Birth of the Tank: Armoured Warfare in WWI

The First World War, a dreadful historic milestone that resonates for its human cost and the brutalisation of an entire generation of Europeans. The war to end all wars was fought using the latest technology. The industrial might of the most developed nations had been committed to the destruction of their enemies with unprecedented ferocity. When the war began mechanisation was already underway. London buses were used to transport the British Expeditionary Force, tractors pulled the heavy guns and the army was using aircraft in a military capacity. But World War One saw the birth of a machine that's now synonymous with warfare, the tank. In this video we'll look at the different tanks developed by Britain, France and Germany, how they used and how well they performed. This is the story of the evolution of a tank in World War One. This video has been made possible by our supporters on Patreon, our YouTube members and our Superthanks donors. Please join them if you can't and support Tank Museum and thanks for watching. The First World War was a war like none other before or since. After the first few weeks traditional mobile warfare fought by cavalry, infantry, artillery comes to an end and it's replaced by the static horror of trench warfare. A narrow strip of blasted earth dominated by machine guns, barbed wire entanglements and the massive use of artillery extended from the North Sea coast to Switzerland. To survive in this new hell involved digging in. The German army called it der Spatenkrieg, the spade war. To leave the safety of the trenches in advance was almost suicidal. To repeat an often quoted statistic on the 1st of July 1916, first day of the battle of the Somme, the British army suffered 58,000 casualties of whom 20,000 were killed. This couldn't go on. A technologically created problem must be solved with a technological solution, some sort of vehicle. Identified by Winston Churchill as a machine gun destroyer, the vehicle must exhibit three characteristics. Armour protection against small arms fire at the very least. Mobility, it's got to be able to get through the mud, the shell holes and most importantly crush the enemy barbed wire, let the infantry through. And firepower, silenced machine guns to hose down trenches. Now we're familiar with these three things today, we call them the tank triangle, the armour triangle. Of course in 1915 there was no such thing. Armoured vehicles were nothing new. In 1914 officers of the Royal Naval Air Service, including some enthusiastic amateurs, who were using cars behind the German lines to recover damned pilots, had begun fitting them with boiler plate and Maxim guns to fight off the Germans they encountered. Purpose-built armoured cars like the earlier version of this Rolls-Royce with its armour plate superstructure and turret with a Vickers gun were extremely useful in the right circumstances. T.E. Lawrence wrote that in the desert a Rolls-Royce was valued above rubies. Armoured cars solved two-thirds of the problem, armour protection and firepower. But the real problem was mobility. Wheeled vehicles couldn't cope with the type of terrain you find on the western front. Here again the solution, tracks, were a known concept. The American halter company had been making tractors for some years and halter vehicles were in use as artillery tractors on the western front. After a number of peculiar and sometimes bizarre proposals, the Pedrail landship and the 300 tonne big wheel machine sprang to mind. William Foster and Curve Lincoln, builders of agricultural machinery, were awarded a contract to produce a prototype. The machine behind me, which as you can see is called Little Willie, was designed by William Tritton and a guy called Walter Gordon Wilson, who was a brilliant but quite irascible engineer. Sometimes known as the world's first tank, but in fact it's a prototype, never saw a battlefield. They've got the basic principles here but there are some significant problems to overcome. Firstly it's too tall to be stable and even more so if the proposed two pounder gun turret had been fitted on top. Secondly it's the wrong shape to cross trenches. Facing a three meter wide gap at the average German trench width, this will just fall in nose first. It did yield two good elements. The engine, a Daimler straight 605 horsepower petrol unit that will go on to power British tanks up to the mark four. And the second thing are the tracks. When it comes to the tracks, the American Holt tracks, they come off an agricultural tractor, they are not robust enough for cross-country use. So William Tritton redesigned the tracks and he came up with this system. It's a pressed steel plate with two flanges on the back to take the track pins. These do the job and they are used on every British tank for the remainder of the war. The trench crossing problem was effectively solved by Wilson. He came up with the rhomboid shape forever associated with British heavy tanks of the First World War. Looking at this one, our mark two, you can see it's been lengthened. The front and the rear horns stick out and that gives you a total length of about 26 feet, eight meters. And it means that with skill and a certain amount of luck, this tank will bridge a three meter wide gap. The thing to remember about marks one to four is they're all far more alike than they are different. They all weigh around about 28 tons. They've all got the same engine, Daimler straight 605 horsepower petrol engine, and they're built as either