Why tanks were invented

It surprised the enemy and made good progress, but most of the gains were lost to enemy counterattacks in early December. Better tactics for coordinating the use of tanks, infantry, artillery, and aircraft marked the Allied offensives of More tanks were also available, with British and French forces using hundreds in summer attacks at Le Hamel and Soissons.

Concentrated artillery fire knocked out many of them by the third and fourth day of the battle, and they were used intermittently during the remaining battles of the Hundred Days campaign. Had the war continued into , the Allies planned to launch a massive armada of several thousand tanks to breach the enemy lines. The tank was not decisive during the war, but it added an important weapon to the Allied arsenal, especially when used in a combined-arms role with artillery, infantry, machine-guns, mortars, and tactical air power.

Canada and the First World War. Strength in Defence The riddle of the trenches was to find a way to overcome the power of the defender. The defender had many advantages: Deep trenches and dug-outs protected against artillery; Barbed wire slowed or stopped infantry advances; Machine-gunners and riflemen protected the front lines; Mortars and artillery provided support to the front line infantry with firepower from the rear; Reinforcements of troops were available to blunt attacks or throw back Allied troops with rapid counterattacks.

Both sides dug formidable trench systems, which could be defended by a relatively small number of soldiers with rifles and machine guns. An enemy trench system could only be captured by advancing infantry at great cost. Journalist and former soldier Ernest Swinton saw the stalemate at first hand in fall and tried to come up with ways around it. Tied up with the stalemate was the lack of mobility, and with their armored bodies, tanks promised to provide battlefield mobility.

Developers hoped their caterpillar tracks would help the vehicles maneuver across uneven terrain, but in reality the top speed of the early tanks -- just 4 miles per hour -- was rarely attained. What tanks did provide was a degree of mobile firepower. World War I challenged its participants to develop new technologies in an effort to win. Switching to the use of caterpillar tracks offered a way round this problem.

Swinton, made a suggestion to General Headquarters. After receiving the backing of Winston Churchill , the First Lord of the Admiralty, a prototype was quickly developed after Churchill warned Asquith that the Germans might introduce something similar any moment.

Churchill established the Landships Committee in early , where a requirement was formulated for an armoured vehicle capable of a speed of 4mph to match infantry, of climbing a 1. The military combined with engineers and industrialists including Fosters of Lincoln. A rhomboid shape was chosen to enhance climbing capacity and gap clearance, with guns on the side. In February recruitment began for men to crew these new weapons.

Secrecy was paramount and the new recruits to the so-called Heavy Section of the Machine Gun Corps had no clue what they were letting themselves in for except that it would be dangerous. The first 50 were delivered to France on 30 August , comprising of varying amounts of guns. The tanks had a crew of 8, half of which focused on steering and the gears. The effectiveness of the tanks at their first appearance was mixed.

Of the 32 tanks ready for action on 15 September , only 9 were able to reach the enemy lines and engage in actual combat. Many broke down as they were mechanically unreliable and were abandoned. Although lessons could quickly be learned from their first deployment, the French Army felt the British had sacrificed the secrecy of the weapon, and used it in numbers too small to be decisive.

However, the army still lacked officers who understood how best to employ the tanks and they failed to impress during Arras, Messines and Passchendaele. It was not until the Battle of Cambrai in November that the tanks were really able to show what they could do, proving their effectiveness as crossing barbed wire defences when over tanks penetrated almost 6 miles on a 7-mile wide front.

Other countries such as France had also ramped up their tank development, with the French creating the Renault FT light tank — the first to use a fully rotating main armament turret on top and the basis of tank design ever since.