Evolution and prospects of tanks always arouse great interest among both specialists and amateurs.
One hundred years ago
Tanks appeared a hundred years ago, in the First World War, confidently occupied their niche in the structure of many armies of the world and remain the main striking force of the ground forces. During this time, tanks have gone through a certain evolution - from bulky and slow-moving "monsters" to maneuverable, well-protected and effective battlefield weapons.
Several generations of tanks have already changed. They acquired a definite form and purpose of military equipment. Today, a 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 unit with a non-rotating or partially rotating turret.
The first tanks looked completely different, and the tasks before them were somewhat different. In this regard, the evolution of tanks is interesting from the point of view of the development of engineering thought, the adopted technical solutions in the process of their improvement, dead-end and promising areas of development. Of interest is also the history of what prompted the creation of the tank, what tasks were set for 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 have a high lethality of enemy manpower.
The idea of protecting a warrior on the battlefield has been hovering for a long time, and knightly armor is a confirmation of this. No armor could save from firearms. Instead of individual protection, they began to look for collective protection capable of maneuvering on the battlefield.
Technological progress has created the prerequisites for solving this problem. With the creation of the steam engine and steam locomotive, such projects began to appear. One of the first was the project 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 track, equip this monster with guns and provide a crew of two hundred people. Due to the doubtful implementation of the project, the project was rejected. There were also a number of similarly dubious projects.
At the beginning of the 20th century, armored trains were created on the basis of the steam locomotive, providing the delivery of manpower with small arms and artillery to the battlefield, while with good protection from enemy weapons.
But this type of weapon had a significant drawback. The armored train could only move on railway rails and was limited in its maneuverability. The enemy could always foresee in advance ways to neutralize this threat, and where there was no railroad, there was no danger of a formidable armored train appearing.
Manpower Protection and Project Hetherington
The issue of protecting manpower became especially acute at the height of the First World War, which took on the character of a "trench war" (with positional battles, many kilometers of trenches and barbed wire). The manpower of the opposing sides suffered colossal losses, it was necessary to have a means of protecting the soldiers going into the attack on the well-prepared enemy defenses. The army needed a maneuverable means of delivering and protecting manpower and weapons on the battlefield and breaking through the enemy's defenses.
The idea of creating such a machine began to be implemented in specific projects. Major of the British Army Hetherington proposed a project to create a technical monster 14 meters high, weighing 1000 tons, on huge wheels, armed with naval guns. 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 have begun to be offered in Russia as well. In May 1915, Russia began testing a prototype of the first All-terrain vehicle, inventor Porokhovshchikov. The tank was 4 tons in weight, 3.6 m long, 2.0 m wide and 1.5 m high (without the turret). The supporting structure of the tank was a welded frame with four hollow rotating drums, around which one wide rubber track was rewound.
A 10-liter gasoline engine was housed in the rear of the tank. with. Torque was transmitted to the drive drum through a cardan shaft and a mechanical planetary gearbox. The caterpillar was tensioned by a special drum. On the sides in front of the tank there were two wheels, due to which the tank turned. The wheels were connected to the steering wheel using a linkage system. The tank developed a highway speed of up to 25 km / h.
The chassis was wheeled and tracked. On the roads, the tank moved on wheels and a rear drum of a caterpillar. With loose soil and overcoming obstacles, the tank lay down on the track and overcame the obstacle.
The body of the tank was streamlined with significant angles of inclination of the armor. The armor was combined multilayer and had a thickness of 8 mm. It consisted of two layers of elastic and rigid metal and special viscous and elastic seals of sea grass and hair, which could not be penetrated by machine-gun bursts. The chassis was protected by bulwarks.
Above the hull was a rotating cylindrical turret with one or two 7.62 mm machine guns. In the middle of the tank, on two adjacent seats, there were two crew members - the driver and the machine-gunner commander.
According to the test results of the prototype, the tank "All-terrain vehicle" showed good acceleration characteristics, high speed, satisfactory passability through obstacles. Due to the wide track, the tank did not sink to the bottom and overcame obstacles.
