A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle intended as a primary offensive weapon in front-line ground combat. Tank designs are a balance of heavy firepower, strong armour, and battlefield mobility provided by tracks and a powerful engine; their main armament is often mounted within a turret. They are a mainstay of modern 20th and 21st century ground forces and a key part of combined arms combat.
Modern tanks are versatile mobile land weapons platforms whose main armament is a large-calibre tank gun mounted in a rotating gun turret, supplemented by machine guns or other ranged weapons such as anti-tank guided missiles or rocket launchers. They have heavy vehicle armour which provides protection for the crew, the vehicle's munition storage, fuel tank and propulsion systems. The use of tracks rather than wheels provides improved operational mobility which allows the tank to overcome rugged terrain and adverse conditions such as mud and ice/snow better than wheeled vehicles, and thus be more flexibly positioned at advantageous locations on the battlefield. These features enable the tank to perform in a variety of intense combat situations, simultaneously both offensively (with direct fire from their powerful main gun) and defensively (as fire support and defilade for friendly troops due to the near invulnerability to common infantry small arms and good resistance against heavier weapons, although anti-tank weapons used in 2022, some of them man-portable, have demonstrated the ability to destroy older generations of tanks with single shots), all while maintaining the mobility needed to exploit changing tactical situations.von Senger and Etterlin (1960), The World's armoured Fighting Vehicles, p. 9. Fully integrating tanks into modern military forces spawned a new era of combat called armoured warfare.
Until the invention of the main battle tank, tanks were typically categorized either by weight class (ultralight, light, medium, heavy or super-heavy tanks) or doctrinal purpose (breakthrough, cavalry, infantry, cruiser, antinfantry, antitank, operational, qualitative reinforcement, combined arms, special operations, or reconnaissance tanks). Some are larger and more thickly armoured and with large guns, while others are smaller, lightly armoured, and equipped with a smaller calibre and lighter gun. These smaller tanks move over terrain with speed and agility and can perform a reconnaissance role in addition to engaging hostile targets. The smaller, faster tank would not normally engage in battle with a larger, heavily armoured tank, except during a surprise flanking manoeuvre.
Etymology The word tank was first applied in a military context to British "landships" in 1915 to keep their nature secret before they entered service.
Origins On 24 December 1915, a meeting took place at the Inter-Departmental Conference (including representatives of the Director of Naval Construction's Committee, the Admiralty, the Ministry of Munitions, and the War Office). Its purpose was to discuss the progress of the plans for what were described as "Caterpillar Machine Gun Destroyers or Land Cruisers." In his autobiography, Albert Gerald Stern (Secretary to the Landship Committee, later head of the Mechanical Warfare Supply Department) says that at that meeting:
He incorrectly added, "and the name has now been adopted by all countries in the world."Tanks 1914–1918: The Log Book of a Pioneer. Hodder & Stoughton, 1919, p. 39
Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Swinton, who was secretary to the meeting, says that he was instructed to find a non-committal word when writing his report of the proceedings. In the evening he discussed it with a fellow officer, Lt-Col Walter Dally Jones, and they chose the word "tank". "That night, in the draft report of the conference, the word 'tank' was employed in its new sense for the first time."Eye-Witness, And the Origin of the Tanks; Major-General Sir Ernest D. Swinton; Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1933, p. 161 Swinton's Notes on the Employment of Tanks, in which he uses the word throughout, was published in January 1916.
In July 1918, Popular Science Monthly reported:
(*F.J. Gardiner, F.R.Hist.S.)
D'Eyncourt's account differs from Swinton's and Tritton's:
This appears to be an imperfect recollection. He says that the name problem arose "when we shipped the first two vehicles to France the following year" (August 1916), but by that time the name "tank" had been in use for eight months. The tanks were labelled "With Care to Petrograd," but the belief was encouraged that they were a type of snowplough.
International
The term "tank" is used throughout the English-speaking world, but other countries use different terminology. In France, the second country to use tanks in battle, the word or was adopted initially, but was then, largely at the insistence of Colonel J.B.E. Estienne, rejected in favour of ("assault vehicle") or simply ("vehicle"). During World War I, German sources tended to refer to British tanks as Die Tankschlacht bei Cambrai: Dr. Georg Strutz, pub 1929. and to their own as .Die deutschen Kampfwagen im Weltkriege; Ernst Volckheim, 1937. Later, tanks became referred to as "" (), a shortened form of the full term "", literally "armoured fighting vehicle". In Arabic, tanks are called . The same word is used in Turoyo (a western dialect of Aramaic), but Swadaya, an eastern dialect, uses instead. In Italian, a tank is a "" (). Norway uses the term and Sweden the similar (, also used for chariots), whereas Denmark uses (). Finland uses (armoured wagon), although is also used colloquially. The Polish name , derived from verb ("to crawl"), is used, depicting the vehicle's movement and its speed. In Hungarian, the tank is called (combat wagon), albeit is also common. In Japanese, the term (, lit. "battle vehicle") is taken from Chinese and used, and this term is likewise borrowed into Korean as (/); more recent Chinese literature uses the English-derived (tank) as opposed to (battle vehicle) used in earlier days.
