Everyone who entered the dark metal box for the first time was sure to hit his head on the ceiling. It was then that the tightness in the tanks became the talk of the town, but here everything was new. Even this kind of "battle" baptism, which did not pass not a single infantryman, sapper, signalman sent for retraining. Exactly 100 years ago, at the Battle of the Somme, tanks first crept through craters and trenches. Thus a new type of war was born.
A tank is an armored vehicle with weapons, and by the first quarter of the 20th century, when the tank was born, there was nothing fundamentally innovative about this vehicle. The advantages of having a well-defended combat unit on the battlefield, be it the Roman "turtle" or the armored heavy cavalry of the medieval West, have been appreciated since pre-industrial times. The first car, the Cugno steam wagon, was built before the French Revolution. So, theoretically, a prototype of the tank could participate in the Napoleonic wars. However, by that time, everyone had long forgotten about shields and armor, and a cart crawling slower than a pedestrian could not compare with the swiftness of the cavalry.
Machine gun argument
When, after the peace that lasted in Western Europe for half a century, a great war suddenly broke out, many at first did not understand that a terrible massacre was coming, not much like the battles of the times of Austerlitz and Waterloo. But something happened that had not happened before: on the Western Front, the belligerents, unsuccessfully trying to outflank each other, built a continuous front line from Switzerland to the North Sea. In mid-1915, the British and French on one side and the Germans on the other entered a hopeless positional clinch. Any attempts to break through the echeloned defense buried in the ground, hiding in the pillboxes, fenced off with barbed wire, forced the attackers to wash themselves in blood. Before sending the infantry into the attack, other people's trenches, of course, were diligently processed with artillery, but no matter how dense and crushing its fire was, it was enough for a couple of machine guns to survive so that they successfully brought down the attacking chains to the ground. The infantry on the offensive clearly needed serious fire support, it was required to quickly identify and suppress these death-spitting machine guns. Then it was time for the tank.
This is not to say that nothing was done in this sense before the appearance of the tank on the battlefield. For example, they tried to arm and arm cars. But even if the low-power machines of those times could withstand the weight of armor and weapons, it was extremely difficult for them to move off-road. But the "no man's land" between the first rows of trenches was not specially prepared by anyone for automobile traffic, moreover, it was pitted by explosions of shells and mines. We had to work on cross-country ability.
Several British and Russian inventors, in particular Dmitry Zagryazhsky and Fyodor Blinov, proposed their designs of a caterpillar propeller in the 19th century. However, the ideas of the Europeans were brought to commercialization on the other side of the Atlantic. One of the pioneers of American tracked vehicles was Benjamin Holt's company, which in the future renamed itself Caterpillar.
Churchill invented it all …
Holt tractors were not unusual in Europe at the start of the war. They were actively used as tractors for artillery guns, in particular, in the British army. The idea to turn the Holt tractor into an armored vehicle on the battlefield came back in 1914 to Major Ernest Dunlop Swinton, one of the most ardent supporters of what would be called a "tank" in the future. By the way, the word "tank" (English "tank") was coined as a code name for a new vehicle in order to mislead the enemy. Its official name at the time of the launch of the project was Landship - that is, "land ship". This happened because Swinton's idea was rejected by the general army leadership, but the first Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, decided to act at his own peril and risk and take the project under the wing of the fleet. In February 1915, Churchill created the Land Ships Committee, which developed the terms of reference for an armored fighting vehicle. The future tank had to reach speeds of up to 6 km / h, overcome pits and ditches at least 2.4 m wide, climb parapets up to 1.5 m high. Machine guns and light artillery pieces were offered as weapons.
