into the enemy rear, while other tanks supported the main attack. The development between the infantry tank and the cruiser tanks had its origins in the First World War division between the first British heavy tanks which supported the infantry and the faster Whippet Medium Mark A and its successors the Medium Mark B and Medium Mark C. During the interbellum British tank experiments generally followed these basic classifications, which were made part of the overall doctrine with the work of Percy Hobart and Captain B. H. Liddell Hart. The next development of the more heavily armoured and upgunned tanks was brought about by the tank on tank battles in the Second World War German Blitzkrieg. This continued throughout the war, and led to heavy tanks which became the basis of the current Main Battle Tanks seen throughout the armies today.British development
The Landship Committee commissioned Lieutenant Walter Gordon Wilson of the Royal Naval Air Service and William Tritton of William Foster & Co. of Lincoln, to produce a small landship. Constructed in great secrecy, the machine was given the code-name tank by Swinton.The "Number 1 Lincoln Machine", nicknamed "Little Willie" weighed 14 tons and could carry a crew of three, at speeds of less than 2 mph over rough ground. Trench-crossing ability was deemed insufficient however, leading to the development of a rhomboidal design, which became known as "HMLS Centipede" and later "Mother", the first of the British heavy tanks. After completion on 29 January 1916 very successful trials were made, and an order was placed by the War Office for 100 units to be used on the Western Front in France, on 12 February 1916, and a second order for 50 additional units was placed in April 1916.
The great secrecy surrounding tank development, coupled with the skepticism of infantry commanders, often meant that infantry at first had little training to cooperate with tanks.
The first use of the British tanks on the battlefield was the use of 49 Mark I tanks during the Battle of the Somme on 15 September 1916, with mixed, but still impressive results. Many broke down but nearly a third succeeded in breaking through. Finally, in a preview of later developments, the British developed the lighter Whippet. This tank was specifically designed to exploit breaches in the enemy front. The Whippet was faster than most other tanks, although it carried only machinegun armament. Postwar tank designs would reflect this trend towards greater tactical mobility.
While the British took the lead in tank development, the French were not far behind and fielded their first tanks in 1917. The Germans, on the other hand, were slower to develop tanks, concentrating on anti-tank weapons.
Following the Great War, many experiments involving armoured vehicles were conducted in the United Kingdom. Particularly many advances were made in the areas of suspensions, tracks, communications, and the organization of these vehicles on the battlefield. Britain continued its technical dominance of tank design from 1915 through to at least the early 1930s. British designs, particularly those from Vickers-Armstrong, formed the basis for many of the most common tanks of the 1930s and early WWII. The Vickers 6-Ton, which was arguably the most influential design of the late 1920s, was not adopted by the British Army.
The Carden Loyd tankettes influenced the tankette concept through export and similar designs such as the Soviet T-27, Italian CV-33, German Panzer I and other copies. Another notable design was the Vickers Medium Mk II, a pivotal design which combined some of the best traits of WWI tanks into a much faster tank. Eventually, by the 1930s, British experiments and policy and their strategic situation led to a tank development programme with three main types of tank: light, cruiser, and infantry. The infantry tanks were intended to support dismounted infantry. The maximum speed requirement matched the walking pace of a rifleman, and the armour on these tanks was expected to be heavy enough to provide immunity to towed anti-tank guns. Armament had to be sufficient to suppress or destroy enemy machine gun positions and bunkers as well as enemy tanks. Cruiser tanks were to carry out the traditional cavalry roles of pursuit and exploitation, working relatively independently of the infantry. This led to cruiser tank designs requiring greater speed. To achieve this they were unable to carry as much armour as the infantry tanks, and tended to carry anti-tank armament. In practice both cruiser and infantry tanks entered the Second World War with the same gun. The light tanks were tasked with reconnaissance and constabulary-type colonial roles, with cost the major design factor.
An outstanding achievement of the British Army had been the creation of the Experimental Mechanised Force in the late 1920s. This was a small Brigade-sized unit developed to field-test the use of tanks and other vehicles. The unit pioneered the extensive use of radio to control widely separated small units. The unit was short-lived, however. However even though the British in the 1930s continued the design and development of tanks themselves, the Germans began to further develop tank strategy and incorporate them into their tactical employment more than the British. This doctrine of deployment led armies to equip their tanks with radios, to provide unmatched command and control, Germany along with the USSR also led the way with welding, although the US followed closely. Riveting and bolting remained in use in British designs.
Infantry tanks were a continuation of the Great War tanks, heavily armoured and designed to accompany an advancing infantry unit and hence slow. Once the infantry tanks had punched through an enemy line, lighter and faster cruiser tanks would be let loose to disrupt supply lines.
The main problem with this strategy however, was that the British infantry tanks were just too slow and the cruisers of the time were vulnerable, and often mechanically unreliable. Come 1940, most of the British armour had been abandoned in France when the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk, but this encouraged new designs. By the end of the war the increase in speed of the infantry tanks, and the increased armour of the cruisers, meant that there was little difference between the two classes of British tank. However, the British had to quickly build more reliable and more heavily armoured designs from the experienced gained in the early battles or acquire US designs to meet the needs.
At the start of the war most British tanks were equipped with the Ordnance QF 2-pounder gun which was able to penetrate contemporary German armour. The trend towards bigger guns and thicker armour which resulted in heavier tanks, made itself felt as the Second World War progressed, and some tanks began to show weaknesses in design.
In 1939, most tanks had maximum armour of 30 mm or less, with guns no heavier than 37–47 mm. Medium tanks of 1939 weighed around 20 tons. Also if the tank's gun was to be used to engage both unarmoured and armoured targets, then it needed to be as large and powerful as possible, making one large gun with an all-round field of fire vital. Also, mounting the gun in a turret ensured that the tank could fire from behind some cover. Hull-mounted guns required that most of the vehicle be exposed to enemy fire. Multiple-turreted or multi-gun designs such as the British A9 Cruiser Mk I slowly became less common.
British tanks armament and use in the battles also had to change as German Blitzkrieg tactics and doctrine shifted towards faster medium and heavy tanks fighting large multi-tank battles, with the role of the infantry tank in assaults taken by simpler self-propelled artillery. In British practice, the main armament of the infantry tank went in three phases. The pre-Dunkirk British Army Matilda I infantry tank had only a single Vickers machine gun, a compromise forced by the low cost to which they had been built. The Matilda II had a capable anti-tank gun with the 40mm 2 pounder but these were only issued with solid-shot AP shell for anti-tank use and was of little use for artillery close-support of infantry. The follow-up gun to the 2pdr was already in development but the need to rapidly replace the losses in France delayed its production. Eventually QF 6-pounder guns were put into the British tanks, and these could deal with pretty much anything but head on attacks on the German Tiger and Panther tanks - thanks to their special armour piercing rounds. As the war progressed many British tanks were equipped with a gun firing the same 75mm ammunition as American Sherman tanks. These had better performance using high explosive or smoke ammunition, but could not match the 6-pounder against armour. Then the 17-pounder was developed, becoming the best British gun of the war - able to deal with almost any armour put up against it.