males or females. And the males have a six pounder QF gun either side plus three secondary Hotchkiss guns. The females start off with a pair of Vickers guns each side. Those are changed to Lewis guns and they have one Hotchkiss. Owing to the fact that the engine sat right in the middle of the crew compartment, two Bulgers, sponsons, housed the main armament. They all also had an eight man crew. So you've got a commander, a driver, two gearsmen, and then for the males you have a loader and a gunner each side. For the females, two gunners each side. It takes a committee of the first four in order to drive and steer the thing. And they have to operate with hand signals banging on the engine cover to attract attention because of the huge amount of noise. And also when you turn, most of the time you actually have to stop and pivot on the spot. They were slowed. Four miles an hour on the road and probably less than two miles an hour off road. Although this wasn't that much of a problem. The role of the tanks was to precede the infantry. They'd be moving even slower than this. Up to the German lines, then crush the wire, allowing the infantry through to clear the trenches. Unfortunately, out of necessity to keep weight down, the tanks were thinly armoured, at a maximum of about 12 millimetres. And that will keep out small arms fire, just about, but nothing else. The question is, how effective were they? It's not enough to just build tanks. You've got to address the tactical approach. How are things going to be used on the ground? The Mark I heavy tank was first used in combat on September the 15th, 1916, in the Battle of Fleur-Courcelette, part of the Somme offensive. The tanks had been rushed into combat. New technology, almost untested, with crews who were experiencing warfare for the first time. So many ditched or suffered mechanical breakdown. Others were lost to enemy action. Of the 32 tanks deployed, nine got as far as the German front line, broke through the German defences. A further nine were able to assist with mopping up operations. Now the results are distinctly limited, but the thing is, the cat is out of the bag. The German army has seen tanks. They will start thinking about how to counter the things, start devising anti-tank weapons. But, in spite of this, the British GOC, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, was impressed. He gave the instruction, go home, build as many tanks as you can. The surviving Mark I's went on to support operations on a few occasions throughout the remainder of the Somme offensive, until the weather closed things down, and the offensive ended in mid-November. The following year, 1917, was a year of very mixed fortunes for tanks. In April, at Arras, a force of 48 mixed Mark I's and some Mark II's, and those are just unarmoured training tanks, were patched together. On the 9th of April, they were committed to combat, and our Mark II here, number 285, was one of them. She made it as far as Neuville-Vitasse, where she engaged the enemy, but she's one of only nine that make it back to the rallying point at the end of the day. Two days later, the tanks suffered major problems at Boulecourt. Penned in behind a railway embankment, they suffered huge losses for very slight gains. The Australian troops they were meant to be supporting were very unimpressed, and it took a long time before the Australians would be convinced the tanks were any use at all. The Third Battle of Ypres, which ran from July to October 1917, was a prime example of how not to use tanks. Initially, this was an ambitious plan, a major breakthrough in the Ypres salient, coupled with an amphibious landing on the Belgian coast. In the end, the amphibious landing didn't happen, and the offensive ground to a halt in the shell-smashed polder land of the Ypres salient. The tanks suffered heavily in the muddy conditions. It's actually quite easy to get a tank stuck, even 70 tons of modern main battle tank. The tank sinks, the tracks churn round and create channels, and she sat there on a belly plate. It's actually called bellying out. This happened on a huge skull at the Third Ypres. Pictures of the area out on the Menin Road, called Clapham Junction, show numbers of bellied out tanks not going anywhere. The crews, in spite of hideous odds, carried out feats of huge gallantry. The crew of an F battalion tank, Freybentos, held out and fought their stranded tank against waves of enemy attackers for several days. Of eight crew, one was killed and the rest were wounded, but held out until they were able to disable the tank and withdraw. The one glimmer of light at Third Ypres comes on the 19th of August, with the Cockcroft action. A section of six tanks, led by Captain Douglas Brown, had been detailed to assist infantry in clearing a series of German strong points northeast of St Julian. The expected butcher's bill, the number of casualties, was 1,500. Wrecking the area, Captain Brown discovered that a section of Parvay Road was still intact, and by using this, his tanks were able to avoid getting stuck in the mud and get amongst the enemy fortifications at close range, successfully suppressing them until they could be cleared by the infantry. The butcher's bill shrank from 1,500 to 15. Up to this point, autumn 1917, the tank has been in action for almost a year. Mark 1's been mostly replaced by Mark 4's, but the use of tanks has been largely incidental, an add-on to the use of infantry and artillery. Strong elements in the British Army's general staff wanted to write the tank