Tanks: An Illustrated History of Their Impact (Weapons and Warfare)

396 Pages·2004·8.44 MB·English

by  Spencer Tucker

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TANKS
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Other Titles in ABC-CLIO’s
WEAPONS AND WARFARE SERIES
Spencer C. Tucker, Series Editor
Air Defense, Shannon A. Brown
Aircraft Carriers, Hedley Wilmott
Ancient Weapons, James T. Chambers
Artillery, Jeff Kinard
Ballistic Missiles, Kev Darling
Battleships, Stanley Sandler
Cruisers and Battle Cruisers, Eric W. Osborne
Destroyers, Eric W. Osborne
Helicopters, Stanley S. McGowen
Machine Guns, James H. Willbanks
Medieval Weapons, James T. Chambers
Military Aircraft in the Jet Age, Justin D. Murphy
Military Aircraft, 1919–1945, Justin D. Murphy
Military Aircraft, Origins to 1918, Justin D. Murphy
Pistols, Jeff Kinard
Rifles, David Westwood
Submarines, Hedley Paul Wilmott
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TANKS
AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THEIR IMPACT
Spencer C. Tucker
Santa Barbara, California Denver, Colorado Oxford, England
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Copyright © 2004 by Spencer C. Tucker
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for
the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tucker, Spencer, 1937–
Tanks : an illustrated history of their impact / Spencer C. Tucker.
p. cm. —(Weapons and warfare series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57607-995-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 1-57607-996-1 (e-book)
1.Tank warfare. 2. Tanks (Military science) I. Title. II. Series.
UE159.T83 2004
623.7’4752—dc22
04 05 06 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an e-book.
Visit abc-clio.com for details.
ABC-CLIO, Inc.
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
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CONTENTS
Introduction to Weapons and Warfare Series,
Spencer C. Tucker vii
Preface ix
chapter one
Introduction of the Tank, 1914–1918 1
chapter two
The Interwar Years, 1918–1939 41
chapter three
World War II, 1939–1945 87
chapter four
Tanks of the Cold War, 1945–1989 137
chapter five
Contemporary Tanks, 1989 to the Present 181
Individual Tank Models 199
Glossary of Terms for Tanks and Their Ordnance 347
References 363
Index 371
v
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INTRODUCTION TO
WEAPONS AND WARFARE
SERIES
Weapons both fascinate and repel. They are used to kill and
maim individuals and to destroy states and societies, and occasion-
ally whole civilizations, and with these the greatest of man’s cultural
and artistic accomplishments. Throughout history tools of war have
been the instruments of conquest, invasion, and enslavement, but
they have also been used to check evil and to maintain peace.
Weapons have evolved over time to become both more lethal and
more complex. For the greater part of man’s existence, combat was
fought at the length of an arm or at such short range as to represent
no real difference; battle was fought within line of sight and seldom
lasted more than the hours of daylight of a single day. Thus individ-
ual weapons that began with the rock and the club proceeded
through the sling and boomerang, bow and arrow, sword and axe, to
gunpowder weapons of the rifle and machine gun of the late nine-
teenth century. Study of the evolution of these weapons tell us
much about human ingenuity, the technology of the time, and the
societies that produced them. The greater part of technological de-
velopment of weaponry has taken part in the last two centuries, es-
pecially the twentieth century. In this process, plowshares have
been beaten into swords; the tank, for example, evolved from the
agricultural caterpillar tractor. Occasionally, the process is reversed
and military technology has impacted society in a positive way. Thus
modern civilian medicine has greatly benefitted from advances to
save soldiers’ lives, and weapons technology has impacted such ar-
eas as civilian transportation or atomic power.
vii
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viii SERIES INTRODUCTION
Weapons can have a profound impact on society. Gunpowder
weapons, for example, were an important factor in ending the era of
the armed knight and the Feudal Age. They installed a kind of
rough democracy on the battlefield, making “all men alike tall.” We
can only wonder what effect weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
might have on our own time and civilization.
This series will trace the evolution of a variety of key weapons sys-
tems, describe the major changes that occurred in each, and illus-
trate and identify the key types. Each volume begins with a descrip-
tion of the particular weapons system and traces its evolution, while
discussing its historical, social, and political contexts. This is fol-
lowed by a heavily illustrated section that is arranged more or less
along chronological lines that provides more precise information on
at least 80 key variants of that particular weapons system. Each vol-
ume contains a glossary of terms, a bibliography of leading books on