The Military-Technical Directorate pointed out a number of shortcomings of the project (unreliability, vulnerability and slipping of the tape along the drum, extreme difficulty in turns, low cross-country ability on loose soil, the impossibility of simultaneous firing from machine guns) and rejected the project.
At the beginning of 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 guidance and fire at targets. But the fundamental flaws of the project were not eliminated, and it was closed.
Tank "All-terrain vehicle" was tested a few months before the tests of the English "Little Willie", which since January 1916 under the brand name MK-1 was adopted and became the world's first serial tank. There is a version that the blueprints of the All-Terrain vehicle were offered to the owner of the French car manufacturer Louis Renault. He refused to purchase them, but then he was able to restore them from memory and based on the French Renault-17 tank, 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-grounded project for the development of the Tsar Tank and allocated funds for the production of a prototype. The tank was like a gun carriage enlarged several times with two huge 9-meter drive wheels with spokes and a man-sized steering wheel at the end of the carriage. At the top of the carriage were three armored wheelhouses, one in the center at a height of 8 meters and two slightly lower on the sides, in which weapons, two guns and machine guns were installed.
The tank was supposed to be serviced by 15 people. The length of the tank reached 17 m, and the width was 12 m, the weight was about 60 tons. The design speed was supposed to be at the level of 17 km / h. Each wheel was driven by its own 240 HP Maybach German gasoline engine. with. The main disadvantages of this tank were low maneuverability due to high ground pressure and easy vulnerability of the spokes from enemy artillery.
The manufactured sample of the tank in August 1915 was demonstrated to representatives of the army and the Ministry of War. The tank began to move confidently, but after walking several tens of meters, the rear wheel got stuck in a shallow hole, and, despite all efforts, could not move on. After such "tests" interest in the tank disappeared, it lay in this place for several years and was dismantled for scrap.
In Russia, a number of tank projects were also proposed that had not been brought to the production and testing of prototypes.
Colonel Swinton's project
More successful was the project of Colonel Swinton of the British Army, who regularly prepared reports on combat operations on the Western Front since the beginning of the war and saw the deadly power of machine-gun fire. He suggested using tracked tractors used in the British army as tractors to "break through" the enemy's defenses, 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 capable of suppressing enemy machine guns. The car had to move around the battlefield, overcome trenches and escarpments and break wire barriers.
Swinton in February 1915 presented his idea to the Minister of the Navy of England 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 car. It had to have bulletproof armor, it must overcome and force obstacles and craters up to 2 m deep and up to 3, 7 m in diameter, ditches 1, 2 m wide, break through wire barriers, have a speed of at least 4 km / h, a reserve fuel for 6 hours of travel and have a cannon and two machine guns as weapons.
The advent 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 already existing wheeled armored vehicles as a base for the future tank did not ensure the fulfillment of the task at hand due to their poor maneuverability and the inability to overcome obstacles on the battlefield.
The tank began to be designed by naval officers as a naval cruiser, taking as a basis the American caterpillar tractor "Caterpillar" and using waste components and systems of British steam tractors in the design.
The tracked version of the chassis was chosen for the tank. It turned out to be so successful that it has survived to this day, and attempts to switch to other types of propulsion, for example, to wheeled, have not yet found widespread use.
Land battleship
In the "Little Willie" tank under development, the chassis and power unit were used from a tractor; for turning, the steering wheels were placed on the back of the trolley, like a steering wheel on a ship. The armored hull was box-shaped with vertical armor. It housed a rotating round turret with a 40-mm cannon, the control compartment was in front, the fighting compartment in the center, the power compartment with a 105 hp gasoline engine. with. aft. The tower was then removed and replaced with sponsons on the sides of the tank, since it was designed by naval officers and saw it as a "land battleship".