off as a pointless failure, but this was about to change. An attack on the German front line at Cambrai in northeast France had been suggested by Major General Hugh Tudor, Commander Royal Artillery for 9th Division. This was hit upon by Major General Hugh Ellis as an ideal opportunity to use tanks en masse in the right conditions, well-drained chalk downland with few shell craters. At dawn on November the 20th, 476 tanks, proceeded by an artillery barrage and accompanied by infantry, screened by aircraft, punched a hole in the Hindenburg line defences. That's the toughest bit of the German front line. They punched a hole in that which is six miles wide, four miles deep. The tanks, using large numbers and in different roles, male and female gun tanks, barbed wire cutters and wire pullers, and supply tanks, were integrated into the all-armed action. A combination of artillery, infantry, tanks and aircraft which produced revolutionary results. The victory was, I'm afraid, rather short-lived. Tank numbers dropped dramatically through mechanical breakdown and enemy action, and the enemy launched a massive counter-attack that retook most of the gains. But just for a moment, the tanks had shown what they could do. Now the thing you have to remember about British heavy tanks in the First World War, Marks 1-4 and also to a certain extent Mark 5s, is they are far more alike than they are different. But certain changes are made. Mark 1s have these trail wheels behind. They're abandoned pretty early on because they're completely ineffective. They don't really do anything at all. The fuel tanks in the Mark 1 are up front, right in the front horns. They're pretty vulnerable there, so they're moved back to between the rear horns, give them a bit more protection. The other thing is with the females, machine gun armed tanks. Now with those, you start off with Vickers guns, and those are big belt-fed things. They are frankly a bit of a handful in a tank sponsor. So they are changed, first of all, for Lewis guns, and then later on, Hotchkiss guns. But quite a lot of the real innovation is done by the guys in France, by the tank corps themselves, at places like Burma Corps, which is the big tank corps depot. The tanker droom at Rollencourt became a hive of inventive activity and produced two solutions to major problems, the unditching beam and the fascine. The unditching beam, a heavy timber with chains at either end, sat on rails on top of the tank. Attached to the tracks and set in motion, it acted to lever a bellied out tank out of deep mud. The fascine, a bundle of logs and brushwood constructed by the Chinese labour corps, perched on top of a cab as an aid to trench crossing. You drop it into the trench to get across. That was actually rather useful because the German army, having realised that these things could cross a three metre wide gap, had started to dig their trenches wider than three metres. In the spring of 1918, the Kaiserschlacht, a strong German last-ditch offensive fought to a standstill and then reversed at the Battle of Amiens in August. The tanks, particularly the new Mark V, this one, played quite a significant part. This has a larger engine, it's the 150 horsepower Ricciardo, and it's also got an epicyclic gearbox. What it means is it's not much faster, but it can be driven by one man and it doesn't need to stop in order to turn, so you've got more mobility. There's also slightly thicker armour. Following the Battle of Amiens, with the German army on the retreat, there is a return to mobile warfare, and that is something that a new tank, the Whippet, is very well placed to exploit. The medium Mark A Whippet began arriving in France in December 1917. A major departure from the heavies, it was machine gun armed, powered by two 45 horsepower Tyler engines, and could manage eight miles an hour. The capabilities of the Whippet were well demonstrated by the performance of A344 Musical Box, commanded by Lieutenant Clement Arnold. On the 8th of August, Musical Box assists infantry in taking an artillery battery, then roams around for several hours, shooting the living daylights out of everything. Disperses the large part of an infantry division, transport column, a balloon section, before finally breaking down. The crew are taking POW. They are roughed up, but they quite remarkably survive. The age of the tank as a hard-hitting weapon of battlefield mobility had arrived. The British army weren't the only ones to start thinking about the possibilities of the use of armour on the battlefield. As early as 1903, their Projet Le Vavasseur, the French army, came up with a design for a tracked artillery carrier that looks remarkably like a tank. There were objections from their general staff that it wasn't perceived with, but it does just show the way the thinking was going. By 1915, the French army was facing exactly the same problems as the British, so they too began developing tanks. Two rival designs, the Saint-Chamond and the Schneider CA1, were put into production. The Saint-Chamond design shared quite a few characteristics with the Le Vavasseur. It carried a 75mm gun, had an 80hp motor, and a very similar profile, overhanging the tracks at the front and the rear. A petrol-electric drive gave it a top speed of 12kmh, that's about 7.5mph. On the minor side, it was cumbersome, underpowered, and the projecting front, which housed the 75mm gun, and was supposed to enable it to part wire, meant that it was very prone to get stuck. The Schneider design, which bears a superficial similarity