that particular subject, and an index.
Individual volumes in the series, each written by a specialist in
that particular area of expertise, are as follows:
Ancient Weapons
Medieval Weapons
Pistols
Rifles
Machine Guns
Artillery
Tanks
Battleships
Cruisers and Battle Cruisers
Aircraft Carriers
Submarines
Military Aircraft, Origins to 1918
Military Aircraft, 1919–1945
Military Aircraft in the Jet Age
Helicopters
Ballistic Missiles
Air Defense
Destroyers
We hope that this series will be of wide interest to specialists, re-
searchers, and even general readers.
Spencer C. Tucker
Series Editor
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PREFACE
And the Lord was with Judah;
and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain;
but could not drive out the inhabitant of the valley,
because they had chariots of iron.
The Book of Judges1:19
Mention the word “tank” and most people think of an awe-
somely powerful, seemingly unstoppable weapon. Tanks (often re-
ferred to loosely as “armor”) may be defined as tracked, armored
fighting vehicles armed with a high-velocity, flat-trajectory main gun
designed for direct-fire engagement. This distinguishes them from
artillery, which primarily employs indirect fire. Conceived in World
War I as a means of ending the bloody stalemate of trench warfare
on the Western Front, tanks were first employed by the British in
September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. Unfortunately for
the British they were used in insufficient numbers and without suf-
ficient thought or training in combined arms operations. The oppor-
tunity, if indeed it had existed, to win the war with this new weapons
system was thus lost. By the end of the war, however, both the
British and French were utilizing tanks in large numbers in their
military operations.
Tanks reached their full potential only in World War II when,
formed in entire divisions with infantry and artillery, they were the
key element of the German blitzkrieg (literally, “lightning war”) and
early military triumphs against Poland and France and the Low
Countries. Tanks were also immensely important on the flat plains
of the Eastern Front. In the Soviet Union, however, the German
blitzkrieg ground to a halt, because of the vast distances involved,
the poor Soviet transportation system, and the breakdown in the su-
ix
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x PREFACE
perb German combined arms fighting combination. The Eastern
Front was nonetheless the scene of the largest armor battles in
world history. Tanks also proved vital in the fluid battles of North
Africa and in the contest for France in 1944. They were less impor-
tant when terrain and circumstance precluded their employment en
masse, as in the mountainous terrain of Italy and in the jungle is-
lands of the Pacific Theater.
Since World War II tanks have been a part of almost every major
armed conflict. They helped secure victory for the State of Israel in
the many Arab-Israeli wars. Indeed, these wars saw some of the
largest tank battles. Tanks fought in the Korean War, in the wars be-
tween Pakistan and India, in the jungles of Vietnam, and in the long
Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s, and they were a vital element of coali-
tion victories in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
There are many images of tanks at war. They include the ponder-
ous, lozenge-shaped British machines of World War I trapped in the
mud of the Western Front, German panzers on the plains of Russia,
and the M4 Sherman medium tanks of Lieutenant General George
S. Patton’s Third Army racing across France. Most recently, there are
the television images shown in real time of U.S. M1A1 and M1A2
Abrams tanks advancing across the flat terrain of southern Iraq.
Tanks are a powerful symbol of military force, but they are also an
important sign of state power and authority. Thus in January 1996
the prime minister of India, P. V. Narasimha Rao, made a statement
about India’s progress as a military power by climbing into his na-
tion’s first indigenous-produced tank, the 56.5-ton Arjun. On occa-
sion the reverse has been true, with the tank overwhelming the indi-
vidual, as when the helmeted and smiling Democratic presidential
candidate Michael Dukakis waved to photographers from an M1A1
Abrams tank. The Republicans seized on what was a rather unfortu-
nate image and incorporated it into their campaign ads as somehow
proof that Dukakis was soft on defense. Pundits cite this negative
image as a factor in the 1988 presidential election.
There are abundant images of tanks as a powerful instrument of
state power. Many of these are fixed in the mind, probably none
more so than that of 5 June 1989, when nineteen-year-old Wang
Weilin (first known to the West as “Tank Man”) stepped in front of
and temporarily blocked with his body the progress of a column of
40-ton People’s Liberation Army NORINCO Type 69/59 main battle
tanks moving down the Avenue of Perpetual Peace in Beijing to
crush the student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. The inci-
dent, its implications, and its use as a powerful symbol are discussed