Interestingly, the idea of using a chassis from a Holt tractor was abandoned as a result. French and German designers built their first tanks on this platform. The British, on the other hand, gave the development of the tank to the company from William Fosters & Co. Ltd., which had experience in creating agricultural machinery on tracked vehicles. The work was carried out under the leadership of the chief engineer of the firm, William Tritton, and the mechanical engineer attached to the military department, Lieutenant Walter Wilson. They decided to use an extended tracked chassis from another American tractor, the Bullock. True, the tracks had to be seriously strengthened, making them completely metal. A box-shaped metal body was placed on the tracks, and it was supposed to raise a cylindrical tower on it. But the idea did not work: the tower shifted the center of gravity upwards, which threatened to overturn. At the rear, an axle with a pair of wheels was attached to the tracked platform - a legacy inherited from civilian tractors. If necessary, the wheels were hydraulically pressed to the ground, lengthening the base when passing irregularities. The entire structure was pulled by a 105-horsepower Foster-Daimler engine. The prototype Lincoln 1, or Little Willie, was an important step in tank design, but left some questions unanswered. First, if there is no tower, where should the weapons be placed? Let's remember that the first British tank was developed under the supervision of the Navy, and … a purely naval solution was found. They decided to place the weapon in sponsons. This is a nautical term for the side-projecting structural elements of a ship that carry weapons. Secondly, even with the extended chassis from Bullock, the prototype did not fit into the specified parameters of the passage of irregularities. Then Wilson came up with an idea that later turned out to be a dead end, but this time it determined the British priority in tank building. Let the body of the combat vehicle become diamond-shaped, and the tracks will rotate around the entire perimeter of the diamond! This scheme allowed the car to roll over obstacles, as it were. On the basis of new ideas, a second car was built - Big Willie, nicknamed Mother. This was the prototype of the world's first Mark I tank, which was adopted by the British army. The "mother", as it should be, gave birth to offspring of different sexes: the "male" tank was armed with two 57-mm naval cannons (and again naval influence!), As well as three 8-mm machine guns - all the armament of the Hotchkiss company. On the "female" there were no guns, and the machine-gun armament consisted of three 8-mm Vickers and one Hotchkiss.
The torment of the first tankers
“The undercarriage and propulsion system of the Mark I tank,” says Fyodor Gorbachev, a historical consultant at Wargaming, “made it possible to move around the battlefield off-road, to overcome barbed wire obstacles and trenches up to 2.7 m wide - this was a difference between the tanks and their modern armored vehicles. On the other hand, their speed did not exceed 7 km / h, the lack of suspension and damping means made them a rather unstable artillery platform and complicated the work of the crew. According to Tanks Driver's Handbook, there were four ways to turn the tank, while the most common and sparing for mechanisms required the participation of four crew members in this process, which affected the vehicle's maneuverability not in the best way. The armor provided protection against hand-held firearms and shrapnel, but was penetrated by armor-piercing “K” bullets (massively used by the Germans since the summer of 1917) and artillery”.
The world's first tank, of course, was not a model of technical excellence. It was created in an unrealistically tight time frame. Work on an unprecedented combat vehicle began in 1915, and already on September 15, 1916, tanks were first used in battle. True, the Mark I still had to be delivered to the battlefield. The tank did not fit into the dimensions of the railway - the "cheeks" - sponsons interfered. They, each weighing 3 tons, were transported separately on trucks. The first tankers recalled how on the eve of the battle they had to spend sleepless nights, screwing sponsons to combat vehicles with bolts. The problem of removable sponsons was was solved only in the Mark IV modification, where they were pushed inside the hull. The crew of the tank consisted of eight (less often nine) people, and for such a large crew there was not enough space inside. In the front of the cockpit there were two seats - the commander and the driver; from them two narrow passages led to the stern, bypassing the casing that covered the engine. The walls of the cockpit were used as lockers, where ammunition, spare parts, tools, food and drink supplies were stored.
The Germans ran
“In the first battle, at Flers-Courcelette, the Mark I tanks achieved limited success and failed to break through the front, but the effect they had on the fighting sides was significant,” says Fyodor Gorbachev. - The British in one day on September 15 advanced 5 km deep into the enemy's defense, and with losses 20 times less than usual. In German positions, cases of unauthorized abandonment of trenches and flight to the rear were recorded. On September 19, the commander-in-chief of the British forces in France, Sir Douglas Haig, asked London to provide more than 1,000 tanks. Undoubtedly, the tank justified the hopes of its creators, despite the fact that it was quickly ousted from combat units by its heirs and was later used for training crews and in secondary theaters of military operations."
It cannot be said that it was the tanks that changed the course of the First World War and tipped the scales in favor of the Entente, but they should not be underestimated either. Already in the Amiens operation of 1918, which led to the breakthrough of the German defense and in fact to the imminent end of the war, hundreds of British Mark V tanks and more advanced modifications took part. This battle was the forerunner of the great tank battles of World War II. British diamond-shaped "Marks" also fought in our country during the civil war. There was even a legend about the participation of Mark V in the Battle of Berlin, but later it turned out that the Mark V discovered in Berlin was stolen by the Nazis and taken to Germany from Smolensk, where it served as a memorial in memory of the Civil War.