Development overview The modern tank is the result of a century of development from the first primitive armoured vehicles, due to improvements in technology such as the internal combustion engine, which allowed the rapid movement of heavy armoured vehicles. As a result of these advances, tanks underwent tremendous shifts in capability in the years since their first appearance. Tanks in World War I were developed separately and simultaneously by Great Britain and France as a means to break the deadlock of trench warfare on the Western Front. The first British prototype, nicknamed Little Willie, was constructed at William Foster & Co. in Lincoln, England in 1915, with leading roles played by Major Walter Gordon Wilson who designed the gearbox and hull, and by William Tritton of William Foster and Co., who designed the track plates. This was a prototype of a new design that would become the British Army's Mark I tank, the first tank used in combat in September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. The name "tank" was adopted by the British during the early stages of their development, as a security measure to conceal their purpose (see etymology). While the British and French built thousands of tanks in World War I, Germany was unconvinced of the tank's potential, and did not have enough resources, thus it built only twenty.
Tanks of the interwar period evolved into the much larger and more powerful designs of World War II. Important new concepts of armoured warfare were developed; the Soviet Union launched the first mass tank/air attack at Khalkhin Gol (Nomonhan) in August 1939 against the Japanese forces based there,Coox (1985), p. 579, 590, 663 and later developed the T-34, one of the predecessors of the main battle tank. Less than two weeks later, Germany began their large-scale armoured campaigns that would become known as blitzkrieg ("lightning war") – massed concentrations of tanks combined with motorised and mechanised infantry, artillery and air power designed to break through the enemy front and collapse enemy resistance.
The widespread introduction of high-explosive anti-tank warheads during the second half of World War II led to lightweight infantry-carried anti-tank weapons such as the Panzerfaust, which could destroy some types of tanks. Tanks in the Cold War were designed with these weapons in mind, and led to greatly improved armour types during the 1960s, especially composite armour. Improved engines, transmissions and suspensions allowed tanks of this period to grow larger. Aspects of gun technology changed significantly as well, with advances in shell design and aiming technology.
During the Cold War, the main battle tank concept arose and became a key component of modern armies. In the 21st century, with the increasing role of asymmetrical warfare and the end of the Cold War, that also contributed to the increase of cost-effective anti-tank rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) worldwide and its successors, the ability of tanks to operate independently has declined. Modern tanks are more frequently organized into combined arms units which involve the support of infantry, who may accompany the tanks in infantry fighting vehicles, and supported by reconnaissance or ground-attack aircraft.
History
20th-century Conceptions The tank is the 20th-century realisation of an ancient concept: that of providing troops with mobile protection and firepower. The internal combustion engine, armour plate, and continuous track were key innovations leading to the invention of the modern tank.
During the 119 BC Battle of Mobei of the Han–Xiongnu War, the Han general Wei Qing led his army through a fatiguing expeditionary march across the Gobi desert only to find Yizhixie chanyu's main force waiting to encircle them on the other side. Using armoured heavy wagons known as "Wu Gang Wagon" (Chinese: 武剛車) in ring formations that provided Chinese archers, crossbowmen and infantry protection from the Xiongnu's powerful cavalry charges, and allowed Han troops to utilise their ranged weapons' advantages of precision. This forced a stalemate and allowed time for his troops to recover strength, before using the cover of a sandstorm to launch a counteroffensive which overran the nomads.
In the 15th century, Jan Žižka built armoured wagons known as Wagenburg containing cannons and used them effectively in several battles during the Hussite-wars.
While some sources claim or imply that Leonardo da Vinci invented the tank, his late-15th-century drawings of armoured vehicles were never built and would have been impractical. These human-powered, wheeled vehicles with cannons would have been difficult for humans to move by themselves and use of animals inside the their hulls would have been problematic.
Continuous track, rather than conventional wheels, arose from attempts to improve the mobility of wheeled vehicles by spreading their weight, reducing ground pressure, and increasing their traction. Experiments can be traced back as far as the 17th century, and by the late nineteenth they existed in various recognisable and practical forms in several countries.
It is frequently claimed that Richard Lovell Edgeworth created a caterpillar track. It is true that in 1770 he patented a "machine, that should carry and lay down its own road", but this was Edgeworth's choice of words. His own account in his autobiography is of a horse-drawn wooden carriage on eight retractable legs, capable of lifting itself over high walls. The description bears no similarity to a caterpillar track.Edgeworth, R. & E. Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 1820, pp. 164–66 Armoured trains appeared in the mid-19th century, and various armoured steam and petrol-engined vehicles were also proposed.