to the Saint-Chamond, but is a little over half the weight, and 6m rather than 9m long, was based on an American halt tractor, with a short-barrelled, blockhouse Schneider 75mm fortification gun, in a barbette on its right-hand side. Again, like the Saint-Chamond, it had a pointed wire-cutter nose, with similar results. Both designs, the Schneider and the Saint-Chamond, were rushed into production in time for the Nivelles Offensive of May 1917, and this was where the newly-appointed Maréchal Robert Nivelles had optimistically said he could throw the Germans off the Chemin des Dames ridge. It was a disaster. The artillery barrage didn't work, and the tanks suffered huge losses from German artillery. Of the two, the Schneider was lighter and more manoeuvrable, and a little bit more effective, but its thunder was to be stolen by a remarkable little vehicle, this one, the Renault FT. Sometimes called the first modern tank, the Renault had a two-man crew, separate engine and crew compartments, and the first fully traversable turret, mounting either a Hotchkiss 8mm machine gun, or the Poteau 37mm cannon. General Estien, the père de chars de combat, the father of the tanks, had envisaged swarms of FT's annihilating the enemy, and with over 3,000 being manufactured in 1918 alone, the effect was just about achieved, especially during the 100 days offensive of August to November. The Renault FT was such an effective vehicle that numbers were actually still in use for the French army in 1940, and even after that, vehicles captured by the Wehrmacht were used in internal security duties. The other major player on the western front, the German army, did somewhat reluctantly develop a tank design. Bermonster, the A7V Sturmpanzerwagen, needed a minimum of It weighs between 23 and 25 tons. It's armed with a mix of machine guns, and around the front end there's a 5.7 centimetre Nordenfelt Maxim gun. Quite a lot of those were captured from either the British or the Russians. But on the downside, it is very unstable, and actually prone to fall over on rough ground, which is, to my way of thinking, not an ideal tank characteristic. They only built 20 of them, and none are identical. This, incidentally, is a replica. If you want to see the real thing, you'll have to go to Australia. That might seem quite odd when you consider the importance the German army placed on the Panzerwaffe during World War II, but the tank is primarily a weapon of attack. And in the First World War, the German army, certainly on the western front, most of the time they're in a defensive posture. I think the attitude in the general staff to the tank is best summed up by von Ludendorff's statement. The tanks won't be much use, but as we built them, we might as well use them. He was more or less correct. Although A7Vs were used with modest success on a number of occasions, the only serious, or the only tank-on-tank engagement of the war happened on the 24th of April 1918 at Villers-Bretonneux, and on that occasion, three A7Vs met three British Mark IVs. One A7V was destroyed, one overturned, and the last one was forced to retreat. The German army also captured, more or less intact, around about 400 British Mark IVs, either at Cambrai or during the Kaiserschlacht offensive of 1918, and these they rearmed, they called them Beuterpanzer, and turned them back against their original owners. The German army actually used far more captured British tanks, and they built their own. Looking at the impact and the design of tanks in the First World War, both the British and the French armies are designing tanks really to achieve one thing, and that is to break the stalemate of trench warfare. But when you take that into account, and also the limitations of the technology of the time, First World War tanks don't bear a huge resemblance to our concept of the modern tank. It also took time and bitter experience to work out how best to use the tank, and to, as the British did at Cambrai, incorporate it into the all-arms concept that would eventually bring victory in 1918. Both armies also eventually developed tanks, the Whippet and the Renault FT, that were more suited to mobile warfare, a nod to the potential for armoured warfare in the way that tanks would be used in the future. After the war, the impetus to develop tanks slowed, and projects like the Mark 8 International, a tank which was to be developed jointly between Britain, France and the United States, were abandoned. The US army more or less halted any tank development or production. The British and French continued, the French under Estienne continuing with variations on the Chars de Combat team, and the British moving forward with the medium Mark C Hornet. Muddled thinking in the interwar period led the British army to develop and then drop the revolutionary experimental mechanised force, and the French to produce some good tanks, but failed to develop the tactics to go with it. The one army that really started to comprehend the potential importance of the tank on the battlefield was the German army, and the Reichs here was forbidden to build tanks under the Treaty of Versailles, but they began covert experiments in armoured warfare, some in cooperation with the Soviet Red Army. By 1933, when German rearmament was underway, this knowledge base was put to use with the creation of the Panzerwaffe, and the tank was to come to maturity on the battlefields of World War II. Thank you for watching, we do hope you enjoyed this video. 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