Jenkins - Famous Tank Battles & Air Combats

In the late 15 th or early 16 th century, Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519) conceived and drew up blueprints for a human powered, armored vehicle. Shaped vaguely like a native North American teepee, the vehicle was to be powered by hand cranks turned by men sitting behind the walls of the machine, which were of armored plate. Light cannons were to be placed on the inside and fired into enemy ranks when the armored plating in front of it was lifted. The motive behind this vehicle was to break up enemy formations and overawe the foe.

Three hundred years later, on the battlefields of the northwestern Europe during World War I, a stalemate had developed between the combatants after initial advances by the Germans into Belgium and France. Grinding into a battle of attrition behind walls of barbed wire, mines, strong-points, and (most obviously) trenches by the winter of 1914-15, World War One became a slaughterhouse of immense proportions. Advances were not measured in miles, as they had been before and as they would come to be in World War II, but in yards, if at all.

Though the trenches of WWI initially were dug with the intention of providing minimum cover until the offensive could be resumed or started and were, in many cases, simply relatively shallow holes in the ground, they soon developed into elaborate fortifications which housed millions of men, provided them with headquarters, communications, hospitals, and homes. The trench warfare of WWI was dominated by one weapon the machine gun.

The machine gun enabled a crew of two men to stand off hundreds at a time. The massed firepower of hundreds of machine guns, all with overlapping fields of fire, enabled armies to withstand the massed attacks of thousands.

Additionally, the development of mass production on a huge scale of artillery meant that not only were attacks sometimes broken up before they could even start, but that the trenches that protected the men of WWI had to be deeper and more elaborate than anyone had thought necessary. Even today, almost exactly one hundred years later, some of the trench lines of WWI can be seen in the pastures and farmland of northwestern Europe.

Life in the trenches was more than miserable, and thousands of men, even those few who were perhaps untouched by bullets or shrapnel, suffered horrors beyond measure in them. Vermin, bad water and food, dirt, disease, lack of light, exposure to all kinds of weather, mud... the list goes on and on.

Artillery barrages could last for days. In the days before the Battle of Passchendaele between the forces of the British Empire (England, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) and Germany, approximately four million shells were fired in the preparatory bombardment of the German lines by the British and Dominion forces alone. Trenches were dug so deeply that very few casualties from direct impact from shells or shrapnel were caused. However, many hundreds of German soldiers were buried alive, and many experienced what came to be known as shell-shock, a physiological or mental (or both) breakdown due to the intense stress of the bombardment. This could last temporarily or permanently. Years after the war, cities, towns, villages, and hospitals all over Europe had legions of shaking, shambling, and incoherent men in them.

For these reasons, and to perhaps achieve the breakthrough that the infantry could not, the British and the French began work on an armored fighting vehicle.

In England, the military/civilian committee that was appointed (1915) to develop the tank was called The Landships Committee , and this is what the first tanks were called landships. Soon, however, out of a desire to disguise the development of the vehicles from German spies, and because workers on the vehicles thought they bore a resemblance to water storage tanks, the vehicles were referred to as tanks. The French had their own version of the committee, and soon both nations had working versions of the weapon.

The first use of tanks in battle took place near the French towns of Flers and Courcelette in Flanders, part of the Somme Offensive of September 1916. The forty nine British tanks, dubbed the Mark I, were rhomboidal, with two sets of treads moving on the outside of a central engine, crew, and weapons area. There were two versions: male and female. The male was heavier by a ton (twenty eight), carried two six-pounder (57mm) cannons and three eight millimeter machine guns. The female carried five machine guns and no cannon. Both had a crew of eight, and could achieve a top speed (on level ground) of four miles per hour. Their armor was a quarter to a half inch thick, and their range was twenty-six miles. The temperatures inside, where the unprotected engine was inches from the crew, could reach over one hundred degrees, and the exhaust sometimes leaked into the crew cabin, leading to sometimes deadly results.

These were the machines that the British hoped would change the war.

The French constructed similar machines, including one that carried a 75mm cannon (this would be the largest fielded on a tank until 1941). However, the French light tanks were of a different design, and anyone viewing the French Renault FT would recognize it as a modern tank, with a rotating turret above a crew cabin and treads below.

On September 15 th , 1916 forty-nine British tanks were supposed to move forward towards German lines. Many believed the move to be premature, and they turned out to be correct. Seventeen broke down almost immediately. Of the remaining thirty-two tanks, only nine made it across the no mans land of shell holes, barbed wire, and other obstacles into the German lines. They could cross over most trenches, and crush barbed wire, but larger shell holes proved a problem, and so did mud, into which the tanks sank.

However, the tanks that worked properly did achieve a localized success and moreover, were able to break into German lines, where they terrified and intimidated the defenders. Though the actual effect of the tanks in the battle was negligible, many saw that they had great potential.

Today, many history buffs believe it is the Battle of Cambrai, not the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, where the tank made its debut in battle. This is not so, but the Battle of Cambrai did see the first massed use of tanks in a coordinated and successful way (the French and British both had used massed tanks earlier in the year, but to little effect), and was the battle in which most people came to realize that the tank was going to remain in the modern military arsenal.