Development
World War I generated new demands for armoured self-propelled weapons which could navigate any kind of terrain, leading to the development of the tank. The great weakness of the tank's predecessor, the armoured car, was that it required smooth terrain to move upon, and new developments were needed for cross-country capability.[1]:35
The tank was originally designed as
a special weapon to solve an unusual tactical situation: the stalemate of the trenches on the Western Front. "It was a weapon designed for
one simple task: crossing the killing zone between trench lines and breaking
into enemy defenses."[2] The armoured tank was intended to be
able to survive artillery bombardments and machine-gun fire, and pass through barbed wire in a way infantry units could not
hope to, thus allowing the stalemate to be broken.
Few recognized during World War I
that the means for returning mobility and shock action to combat was already
present in a device destined to revolutionize warfare on the ground and in the
air. This was the internal combustion
engine, which had made possible the development of the tank and
eventually would lead to the mechanized forces that were to assume the old
roles of horse cavalry and to loosen the grip of the machine-gun
on the battlefield. With increased firepower and protection, these mechanized
forces would, only some 20 years later, become the armour of World War II. When
self-propelled
artillery, the armoured personnel
carrier, the wheeled cargo vehicle, and supporting aviation—all with adequate communications—were
combined to constitute the modern armoured division, commanders regained the
capability of maneuver.
Numerous concepts of armoured
all-terrain vehicles had been imagined for a long time. With advent of trench warfare in World War I, the Allied French and British developments of the tank were largely
parallel and coincided in time.[3]
Early
concepts
The earliest concepts in recorded
history include Leonardo da Vinci's
late 15th century drawings of what some describe as a "tank"; a
man-powered, wheeled vehicle encased in armor, with cannons all around it.[4] However the human crew would not have
enough power to move it over larger distance, and usage of animals was
problematic in a space so confined.
The Levavasseur project
described a crawler-tracked armoured vehicle equipped with artillery as early
as 1903.[5]:65[6]:101
1904 illustration of H.G. Wells' December 1903 The Land Ironclads,
showing huge ironclad land vessels, equipped with pedrail wheels.
H. G. Wells, in his short story The Land Ironclads,
published in The Strand Magazine
in December 1903, had described the use of large, armoured cross-country
vehicles, armed with cannon and machine-guns, and equipped with pedrail wheels (an invention which he
acknowledged as the source for his inspiration),[8] to break through a system of fortified
trenches, disrupting the defense and clearing the way for an infantry advance:
"They were essentially long, narrow and very strong
steel frameworks carrying the engines, and borne upon eight pairs of big
pedrail wheels, each about ten feet in diameter, each a driving wheel and set
upon long axles free to swivel round a common axis. This arrangement gave them
the maximum of adaptability to the contours of the ground. They crawled level
along the ground with one foot high upon a hillock and another deep in a
depression, and they could hold themselves erect and steady sideways upon even
a steep hillside."[9]
Some eight years later, in 1911, two
practical tank designs were developed independently by the Austrian engineering officer Günther Burstyn and Australian civil engineer Lancelot de Mole, but both were rejected by
governmental administrations.
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