Tank

Etymology

The word tank was first applied to British landships in 1915 as a security measure to conceal their purpose before they entered service. On 24 December 1915, an Inter-Departmental Conference discussed plans for what were called Caterpillar Machine Gun Destroyers or Land Cruisers. Albert Gerald Stern, Secretary to the Landship Committee, later wrote that at that meeting he incorrectly added that the name had been adopted by all countries. Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Swinton, secretary to the meeting, was instructed to find a non-committal word for his report; that evening he discussed it with Lt-Col Walter Dally Jones, and they chose tank.

In the draft report of the conference, the word was used in its new sense for the first time. Swinton's Notes on the Employment of Tanks, using the word throughout, was published in January 1916. In July 1918, Popular Science Monthly reported that the name problem arose when the first two vehicles were shipped to France in August 1916, but by then tank had been in use for eight months; the tanks were labelled With Care to Petrograd, and the belief was encouraged that they were a type of snowplough.

Development overview

The modern tank results from a century of development from the first primitive armoured vehicles, driven by improvements such as the internal combustion engine. Tanks in World War I were developed separately by Great Britain and France to break the deadlock of trench warfare on the Western Front. The first British prototype, Little Willie, was built at William Foster & Co. in Lincoln, England in 1915, with Major Walter Gordon Wilson designing the gearbox and hull and William Tritton designing the track plates.

This led to the Mark I tank, first used in combat in September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. The name tank was adopted early as a security measure. Interwar tanks evolved into larger, more powerful World War II designs. The Soviet Union launched the first mass tank and air attack at Khalkhin Gol in August 1939 and later developed the T-34, a predecessor of the main battle tank.

Germany then began blitzkrieg campaigns using massed tanks with motorised infantry, artillery and air power. The introduction of high-explosive anti-tank warheads in World War II led to lightweight infantry-carried weapons like the Panzerfaust. Cold War tanks were designed with these in mind, leading to improved armour types in the 1960s, especially composite armour, and advances in engines, transmissions, suspensions, shell design and aiming technology.

History

The tank is the 20th-century realisation of an ancient concept: providing troops with mobile protection and firepower. The internal combustion engine, armour plate, and continuous track were key innovations. In 119 BC during the Han–Xiongnu War, the Han general Wei Qing used armoured heavy wagons known as Wu Gang Wagon in ring formations to protect archers and crossbowmen from Xiongnu cavalry charges, forcing a stalemate before a counteroffensive.

In the 15th century, Jan Žižka built armoured wagons called Wagenburg containing cannons, used effectively in Hussite wars. Leonardo da Vinci's late-15th-century drawings of armoured vehicles were never built and would have been impractical, being human-powered and wheeled. Continuous track arose from attempts to improve wheeled vehicle mobility by spreading weight and increasing traction; experiments date to the 17th century, with recognisable forms by the late 19th.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth patented a machine in 1770 that should carry and lay down its own road, but his own account describes a horse-drawn carriage with retractable legs, not a caterpillar track. Armoured trains appeared in the mid-19th century, and various armoured steam and petrol-engined vehicles were also proposed.