The aim of this book is to present a comprehensive account of the worldwide evolution and employment of tanks from their inception a century ago to this day.
Because of their military importance and general interest much has been written already about tanks, including three books of which I have been the author.1, 2, 3 However, there is much more to be said about them, not only because of the more recent developments or because of tanks’ worldwide proliferation but also because of the misconceptions about their origins and other developments.
In consequence, the present account starts with a reappraisal of what led to the development of tanks and how they came into being during the First World War. By the end of that conflict tanks had gained considerable importance but this was not sustained in its immediate aftermath, and a revival only began when the British Army started in the 1920s to experiment with a more mobile use of tanks. The subsequent rise in the importance of tanks was accompanied by and was partly due to the advances in their design and performance that were achieved in Europe and America before the Second World War. The enhanced capabilities that tanks consequently acquired enabled them to become the core of combined arms, mechanized formations and these provided the most effective way of employing them, which was demonstrated by the German panzer divisions at the outset of the Second World War.
The successes of the panzer divisions were followed by a widespread expansion of the armoured forces, which came to dominate ground warfare and resulted in the large scale production and employment of tanks during the Second World War by the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain as well as Germany.
The present account goes on to describe the development of tanks during the years of Cold War confrontation between the Western countries and the Soviet Union that followed the Second World War, when large numbers of tanks were deployed in Central Europe by the opposing armies and when further intensive development of them took place in what were at the time the five leading tank producing countries, namely the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, France and Germany. Significant developments also took place in a number of other countries, in particular in Switzerland, Sweden and Israel, while others acquired tanks produced elsewhere. Important progress has also been made in the Far East, where Japan, South Korea and China have developed in recent years tanks that in some respects have overtaken those built in the United States and Europe, while India and Pakistan have embarked on the production, respectively, of the latest Russian and Chinese designs.
Tanks produced in the various countries may appear to differ, but much of the technology on which they are based is common to them and the principal aspects of it are summarized in three Appendices. The first deals with the general growth in the gun power of tanks and the attempts to improve on it by resorting to guided missiles, liquid propellants and electromagnetic launchers. The second Appendix describes the universal quest for greater protection, which involves not only the use of different armour materials but also explosive reactive armour and computerized active protection systems. The last Appendix concerns the mobility of tanks and includes, among others, the development of various types of engines as well as the interaction of tanks with the terrain on which they operate.
Although the book covers a wide field it does not claim to be exhaustive. It does not, therefore, attempt to deal with more than the most important or the most interesting of the many tanks that have been built. Similarly, it does not attempt to do more than indicate the principal operations in which tanks have taken part, a detailed description of the operations being beyond the scope of one volume.
Richard Ogorkiewicz