A rhomboid shape was chosen to enhance climbing capacity and gap clearance, with guns on the side. In February recruitment began for men to crew these new weapons.
Secrecy was paramount and the new recruits to the so-called Heavy Section of the Machine Gun Corps had no clue what they were letting themselves in for except that it would be dangerous. The first 50 were delivered to France on 30 August , comprising of varying amounts of guns. The tanks had a crew of 8, half of which focused on steering and the gears.
The effectiveness of the tanks at their first appearance was mixed. Of the 32 tanks ready for action on 15 September , only 9 were able to reach the enemy lines and engage in actual combat. Many broke down as they were mechanically unreliable and were abandoned. Although lessons could quickly be learned from their first deployment, the French Army felt the British had sacrificed the secrecy of the weapon, and used it in numbers too small to be decisive.
However, the army still lacked officers who understood how best to employ the tanks and they failed to impress during Arras, Messines and Passchendaele. It was not until the Battle of Cambrai in November that the tanks were really able to show what they could do, proving their effectiveness as crossing barbed wire defences when over tanks penetrated almost 6 miles on a 7-mile wide front. Other countries such as France had also ramped up their tank development, with the French creating the Renault FT light tank — the first to use a fully rotating main armament turret on top and the basis of tank design ever since.
German forces often salvaged British and French tanks to re-use for their own purposes on the battlefield and to obtain information for research. The German General Staff did not have a similar enthusiasm for tanks, but allowed the development of anti-tank weapons.
After the Battle of Cambrai, the Germans developed their own armoured programme, yet despite creating the A7V tank which weighed 30 tons and had a crew of 18 , by the end of the war, only 20 had been built. Although other tank designs had been planned, material shortages limited the German tank corps to the A7Vs. The Americans too were interested in tank development. World War I introduced new technologies and doctrine in a quest to overcome the tactical stalemate of the trenches.
The first tanks had great potential that would be capitalized upon during the next world war, but early models suffered from design flaws and lack of doctrine for their use on the battlefield. Tanks are armored vehicles designed to combine the military factors of fire, maneuver and protection.
Although the concept of armored vehicles preceded the Great War, the tank was specifically developed to overcome the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front that followed the First Battle of Ypres 19 October November The first tanks introduced in were generally slow and hard to maneuver, and they performed poorly in rugged terrain.
The early models were heavily influenced by commercial tractors. While impervious to barbed wire , small arms, and shrapnel, their primitive armor was still susceptible to heavy machine gun fire and direct hits from high explosive artillery rounds.
The British developed the initial tank prototypes in near total secrecy after a proposal by Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Swinton , with the enthusiastic support of Winston Churchill , First Lord of the Admiralty. In February , the government formed the Landships Committee, which consisted of military engineers and officers from the army and the Royal Navy Air Service, to review plans for new armored vehicles.
The very first tank to be built in the world was the No. Great Britain first introduced tanks to the battlefield at the Somme on 15 September Out of forty-nine total British Mark I tanks deployed to France , only thirty-one crossed the German lines, due to mechanical issues.
Early tank warfare also suffered from inexperienced crews and a lack of doctrine regarding their integration with infantry. Nevertheless, the success of the tank in achieving total surprise and its potential to overcome trench warfare prompted the British High Command to order 1, more following the battle. The Mark IV was the most common tank used by the British army during the war. It carried a crew of eight, weighed twenty-eight tons, and had a six-cylinder engine that allowed it to achieve a top speed of six kilometers per hour.
The tanks were a critical component of a combined arms assault involving infantry and artillery, which successfully drove a salient eight kilometers deep into enemy territory while suffering a fraction of the typical casualties.
The ultimate failure of the offensive was a result of poor planning regarding the allocation of reserve forces to follow up the initial assault. Only Great Britain and France possessed a significant number of tanks by the end of the war, with the latter possessing the most. Both countries had experimented with their initial tank designs simultaneously. Out of tanks deployed, the French lost seventy-six tanks without much gain due to poor planning and difficult terrain.
All six were put out of action during the attack, four from enemy shellfire. Only one reached its objective. Allied tanks became faster, more reliable, and more useful in battle during the course of the war, but they were far from a war-winning weapon. They were also in limited supply until very late in the war. At Passchendaele in October and November , no tanks could operate in the muddy terrain. The first truly successful tank attacks did not come until late It surprised the enemy and made good progress, but most of the gains were lost to enemy counterattacks in early December.
Better tactics for coordinating the use of tanks, infantry, artillery, and aircraft marked the Allied offensives of More tanks were also available, with British and French forces using hundreds in summer attacks at Le Hamel and Soissons.
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