What contributed to the emergence of tanks in World War I
Hundred years ago
Tanks appeared a hundred years ago, during the First World War, confidently occupied their niche in the structure of many armies in the world and remain the main striking force of the ground forces. During this time, the tanks underwent a certain evolution - from bulky and slow-moving "monsters" to maneuverable, well-protected and effective weapons battlefield.
Several generations of tanks have changed. They acquired a certain form and purpose of military equipment. Today the tank is an armored tracked vehicle with a rotating turret, equipped with a cannon and machine guns. There is also a simplified version of the tank - a self-propelled artillery installation with a non-rotating or partially rotating turret.
The first tanks looked completely different, and the tasks assigned to them were somewhat different. In this connection, the evolution of tanks is interesting from the point of view of the development of engineering thought, the technical decisions taken in the process of their improvement, the dead-end and promising development directions. Also of interest story what prompted the creation of the tank, what tasks were put before the tanks and how they were transformed in the process of evolution.
Armored monster
Tanks as a type of weapon appeared during the First World War. This was facilitated by the development at the end of the 19th century of rifled small arms and artillery weapons, which possess a high destructive ability of enemy personnel.
The idea of protecting a warrior on the battlefield has long been vital, and the knight’s armor is a confirmation of this. From the firearms no armor could not save. Instead of individual defense, they began to look for collective defense capable of maneuvering on the battlefield.
Technical progress has created the prerequisites for solving this problem. With the creation of a steam engine and a locomotive, such projects began to appear. One of the first was the draft of a tracked armored train proposed by the Frenchman Buyen in 1874. He proposed to put several wagons connected to each other not on rails, but on a common caterpillar, equip this monster with tools and equip it with a crew of two hundred people. Due to the questionable implementation of the project was rejected. There were a number of similarly dubious projects.
At the beginning of the 20th century, armored trains were created on the basis of a steam locomotive that ensured delivery of manpower to the battlefield with small arms and artillery, with good protection against enemy weapons.
But this type of weapon had a significant drawback. The armored train could only travel on rails and was limited in its maneuverability. The enemy could always foresee ways to neutralize this threat, and where there was no railway, there was no danger of the appearance of a formidable armored train.
Human Defense and the Hetherington Project
The issue of protecting manpower was particularly acute at the height of the First World War, which took on the character of a “trench warfare” (with positional battles, many kilometers of trenches and wire barriers). The living force of the opposing sides suffered colossal losses, it was necessary to protect the soldiers who were attacking the well-prepared defenses of the enemy. The army required a maneuverable vehicle for delivering and protecting manpower and weapons on the battlefield and breaking through enemy defenses.
The idea of creating such a machine began to be implemented in specific projects. The British Army major Hetherington proposed a project to create a technical monster with a height of 14 meters, a mass of 1000 tons, on huge wheels, armed with ship cannons. But the project was abandoned due to the complexity of the technical implementation and vulnerability on the battlefield.
Tank of the inventor Porokhovshchikov
Similar projects began to be offered in Russia. In May, the 1915 of the year in Russia began tests of a prototype of the first tank “Rover” of the inventor Porokhovshchikov. The tank was a 4 ton weight, 3,6 m long, 2,0 m wide and 1,5 m high (without a tower). The supporting structure of the tank was a welded frame with four hollow rotating drums around which one wide rubber track was rewound.
In the stern of the tank housed a gasoline engine power 10 l. with. Through the drive shaft and the mechanical planetary gearbox torque was transmitted to the driving drum. The tension of the caterpillar was carried out with a special drum. On the sides in front of the tank were two wheels, due to which the tank was turning. The wheels were connected to the steering wheel with the help of the system. The tank developed speed along the highway to 25 km / h.
Chassis was wheel-tracked. On the roads, the tank was moving on wheels and the rear drum tracks. When friable soil and overcoming obstacles tank lay on the track and overcame the obstacle.
The hull of the tank was streamlined with significant angles of armor. The armor was a combined multi-layer and had a thickness of 8 mm. It consisted of two layers of elastic and hard metal and special viscous and elastic pads of sea grass and hair, which was not penetrated by machine gun bursts. Chassis defended by bulwarks.
A rotating cylindrical turret with one or two 7,62-mm machine guns was located above the hull. In the middle part of the tank on two adjacent seats were placed two crew members - the driver and the commander-machine-gunner.