Tests of a prototype tank showed that with a tank length of 8 m and a weight of 14 tons, it has unsatisfactory maneuverability and had to be completely redone. The military demanded that the tank be able to cross a ditch 2.44 m wide and a wall 1.37 m high, the chassis from a tractor was not suitable for such requirements. A new original track was developed for the tank, covering the entire hull of the tank, and from that time the history of "diamond-shaped" British tanks began, the first of which was the "Big Willie" or Mk1 tank. Tanks of this series were divided into "males" and "females". "Males" had two 57-mm cannons and three machine guns, "females" only five machine guns.
Big Willie
The name of this vehicle - "tank" is also connected with the appearance of the Mk. I tank. In English, this word means "tank, capacity". The incident is that one of the first batches of tanks were sent to the front in Russia, and for reasons of secrecy they wrote “tank” and in Russian “tank”, meaning a self-propelled tank, a tank for water. So this word stuck, but the Germans basically call the tank "panzerkampfwagen" - an armored combat car.
The tank was a huge clumsy structure on diamond-shaped tracks, covering the entire body of the tank, so that cannons and machine guns could shoot forward and to the sides. Cannons and machine guns protruded from the tank in all directions, installed in the side protrusions - sponsons. The tank weighed 28 tons, 8 m long and 2.5 m high, could move over rough terrain at a speed of 4.5 km / h and along the highway 6.4 km / h. So in England began the development of a line of "heavy" according to the criteria of that time and sluggish tanks to ensure the infantry break through the well-prepared enemy defenses.
There was no turret on the tank, as it was believed that it would make the tank too visible.
Structurally, armor plates up to 10 mm thick were riveted to the frame made of corners and strip steel, providing bulletproof protection. The drive and support wheels and final drives were attached to the body. Each track was 520 mm wide and consisted of 90 flat tracks. The specific pressure of the tank on the ground reached 2 kg / cm, which limited its cross-country ability, especially on wet and swampy soil, and tanks often buried themselves in the ground and sat down on the bottom of the ground.
Inside, the tank resembled the engine room of a small ship. The major part was occupied by the Daimler 105hp gasoline engine, transmission and fuel tanks. A cart with swivel wheels was attached to the rear of the tank through a hinge.
The tank's crew consisted of eight people: a commander, a driver, two mechanics and four gunners or machine gunners.
There was no amortization of the tank's undercarriage and it shook violently during movement. Inside the hull, the temperature sometimes reached 60 °, powder fumes, gasoline vapors and exhaust gases accumulated, which greatly poisoned the crew and brought it to fainting.
Controlling the tank also required considerable effort. The driver and commander of the tank, who was responsible for the brakes of the tracks of the right and left sides, as well as two transmission operators who worked on the onboard gearboxes, took part in traffic control. The driver gave them commands by voice or gestures. The turn was carried out by braking one of the tracks and shifting the gearbox. To turn with a large radius, a cart with wheels at the back of the tank was turned using a special cable, which was manually wound onto a drum inside the tank.
For observation, viewing slits covered with glass were used, which often broke and wounded the eyes of the tankers. Special glasses were not particularly helpful - steel plates with many holes and chain mail masks.
The communication problem was solved in a very original way, in each tank there was a cage with carrier pigeons.
The path of improvement
The tank was improved throughout the war. The Mk. II and Mk. III models appeared, followed by the more powerful Mk. IV and Mk. V. The last model, produced since 1918, was seriously improved, a special tank engine "Ricardo" with a capacity of 150 hp was installed on it. sec., a planetary gearbox, the onboard gearboxes and a cart with swivel wheels were removed, which made it possible to control the movement of the tank by one person. The commander's cabin was also improved and one machine gun was installed in the back.
The tanks received their first baptism of fire in France during the Battle of the Somme in September 1915. 49 tanks attacked the German positions, plunging the Germans into panic, but due to the imperfection of the tanks, only 18 vehicles returned from the battle. The rest are out of order due to breakdowns or stuck on the battlefield.
The use of tanks on the battlefield showed that they are not only reliable protection for crew members, but also an effective means of striking the enemy. The Germans appreciated this and soon prepared their response to the British.