According to the test results of the prototype, the Vzadkhod tank showed good acceleration characteristics, high speed, satisfactory maneuverability through obstacles. Due to the wide track, the tank did not sink the bottom and overcame obstacles.
The Military Technical Directorate pointed out a number of project flaws (unreliability, vulnerability and slippage of the tape on the drum, extreme difficulty in turning, low permeability on loose soil, the impossibility of simultaneous firing from a machine gun) and rejected the project.
At the beginning of the 1917, Porokhovshchikov improved the design of the tank, giving it the name "All-Terrain Vehicle-2" and increasing the number of machine guns to four with the possibility of independent targeting and fire on targets. But the fundamental flaws of the project were not eliminated, and it was closed.
The tank "All-terrain vehicle" was tested several months before the tests of the English "Little Willie", which since January 1916, under the brand name MK-1, has been adopted and became the world's first production tank. There is a version that the drawings of the tank "All-terrain vehicle" were offered to the owner of the French automaker Louis Renault. He refused to acquire them, but then he was able to restore them from memory and based on the French tank Renault-17, the most massive tank of the First World War.
"Tsar-tank" by Captain Lebedenko
In January, 1915, the Military Technical Directorate approved Captain Lebedenko’s well-founded project for the development of the Tsar-Tank and allocated funds for the manufacture of a prototype. The tank was like a gunfly magnified several times with two huge 9-meter drive wheels with knitting needles and the height of a man with a steering wheel at the end of the gun carriage. At the top of the gun carriage there were three armored felling, one in the center at a height of 8 meters and two slightly lower on the sides in which the weapons were installed, two guns and machine guns.
The tank should have been serviced by a 15 man. The length of the tank reached 17 m, and the width 12 m, the weight of the order of 60 t. The design speed should have been at the level of 17 km / h. Each wheel was set in motion by its own Maybach gasoline engine with a power of 240 l. with. The main disadvantages of this tank were low permeability due to the high ground pressure and the slight vulnerability of the spokes to the enemy’s artillery.
The made sample of the tank in August 1915 was demonstrated to representatives of the army and the military ministry. The tank began to move steadily, but after passing a few tens of meters, it was stuck in the shallow hole with its rear wheel, and, despite all the efforts, could not move on. After such "tests" the interest in the tank disappeared, it lay in this place for several years and was dismantled for scrap.
In Russia, a number of other tank projects were also proposed that were not brought to production and testing of prototypes.
Colonel Swinton's Project
More successful was the project of Colonel Swinton of the English Army, who regularly prepared reports from the war on the Western Front from the beginning of the war and saw the murderous power of machine-gun fire. He proposed to use for the "breach" of the enemy's defense used in the British army as tractors tracked tractors, protecting them with armor.
His proposal was to create an armored vehicle, which was supposed to be self-propelled, have armor that protects against enemy bullets, and weapons that could suppress enemy machine guns. The machine was supposed to move around the battlefield, overcome trenches and escarpments, and tear off wire barriers.
Swinton presented his idea to the Minister of the Navy in February 1915 fleet Churchill, who supported the idea and created a special Committee on land ships, which urgently began the development of a "land battleship." The committee formulated the requirements for the future machine. It should have bulletproof armor, it must overcome and force obstacles and funnels up to 2 m deep and up to 3,7 m in diameter, 1,2 m wide ditches, break through wire fences, have a speed of at least 4 km / h, a reserve fuel for 6 hours and have a gun and two machine guns as weapons.
The emergence of the internal combustion engine and the creation of "self-propelled carts", the first cars contributed to the creation of a new type of weapon. But the use of existing wheeled armored vehicles as the base of the future tank did not ensure the fulfillment of the task due to their poor maneuverability and the impossibility of overcoming obstacles on the battlefield.
The tank began to be designed by naval officers as a naval cruiser, using the American caterpillar Caterpillar tracked tractor as a basis and using waste nodes and systems of English steam tractors in the design.
For the tank was chosen tracked version of the chassis. It turned out to be so successful that it has survived until today, and attempts to switch to other types of propulsion, for example, to a wheel, have not yet found wide application.
Land battleship
In the “Little Willie” tank under development, the undercarriage and power unit were used from the tractor, to turn the steering wheels on the rear of the truck, like a steering wheel on a ship. The armored hull was boxed with vertical armor. It housed a rotating round turret with an 40-mm cannon, the control compartment was in front, the combat compartment in the center, and the power one with a gasoline engine of 105 power. with. aft. The tower was then removed and replaced with sponsons along the sides of the tank, since it was designed by naval officers and saw in it a “land armadillo”.
Tests of the prototype tank showed that with the length of the tank 8 m and weight 14 t he has poor maneuverability and had to completely redo it. The military demanded that the tank be able to force a ditch with a width of 2,44 m and a wall with a height of 1,37 m, which the chassis did not suit the tractor for such requirements. A new original caterpillar was developed for the tank, covering the entire hull of the tank, and from that time began the history of the “diamond-shaped” British tanks, the first of which was the Big Willie, or Mk1. The tanks of this series were divided into "males" and "females". "Males" had two 57-mm guns and three machine guns, "females" only five machine guns.
"Big Willy"
With the advent of the tank Mk.I connected and the name of this machine - "tank". In English, the word means "tank capacity". The incident is that one of the first batches of tanks was sent to the front in Russia, and for reasons of secrecy they wrote "tank" and in Russian "tank", referring to the self-propelled tank, tank, for water. So the word stuck, but the Germans basically call the tank “ranzerkampfwagen” - an armored fighting car.
The tank was a huge hulking structure on diamond-shaped tracks, covering the entire hull of the tank, so that guns and machine guns could shoot forward and to the side. Guns and machine guns mounted in side ledges - sponsons stuck out of the tank in all directions. The tank was weighing 28 t, a long 8 m and a height of 2,5 m, could move over rough terrain at a speed of 4,5 km / h and along the 6,4 highway km / h. So in England began the development of a line of "heavy" according to the criteria of that time and hulking tanks to ensure the infantry to break through the well-prepared defenses of the enemy.
There was no turret on the tank, as it was believed that it would make the tank too noticeable.
Structurally, armor plates up to 10 mm thick were fastened to the frame from the corners and flat steel with rivets, providing anti-bullet protection. On the case were mounted leading and supporting wheels and side gearboxes. Each caterpillar was 520 mm wide and consisted of flat tracks 90. The specific pressure of the tank on the ground reached 2 kg / cm, which restricted permeability, especially on damp and swampy soil, and the tanks often buried in the ground and sat on the bottom of the bottom.
Inside the tank resembled the engine room of a small ship. Most of it was occupied by the Daimler gasoline engine with 105l.s power, transmission and fuel tanks. Behind the tank through the hinge was mounted trolley with swivel wheels.
The crew consisted of eight people: the commander, the driver, two mechanics and four gunners or machine gunners.
There was no depreciation of the undercarriage of the tank and it shook violently when moving. Inside the hull, the temperature sometimes reached 60 °, powder fumes, gasoline vapors and exhaust fumes accumulated, which greatly poisoned the crew and brought it to fainting.
Tank control also required considerable effort. The driver and the tank commander, who was responsible for the brakes of the caterpillars of the right and left sides, as well as two transmissions working on the onboard gearboxes took part in the movement control. The driver gave them commands by voice or gestures. The rotation was carried out by braking one of the tracks and shifting the gearbox. To turn with a large radius, the cart with the wheels at the back of the tank was turned using a special cable, which was wound by hand on the drum inside the tank.
The observation slits were covered with glass, which were often broken, and wounded the tankmen’s eyes. Special glasses did not help much either - steel plates with many holes and chain mail masks.
The problem of communication was solved in a very original way; in each tank there was a cage with postal pigeons.
Improvement path
During the war, the tank improved. There were models Mk.II and Mk.III, and then more powerful Mk.IV and Mk.V. The latest model, produced from the 1918 of the year, was seriously improved, it was equipped with a special tank engine “Ricardo” with a capacity of 150 l. with., a planetary gearbox, removed the side gearboxes and a trolley with swivel wheels, which made it possible to control the movement of the tank by one person. They also improved the cabin of the commander and installed one machine gun in the back.
The tanks received their first baptism of fire in France at the Battle of the Somme in September 1915. 49 tanks went into an attack on the German positions, plunging the Germans into a panic, but because of the imperfection of the tanks, they returned from the battle of all 18 vehicles. The rest are out of order due to breakdowns or stuck on the battlefield.
The use of tanks on the battlefield has shown that they are not only reliable protection of crew members, but also an effective means of attacking the enemy. The Germans appreciated this and soon prepared their response to the British.
To be continued ...
- Yuri Apukhtin
- fishki.net, images / tank / pervii_tanki
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